Book Review: The Drowning House by Cherie Priest

Simon, Melissa, and Leo have been tightly knit ever since spending practically every summer growing up together on Washington State’s Marrowstone Island. Despite Leo being four years younger than the other two, their experiences as the only kids in the island’s small community bonded them for life. Most of the time, they played at Simon’s house, where he lived with his grandmother, the formidable Mrs. Culpepper. She was a fairly lenient caretaker, only warning them not to go out too deep into the water for fear of getting dragged out to sea by the treacherous currents.

As the decades pass, Simon chooses to stay on the island to take care of his grandmother, despite the urgings of Melissa and Leo, who both have their own lives on the mainland. But one night Simon sends Melissa a weird voicemail, followed by an email entreating her to come stay on the island with him for a while. Apparently, Mrs. Culpepper has just died, likely scared to death by something she saw on the beach just behind their house.

When Melissa attempts to call back, a sheriff’s deputy picks up and informs her that Simon has disappeared. Alarmed, Melissa contacts Leo and makes her way north. Once Leo joins her in the Culpepper home, the old friends search the island. They find no trace of their friend, who they know would never voluntarily disappear right after his grandmother died. Just as puzzling is the appearance of the wreck of an entire house, washed ashore right behind the place where they spent so many wonderful childhood hours.

Their search for Simon leads them down some strange and scary paths, and also begins to highlight the flaws in their own relationship. Simon had always been the linchpin that held them together, and their bickering only grows worse as each copes in their own way with what might have happened to their beloved friend:

“Everything you asked that woman had to do with the stuff in the house, not Simon,” he accused. “You’ve already decided he’s dead, and now you’re more interested in that shit in the basement.”

 

“Oh, you’re allowed to be interested in Mrs. Culpepper’s house? But I’m not? At least I’m not trying to sell it as soon as her body’s cold.”

 

“That’s not fair.”

 

“You’re not fair,” she countered. “We don’t know what line of inquiry might lead us back to Simon. Everything happened at basically the same time—Mrs. Culpepper dying, the house washing up, Simon disappearing. They’re obviously connected, and who the hell do you think you are, trying to imply that I don’t care about him as much as you do?”

Will they be able to keep it together at least long enough to figure out what happened to their best friend? When a malevolent force threatens to take their lives, will they find the strength to set aside their differences and save their island?

Shot through with plot threads of horror and fantasy, what starts out as a missing person thriller soon becomes a book about overcoming the demons of your past in order to prevent further horrors from occurring. While Leo and Melissa looked forward to going to Marrowstone Island each year as children, it wasn’t always an idyllic experience, as this flashback passage illustrates:

“Leo, buddy? What are you looking at?” She kept her voice as low and soft as she could.

 

He responded in kind, never taking his eyes off the corner. “You don’t see them?”

 

“See who?”

 

“You don’t hear them?”

 

“Who?”

 

“They cry,” he said. “Those boys, they hide in the corners and cry.”

 

“Leo, there aren’t any other boys in the house. Just you and Simon. Come on, let’s go outside and play with fireworks.” She gently pulled on his arm. 

 

“I couldn’t see them before. Not until what happened in the water.” He looked up at Melissa and said in an almost ordinary voice, “Now I hear them all the time. Sometimes, I see them too.”

These mysterious elements only strengthen the pathos of the friends’ search, as the narrative unfolds forward and backward in time to show us the true scale of what our protagonists are up against. While I found Melissa and Leo’s story ultimately satisfying, I was a little confused by the epilogue, which seemed somewhat tacked on and only raised more questions than it answered. It was interesting though to see how the sisters depicted in the coda bickered just as much as Leo and Melissa do, and how their plans only succeeded when they finally learned to set aside their differences and trust each other enough to work as one.