4.5 stars

Ominous, lingering, Americana gone wrong with a dose of the eldritch.

Concept:★★★★
Pacing: ★★★★
Atmosphere: ★★★★★

This is one of those books that you either barely describe or seriously over describe--it's rich, the plot is layered, and some of the magic in this story's structure comes from knowing the movements of the plot and yet being absolutely compelled to savor it anyway for the journey. A really masterful horror-speculative from an author to watch.

In the town of Amity Falls, a family of beekeepers lives in relative harmony with their close-knit group of townspeople. Their town exists in the valley of a hard-to-travel mountain range, and monsters, perils, and death plague anyone who tries to get into Amity Falls....and out. Supply runs to the outside world are dangerous and infrequent. The people of Amity Falls are isolated.

In this setup of isolation and crowd-based community, Ellerie Downing is learning to care for the bees. And trying to find her place in the community as a young woman of seventeen with dreams and goals that don't *quite* align with the patriarchal lifestyle of her town.

When she meets a strange boy at the fringes of the woods, Ellerie has no idea that everything is about to change.

The woods are dark and deep. And something has been drawn to the glowing jewel of Amity Falls like a moth to a flickering flame...

Keep your luck with you, and don't go lending out small favors.

Ohhhhhh, this was delicious. Like the honey that this novel's bee motif alludes to, Small Favors is a book that seeps into your consciousness with a sweet yet hard-to-escape sticky residue. You're caught like a fly in the amber within the author's beautiful words, aware that the story is heading for destruction and yet unable to stop, happy to sink in.

What an interesting combination to add the Salem witch trials-esque Americana spirit to the folkloric eldritch horrors of the older worlds. You'd think this would have been done before and therefore boring in its familiarity, but the author took those familiar concepts and really tangled them up into something fresh on the market (or at least it was fresh for me, a fan of folklore horror).

I wonder how this novel would translate to an international audience, because it is so rooted in that sense of nebulously frontier Americana with all of the folklore, superstitions, and religion vs. folk that seems to have a unique flavor in this particular country and time. But then, the core concepts are familiar to a lot of Western countries that are based in Christianity, so who knows.

A fantastic entry into the folklore horror canon, and another beautifully written story by Erin A. Craig.

Thank you to Random House Children’s for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.