Review: Chapel Street by Sean Paul Murphy

 

TW: Suicide is mentioned frequently in this novel as are aspects of mental health disorders.

Rick Bakos wanted a normal life. After the tragic death of his father when Rick was a child, he was left to grow up with a mentally unstable mother and brother who succumbed to suicide, and an absent younger sister. Suicide had long been a family trait in the Bakos family, with Rick’s mother and brother not being the first members to die by their own hand. To make sense of his family's tragic history, Rick set out to work as a volunteer with the website RestingPlace, a genealogy website, cataloging the final resting places of people around Baltimore where he lives.

Inexplicably drawn to the grave of Betty Kostek, Rick begins to experience incidents of paranormal activity as soon as he uploads her grave to the RestingPlace website. When Rick realizes that all the occurrences are connected to Betty, he attempts to take down her photo and information from the website, only to have his account frozen so that he cannot remove it. His only ally, Terri Poskocil, another genealogist on RestingPlace who is having her own issues with paranormal occurrences. Terri attempts to help Rick find out the answers to the question of who Betty was and how she is connected to both of their families’ pasts. The pair work together with priests from the school where Terri works to find out the answers before it costs both them and their loved ones their lives.

Reading a book that focused on horror and religion was something new for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Mixing horror, romance, religion, and demonic entities together wasn’t a trope that I had explored previously, and Mr. Murphy blended them all seamlessly. Murphy builds an instantly immersive world for his characters so that you feel like you are with them on their search. I would love to see this novel, with Mr. Murphy as head writer, see this as a feature-length film.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to Sean Paul Murphy for providing me with a review copy of his novel in exchange for my honest opinion. All thoughts and opinions are my own.