The Insatiable Volt Sisters, Rachel Eve Moulton’s second novel, is a creepy, sprawling novel that offers a master class in atmosphere while making readers feel like they’re standing on ambiguous terrain. At once a Lovecraftian nightmare about a water demon that feeds on women and their pain, a gothic novel about familial trauma and secrets (complete with haunted, crumbling mansion), and a horror narrative about shape-shifting, ghosts, and making deals with the Devil, The Insatiable Volt Sisters eschews categorization, and in the process offers a gripping, haunting narrative in which things left unspoken and everything that’s unseen become as important as everything that’s on the page.
Back in the summer of 1989, Henrietta and Beatrice (B.B.) Volt were growing up on Fowler Island, a small piece of land on Lake Erie that had been in their family for generations. The sisters spent their days running around together, dreaming about the future, and swimming in the quarry pond, which had been made by their grandfather as he blasted his way through the rock and was deeper than it looked. Unfortunately, their plans were interrupted when their parents—only Henrie’s biological mother—separated and did the same to them in the process.
A decade later, Henrie receives a phone call from B.B: Their father has died and Henrie has to return to Fowler Island for the funeral. But Henrie doesn’t want to go back. Fowler Island wasn’t a horrible place to grow up in, but it was far from perfect. Their father, a poet, was moody and always locked in his study, typing away. Also, the house was haunted, their mother was always sad, there was something dangerous in the quarry pond, and the island had a long history of missing women, including some in the Volt family. Henrie had managed to move on with her life, but the island and the house she grew up in, along with everything she remembers and the things she can’t remember, are never far from her mind. Despite her discomfort, Henrie returns to Fowler Island with her mother, and the two of them soon find themselves in the island’s grasp, simultaneously eager to leave but also feeling Fowler Island’s strange, powerful pull. They deal with B.B.’s desire to stay on the property they’ve inherited and make it something new in order to erase its dark history.
Buy the Book
The Insatiable Volt Sisters
The preceding synopsis barely scratches the surface of this novel. There is a lot going on in the pages of The Insatiable Volt Sisters, which is told from the perspective of not only Henrie and B.B. but also Carrie, Henrie’s mother, and Sonia, the island’s “Curator” who’s in charge of the museum. While several men are part of the story—the first Volt, B.B. and Henrie’s father, the sisters’ love interests on the island, etc—the novel is narrated by and focuses on women. The result is a narrative about sisterhood, but also about motherhood, fighting against the genre roles society insists on placing on women, the vulnerability of women on the run, and the many women who have vanished on the island, often leaving behind some of their possessions or, in a few cases, body parts. The strength and resilience shown by the women in this novel give it a feminist touch that bristles right below the surface and shows just how much time, care, and attention to detail Moulton placed while crafting it.
Moulton deftly juggles a plethora of elements here, but horror is perhaps the one that deserves the most attention. Yes, the dialogue is superb and has some unexpected moments of humor, the relationship between Henrie and B.B., which sometimes brings to mind the Blackwoods of Shirley Jackson’s classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is deep and nuanced, and the prose is at once elegant and electric —but in this novel, darkness reigns. Moulton clearly understands that sometimes showing, describing in detail, and explaining often get in the way of horror, and she allows many parts of her story to inhabit a wonderfully disturbing interstitial space between shadows, dreams, and things only half-seen in the middle of the night. And there are plenty of these half-seen things. There is a creature/demon that lives at the bottom of the quarry pond where it connects to Lake Erie. It feeds on grief, and it’s directly related to the women who have disappeared on the island. There are also many ghosts trapped in the house, which starts shaking toward the end of the novel. Lastly, the sisters may or may not be something else, just like their father, who left a complete skin before he died that was shaped like a monster. Everything is related, but it almost takes the novel’s 464 pages to understand how and why.
I read and reviewed Moulton’s Tinfoil Butterfly when it came out in 2019 and was blown away because the atmosphere was superb and the novel managed to get under my skin. I was cautiously optimistic about whatever she published next, but understood that an entirely different story might not necessarily possess the same power in terms of atmosphere. I was wrong. While completely different, The Insatiable Volt Sisters is just as great as Moulton’s first novel and surpasses it in terms of the elements at play and unnerving subplots and events that stick with you long after you’ve turned the last page. An impressive debut (it was short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Award) is hard to follow, and Moulton has done so incredibly well, and that makes me even more excited about whatever she writes next.
Perhaps the most powerful thing about horror fiction is the way it can blend everything together under the same roof and allow disparate elements to shine while still delivering a very cohesive narrative. In The Insatiable Volt Sisters, monsters, demons, and ghosts cavort with grief, a dark legacy, a history of dead women, and a profound, complicated sibling relationship that’s all about love and then morphs into something else, and everything gets equal time in the spotlight. Moulton is a talented storyteller with a knack for atmosphere, and Fowler Island is the kind of place that sucks you in and refuses to let you go. You should set foot on it because the story is worth the risk, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t let you leave.
The Insatiable Volt Sisters is published by MCD + FSG Originals.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. Iglesias’ nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor, and his reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and the Millions Tournament of Books, and is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle.
