Book Review: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

Book #50 of 2024:

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

This 2024 thriller reads like vintage Stephen King — I’m thinking specifically of books like Cujo or Misery or Gerald’s Game — for placing a protagonist in a simple untenable situation and watching them frantically scramble for a way to escape. In such a work, the space is confined and the action internal for the most part, but the terror is no less real for those constraints upon the story. Here, a single mother is heading back to bed after settling her five-year-old from a nightmare when she hears a creaky floorboard from across the house. Realizing that someone must have broken in, she has just enough time to wake the little boy and his sister and lead them into a secret crawlspace to hide. The glimpses they see of the intruder through the vent are terrifying: the manager at a local restaurant who had made the woman uncomfortable for how he touched and looked at her eight-year-old daughter, now prowling their home wearing gloves but no mask (implying that he doesn’t want to be caught but isn’t afraid of their recognizing him, which doesn’t bode well for their chances of surviving the encounter).

And of course, he’s stolen her cell phone from its charger, the nearest neighbors are a half-mile away, and he’s planned his arrival for the night before a long holiday break. No one is expecting to hear from the family for days, and none of them are dressed for the blizzard conditions outside, further hampering an easy exit beyond the inherent logistics of sneaking away unnoticed with two small kids in tow.

As new author Tracy Sierra spins out that plot, we also learn more about the heroine’s backstory — much of which isn’t immediately relevant to the crisis at hand, but at least helps to strengthen her characterization and explain why she’s so paralyzed with the conviction that she’s powerless. (When this novel gets its inevitable film treatment, that’s the element I expect will rightfully get dropped in adaptation. I don’t feel like we benefit from keeping her husband’s absence in the present as a mystery for so long, for instance.)

Mostly, though, we are right there in the moment with the nameless woman, experiencing the same nervous suspense as she tries to both keep the children quiet and rack her brains for a solution to the threat before them. Even after they narrowly escape about halfway through the book, she finds she is unable to convince the police that the danger was real. The man left no evidence behind — he doesn’t appear to have even worked at the place where she met him — and her injuries leave her confused and apparently misremembering key details, though certain he’s going to return to finish the job. Was the whole event all in her mind? She’s had previous mental health issues, so did she hurt the kids herself during a psychotic break? Or do the strange inconsistencies in her story mean that the assailant was stalking the house well in advance of that evening, moving things around to gaslight her for his own amusement while everyone slept?

Given the genre, I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to confirm that she’s right and the villain really does exist. What emerges is a thrillingly vindicating tale of female empowerment for a character who’s had her complaints of unease brushed aside by various patronizing men all her life, along with the troubling implication that she herself has dismissed her children’s valid worries and observations in turn. It’s altogether a great read, although one wonders if the true-crime addicts out there will take it as justification for their own statistically-unlikely fears of victimization from such a predator. Regardless, as a work of fiction divorced from any broader societal implications, it’s a strong debut that already has me eagerly awaiting the writer’s next release.

[Content warning for gun violence, ableism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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