It takes little time for the reader to grow aware that tattoo shop apprentice Johnny Truant is an unconventional narrator — he revels in lies he tells to strangers. When he discovers an abandoned monograph by the late scholar Zampano that critiques a documentary film called The Navidson Record, he finds himself obsessed. The film follows a family's discovery of a chilling hallway in their living room wall that ought to — but doesn't — lead into their yard. Layer upon layer of madness

—Lyndsay Faye