Creepy forests, missing girls, eerie dolls, and unexplainable phenomena populate King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis (Lives of the Monster Dogs), a hypnotic feminist fantasy featuring the real-life figures Anna and Charles Fort. It is November 1918, and self-described "crypto-scientist" Charles and his wife, Anna, debark on Prosper Island at the invitation of millionaire Claude Arkel--an admirer of Charles's eccentric study of meteorological anomalies that science cannot explain (fish, eels, and even blood falling from the sky). Arkel invites them to stay on his private estate for the winter so that Charles can finish writing his magnum opus of oddities.
Narrator Anna, however, is uneasy after learning three local girls at the Arkel School for Domestic Service on the island are missing. Painful memories of her own life in service to Charles's abusive father--and the startling vision of a long-lost friend in the island's forest--force Anna into a dangerous reckoning with reality and sanity. Bakis's focus on female friendship is a bracing tonic, especially with the addition of Anna's hard-drinking fellow guest Stella Bixby, who takes Anna's quest to find the lost girls seriously. (Their husbands are of no help in this or any other regard.) As the mysteries of Prosper Island multiply and her repressed memories return, Anna realizes the "deeper you go, the stranger and uglier the monsters." Although the climax is somewhat implausible, Bakis's gothic journey, rendered in mellifluous and dreamy prose, will keep readers turning pages long past midnight. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver