Spawned by Brendan Deneen’s own experiences relocating to a New Jersey suburb with his young family, The Chrysalis combines chills, thrills, and a literal monster in the basement with commentary on love, marriage, and impending parenthood. Welcome to the dark side of suburbia. Barely employed millennials Tom and Jenny Decker have to grow up fast when they lose their cheap Manhattan apartment. Leaving “the city” is hard, but the blow is softened when they stumble upon a surprisingly affordable house in the suburbs. For Tom, the bills, the mortgage, and Jenny's unexpected pregnancy add up to terror. He's not ready for this kind of responsibility. Then he finds the thing in the basement. It makes him feel like a winner even as it scrambles his senses. A new job soon has him raking in the big bucks—enough that Jenny can start making her entrepreneurial dreams come true. The Deckers' dream home conceals more than one deadly secret. As Tom's obsession with the basement grows, Jenny realizes that to save her family, she must expose everything. Before it destroys them all. No one ever really wants to grow up…but sometimes behaving like an adult is the only way to survive. "Creepy, powerful, wonderfully twisted."--New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry
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Eerily beautiful in its descriptions of the circus and its misfit crew. Realism and fantasy mixes well in Deneen’s hands. The Ninth Circle also fits solidly in a sub-genre of carnival themed horror novels that includes Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Will Elliott’s The Pilo Family Circus.
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HellNotes