In the 1960s and 1970s, way before the Internet shrank our world, small towns could be scary places. Local governments, law enforcement, the family down the street, the church, all existed in their own tiny worlds. People looked the other way. Families were no one else’s business… I remember those days, and in The Quarry Girls, Jess Lourey took me back there and made it so much worse.
A small town, built to support a failed factory, where tunnels run under the ground between homes, and the kids party at the end of winding roads at quarries with pools of water so deep you might never reach the bottom. Lives lived on different levels, the surface, the agreed upon reality, the truth, almost never open or public, and even then rarely to be trusted.
Heather is just reaching the end of her high school years. She has friends. She has a band, her drums, a handsome father, and a fragile family dynamic she is forced to maintain, despite her age. She has survived trauma, and has all the issues of a young girl getting ready to face the world.
After a man named Ed rolls into town and starts corrupting her friends, and young women begin to go missing, Heather has to fight for her sanity while unraveling a continually more tangled knot of terror and lies.
This is a frightening story with a lot to say. Highly recommended.