TL;DR: York opens with one of the best horror premises in recent YA memory and a mother-daughter relationship that quietly breaks your heart. Then she lets her devil out of the box and never gets him back. Our Devil’s Awake is a debut with teeth that chooses, in the end, not to bite. Read it for what it is. Mourn what it could have been.

In a scene near the opening of Our Devil’s Awake where Blythe Rousseau, eighteen years old, brunette with fuchsia highlights she got to impress a girl, kicks her bra under the basement sofa before opening a casket and driving a cypress stake through the chest of the family devil. The devil’s name is Rosie. He has been in the family trunk for generations. He has to be staked every time he wakes up or he will kill someone. He wakes up at the worst possible moments. Blythe does it so many times she barely registers it anymore.

That’s a great premise. Not devil-hunting but devil-keeping. Not a hero’s journey but a maintenance shift. Generational dread as domestic labor. And Chloe York does something smart with it in the opening chapters: she lets the weird live right alongside the completely ordinary without blinking, without announcement, without apology. Pizza rolls. Mom coming home from the night shift. The devastation of being eighteen and wanting someone and not being able to have them. For a while, this book sings.

I am going to tell you what I needed from it, because that is the only honest way to explain where the disappointment comes from.

I needed the horror to stay weird. I needed Rosie to remain what he is in the first chapter: ancient and patient and unnerving, a creature that cannot die but also cannot leave, something that has been sleeping inside a pretty wooden box in a suburban rec room since before Blythe’s mother was born. I needed the book to understand what it had.

It does, for a while. The mother is the best thing in it. Andie Rousseau is a former pageant girl with a Dolly Parton drawl and pink bunny slippers, capable of staking a seven-foot demon without disturbing a single golden curl, and she is more fully realized than almost anyone I have read in horror fiction this year. The love between her and Blythe is specific and tender and completely unperformed. When the book breaks her early, it breaks hard. The image that follows, the one Blythe finds at the bottom of the stairs, is horrible in the right way. Horrible as in: it costs something. A posthumous pre-scheduled email that arrived a month too early because Andie could never quite get the hang of technology. That is the kind of detail that makes you put a book down for a minute. That is a writer who knows what she is doing.

The problem is that Rosie gets loose. Not just in the story. Conceptually. York’s devil is most frightening in the early chapters when he is confined: that smile, those black eyes, the casual impossibility of his continued existence across multiple generations of a single women’s bloodline. Once he escapes into the Louisiana swampland and becomes a plot engine, he stops being a horror and starts being a MacGuffin with wings. The supernatural logic of this book never quite holds. York layers mythology on in the second half like she is hoping the warmth of it will patch the gaps.

York herself is one of the more interesting debut novelists to appear in horror fiction recently, and not despite but because of the obvious autobiographical seams. She is an award-winning abstract painter, an insect taxidermist, and the owner of a small oddities company in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lives with her sculptor husband and what she calls her ferocious daughter. She has said in interviews that Our Devil’s Awake came to her after watching the ending of Jeepers Creepers 2, the part where the hibernating monster hangs in someone’s barn, waiting. What would it be like, she wondered, to be an ordinary suburbanite responsible for guarding something like that. The oddities museum in the novel’s Louisiana section is not invented. It is remembered and loved. The preserved butterflies in the window are posed on looping wire because York knows exactly how that is done. She is a first novelist with a genuine point of view, and a whole career ahead of her to figure out how to push it.

The pacing in the Louisiana section has a looseness the early chapters do not share. York falls in love with her second protagonist the way Blythe does, and it slows everything down, and not in the way that longing can slow a narrative. It slows down the way a draft does when a writer cannot bring herself to cut the scenes she likes most. The momentum the book builds through Andie’s death, Rosie’s escape, Blythe alone in an empty house with an empty casket and no one to call: all of it dissipates here, and it takes a long time to come back.

The ending resolves too sweetly for the book that preceded it. I understand the impulse: after a story about hereditary burden and the costs of an inherited life, York wants to give Blythe something, and she should. But the final images are a rom-com epilogue dressed in horror clothing, and the horror clothing comes off fast. A book that opened with a girl finding her mother dead inside a devil’s arms, in a suburban basement, under fluorescent light, needed to earn its happiness with something braver and stranger than what it settles for. The warmth is real. But it does not cost anything. The best horror endings cost something.

Our Devil’s Awake has a premise I will be stealing in my dreams and a mother-daughter relationship that quietly outclasses everything around it. Chloe York is not a writer I will stop paying attention to. She just wrote a book that got comfortable too early and never quite found its way back to strange.