Listen to Your Sister

November 1, 2024
A trio of Black siblings battle surreal horrors in Viel's intense debut. Beleaguered 25-year-old Calla has recently been named the guardian to her 16-year-old brother, Jamie, due to their mother's neglect. Middle sibling Dre promised to help raise the reckless teen, but he's mostly busy doing his own thing. Plagued by recurring nightmares of her brothers dying, Calla is barely keeping it together, and then Jamie runs afoul of a violent police officer at a protest. Forced to flee, the siblings take refuge in a remote cabin where they realize the nightmares are only just beginning. Viel's fever dream of a novel unfolds from each character's perspective, revealing how their traumatic childhoods and strained relationships have led them to this point--and how they'll have to put all their hurts aside and rely on each other if they want to survive. At turns heartfelt and darkly humorous, with moments of gross-out horror, Viel's inventive take on haunted-house tropes thoughtfully examines the undue burdens placed on Black women to keep their families together. Fans of Jordan Peele's films will want to check this out.

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October 28, 2024
Viel’s frenzied and addictive supernatural thriller debut follows Calla Williams, a Black 25-year-old who must play surrogate parent to her reckless younger brothers, Dre and Jaimie, after their father dies and their mother abandons them. Calla makes for an anxious parental figure, driven by fear of what she calls her Nightmare: a vivid, paralyzing dream in which she is powerless to prevent her brothers’ gruesome deaths. After a night of separate incidents in which both Dre and Jaimie are saved from certain slaughter by mysterious female figures who savage their assailants, the trio—fearing persecution from the law—hightail it from their home in Seattle to a creepy remote Airbnb. There, Calla’s Nightmare erupts into reality, subjecting all three to a harrowing and bloody confrontation with their subconscious demons given visceral life. Viel depicts her characters’ terrifying ordeals as phantasmic expressions of the racial and social forces that have shaped their lives, and her portrayal of Calla as a sacrificing martyr whose love for her family is curdling into resentment gives her story powerful emotional ballast. Though the plotting is chaotic in spots, it nimbly focuses Black American experience through the lens of horror fiction. Viel should win many fans with this.

January 1, 2025
Anxiety metamorphoses into terror for a young Black woman fiercely protecting her own. Like a good scary movie, this debut novel never fully explains the monsters within, but sharp portrayals, staccato wordplay, and an absolutely bloodcurdling atmosphere ameliorate the frustration of murky explanations for what follows. When we first meet 25-year-old Calla Williams, there's not much sign from the outside that her world is falling apart, though she's struggling at her job, trying to connect with a new boyfriend, and attempting to make a life for herself. Unfortunately, her two younger brothers, Dre and Jamie, are making it damn near impossible. With their father dead and their mother gone, the three siblings are stuck with each other, to everyone's constant discontent. Middle sibling Dre means well, but he's a flake who can't be counted on to show up when it really counts. The real troublemaker is 16-year-old Jamie, full of a uniquely adolescent combination of bravado and recklessness, prone to trouble with school, drugs, and law enforcement. "It's so hard keeping black boys alive," Calla thinks, and her particular angst soon gets twisted into a scenario Jordan Peele might admire. When a racist cop stops Jamie at a civil rights protest, it looks like he's about to be another fatal victim of violent injustice, but fate--or something darker--has other plans. When a spooky little girl eviscerates the officer and shortly after a terrifying series of encounters leaves Dre marked by strange, unexplainable wounds and Calla haunted by visions of a vengeful specter, they realize taking off may be their only chance at survival. As the trio flees to a remote cabin in the woods (always a good plan in a horror story), spooked readers may find themselves checking to see what's gaining on them. A relentless descent into familial fears made manifest, both haunting and terribly familiar.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2025

At 25, Calla, who is haunted by nightmares that her brothers might die, has become guardian to her reckless 16-year-old brother, Jamie. His actions at a protest send the siblings on the run to a remote cabin, where they find new threats. Viel's debut receives a 150K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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