Book Review: Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
Weird conspiracies on campus in this dark academic setting
Wildfire, 2024
Sleep had eluded her since girlhood. She spent countless black hours twisting in the grip of night terrors, screaming and shrinking from some invisible menace until she was unceremoniously submerged in cold water. By the time she was ten, her parents had given up on the sleep training touted by every child psychologist and abandoned her to the supervision of late-night TV. By the time she was twenty, she had given up on every sleep aid that promised to alleviate her insomnia. By the time she was thirty, she had given up trying, tired of being tired, tired of telling people she was tired, tired of being bombarded with imbecilic advice about how to be less tired. Have you tried a warm bath? Warm milk? Herbal tea? Reading before bed always works for me!
I missed Rio’s first book If We Were Villains on account that at the same time it was published, I finally got round to reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a book which I thought was terrifically written; I just happened to despise all the characters in it. Villains was doing the rounds, and I just couldn’t bring myself read another book that was oft-compared to The Secret History.
This seems unfair, but I’m a mood reader outside of reading for research, and anything resembling Dark Academia is currently out of my orbit. However, I’ve enjoyed reading Rio’s Notes and posts on Substack, and when I saw the rat-infested cover art for Graveyard Shift, I picked it up, intrigued by the idea of a story taking place over the course of a single night.
In her introductory note, Rio touches on the debilitating effects of insomnia, and this thematic restlessness infects the rag-tag misfits of Graveyard Shift, which lends the reading experience a disconcerting, helter-skelter quality when events progressively get weirder as the night ploughs on.
Graveyard Shift is a short read, so I won’t say too much about the plot, but if hanging out in cemeteries, college dive bars, and laboratory-stemmed conspiracies are your thing, then you’ll get a kick out of this novella.
Guess I’ll be reading If We Were Villains, after all.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #6.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
