Grace by A.M. Shine: Beautifully Built Dread That Never Quite Takes Hold
Ever notice how a horror novel can make you feel two things at once? Like when you’re admiring the perfectly crafted, bone-chilling gloom of a setting, but your fingers are just… turning pages, not exactly racing to the next one. That was my experience with A.M. Shine’s Grace. It’s a book you can respect for its craft, a masterclass in building a specific kind of wet, Irish dread.
Yet, for all its atmospheric prowess, it kept me at arm’s length, a spectator to its horrors rather than a participant. The pieces of a great folk horror novel are here, on that lonely, wilfully forgotten island of Croaghnakeela. But they never quite lock together into a story that truly haunts you after the fog lifts.
Let’s start with what Shine undeniably gets right. The man can paint a setting with the bleakest colours. Croaghnakeela isn’t just a location; it’s a condition. You feel the salt-licked isolation, the suspicion in the islanders’ eyes, the weight of a secret so heavy it has literally stopped life in its tracks. The central folk horror conceit, tied to a malevolent creature from Irish myth and a community pact that has prevented children for thirty years, is solid, compelling stuff. When the story sticks with Grace, the adopted woman returning to her nightmarish birthplace, it has a sharp, personal focus. Her confusion and creeping dread are palpable.
However, the novel’s structure works actively against these strengths. A major pivot occurs around the midpoint, drastically shifting the narrative’s focus. Grace’s personal journey, the engine of the first half, gets sidelined. The point of view fractures, jumping between various islanders and the local priest.
This is where the trouble begins.
What aims for a rich, communal tapestry often feels choppy and diluted. The tension built around Grace dissipates. For me, it made the characters feel functional, vehicles for exposition, rather than lived-in. We learn their roles in the secret, but not enough about their hearts to make their fates truly resonate. The pacing suffers, too; the slow, ominous burn of the first half gives way to a sometimes plodding unravelling of backstory, before a final quarter that tries to regain momentum with graphic, revelatory violence.
Describing Shine’s prose in Grace is like trying to navigate a country lane with a foggy windshield. The atmosphere is thick, palpable, and obscuring. You can sense the shape of things out there, the gothic trappings and the folkloric menace, but the clarity of the journey is compromised. His sentences are often beautiful, crafting that desolate Irish landscape with care. But this stylistic commitment to mood can come at a cost. The language sometimes feels more in service of the ambience than of propelling the story or defining character voices. Everyone speaks with the same weighty portent, from the terrified outsider to the grizzled local.
This contributes to that sense of sameness among the secondary characters. When the priest, Father O’Malley, takes centre stage, his sections, while thematically important, lack the personal, visceral hook of Grace’s initial discovery. The writing maintains its damp, gloomy tone, but the emotional anchor is gone. It becomes atmospheric horror in a more academic sense: you admire the construction of the scare, but you’re not feeling it in your gut. The folklore, while effectively nasty, can sometimes feel like a checked box; the Bodach is here, it’s evil, without weaving its tendrils deeper into the novel’s psychological fabric.
And then there is the question of the world outside the island, the one with mobile phones and Coast Guard helicopters and rescue services that, in theory, exist. Shine sets Grace firmly in the present, or at least a recent past recognisable as our own. Yet once the horror kicks in, all that modernity evaporates as if it never existed. No one tries to call for help. No one considers that a boat could arrive from the mainland with outsiders who might ask uncomfortable questions.
The island’s isolation becomes a magical dead zone, not just geographically but logically. It asks you to believe that a community of people, however frightened, would simply accept their fate without ever testing the boundaries of their prison. A few determined souls could leave. A distress signal, however faint, could be sent. But the story requires them to stay trapped, so they do. The horror depends on a helplessness that the setting itself contradicts. You spend part of the book not just scared, but wondering why someone doesn’t just leave.
It’s the kind of question that pulls you out of the dread entirely, because you’re no longer thinking about the Bodach in the shadows. You’re thinking about the boat tied to the pier and the perfectly functional engine that, for reasons the novel never quite justifies, nobody seems willing to start. What does a monster mean, after all, when the modern world has already given us so many tools to outrun it?
In a genre thriving on folk horror, Grace is both a participant and a cautionary tale. It proves that Shine remains a formidable builder of worlds and a dedicated student of Irish myth. It has all the right ingredients: the isolated community, the pagan terror, the sins of the past. Yet, it also demonstrates that atmosphere alone cannot sustain fear. For every reader who finds the multi-perspective finale revelatory, another may find it a step back from the more intimate, terrifying potential of its first act.
It’s a competent, often stylish, but ultimately disjointed one. It’s for the reader who values mood above momentum, and who doesn’t mind if a story’s central human heartbeat gets muffled beneath layers of damp fog. You’ll finish it, and you’ll remember the island. But will you remember the people trapped on it? Or just the damp, chilling air they breathed?
Grace: by A.M. Shine
A haunting, atmospheric modern Gothic horror tale based on traditional Irish mythology, from the author of smash hit The Watchers. Ancient evil is awakened on a lonely isle off the coast of Ireland.
TO LEARN THE TRUTH
WOULD YOU DESCEND INTO HELL?
Off the west coast of Ireland lies a lonely island, isolated and wilfully forgotten. Some say there hasn’t been a child born on the island for thirty years. Others speak of strange deaths there, decades ago. But no one really knows what happened. Locals believe that the dark times are behind them.
They are mistaken.
Grace, adopted at four years old, has never known where she came from. A mysterious phone call leads her back to the island where she was born – and where a terrible evil has been disturbed.
As the evil starts to spread, Grace finds herself dragged back into a living nightmare that threatens to engulf anyone who steps into its path.
Grace is perfect for fans of horror classics, Paul Tremblay, and Kealan Patrick Burke.
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