The way Rules for Vanishing blended subtly different types of horror together–urban legends, ghost stories, some unique eldritch creatures, and an unusual dark twist on some mythology–was one of my favorite parts of the book. By setting foot onto the path, Sarah and her friends haven’t merely gathered together in the woods with some phone flashlights and hope of some answers, but set out on a supernatural quest bound by rules they don’t quite understand–but have devastating consequences if broken. The premise for Rules for Vanishing might seem to promise a few ghosts and some spooky local folklore, but it gets way more unique and more eldritch very fast. The group gathers at night, still fraught from a year of estrangement following Becca’s disappearance, and set foot on an old path in the forest. A year after her sister’s disappearance, Sarah and her friends accept a mysterious text invitation to play the “game” and search for the missing girl. Rules of Vanishing is an epistolary/found footage-style YA horror about Sarah, the sister of Becca, a girl who vanished while supposedly investigating the urban legend of a young girl’s ghost in the nearby woods.

I’ve been slowly dipping my feet into the horror genre and Kate Alice Marshall’s book has the honor of being the first book of my reading experiment that creeped me out so badly I forced myself to only read it during the daytime, which I think is a special kind of testimony.

The road is rarely forgiving, and no one will be the same on the other side. Together, they will have to draw on all of their strengths to survive. And even though she’s hardly spoken with them for a year, Sara finds herself deep in the darkness of the forest, her friends–and their cameras–following her down the path. When a mysterious text message invites Sara and her estranged friends to “play the game” and find local ghost legend Lucy Gallows, Sara is sure this is the only way to find Becca–before she’s lost forever. With her sister gone, Sara doesn’t know whether her former friends no longer like her…or are scared of her, and the days of eating alone at lunch have started to blend together. It’s been exactly one year since Sara’s sister, Becca, disappeared, and high school life has far from settled back to normal. Who is brave enough to find her–and who won’t make it out of the woods? Once a year, the path appears in the forest and Lucy Gallows beckons. In the faux-documentary style of The Blair Witch Project comes the campfire story of a missing girl, a vengeful ghost, and the girl who is determined to find her sister–at all costs.

Rules of vanishing