M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet. She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in. Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read. It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise. The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it. Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite. Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.
The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking. Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest. Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story. It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites. An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community). Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries. The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.
I like brief books. I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious. I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year. And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way. Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment. If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one. It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.
