A Shirley Jackson Award winner, so my response is probably idiosyncratic. The characters are bizarre, believable, and deep — some monstrous, some merely broken. The prose is good, outstanding in places. The plotting is manipulative. I think that’s meant to reflect the theme, but a better and deeper story could have been told with less misdirection. Probably most horror fans will rate this book higher than I do. (Since this platform doesn’t allow fractional points, I’m rounding up from 3.75.)