Some books grow teeth as you read them. The Children by Melissa Albert is one of those books, a Gothic-tinged literary horror about siblings whose mother turned their childhood into a publishing empire, and the bill that comes due years after she died in the fire that should have killed them too.
This is Albert’s first adult novel, and she arrives at the form like someone who has been waiting a long time for permission to write it.
The Setup: Two Childhoods, One Survivor
Guinevere “Guin” Sharpe has spent her adult life negotiating two versions of her past. One lives in the Ninth City series, her mother Edith Sharpe’s beloved children’s fantasy books, where she and her brother Ennis are immortalized as plucky child heroes traipsing through a fantastical multiverse. The other version lived in a remote Vermont farmhouse, where two unwashed, underfed kids ran half-feral through the woods while their mother’s career exploded and their father quietly came apart.
When the novel opens, Guin is promoting a ghostwritten memoir, painting the Farmhouse years in soft golden light for morning TV audiences. Then her estranged brother, now a famous and notorious artist, announces a new installation. Its title? Mother.
Guin has not spoken to Ennis in over twenty years. Now he is summoning her back, and the secrets she has spent decades sealing shut are starting to seep through the walls.
Prose Built for a Slow Haunting
If you have read Albert before, particularly The Hazel Wood or Our Crooked Hearts, you already know her sentences carry unusual weight. Here she pushes further. Her descriptions feel coaxed out of woodgrain and lamplight. A morning TV host has “a pert woodland creature face.” A predatory novelist on a couch has “hard joviality atop an acre of entitled discontent.” Edith, the absent mother at the center of everything, “looked neck up like a sleepless Medici daughter. Neck down like a skater boy.”
The prose carries a sticky, candle-warm quality that suits the material. Albert understands that a Gothic novel is, in some ways, a guided tour through a haunted house. She slows you down. She lets the wallpaper breathe. Readers chasing breakneck plot may find the early chapters too leisurely. Readers who like to read with a thumb pressed against the next page, savoring the dread, will be very happy here.
A Dual Timeline That Earns Its Keep
The Children by Melissa Albert moves on twin tracks. The present-day storyline follows Guin in the five days leading up to Ennis’s exhibition opening. The other track travels backward into the Sharpe family’s Vermont years, beginning with two small children entering a house they will love before it ruins them.
This structure never feels like a gimmick. The flashbacks earn their place because Albert uses them to slowly unscrew the lid on what really happened. The present-day chapters keep clicking up the tension a half-notch at a time. By the final stretch, the two timelines are barely separable in your mind. Past and present rhyme each other in ways that are quietly devastating.
Themes: The Shadow Inside Beloved Stories
What makes The Children by Melissa Albert feel fresh in a crowded Gothic subgenre is its preoccupation with how children’s books work on us. Albert clearly grew up reading Lewis, L’Engle, Aiken, Ibbotson, Carroll, Baum. She names them like saints throughout the book.
The novel keeps circling a hard question: what does it cost an author to write the kind of fantasy that becomes a refuge for millions of kids, and what does it cost the actual children whose mother is busy building those refuges? Albert takes the warm childhood classic, the kind of story Edith Sharpe purportedly wrote, and quietly turns it over to show the rot underneath. The Ninth City sounds magical because it is. But magic, in this novel, is rarely free.
Other threads worth flagging:
Fame as a long, slow-acting poison passed from mother to daughter.
The slipperiness of memory, especially memories formed before the age of twelve.
The strange contract between an artist and the people who love their work.
Sibling loyalty under conditions that make loyalty almost impossible.
What Albert Gets Right
A few things land with real skill:
The sibling bond between Guin and Ennis is rendered with bruise-deep tenderness. Even after years of silence, their connection thrums through every chapter.
The supporting cast is sharp and economical. Regina the publicist, Candy the protector, Fern the assistant, Hank the fiancé. Each one feels like a complete person rather than a plot delivery system.
The horror creeps in obliquely. You do not get jump scares. You get the feeling of a finger ticking down a hallway, a perfume that smells of clove and pepper, a row of windows that may or may not be there.
The book is funny. Guin’s interior voice is sardonic, exhausted, and frequently lethal. The opening scene with the smarmy male novelist in the green room is worth the entry fee alone.
Where It Stumbles
An honest assessment requires saying so when something does not quite click.
The supernatural backbone, once it fully reveals itself, lands somewhere between literary metaphor and outright fantasy horror. Not every reader will find the balance satisfying. Some will want the dread sharper and more literal; others will want it kept fully ambiguous. Albert plants her flag in the middle, which is a brave choice and also a divisive one.
Ennis, despite being the gravitational center of Guin’s emotional life, spends most of the novel offstage. When he finally takes the page, he carries it. Readers may still wish for more direct time with him along the way.
There is also a section in the back third where the dream logic accelerates and a clutch of revelations come quickly. Some readers will find it cathartic, the long-promised payoff. Others may need to flip back a few pages to make sure they did not miss a step.
Read-Alikes Worth Adding to the Stack
If The Children by Melissa Albert lands the right nerve, these books move in similar territory:
Our Crooked Hearts and The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert, for more of her witchy, sister-haunted register.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, for atmospheric horror about a house with appetites.
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth, for a Gothic puzzle-box about a book that warps the people who love it.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, for inherited curses and architecture that refuses to behave.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, the patron saint of sisters and survival.
Bunny by Mona Awad, for art-world unease and dream-logic transformation.
Final Word
The Children is Melissa Albert at her most assured. It is a novel about siblings, about famous mothers, about the cost of being written into someone else’s story before you ever got to write your own. The prose is rich, the structure is sturdy, and the dread accumulates like dust in an attic.
It is not a flawless novel. It moves at its own pace, and the supernatural element will sort readers into camps. But for anyone who has ever returned to a beloved childhood book and felt a chill they could not quite name, The Children by Melissa Albert is going to find a permanent shelf in your memory.