Lost Man's Lane Review

It’s a rare occurrence for a book to take me through the range of emotions that Lost Man’s Lane did: I felt nostalgia like a book has never made me feel; a profound sadness that rocked me to my core; an unsettling sense of dread that kept me turning the pages; an overwhelming desire to savor each page. It isn’t hyperbole when I say that this book should sit on the shelf next to Boy’s Life and IT as an example of what it means to grow up, lose your innocence, and redefine what family can be. 

Reading about the year 1999, albeit through the lens of a high school kid, unlocked some core memories, or rather, it unlocked lost feelings from my childhood that I haven’t accessed in decades. And maybe that comes off as a tad saccharine. 

Lost Man’s Lane does what lots of horror novels have done since Stephen King’s style became the litmus test for horror in the late 70 and 80s, but the thing is, where a lot of novels mimic King and what made his works groundbreaking, Lost Man’s Lane blazes its own trail. Echoes of King’s influence can be heard bouncing off the granite and limestone, but the DNA, the blood of the novel, is anything but derivative. 

The whole time I was reading I was thinking about how I could read this book forever if it never ended. As I got closer to the ending, I hoped beyond hope that the ending would stick the landing. What I can say about that is that the last 100 pages of this novel piece together a mystery and tie up the narrative perfectly. There were a million ways that the ending could have gone and dropped the ball, but what we ended up with? Oh man. It’s something special. Lost Man’s Lane is a book I’ll remember forever.

5/5 🌟 

- @adamsfall