In upstate NY Galesburg was an old community drowned when the Chilewaukee dam was created in response to more water needed for the city. Its residents did everything in their power to stop officials from ruining their land and flooding their buildings, all for naught. Galesburg might be under water but some of original families remember and hand this knowledge down to their future generations. The people of Galesburg still want revenge, especially as the dam was never completed and used as a water supply.
Now in present day unprecedented rains and poorly maintained infrastructures, set the stage for a chilling ghost story. Complicated and nuanced real characters bring a richness to the book creating an intertwined second story, as well as interesting history of how dams work, how the city gets its water, and how the tunnels beneath the city deliver this water. . Growing up under the Kensico reservoir, imagining as a child what would happen if the dam broke, added an additional chill to my reading.
Still, I found the reasoning behind the ghosts revenge a little hard to swallow, and their scope of their retribution a little too damning.

THE CHILL (written under a nom de plume) is one extraordinary novel: Supernatural thriller, family dysfunction, average small-town in contrast with highly dysfunctional cultish village. No need for suspension of Disbelief: I leaped immediately into the story on Page 1, and I devoured every bit of it without a pause. The story is so "real" I seemed to be living it, not reading it.


The "Chill" is an Upstate New York dam and reservoir, initially intended to provide water supply to New York City, but instead left as surplus to requirements. Unfortunately its construction came at the cost of submerging a village, and herein lies the tale. I've been fascinated by "drowned communities" since reading Stuart Woods' novel UNDER THE LAKE in the latter 1980's, and I will probably always be simultaneously fascinated abd repelled by such examples of human greed and cupidity.