I love the concept of a novel comprised of interlocking novellas, but I don’t know that that’s really what this was? The stories only brush against each other in the most distant and superficial way, they’re really more about explaining this town and its history. In most short story collections, it’s usually hard to rate the collection as a whole because there are great stories and ok stories (except for Tender by Sofia Samatar which is 100% exquisite). This book it was more like, there were parts of stories I liked a lot but no one story as a whole. A lot of the denouements felt, frankly, a little silly in a horror book? But some imagery, like that of the north woods in the rain, or the weird horrible police officers, or the zookeeper’s dream, were something else.