Kirkus Reviews

When what's real keeps shifting in monstrous ways, can Emma find her way home? Can she even hold on to sanity and self? With a head full of metal that causes migraines and occasional blackouts, 17-year-old Emma makes the best of her life at Holten Prep until one of her teachers accuses her of plagiarizing a dead writer's unfinished and inaccessible manuscript. Taking off on a trip with her friend Lily, Emma gets caught in a freak snowstorm, and she finds her survival, her fate and even her past entwined with those of seven strangers. Reality keeps shifting, and motifs keep repeating, and everything is tied to dead horror author Frank McDermott and the bizarre and bloody way he wrote his stories. Can Emma and her companions escape the monster he released? Bick's doorstopper mixes provocative ideas from Inkheart and the movies The Matrix and Inception with a little Charles Dickens, but it doesn't give readers much in the way of character or plot to hang onto through huge swaths of the tale. Quick cuts between short chapters with cliffhanger endings attempt to keep pages turning; instead, they offer ample opportunity to put this overlong and often confusing first of another gargantuan trilogy down and move on to something more immediately engaging and sustained. Fans who can forgive the downer ending can look forward to a historical-thriller sequel shortly (or longly, as the case will surely be). (Horror. 14 & up)

Voice of Youth Advocates

When Frank McDermott's young daughter, Lizzie, overhears a conversation between her parents about Frank's unfinished works, she is frightened; when she sneaks from the house to the barn where he works, she witnesses horrific events involving a transformation of her father into a monster. When her mother burns the barn down and leaves with Lizzie, readers meet Emma, the other main character. Emma's professor, Kramer, threatens to fail her because she plagiarized (or did she?) the famous writer Frank McDermott's work. But Emma never read the book, so where did her thoughts come from? Are Emma's thoughts and ideas coming from within her, from her blackoutscalled "blinks"that take her into alternate worlds? Emma meets a series of other characters: Eric and Casey, brothers who have escaped an abusive father by shooting him; Rima, whose mother is an alcoholic who tried to kill her; Bode and Chad, who are enlisted in the Army; and Tania, who is really Anita. All the characters try to escape monsters and other horrifying creatures unleashed from the white space, and Lizzie eventually shows Emma how to pull her own stories from white space, which is a blank page waiting to be written with symbols and ideas.Emma is the thread that binds the entire story together and uses a cynosure as a way to focus and show the way for all the characters to follow to escape the horrors. The characters are well written, the descriptions of the horrors they witness are blood curling, and the end is a shocker. She has lived through a difficult experience, and her mind is helping her escape it. This is a fascinating, intricate story with multiple threads running through it. It is a combination of mystery, science fiction, and horroran exciting page-turner. Readers will devour it and want the next book immediately.Rachel Axelrod.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Bick (the Ashes trilogy) launches the Dark Passages series with this ambitious meta-textual adventure, which invokes Stephen King levels of psychological and physical horror, while defying readers- perceptions of reality at every turn. After a car accident, Emma Lindsay is inexplicably trapped in a valley with a handful of other teenagers, unable to escape the pervasive fog and the monsters hidden within. As Emma and her companions attempt to escape, they-re thrust into a series of shifting realities based on the works of a deceased author, where no one and nothing are as they seem. Faced with unsettling revelations and disturbing questions, they must fight for their lives and determine what-s real and what-s fiction. Though the story starts off slowly, and the often-shifting perspective makes it hard to empathize with many characters, things pick up considerably once the heroes start unraveling the underlying mystery. While Bick does an excellent job at conveying tension, atmosphere, and the multi-layered premise, the epic length, frequent character-hopping, and convoluted action detract from an otherwise intriguing tale. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Feb.)

ALA Booklist

It's an interesting premise: Emma Lindsayhas been called into Professor Kramer's office to face his charge of plagiarism. She has written a short story virtually identical to portions of deceased author Frank McDermott's unfinished novel, Satan's Skin. Yet she has never seen the novel, which is stowed away in Edinburgh. How could she copy a portion of a novel she didn't know existed? Is this yet another blink lapse in Emma's daily routine that takes her into other realities, a possible side effect of the plates in her skull? With allusions to The Matrix, The Bell Jar, and The Shining, to name a few, Bick forces readers to face a complex question: Are Emma and others in the story simply characters in one or more books who somehow got trapped together in the white spaces between pages? Or are they real people? This is hardly an easy read. Bick pushes readers, moving between story lines and points of view with little uniting the disparate threads except Emma herself. With incessant violence and gore, this series starter is for the most hard-core connoisseurs of horror or world-shifting fiction.

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-One of the marks of a classic horror story is the slow and insidious shifting of the rules within the tale's universe. Bick understands the power of this trope and uses it relentlessly in this sophisticated horror novel for older teens. A brilliant five-year-old watches her novelist father call horrors from a powerful mirror. A high school junior with static-filled gaps in her memory pens a horror tale, one that had already been written decades ago. A psychically gifted girl accepts a ride from a troubled but sweet boy. A marine and his younger brother head out on snowmobiles after accidentally killing their abusive father. Fleeing their separate nightmares, the cast assembles in a fog-bound, snow-filled valley from which there seems to be no escape. Lovecraft-inspired monsters inflict gruesome deaths and time and space are unreliable in this mind-bending narrative. Slowly, it's revealed that no one is quite who they thought they were, and the boundaries of this universe are definitely falling apart. Continuous references to fictional time and space travelers ( The Matrix' s Neo, A Wrinkle in Time 's Meg Murray) add intricacy, leading characters to wonder if they themselves are made up. Bick is a master of the genre, balancing tension, terror, and tedium through repetition and fractured storytelling. White Space is filled with echoes of other horror stories, but the author manages to hold on to her own narrative voice, playing on readers' expectations through a series of reveals, some just predictable enough to inspire a false sense of security. The first of a series, it also can stand alone. Katya Schapiro, Brooklyn Public Library

Horn Book

Eric felt blood welling from the fresh wound on his cheek. I'm real; I'm bleeding; you can't bleed if you're not real...