Near the Bone by Christina Henry

 

There's a blurb near the top there that calls this "a perfect nightmare of a novel," and that's not wrong. There's a distinct nightmarish quality to the prose and the story, even the bits that are closest to plausible--maybe especially those: the kidnapped girl, twelve years later, is somewhere between a meme and a trope, probably not quite as fresh as back in the 2010s, but still there in our hearts beating to the pulse of true crime podcasts. The supernatural in the novel is overt and shocking and it seems fair to describe it as almost Lovecraftian in its alienness, its inhumanity; it comes and goes according to its own reasons and motivations, and there's nothing the people in the novel can do about it but run away from it. It's never explained in any concrete way, and I'm absolutely OK with this. The prose drills deep into the mind of the protagonist and takes the novel some surprisingly psychological places. The ending is about as upbeat as it could plausibly be, which isn't all that upbeat, but it works. Very good, indeed.