The Drowning Kind By Jennifer McMahon Book Review
This book was a bit of a letdown. I came in expecting something novel and scary. What I got was a simplified, mashed up version of several of McMahon’s other stories. I know that her publishing timeline is a rapid nine months to a year per a book. It makes me wonder if she doesn’t need to slow it down a bit.
But I’m jumping ahead here.
The Drowning Kind is a horror novel that takes place primarily in Vermont. It is one of the huge draws to the author. Most of her novels take place in New England, primarily Vermont. It is fun reading about familiar places, even when the towns are made up. We start with following Jackie (Jax) when she gets a call that her sister Lexie had drowned in the springs at the family mansion across the country. Jax, who is a social worker has to drop her cases and fly back to Vermont and take care of all the arrangement.
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The other perspective we get comes from Jax’s great grandmother from nearly 100 years before. A common trope used by many horror authors to add tension and give back story. Ethel lives in New Hampshire and has what we would now call some sort of depression/anxiety disorder where she does self-harm. Never anything life threatening, but enough to let you know she is troubled. She is married to a wonderful man and the local doctor. Their life is picture perfect except for one major thing; Ethel is unable to get pregnant. It is something she desperately wants; something that she has turned to old wives tales to help her along. When a friend tells her about a magical spring in Vermont that grants wishes at a grand hotel, she jumps at the opportunity.
As we learn quickly, this spring isn’t all good. It heals and grants those wishes but at a price. That those that go there end up miserable in the long term. And that there are a lot of people that drown in these springs. And maybe those that drown there, their souls stay there powering some ancient entity. And those that have died go around the grounds searching for more people to join them.
The writing in this book is great. And if I hadn’t read much of what McMahon had already written, it might have been a creepier read. The problem is, it read too closely to her first novel that I had read The Winter People (check out that review on my podcast Kendall Bookworms). A stripped down version of that novel at that. In Winter People, there were more plot lines screaming about; the jumping back and forth between timelines was more hectic. It was scarier. In Drowning Kind, there just wasn’t much going on. The attempt to hint that it was all mundane murder or suicide was only ever done half heartedly. It was never really convincing that Jax believed anything other than the spring killing her sister.
There was also some grabbing from Stephen King. One of the child patients of Jax on the other side of the country had what can only be described as The Shining. That psychic ability to have visions of doom and destruction. But just as in many of King’s novels that it appears, it does nothing to help. If none of that had been in the novel, it would not have changed anything in the slightest. McMahon could have taken out all the mystical parts of this kid and just have him going into a mental breakdown because he refused to take his medication, and it could have built the same tensions of a healthcare provider being forced to deal with a patient’s problems or their own.
This is not to say I did not enjoy the book. It was fun. It is just something that is too close to what McMahon already wrote. It’s like the mystery author’s dilemma. Once a victim is killed and murderer caught, the author can never use those again. So for every book they write, they must get cleverer and more sneaky. The same is for thriller and horror writers. At the end of the day, this book suffered from too many tropes already having been done before. I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars just for that. I liked the characters and it was a nice, quick, fast-paced read. It just needed a lot more done for it to really draw me in.
