There’s something horribly wrong at Lost Lake…
B.E. Smith’s Shallow Rock makes one thing immediately clear: it is neither a standard crime caper nor a simple ghost story. It is a novel about inheritance—of guilt, of violence, of myth—and about what happens when a community tells the same story for long enough that it becomes internalized by both people and place.
Lost Lake, New York. June 15, 1973.
Deputy Kelly Mackinaw, newly arrived in Wanakena and newly hired as the town’s first female sheriff’s deputy, is staying at an old lumber camp until she finds somewhere more permanent. As she approaches her new home, she spots a figure in the fog: a girl’s body drifting away dissolving into the haze.
With Kelly is Mitch Herkemer, the sheriff’s son, a Vietnam vet who is renovating the camp and who will be her roommate for the foreseeable future. He calmly identifies the apparition as a fourteen-year-old girl called Sarah Punk, explaining to a bewildered Kelly that “she’s been dead for fifty years.”
The encounter with the phantom is eerie, grounded, and unsettling—not because it leans into gothic ghostly excess but because it doesn’t. The horror of the event is quiet. The fog swirls. The girl fades. A scream pierces the air. And then Kelly and Mitch have to continue about their business. The restraint is impressive.
Later, over a beer, Mitch recounts the tragic story of Sarah Punk: a young girl living in a shack in Shaker’s Bog whose baby, Moses, was accidentally shot by drunken hunters, Jim and Baron Margin. No prosecution followed. No justice. Sarah disappeared into the swamp. Later, the hunters died out there in an unlikely shooting accident.
Over the decades that followed, members of the Margin family continued to die violently in or near the swamp. So too did an assortment of other unlucky folks. “They said she liked to sneak up on kids who were by themselves and try to lure them into the water.” The legend of Sarah Punk grew teeth.
Despite what she sees, Kelly doesn’t believe in ghosts. “It’s a cautionary tale,” she insists. “Don’t go wandering off by yourself, kid, or Sarah Punk will drag you into the swamp and make you sleep next to her dead baby.” Her refusal to indulge the local superstition tempers the myth with realism.
But the myth refuses to be neatly contained.
This backstory is effective due to its plausibility. Smith understands that folklore is often just misfiled trauma. For this reason, Mitch explains that he researched Sarah because he hoped facts might “transform her from a ghost into a real person.” This quietly encapsulates the notion that when a community refuses to confront wrongdoing, it invents ghosts instead.
For her part, Kelly counters every eerie event with reason. Fog is vapor and spray. Screams are birds. Haunted planes are pilot errors. She is determined not to be pulled into the uncanny. Yet even she recognizes that belief has power: “Ghosts didn’t have to be real in order for someone to be haunted.”
Due to their differing experiences of the area, Kelly and Mitch have differing interpretations when tragedy strikes once again at Lost Lake. “A woman was dead. The most likely explanation was that a rich, unhappy housewife had OD’d on prescription drugs. It happened all the time these days.” Surely a ghost can’t have been responsible?
B.E. Smith’s immediate recapping of the local legend and its interplay with the local folks means that Shallow Rock operates on two levels: the supernatural legend of Sarah Punk and the very real human rot beneath the lakeside community’s history. While Mitch is immersed in it all, Kelly is a more skeptical anchor to reality.
This tension between their perspectives—between rational explanation and emotional truth—drives the mystery forward. The time and setting are rendered with precision. Lost Lake is not just backdrop; it is an active, brooding presence. The fog is almost sentient. The swamp feels claustrophobic.
In particular, the description of Shaker’s Bog—“a stubborn phalanx of sharp-bladed leaves […] brackish, bug-infested water”—is suffocating. The environment reinforces the sense of something festering just beneath the surface. Even Steep Rock, where children go “cloud jumping” into uncertain depths, becomes symbolic: beauty layered over hidden danger.
Smith also excels at characterization. Kelly is a refreshingly solid female protagonist in the early 1970s—competent, self-aware, and quietly ambitious. The moment she pins on her badge and reflects that “the shield said that you were police, but the star—the star said you were the law” reveals both pride and vulnerability.
She is stepping into a role traditionally denied to women, and Smith doesn’t shy away from the sexism she encounters. Kelly’s toughness is real, but so is her awareness that fear is contagious. When she confronts her reflection in the lamplit mirror, daring Sarah Punk to appear, it captures the psychological uncertainty of the story perfectly.
Mitch is more ambiguous. A Vietnam veteran turned Zen-inspired drifter, he oscillates between grounded and unmoored. His fascination with Sarah feels partly intellectual, partly spiritual, and partly unresolved trauma. He senses “bad karma” in the swamp, and whether that’s mystical insight or survivor’s intuition remains unclear.
Then there is Bobby Margin. Slim, watchful, perpetually half in shadow, he is arguably more unsettling than Sarah Punk: the split lower lip, the Bowie knife tied to his thigh, the habit of appearing silently behind people. He’s not overtly monstrous; he’s worse—he’s plausible. A neglected boy growing into something hard.
The adult men of the lake—lawyers, dealers, predators—add another layer. Mrs. Parker, isolated and armed, seems to expect violence. Recently paroled Hack Weechum, a “mean little fucker,” circles the area. The community is full of threat and dread. This is why Shallow Rock transcends ghost story territory and settles firmly into crime fiction.
Smith is careful with the pacing. Events unfold deliberately, almost painfully so. The early chapters are heavy with atmosphere and strong on character development. The slow buildup of tension is intentional. The lake’s stillness is the point. The violence is not explosive; rather, it accumulates over time.
The lake’s history is murky. The official record is incomplete. Shallow Rock didn’t even officially exist until 1936, despite generations living there. This bureaucratic invisibility mirrors the moral invisibility of what happened to Sarah. No church or medical records. No legal complaint filed. No mention in police reports. Her absence is haunting.
In much of Kelly’s interactions with the myth and the reality of Lost Lake, humor and grit coexist with dread. She faces an unsettling question: What if the ghost isn’t the dead girl in the fog but the community’s refusal to confront what it allowed to happen?
Shallow Rock is a slow-burn crime novel wrapped in the shroud of a ghost story. It’s atmospheric without being indulgent, tense without being melodramatic, and thoughtful without losing narrative momentum. And perhaps the most lingering image is the first one: a pale girl in the fog, neither fully present nor entirely gone.
Whether she’s real or not almost doesn’t matter.
Something is wrong at Lost Lake.
And Smith makes you feel it.
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