Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona
Something very bad is going to happen
Just a single word, “babysitter,” within the context of the horror genre can provoke infinite expectations of what may be in store.
Midnight on Beacon Street plays with these myriad possibilities at varying points throughout the book, regularly appearing to set up one narrative avenue only to pivot in another direction again and again.
It’s a Friday night in October 1993, and Amy is babysitting two kids, pre-teen Mira and her younger brother Ben. The children’s mother has ordered a pizza to be delivered, and Amy has an evening of fun games planned out. Maybe when the kids go to bed, her boyfriend will come over and the two of them will watch a VHS horror movie together.
What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, as it happens.
The book opens near the end of the story, with Ben stepping over the bloody body of a slain girl in his kitchen — but with precious little context as to who the victim is or what actually happened — before flashing back to earlier in the evening to tell the tale that culminates in this grisly scene.
All we know is someone dies.
As the clock ticks down to midnight, the book’s chapters shift between Amy and Ben in the (non-synchronous) present and the younger Amy of several years ago, when she herself was being babysat on a night just like this.
Various clues as to the potential terror ahead are sparingly offered: There’s a cat burglar who has been plaguing the town for weeks… The children and their mother fled their abusive father/husband years earlier… The children believe there is a ghost that haunts their home…
Between the presumptions of the reader and the plentiful breadcrumbs of clues teased (not to mention the frequent references to one Laurie Strode of Halloween fame), there are many possibilities for which direction this book might ultimately go in, and who or what its particular boogeyman may be.
This is a horror novel centered around a babysitter, but what type of horror story is it exactly?
Midnight on Beacon Street will keep you guessing as it routinely upends your predictions before setting up an altogether different possibility, only to rip the rug out from under you all over again. It’s a fun experience for the reader: a playful puzzle of a whodunit in reverse.
This murderous mind-boggler is, of course, underpinned by a very down-to-earth tone that feels highly appropriate for the setting and the period in which its set.
This is early-90s suburban America where, potential homicidal maniacs aside, the biggest problems in our protagonists’ lives are feeling comfortable in their own skin and of fitting in with those people most important to them.
The author handles these elements with a light but effective touch — we get the sense of how absolutely important these concerns are, yet they’re never sources of melodrama nor presented as narrative obstacles to overcome; simply things that make these characters fully human and real.
Which makes Midnight on Beacon Street all the scarier, as it is a portrait of an average, mundane, and unextraordinary American suburb where very bad things can happen.
Even to society’s sweetest specimen; the benevolent babysitter.
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