Best Left Buried

by Solomon J. Inkwell:

Sometimes, if you are lucky, you encounter a story that takes hold of you. You begin reading the book not knowing what to expect, and before you know it, you’re halfway through it. You lose track of how much time you’ve spent immersed in the writer’s world until you smell your dinner burning.

Best Left Buried by Cindy Hutchins is such a tale.

Cindy tells the story of Arliss Pardot, a young woman with a very curious past. From nowhere, Arliss receives a phone call informing her that her mother, a long-term psychiatric patient of Broughton Hospital, has committed suicide.  She hasn’t thought of her mother, or the troubling circumstances of her childhood, in twenty years. But something is forcing her back, back to the shadows of her enigmatic hometown.  A place where she is an unwitting celebrity, a folklore legend known to all as the little girl locked in a remote cabin in the woods with the crazy mother, surrounded by caged birds…and a mysterious mummified corpse.

Arliss returns to Morganton, North Carolina to collect her mother’s body when she becomes caught up in her previous life—the memories, the birds, and the entity known as It, which seems to somehow live and thrive from death and evil. The more clues she uncovers, the more she begins to wonder if her mother was really the insane woman everyone believed her to be, or if there was something else, something evil from which her mother was not only trying to protect Arliss, but the world.

Cindy does a wonderful job painting the vision of this town, its characters, and the strange world of the unknown. Frankly, she had me hooked with her introduction and her recollection of Morganton, the story’s setting and the place where she actually grew up. She paces her story well, and you don’t feel rushed, but guided through the mysterious details. Interestingly, the book itself has no formal chapter separations. Personally, I missed this traditional structure, but it didn’t deter my enjoyment of the story.

“Some things are best left buried; some things won’t stay down…”

I love that line…

Best Left Buried can be found on Amazon.com.