Library Journal - Audio
06/01/2022
The newest from Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) explores familial bonds, lingering traumas, and violent legacies. Rob tries to be a good wife and mother to her daughters, despite her abusive, philandering husband and his constant power games, but Rob notices daughter Callie's peculiar behaviors and is horrified by what she's done to her younger sister Annie. To help Callie and save Annie, Rob takes Callie to the desert, to Sundial, her now-abandoned childhood home. While Rob remembers what events at Sundial led her to what she must do now, young Callie worries that this will be her last trip. The story, with its many twists and turns, alternates between Callie and Rob and jumps between past and present. Readers will never be entirely sure what is going on until the end but will nevertheless be drawn into this book's inescapable narrative web. Narrator Katherine Fenton imbues each syllable with tension and unease. VERDICT A masterful example of suspense; audiences will love their trip to Sundial, even as the sands shift constantly beneath their feet.—James Gardner
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/10/2022
With this masterful horror novel, Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) weaves a seething, hallucinatory tale of family, death, and hereditary trauma that will keep readers guessing all the way to the devastating conclusion. Rob has spent years distancing herself from Sundial, her enigmatic childhood home nestled deep in the Mojave Desert, finding comfort and normalcy in playing the role of dutiful wife and mother of two. But when her haunted, volatile daughter, Callie, shows signs that she might be heir to the horrors that Rob has spent so long trying to escape, Rob and Callie must venture back into the Mojave to exorcise the ghosts of Rob’s past before they destroy her family’s future. Ward’s brilliance lies in how she explicates the innate bizarreness of a child’s experience of the world and explores the small cruelties that families are uniquely capable of visiting upon one another through intimacies accumulated and treated as ammunition. The queasy narrative gives its characters plenty of space to explore their unreal circumstances without ever sacrificing momentum, and while the ending skillfully ties together the many threads, it never offers easy answers. This is a must-read for fans of gothic literature and taut psychological thrillers. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
A LibraryReads Top 10 Pick • A GoodReads Choice Award Finalist for Best Horror • Starred review from Publishers Weekly!
“DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK. Authentically terrifying.” —Stephen King
“Sundial is a heart-in-the-throat smash.” —Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
“Ward is surely one of the most talented writers working in the thriller genre today. A story where nothing is what it seems—a thrilling hall of mirrors full of deeply disturbing twists. This book will haunt you." —Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"Ward coaxes Rob’s gruesome past open like a toxic flower. ...And yet at its core, Sundial is about resilience. …And that, in itself, is an unthinkable feat." —The New York Times Book Review
“Masterful...A must-read for fans of gothic literature and taut psychological thrillers.” —Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
“Sundial is as brilliant and moving as you would expect from a Catriona Ward book.” —Sarah Pinborough, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes
“Sundial is yet another example of Ward’s ability to create a profoundly unsettling scenario and drive it to a point of explosive terror. Dizzying, intimate, haunting.” —Sarah Gailey, author of The Echo Wife
“Sundial serves up a deeply, deliciously disturbing family mystery.” —ShelfAwareness
“As if we needed further evidence, Sundial confirms Catriona Ward as one of the brightest stars in horror fiction. As compelling and unique a voice for the 21st century as Shirley Jackson was for the 20th. She’s brilliant.” —Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones and Ararat
“Holy moly, Sundial plumbs the psychological depths and traps of toxic relationships, expertly mixing suspense, shocks, and menace. It's a wild, twisted family gothic unlike any you've read before, and one you won't soon forget.” —Paul Tremblay, author of Survivor Song and A Head Full of Ghosts
“This novel is reminiscent of the best of Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, and I cannot think of higher praise.” —Thomas Olde Heuvelt, author of Hex and Echo
“There are two things you must know about Sundial. First, it's a great read, a genius piece of storytelling. But second, this is true horror, the horror of everyday life that we make ourselves blind to, horror that is brutal, truthful, terrifying. Ward knows horror.” —Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor
"This is every bit as creepy, individual and gripping as The Last House on Needless Street. Bravo."—Ian Rankin, bestselling author of the Rebus thrillers
“No one is as expert as Catriona at pulling the rug out from under the reader's feet. It's eerily beautiful, haunting, wild, grotesque and darkly dazzling.” —Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne
“Ward has done it again with Sundial. Elegantly horrifying, this tale of a family's darker-than-dark past drives the knife in deep and isn't afraid to twist. It's a desert-dust nightmare with a scorpion's sting, and I LOVED it.” —Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters
“A deeply dark and unexpected tale about families, love, hate, the long shadow of the past, and the redemptive power of storytelling. Clever, poetic and immersive.” —Araminta Hall, author of Imperfect Women
“Absolutely, stunningly, heartbreakingly wonderful. A wild beast of a book.” —Virginia Feito, author of Mrs. March
Library Journal
12/17/2021
When Rob finds animal parts hidden in her daughter Callie's room, she packs the girl up and takes her to Sundial, her family's remote, now uninhabited outpost in the Mojave Desert. Her father had kept Rob and her sister, Jack, sequestered at Sundial with no access to the outside world or people outside the family, other than the graduate students who came to aid him and his assistant/partner Mia with their experiments. The book shifts between the past, as Rob and Jack learn more about the work their father and Mia are doing, and the present day, as Rob tries to use her time alone with Callie to teach her about the darkness in their family's past. But the longer they stay in the desert, the more Rob comes to realize how unreliable her own version of her family history may be. Ward's (The Last House on Needless Street) latest gets off to a brisk start, slows down in the middle, and then races to the finish at such a breakneck speed that readers may struggle to absorb the full range of horrors Rob is recollecting. Note that many readers will be disturbed by scenes of experiments on animals. VERDICT On its own merits this would be an optional purchase, but since fans of the excellent Needless Street will drive demand, libraries should have it on the shelves.
