A quick brush with death can make anyone anxious, but Olive knows what's beyond this life thing. Filled with existential dread, Olive finds herself drawn to the spirit world, and summons one to answer her questions. At the same time, a series of strange attacks start on her classmates. Anderson's debut is a slow-burn horror story that tackles colonialism and dark tourism in a small American town, drawing solid comparisons to real-life places like Salem. While seasoned fans of the genre may find the plot predictable, Olive's belated queer epiphany shines, and will appeal to fans of the enemies-to-lovers romance. White Havens, a town that charmingly celebrates the macabre, also stands out as a place full of chilling contradictions, the horror grounded in real atrocities: stolen native land, paupers' graves, and a testament that the scariest ghost story is local history. Here Lies Olive fits on the shelf next to The Dead and the Dark (2021) by Courtney Gould and Prelude for Lost Souls (2020) by Helene Dunbar.

A goth girl in New Mexico grapples with death-and what comes after it.Death-obsessed Olive lives in a town known for dark tourism thanks to its history of a tuberculosis sanitarium that drew in Hollywood celebrities and other elites and which was built by the Seymour family on stolen Navajo land, compounding its morbid legacy. Olive has been terrified ever since her shellfish allergy caused a near-death experience: "instead of going to Heaven, I was alone in the Nothing." She's distanced herself from others, including her parents and best friend, Davis. Seeking answers about the afterlife, Olive decides to ask a ghost and summons Jay, who experienced atrocities at the sinister Seymour House Asylum for the Poor, a nightmarish institution "full of forgotten people." Jay is at risk of becoming a shade, and Olive must help him find his grave so he can move on. In the process, she hopes to learn the answer to her enduring question, "where do you go after you die?" The book maintains levity through its pleasantly gothic energy, which will appeal to earnest believers in the paranormal and those in the throes of mortality-related existential crises alike. Davis is Diné; Olive, Jay, and the Seymours are white. This morbid tale that's just as playful as it is unsettling explores race and cultural legacies in the context of New Mexico's historical and contemporary politics of development.A creative and surprising mixture of upbeat and macabre make for an engaging read. (Supernatural horror. 14-18)

Anderson presents a fresh, multilayered exploration of grief and trauma set against an engaging supernatural mystery that evokes urban legends and ghost