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Me, rollerblading into my therapist’s office with heart-shaped sunglasses and a piña colada and dropping this book on the desk with a loud thud: Boy do we have much to talk about today!

Why read Verity when you can just pull out an Ouija board and summon a demon from hell? I'm sure it’ll have the same effect. I finished this book feeling completely sapped of life, as if I've been bleeding freely for the past few hours instead of simply reading. That ending. What the hell. If I could just shake my head to dissolve the memory of it, to disarrange it somehow, I would. Because of all the things I’d braced myself for, that was not it.

Right. Let's talk plot.

Lowen Ashleigh is set free from the long tedium of her daily life when she’s employed by Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in a popular series his wife, Verity, is unable to finish due to an unfortunate accident. Lowe acquiesces in the spirit of hope: that this opportunity would help her acquire some small measure of celebrity and that celebrity would be oxygen to the fire of her career. But nothing prepares Lowe for Verity’s autobiography, which she accidentally stumbles upon one day. For the horror of it. Verity’s secrets paint a different picture of what Lowen thought she knew of Verity, Jeremy, and their lives together. But sooner or later, as these things often go, the whole truth will spill, and the fraught waiting in-between would come to an end, with havoc and screaming and loss.

“After all, this is a house full of Chronics. The next tragedy is already long overdue.��

I love books that make me backtrack my own declarations of preference. The books that catch me completely off-guard, astonish me, keep me on my toes. Verity is not at all what I expected, and I think it is all the better for it. I picked it up with a great deal of skepticism. I did not enjoy any of Hoover's previous work, and didn't think Verity would tip the scales. I’ve never been happier to be so wrong because this book absolutely lives up to the buzz.

Verity is a huge departure from Hoover's catalogue. It's a fiendishly clever, mind-bending whirligig of a book. The plot is a hall of mirrors where everything is a vacant reflection, including the people who live there. Hoover draws you into a world where illusion informs reality, and time enfolds hauntingly. She lures and tricks and wrong-foots. Always, she wields her unreliable characters to stunning effect: confounding, disturbing and delighting in turn. Not only is nothing what it seems, it’s not even what it seems after it’s been revealed to be not what it seems. And I was entrapped in this story long before I even realized the net was already cast.

The book's biggest triumph to me was the sheer energy threaded the pages, how it feels uncontrollable, yet it is perfectly under control by the author. I like the way Hoover makes you feel Lowe’s deep-skin unease and confusion as if it's your own. You can sense the danger pulsing all around, and while you can scarcely see the freshly hideous future taking shape ahead, you can feel it all the same. In short, if I were Lowe, I’d have gotten the hell out of there. I’d have been impressed by her courage if I weren’t too preoccupied repeating a litany of “GET OUT OF THERE, YOU IDIOT�� in my head.

And, oh my God, the ending. That shit struck me backhanded. I'm still reverberating from it. Because here's the thing: Verity offers its reader no solidity of truth that they could hold in their hands. Even as I was reading and rereading the last chapter I was mining it for clues, trying to make sense of something that felt so utterly senseless. Everything I’ve read up until that point felt like a false memory and I was left shaking my fist at the whole book for leaving me on such a hideous note as it did. Because, what.

So, yeah. I'm going to let this story haunt me for a long time.