Review: “The Descent: A Halloween Story”

By Will Tallman

Donna Kathryn Kelly’s latest novel, “The Descent: A Halloween Story”, delivers all the thrills and chills expected of a “paranormal horror thriller”, but with a unique twist: the story is set in local Oregon, Illinois.

Kelly, the author of several novels in the genre of crime fiction, is a longtime resident of Cary, and was inspired to pen “The Descent” based on her experiences visiting the town of Oregon as a child. The book is littered with easter eggs that reference small towns in northern Illinois. 

The protagonist, Galena Kane, is a graduate of a fictional law school in Oregon. The story opens with her returning to her alma mater to reluctantly attend a party celebrating her thirtieth birthday. Galena and her best friend, Lorne Edwards (a Chicago-based lawyer), set the story into action during a car-ride to the law school. The opening scene describes the locally well-known scenery of historic Route 64, but it illuminates it in a shroud of mystery and foreboding which set the tone for this pleasingly creepy novel.

Local landmarks like the Blackhawk Statue are namechecked as Lorne and Galena banter excitedly about the party. The first chapter is a treat for any Ogle County local, who are certain to get a kick out of Kelly’s description of the Rock River Valley. She does a great job of providing colorful descriptions of the local surroundings and paints a vivid picture of the Oregon landscape. 

Of course, this novel is no whimsical jaunt through the trees of Lowden Park – it is a horror novel. As the two characters arrive at the law school, things get - for a lack of a better word - creepy. Though the author eventually leaps from the bucolic reality of local scenery into a fictional world of horror and thrills, these opening sections of the novel are sure to draw in anyone familiar with the surroundings of Oregon and the Rock River Valley.

As the story unfolds, readers discover that Galena holds a personal vendetta against  her former law school nemesis - a classmate by the name of Logan Carmichael. As she gets closer to the house that she and her law school friends occupied during their time in Oregon, memories of Logan emerge to the forefront of her mind, and she is convinced that he stole her manuscript for a crime-thriller story she had been working on during school. Her hatred and anguish come back to haunt her – in more ways than one. 

In “The Descent”, the seemingly innocuous setup of former law students reuniting for a birthday party gradually transforms into a menacing and terrifying affair, where the students’ former house (and the entire town, for that matter) soon becomes as haunted as Galena’s memories.. “The Descent: A Halloween Story'' is available for purchase in both hard-cover and paperback form at Amazon.com.