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This is a book review tour hosted by Black Tide Book Tours. A copy of the book was provided in exchange for my honest review.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be trapped in an abandoned mineshaft? Yea… I hadn’t either. Now I’ll never, ever go near one.
Kaplan beautifully illustrates a ravaged world, destroyed by climate change where the western half of the United States is on fire from over exposure and water is scarce. While the eastern half is inundated with hurricanes and flooding. Mads and Waynoka are trapped in the water deprived portions of California and making the dangerous trek across country to get to water. But their stop off in Virgil, Nevada brings them to an abandoned mining town that is full of secrets, living history and dangers beyond their imaginations.
They seek respite and water in the abandoned silver mines, but tragedy has them stuck inside the deep shafts as they attempt to find water. Amongst the rubble is a place of refuge, where someone must have been staying at one time. A diary from the late 1800’s is there and as Waynoka reads the story of Lavinia’s experience in 1869, she soon starts to realize there are demons lurking in these caves and their lives are seriously in danger.
“And yet we have inhabited this place and built this town where the mountains begin to make hungry jaws of the horizon, and we have dug down into the earth in search of wealth to plunder and take from it, as if we could take from God Himself.”
When The Night Bells Ring, Jo Kaplan
I was most impressed by Kaplan’s writing and the ability to find myself transported into the places the characters are in. Living in central Arizona, I am familiar with the old mines and lore of lost miners to tragedies. It wasn’t difficult to imagine myself inside this story and walking alongside the characters as they unravel their own demise. A work worthy of many re-reads and deep reflection as it provides outlooks on life, the purpose of our own existence and many other reflective pieces.
Whether you like a good old fashioned scary story or a trip through a Dystopian wasteland or even a historical piece on the mining towns of old America, this is a wonderfully written book that should be read by everyone!
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Don’t awaken what sleeps in the dark.
In a future ravaged by fire and drought, two climate refugees ride their motorcycles across the wasteland of the western US, and stumble upon an old silver mine. Descending into the cool darkness of the caved-in tunnels in desperate search of water, the two women find Lavinia Cain’s diary, a settler in search of prosperity who brought her family to Nevada in the late 1860s.
But Lavinia and the settlers of the Western town discovered something monstrous that dwells in the depths of the mine, something that does not want greedy prospectors disturbing the earth. Whispers of curses and phantom figures haunt the diary, and now, over 150 years later, trapped and injured in the abandoned mine, the women discover they’re not alone . . . with no easy way out.
The monsters are still here―and they’re thirsty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jo Kaplan is a Los Angeles based writer and professor. She is the author of the haunted house tale It Will Just Be Us and also writes under the name Joanna Parypinski. Her work has appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, and Bram Stoker Award nominated anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College.
Looking for book recs…
Adventures in Literature 
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