I went into Sarafina expecting historical horror and came out wondering what the actual fuck Philip Fracassi had just put me through. This book starts in the middle of the Civil War, throws three deserters into the wilderness, gives them what looks like a miracle, and then proceeds to get progressively more horrifying and unhinged. I loved every second of it.

The three brothers are already living through one kind of horror when they decide to abandon the Confederate army and try to make it home alive. By the time they stumble across Sarafina's isolated cabin, they're starving, injured, and desperate enough that a woman offering them food, shelter, and somewhere to recover feels almost too good to be true.

Obviously, it is.

What I loved most was how dramatically this book evolves without ever feeling like it completely loses what it started as. The horror of war gradually gives way to something much stranger, and every time I thought I understood what kind of story I was reading, Fracassi pushed it somewhere else. The historical, supernatural, folk-horror, and almost dark-fairytale elements work ridiculously well together.

And Sarafina herself is such a good character. The entire time she's on the page, there is this feeling that something isn't right, but I still wanted to know everything about her. The cabin, the creek, the woods, the cavern, Titus, all of it creates this little world that feels separated from everything outside of it. The deeper the brothers become trapped in it, the more suffocating it gets.

I also really appreciated that the human characters aren't conveniently innocent just because something supernatural is happening to them. This is a story set against an already horrific period of American history, and Fracassi doesn't let the supernatural evil erase the cruelty, guilt, violence, and choices of the people involved.

And then this book just GOES FOR IT. Once everything starts coming together, it becomes brutal, bizarre, and completely fucking insane in the best way. There were several points where all I could think was, oh, we're doing THIS now???

By the ending, I was completely sold.