Our Thoughts Precisely: Holly Horror The Longest Night

Title: Holly Horror: The Longest Night

Series: Holly Horror #2
Author: Michelle Jabès Corpora
Source/Format: NetGalley; eARC
More Details: Young Adult; Horror; Paranormal
Publisher/Publication Date: Penguin Workshop; August 13, 2024

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

In this terrifying sequel, Evie Archer and her friends face a new evil ready to devour their town whole.

Find him, find me. It's been two weeks since Evie escaped the mines after solving the mystery of Holly's disappearance only to discover that Desmond followed her but never came back. Evie knows he’s alive, lost wherever the Patchwork Girl resides. When Evie tries to reach out to Holly again for help, she realizes that her connection to the Lost Girl—and the shadow world itself—has been severed. Desmond is gone, and it’s all her fault. Ravenglass slowly begins to move on from the tragedy of losing Desmond, but as winter creeps closer and the days grow shorter, a sinister being begins to threaten the lives of Ravenglass residents, stealing them away and bringing them back different. Wrong.Evie knows that the only way to stop it is to connect to Holly again. With the help of her friend Tina, and the troubled newcomer Sai, Evie begins to follow the clues Holly left behind, determined to find the Lost Girl once more, at any cost.

I read Holly Horror last year. And while it was a good story overall—and relatively self-contained—by the end there were still some lingering mysteries as well as the massive curveball thrown by the cliffhanger. As the saying goes, out of the oven and into the frying pan. So its sequel, titled Holly Horror: The Longest Night, was near the top of my list of sequels releasing in 2024. And it’s one of my favorites too.

Holly Horror: The Longest Night took what I liked about the previous installment and carried it over into Evie Archer’s second adventure, which pitted her against the shadowy and menacing forces buried beneath the town of Ravenglass.

Part of The Longest Night had aspects of a coming of age story, where Evie had to confront her past—her strained relationship with her father as well as her history with Holly Hobbie and Sarah Flower. She had a lot to work through in her personal life too. She was dealing with grief and guilt, which was tangled with the fallout from Holly Horror’s ending. And, considering how, in the previous book, she’d erroneously assigned blame to herself for the collapse of her family. She’d had this habit of hiding her emotions as well as her distrust of those who she should’ve been able to confide in the most, and it had opened her up to supernatural manipulation. In The Longest Night, enough time was devoted to fully exploring and resolving the complicated nature of Evie’s familial ties and her relationship to the abilities she was just beginning to accept. Her character arch is one of my favorite parts of this story.

On the other hand, the story had this creeping sense of dread, which was always in the background casting a shadow (both literally and figuratively) over the events of the story. One of the pivotal characters of these books, Desmond King, was missing. And the story was, ultimately, something of a race against time. And it was the case: Would they be able to save him or not? I knew something bad was going to go down, and it was about seeing when and how the shoe was going to drop. And Corpora did this to great effect, subtly building a mystery full of secrets around the spookiest aspects of The Longest Night.

The ending was effective with resolving the above mentioned mysteries, and even offered clarity to the tragedy that had given Hobbie House its nickname. Suffice it to say, the questions Holly Horror had left behind were more than answered in its sequel.

So, I got everything I was looking for out of Holly Horror: The Longest Night. It works as a sequel, and sufficiently wrapped up the story in a way that was satisfying for the mystery as well as the characters. And, if you’ve read Holly Horror, then this one is a must read.

About the author....

Michelle Jabès Corpora is a writer, editor, and martial artist. In addition to working in the publishing industry for more than seventeen years as an editor and concept developer, she is the author of two historical novels for middle grade readers, two horror novels for young adult readers, and soon-to-be the author of the Children of Khetara fantasy series for Young Adults. She has also ghostwritten five novels in a long-running middle grade mystery series. In her spare time, Michelle trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a blue belt at Crazy 88 MMA, and enjoys making home-cooked meals, doing tarot readings, and playing Dungeons & Dragons with her friends. Michelle lives in Maryland with her husband, two daughters, two guinea pigs, and a dog named Charlie.

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