From the “Satanic Panic” in rural New Hampshire, to contemporary college campuses, to post-apocalyptic Massachusetts, literature writer Katherine Ouellette recommends books that will keep you enthralled this season.
The ebb and flow from winter to spring is all about give and take. Mother Nature is giving us a little more daylight and sunshine, but could easily take back these 50-degree days to plunge us back into winter chills. New England authors are giving me spine-tingling thriller novels that make me grateful for my mundane life, and I’m taking advice from the animal kingdom and mental health experts on how to decrease climate change anxieties and prioritize play.
When a K-pop idol’s attempts at a solo career accidentally stir political controversy across Korea, China and Japan, the star vanishes from the public eye, turning up in a Los Angeles H Mart. The novel’s unnamed narrator offers her home to Sang Duri as refuge from an obsessive fandom that’s redirecting its intense love to intense scrutiny. But now Duri is giving a psychologist a front-row seat as years of his repressed trauma threaten to bubble to the surface.