NIGHTWATCHING

As a blizzard rages outside, a woman and her young children try to elude a home invader.

It’s midnight, and a mother has just gotten her frightened 5-year-old son back to sleep when she hears an unexpected “wheeze of weight” on the stairs. She sees a tall stranger slink onto the landing. He’s wearing plastic gloves and his grinning face is uncovered, indicating he doesn’t intend to leave evidence or witnesses, and his sneakers are dry despite the storm, suggesting he’s planned ahead and expects to stay a while. He misses her watching from the shadows, instead making a beeline for the 1722 New England colonial’s modern addition, but that also means he now separates her from her phone, computer, car, and gun. Few options remain, so she scoops up her son, rouses and hushes her 8-year-old daughter, and creeps downstairs. Long ago, someone walled in their beehive oven’s “messy flues,” leaving an empty space accessible via a hidden panel. The trio slips inside, hoping the intruder will get frustrated and flee, but he makes himself comfortable and starts trying to break them. With school preemptively canceled and the nearest neighbors half a mile away through feet of snow, nobody can save them but her. Straddling the line between psychological thriller and domestic horror, Sierra’s auspicious debut immediately plunges readers headlong into its unnamed protagonist’s waking nightmare. The tense, emotionally resonant close-third-person narrative intercuts the man’s relentless assault with the woman’s own self-recriminations, imagined in her absent husband’s hypercritical voice. Well-timed flashbacks add context and poignancy.

Fiercely feminist and viscerally terrifying.