Hysteria: A Novel

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

The closer she gets to the truth, the faster it slips away.

Heike Lerner’s life looks perfect from the outside: she’s settled into an easy routine of caring for her young son, Daniel, and spends her days wandering the woods near their summer house, while her nights are filled with clinking glasses and charming conversation. It all helps to keep her mind at ease—or at least that’s what her husband, Eric, tells her. But lately, Heike’s noticed there are some things out of place: a mysterious cabin set back in the trees and a strange little girl who surfaces alone at the pond one day, then disappears—while at home Eric is becoming increasingly more controlling. Something sinister that Heike cannot quite put her finger on is lingering just beneath the surface of this idyllic life.

It’s possible Heike’s worries are all in her head, but when the unthinkable happens—Daniel vanishes while she and Eric are at a party one night—she can no longer deny that something is very wrong. 

Desperate to find her son, Heike will try anything, but Eric insists on a calm that feels so cold she wonders if she can trust him at all. 

Could Eric be involved in Daniel’s disappearance? Or has some darker thing taken him? The closer Heike gets to the truth, the faster it slips away. But she will not rest until she finds her son. 

 

Genres: Canada, Mystery, Thriller, Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Historical Fiction, Suspense

432 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2018

About the author

Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the author of a new collection of short stories, How To Get Along With Women (Invisible Publishing, 2012).

Her poetry and short fiction have been widely published in magazines across Canada, and she's one of the wild minds behind the highly original Toronto Poetry Vendors, a small press that sells single poems by established Canadian poets through toonie vending machines.

Elisabeth works as Marketing Coordinator for Breakwater Books, and is currently based in St. John's, where she lives with the poet George Murray and their combined brood of four children -- making them CanLit's answer to the Brady Brunch.'

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 "unusual, menacing, stylish" stars !!!

2018 Honorable Mention Read.


This is a slow burn that gets under your skin and seeps into your subconscious. Ms. de Mariaffi has written a very fine work that straddles the space between literary fiction, subtle horror and psychological suspense. We never know what is neurosis, what is sadism and what might be supernatural. This is not a book that makes your heart race but rather you hold your breath and shiver.

Heike's boy-child goes missing, yet she starts an affair while her psychiatrist husband concocts new psychotropic cocktails. A young blonde girl rustles through the reeds, a lost sister and a newfound one. States of fugue, dissociation and the deepest of somnolence. Hot days at the lake, evenings at soirees in the 1950s with the writer of the Twilight Zone.
An asylum, diners, retarded maids, a Polish lunatic, old houses, lost money. What the hell is going on in this book. Does it even make sense? Add past trauma, physical assaults, emotional incest, vulnerability, sudden sex, cigarettes and valium. Where on heaven's earth is Heike's boychild.

The writing has an unusual cadence, akward phrases, charming dialogue and lots of atmospheric and chilling description.

Forget all these blatant predictable thrillers and choose something a little greyer, murky and surprising. Choose Hysteria !



One of the year's most under-read but really and I mean really superb books !!

[Antoinette · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 STARS
This is one of those books with an underlying "creepy" feeling. What's real, what's not? Is something about to jump out and spook our main character and me the reader? The book definitely had me feeling on edge.
This book is about Heike and her life with her husband Eric and son Daniel. They have taken up a cottage for the summer, which sounds idyllic, but Heike starts noticing that things feel off and not right and then her son disappears..... From then of course, it is about finding Daniel.
This book started strong, went into hiatus in the middle and finished reasonably strong, but as I expected. Yes, I had figured most of it out quite early on in the book, but it was still fun getting to the end.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hysteria: A Novel starts off kind of promising and new… reminded me of a cross between that Angelina Jolie movie Changeling and Sophie's World. But then it quickly dissolved into… aptly… a 400 pages of hysterics. And not the innovative, mind-bending kind. The whole premise of the novel is that Heike has lost her son. He’s not necessarily dead, just missing. This becomes drilled into your brain because she spends the entire book screaming his name. It was almost headache-inducing at times. It’s difficult to discuss thrillers like these without giving away the ending, so I won’t go into great detail and will let you decide if you want to read it or not. But let me just say: it wasn’t very thrilling.

Also, the main character is German and it takes places in 1950s America for some reason. After finishing the book, I have NO IDEA WHY this place and time were chosen. I’m confused as to why Elisabeth de Mariaffi decided to plop this situation into this time period - and I scrutinized this setting throughout the entire book. I thought I might be wrong and that maybe the time period would be part of the twist… as they say in German, “ende gut, alles gut.” Sadly, not all was gut. Not gut at all.

[Peter Darbyshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s almost impossible to describe Hysteria by Elisabeth de Mariaffi, for it moves not only through a wide range of genres but also beyond their limits, into strange and uncharted literary terrain. Domestic thrillers, psychological thrillers, fairy tales, ghost stories, historical fiction, detective stories – they’re all present in Hysteria in one form or another. But they’re also transformed into something else, a narrative of resistance for a world gone mad, for a world that has perhaps always been mad. The book’s title is a clue to the eerie nature of its story: it’s a state of mind, not a fixed and stable plot with the clear and unambiguous ending of a conventional thriller. In other words, Hysteria is a book better experienced than described.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the positive reviews this book received I did not like it.
I found it difficult to relate to because the characters didn't seem complete. A conversation would take place and end rather abruptly. It was meant to be bizarre and puzzling, but it just didn't cut it with me. Nothing was ever explained thoroughly.
I predicted partway through the major 'surprise' in the story. But it wasn't a satisfying ending for me.
Too often Heike, the MC was imagining sounds, animals, people, etc. It got to be a bit too much for me.

[Anne Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Canadian readers will probably be familiar with this latest can-lit thriller: Hysteria by Elisabeth de Mariaffi. It’s just come out, and it’s getting a hysterical amount of press (obviously I had to use that adjective somewhere in this review, but I promise I won’t do it again). Is this book a page-turner? Yes. Is Mariaffi a good writer? Yes definitely. Did I guess the ending shortly after the book began? Unfortunately, yes. But even though I anticipated the twist almost immediately, I still enjoyed the journey to the end, and I suspect my crime-loving friends will feel the same way. This book isn’t about some shocking conclusion, rather, it’s the eerie atmosphere and gradual character development that draws you in and keeps you interested.

To read the rest of my review please visit:
https://ivereadthis.com/2018/03/27/bo...

[Andrea MacPherson · Rating 3 out of 5]

de Mariaffi’s writing is solid, and she’s good at creating a distinct atmosphere. However, I knew waaaaaay too early on what the “mystery” would be, and some of the characters felt too one-dimensional. A few sub-plots didn’t pan out in a satisfying way.

[Christina McLain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story began in a very promising manner but by the end, it was just too farfetched and strange to be believeable. It is the dark tale of a young German woman living in upstate New York during the stifling years of the 1950s. Heike leads a rather lonely existence at her isolated home as both a detested foreigner and lonely wife. She is married to an emotionally abusive and unstable physician embittered by his lack of success in finding a wonder drug to market to depressed housewives and unhappy men for the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry of the period. Only her relationship with her beloved son Gregory and her friendship with her eccentric husband's sister sustain her. Then one day she discovers an abandoned cottage near her home and meets a mysterious little girl named Tessa ; later the same week her son disappears and Heike is convinced her husband has hidden him from her to punish her for a sexual transgression. She hooks up with a harddrinking but sympathetic television writer to look for the boy but the story unravels from there and the plot begins to give new meaning to the words " unreliable narration." Well written but without the power of a master like Ishiguru to make it believable, the story meanders, stumbles and becomes repetitive and unsatisfying by its end.

[Maggie Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s novel Hysteria is a psychological thriller that defies its own genre in the same way that her characters defy their own realities. The story begins with an exciting but tragic escape from Nazi Germany through the woods where Heike Lerner, our protagonist, is a teenage girl with a seven year old sister in tow. Heike wakes up one morning and her sister is gone, and despite her best efforts she can’t find her. As she moves through the countryside, exhausted she crawls into a hayloft of an abandoned barn. She wakes to the sounds of voices, soldiers coming with a young girl. She bears silent witness to their treatment of this girl, and in the morning when she is sure it is safe to leave, she continues on to safety.

It is the loss experienced in the opening scene that sets the tone for the rest of Heike’s story, which is saturated with loss and the fallout that comes with it.

The story moves forward a few years to 1950s life in cottage country in New York State, where Heike is married to her former psychiatrist, Eric Lerner. Eric is in many ways a typical controlling husband, a jealous man who treats his wife’s undesirable behaviour with a regular course of « tonics », keeping her sleepy, ensuring that she is not a problem. For Eric, anything can count as grounds for the preparation of a psychiatric cocktail, such as the wish to spend more time with her son after she delivered to her husband a fearful account of their son’s near-drowning at a nearby lake.

Heike is a devoted mother of a six-year old son who is always underfoot, wanting always to be close to his mother. One day they take a canoe out to a swimming spot near an abandoned cabin. She and Daniel are eating peaches and almond cookies on a wharf, swimming and sunbathing and having a lovely afternoon together, when a young girl appears out of nowhere and starts talking to Daniel. Her name is Tessa. She disappears under the surface of the lake and Heike frantically tries to find her, to save her, to no avail. Her son, then, falls in the water and almost drowns, appearing also to have scratch marks on his body from the girl. Heike returns home and tells her husband about the terrifying experience but her account of Tessa and the strange things she experienced at the lake are dismissed by her husband, who treats her hysteria with more tonics and assures her that what she has seen cannot be real. He implores her to go get cleaned up and get ready to go to a social event at writer Leo Dolan’s home with his sister, Arden and her husband John.

A scene in the bathroom while Daniel, dirty from the trek through the woods, is bathing and Eric is shaving provides some insight into Heike’s loathing of her controlling husband as they prepare for the party, when she would rather stay home and be close to her son following their experience at the lake.

— Eric.
He jerked the razor away and pressed a facecloth to his cheek.
— Jesus Christ, Heike. He dabbed at the spot but there was no blood, and after examining himself in the mirror, he threw the cloth in the sink. She could see that it would have been more satisfying if she’d manage to cut him.
He lowered his head and closed and opened his eyes before taking up the razor again. Heike started over, keeping her hands well back from his body.
— Eric, listen to me. It wasn’t a dream. I saw a girl, she disappeared under the water. I saw it, I know I did. And here we are going to a party.
Eric went back to scraping at his face.
— Are you still talking about this?
— Because you won’t listen!

Heike has no agency in this relationship, no power, no outside friends. Just Daniel, and later, Eric’s sister Arden. Heike resents him, fantasizes about hurting him. The loathing of an abusive partner had a lot of personal resonance for me and I had to sometimes take a breather from reading the book, because it got too real. De Mariaffi demonstrates a deep understanding of the subject matter. The importance of bearing witness to relationships that include abuse of power is a theme explored in this book, that I was very grateful to have read because I feel that my perspective, at least, is underrepresented in contemporary literature.

Some background on Heike’s loathing of the husband that controls her: She suffered an accident after the war that led to a fit of hysteria and was bedridden, (we don’t get details about what happened until later in the book) and she has no real, tangible memory of who she was before the marriage and before motherhood. She asks Eric many questions about her past, he answers selectively. Who she was and what happened to her is a mystery that keeps the reader guessing.

De Mariaffi explores many typical elements of a controlling relationship and gives them very sinister undertones. An example would be the setting of much of the book: an isolated cottage life in the middle of the woods with no neighbours. While he keeps the family isolated, despite adding a long commute to his work every day, Eric still wants to show off his wife to high society, helping further his position as a cutting-edge psychiatric researcher looking for donors for his work. Party scenes filled with classy socialites at writer Dolan’s house read to me like those in The Great Gatsby or Mrs. Dalloway, with a lot of insight provided into the emotional turbulence of our characters present at this moment in 1950s America, much in the way that Wilde and Woolf had a firm grasp on the outside view of their study subjects at social gatherings in their respective settings.

At Dolan’s house we have a roomful of gambling husbands that drink and do business while their wives pop pills in the bathroom. Auxiliary characters such as the self-medicating wives are interesting and provide valuable subtext of power imbalance and the control of women. A watchful housekeeper, a drunk cook and a catering girl with a black eye who has an altercation around keeping car keys from said drunk cook, remind this reader of David Lynch’s background characters in Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. I am a fan of disturbing, psychological thrillers on film, but this is the first time I’ve read something as disturbing as a Lynchian exploration of the dark corners of the human mind and its search for the total control of beings other than the self.

The pastoral setting of much of the book, wandering through the woods, exploring nature, having mundane discussions with children, all have sinister undertones to the effect that something always seems to be slightly off. Many of the scenes reminded me of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which is my favourite book.

Conversations with Dolan give the reader more insight into Heike’s character. Our protagonist comments to Dolan in a scene where she has sought refuge from the party in a greenhouse on his property « I can’t tell you what makes love tip into control » and he responds after some consideration « you’re Lerner’s wife. » He questions seeing her walking alone toward the woods, says she was far from home. She responds cautiously:

— I like to be alone in the woods.
— Aren’t you afraid?
— In the woods?
— In the woods, Dolan said. Or anywhere. Here. Now. Aren’t you afraid, hidden away here with me? Who knows what I might do.

They later discuss how a good scary story begins with a girl alone in the woods. He is a Hollywood writer with his own ambiguous past, with a wife who is an actress who is no longer in the picture, for reasons unclear to the reader.

De Mariaffi also uses German fairy tales to provide commentary on the stories we tell ourselves about the situations we find ourselves in, and how our fears define us. Heike tells many fairy tales to Daniel as he is going to sleep. De Mariaffi interjects with a tale of Gretchen, a witch, ravens and a bone flute as the novel takes on a more chilling tone. Heike has to face the sudden disappearence in the night of her six year old son. Her world, both internally and externally, takes on a new reality, and it is the determined defiance of her situation that helps her through this new loss. To say any more on the subject would be to spoil the story and this book is too exciting to ruin the mystery.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hysteria. I can’t wait for the next book!

[TSM · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't like this book. I hated the writing style (come on just use quotation marks to indicate speech for Christ's sake). It tried to be too many things: creepy, poetic, deep, mysterious and thrilling. Instead it felt long-winded, slow paced and predictable. The twist was no twist. I would call this a poor man's Shutter Island .

It was nominated for an Evergreen award this year and although I don't always enjoy the books nominated I generally understand that it is just personal taste and not poor writing quality that leads me to dislike the book. In this case I have to utterly question the nomination: this story is wholly unoriginal, poorly written, with contrived drama and characters who are caricatures of real humans.

I wish I hadn't read this book because I will struggle to encourage patrons to my library to waste their time reading such an abysmal story.

[Melissa Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having received an advanced copy, I didn’t have the opportunity to read reviews or spoilers, and had read only a brief description of the book. But knowing it was a psychological thriller and having read (and enjoyed) the author’s previous novel, The Devil You Know, I figured I would enjoy this read. It was a good thing I chose to start reading this over a long weekend because once I started, I could hardly put it down; it was gripping and suspenseful. There were a few predictable parts, but for the most part the story was interesting, taking place between 1946 and 1956. I’m not one to offer spoilers in my reviews, but the plot line was unique and believable for the time.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to keep taking breaks from this book because the anxiety it induced in me was so high. Elisabeth de Mariaffi is simply one of the best writers there is. Problem is I gobble up her books in a day and then have to wait for the next!

In Hysteria, we don't know what's real, and what is imagined; what's dangerous and what's just "nerves"; who is safe and who isn't. All is eventually made clear, but not before the reader starts to doubt his/her own mind. A terrific thriller. As with de Mariaffi's last book, I think this would make an excellent film.

[Simone · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like the way this was written at all - the language didn't flow. I found it a bit easier to read at the end - it made more sense at that time but the beginning was hard to follow and hard to get into. Overall - the plot is great and the 'twist' is very interesting but its the writing that resulted in the low review score.

[Lebrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can believe that a woman who thinks her child is missing would react by having sex with a near stranger then lounge on his veranda while they linger over a meal, then you might like this book. The unreliable narrator and plot holes resulted in a very frustrating read.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Hysteria, Elisabeth de Mariaffi explores the issue of memory repressed and even altered with psychotropic drugs. It is 1956 and Heike Lerner is living in a quiet rural setting in upstate New York with her husband Eric and son Daniel. Eric is a doctor, a researcher whose areas of expertise are the mind and the development of new drugs and treatments for mental disorders. Heike’s past is tragic and traumatic: a German refugee who as a child narrowly escaped the fire-bombing of Dresden by walking for months through the forest, finally making her way into Switzerland, but along the way losing her younger sister Lena who had accompanied her. Her past also includes a brief previous marriage. As far as she can remember, she met Eric in Switzerland while recovering from the accident that killed her first husband and left her gravely injured. They married and Eric brought her to America to start a life together. Now, however, cracks are beginning to show in her recollections and in her life with Eric. Heike dotes on her son but is finding Eric increasingly distant, consumed by his work, and more controlling than in the past. More often than not she is doing as he asks not out of respect and love, but to avoid his displeasure. Because of the atrocities she witnessed during the war (today her condition would likely be recognized as PTSD), Heike suffers from sleeplessness and extreme mood swings, and Eric is in the habit of treating her "hysteria" with draughts and tinctures that he prepares himself, which, as her trust in him erodes, she avoids taking through subterfuge. One night at a party Heike lingers too long in the company of their host, Dolan, a television script writer, and Eric leaves without her. Afterward, Dolan drives her home, but when she gets there she discovers that Daniel is gone. The story that de Mariaffi constructs from this point proceeds at a breakneck pace, loaded with twists and turns, false leads and shocking revelations. Heike, stunned by Eric’s hostile response to her fears for her son's safety and amazed by the apparent lack of police interest in Daniel’s disappearance, conducts a haphazard search of her own, which takes her deep into her own murky past. Hysteria is a complex and cleverly constructed story in which very little is as it appears on the surface, including the motivations of the main players. de Mariaffi is a disciplined writer who works with precision and subtlety, parceling out the clues with maddening restraint. This is a novel that pulls the reader in, not only through sheer force of its storytelling, but also with the language, which evokes remote times and places gracefully and with a level of detail that is often astounding. The book is filled with memorable phrases and arresting visuals. The book’s weaknesses are its excessive length and duplication of some of the situations in which Heike finds herself, the effect of which is to blunt the dramatic impact, dilute the level of suspense and somewhat test the reader’s patience. Still, in Hysteria Elisabeth de Mariaffi has written a genuinely creepy page turner that again and again blows the reader’s expectations out of the water.

[Anastasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first chapter was good. The next chapter was not coherent. The character's thoughts wee were disjointed as were the background descriptions. If this had been a movie I would have felt sea sick from the bad camera work.

[Cady · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very lucky to be selected to get an early readers copy of this book.
I was completely hooked from the beginning until the end. The author created so many layers of this story that blended together so perfectly. While reading this book I could completely feel the tension and total power struggle that the main character , Heike, felt during the beginning of this story. I loved reading the development of this character — her struggles , fears, memories and truth that she adopts throughout her journey to find her son and the truth of her own past.
The author created beautiful imagery and storytelling throughout the novel that made you feel the emotions and tension that the characters were experiencing. There were ghostly elements that kept the reader just slightly creeped out, but saying that, I seriously enjoyed being creeped out in this book. It was like riding a ride at an amusement park— terrifying, exhilarating but you didn’t want it to end.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew my mind. I loved Heike - a badass from page one. There was a Hitchcock feel woven throughout. Taut, creepy, socially relevant - a great read cover to cover. I read it in a matter of days because I had to find out how it ended.

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 While this book had a creepy supernatural feel about it it never really came together in the end for me. It felt like a psychological thriller but became obvious where it was headed. It still had me turning pages at time but got off to a slow start.

[Doug Lewars · Rating 4 out of 5]

*** Possible Spoilers ***

I couldn't bring myself to knock this all the way down to a 3 but it is well below being a 4. Still, some number of stars are required so there you have it.

Mental illness? Delusions? Hallucinations? Ghosts? A controlling sadistic husband? A missing child? A hysterical wife? A secret research project? It’s all here. The author is attempting to convey to the reader a sense of unreality – of how the protagonist cannot differentiate from delusion to reality to false memory. It’s not perfect but it’s done pretty well. What is extremely effective is the sense of foreboding menace that extends from the first page to almost the end of the book. This book is 414 pages in length so it’s pretty impressive to be able to sustain a mood for that amount of time. However in order to maintain the atmosphere the author had to slow the pacing and frankly I wasn’t sure I would be able to complete reading it. This is far from being a page-turner.

I found the ending just a little too conventional or perhaps convenient for my taste; however, at least this book had one. So many modern writers seem to simply stop writing as if distracted by something, and not having the time to complete the manuscript they just send it off for publishing anyway and hope maybe the reader can fill in the details. Most of the loose ends are tied up nicely.

This book is a contender for the 2019 Evergreen awards and it won’t get my vote but I don’t regret the time I spent reading it. If you don’t mind slow pacing and enjoy psychological mind-benders and lots of creepiness then this is likely worthwhile.

[Aparna Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is spooky, with surprising twists and turns, utterly unpredictable, and an absolute page-turner. It is a feminist novel that deals with motherhood, the treatment and attitude towards women, not just of society at large but of the protagonist Heike's own husband who uses her as a guinea pig for medical experiments and for his own fame and glory. The language that de Mariaffi uses, especially when describing sounds (which are very important in the work) is so pitch perfect. There is a miasma of melancholy here that many women will be able to relate to. I could not put the book down and the book has stayed with me though I finished it some time ago.

[Peter Von · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stock characters and a derivative plot, you've seen it all before. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I saw the ending telegraphed very early on. How on earth did this book garner so much praise? That's 2 and a half weeks of good summer reading time I'll never get back.

[Jill Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hysteria is a superbly written contemporary novel that flirts equally with the genre of thriller, and literary novel, both.
De Mariaffi hooks the reader through a strong sense of character, and the subtle hint that something is superbly wrong, something that both the reader and central characters have no idea just what that is. In this way, the novel sometimes reminded me of newer thriller films like A Cure For Wellness, especially in the early going of the novel. However, this book's layers continue to unravel past the point of deftly-delivered psychological thrill-ride, as the piece also contains hints of a historical novel: Hysteria dips into both the popular culture of the American 1950's, as well as some of the darker shades of psychological + chemical warfare in post-WWII North America.

IMO, one of Hysteria's strongest points was its ability to continually draw from material expressed earlier in the book, and re-surface this material throughout the middle, and later stages of the novel, using this material in surprising, and interesting ways. Hysteria is a solid composition of a 400+ page novel.

Hysteria hooked me as a reader from the beginning, and kept me turning pages steadily until the end, and I was impressed that the novel didn't drop the ball at the ending, after sustaining and building upon so much suspense, and uncertainty, throughout its several sections, and chapters.

I highly recommend you read this book.

[chinchil1in · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tense, intimate book - and, unfortunately, not always in the best way. The writing is strong, but also has an odd cadence that makes it hard (at least for me) for the reader to really get lost in the story. The whole thing is told from Heike's perspective, and feels like a camera angle filled only with her face. No real view or understanding of the surroundings and other characters as they truly are, only her reaction towards them. It's effectively creepy in some scenes, but quickly becomes a tiring, predicable device that results in my mind wandering away from the words at hand to some to-do list in my real life.

Another thing that hit my interest level, and hard, is this big tweeeest that is obvious as hell in the first few chapters. I kept waiting for the reveal to happen in the book, and thought that after the protag knew this thing there would be more to the book. Nope - turns out that's the crutch of the story and largely forms the climax, so by the time the book got to that point I was raging - FINALLYYYYYY.

[Shirley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. Who wouldn't love a book that includes the lines 'All the best stories start with a girl alone in the woods' and '...when Eric's attention had moved from sweet talk to something heavy, a hand on the back of her neck...' ? The book opens in 1945 with teen-aged Heike escaping from war-torn Germany. It then skips ahead to America in the mid-50's. Heike is spending the summer in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York with her young son and her psychiatrist husband, who works at a nearby Mental Health Asylum. But in this seemingly idyllic setting, all is not what it seems. Perception and reality are difficult to distinguish. This author has created at narrative that is terrifying, sometimes creepy, and quite provocative. Definitely a 'can't put down until I finish' book.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second book by Elizabeth de Mariafi, that I’ve read and I believe she is currently one of Canada’s best writer of psychological thrillers. The first, The Devil You Know was a ‘can’t put it down’ creepy page turner. That story is about a young journalist covering the all too real Bernardo murders while still dealing with the unsolved murder of her childhood best friend.
Without giving away any specifics, Heike, the protagonist in Hysteria, is also haunted by a unresolved childhood loss - her younger sister who she took care of fleeing from Nazi Germans during WW2. This story is part psychological thriller and part ghost story. We’re not sure which it is until the end. It’s a page turner and the writing is excellent. I highly recommend it.

[Danae · Rating 1 out of 5]

This will most likely be an unpopular opinion, but I did not like this book.
I was so stoked for it because it is written by a Canadian author (yeah) and it promises to be this twisty psychological thriller with multiple positive reviews.
I do not get how the beginning correlates to anything to do with the MC's son finding a girl by the "lake"? I kind of just wanted it to start off with the premise of the book and have it slowly build up from there.
I felt like all of the characters fell a little flat, and I got bored with the writing pretty quickly to the point I DNFed it, so I wouldn't be wasting any more of my time. This book just wasn't for me as much as I wished it would be.
1.5 stars.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was one of the worst books I have read in a very long time. The writing style was odd... conversations between characters did not make any sense... almost as if two people were having two separate conversations, but the author smooshed them together to create one nonsensical disaster of a chat. In real life, if someone asks me a question, I typically provide an answer that relates to the question asked... the characters in this book did no such thing. I kept wanting to yell "WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO, BECAUSE THERE'S NO WAY IT'S EACH OTHER!"
Ugh.
This book was extremely boring and was essentially a story that could have been told in 5 pages but was instead stretched out to over 400 pages.
I will add finishing this book to my list of regrets.

[Katelyn McIntyre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was one of the chosen lucky readers who got to recieve an advanced copy of Hysteria. I had a brief description of the book and dived into it. I would give Hysteria a 4/5 stars. It started off slow but was well worth it. I enjoyed the story telling the author brought to life. She made me feel emotions for the characters. It was a fresh read & didn’t remind me of something I have read before. It had enough suspense to keep me guessing with a satisfying ending. If you enjoy psychological thrillers, this is a must read. I can not wait to see this book on bookshevles and recommend it to my peers.