With White Smoke, Tiffany D. Jackson offers a tense and suspenseful psychological horror story for a young adult audience, in the vein of Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine. After her mother Raquel wins a recently launched writer’s residency sponsored by the Sterling Foundation, teenage Marigold and the newly blended Anderson-Green family uproot their lives in Southern California to start anew in the Midwestern town of Cedarville. Expecting to find an inclusive, developing small-town community just as the Sterling Foundation’s application promised, the interracial Anderson-Greens are surprised to instead find a deserted, racially and socioeconomically stratified town full of abandoned and dilapidated houses and very few visible signs of progress. As part of Raquel’s residency, their family is set up in a house of the Sterling Foundation’s choosing and invited to be rent-free resident-caretakers on the condition that they remain in the house for two years.

Although Raquel and Marigold’s stepfather Alec are initially taken aback by the sight of their new home standing isolated in the middle of a street lined with dark and vacant houses and their nearest neighbors coldly regarding them from across the next block, they shake off their doubts and assure their children that living on Maple Street will be a fun and necessary change. They will be like “pioneers,” Alec exclaims; unconvinced, Marigold remarks to her younger siblings, Sammy and Piper, that they’ll be more like “colonizers.” To Sammy and Marigold, their new town feels eerily reminiscent of the horror films and apocalyptic zombie programs Sammy enjoys watching. The ominous atmosphere only increases when Marigold notes the way that the house’s renovation team routinely hightails off the premises at the end of the day. Marigold wonders why, or from what, they’re running. 

She starts to hear strange thumping noises that awaken her in the middle of the night and see creepy shadows along the hallway and in the corners of rooms. The door to her bedroom frequently creaks, opens, and shuts on its own…a little more than seems natural for an old house. Different items repeatedly vanish, appear in random places, or are left out when Marigold is certain she’d stored them away. And a foul, inexplicable stench emanates from a vent above the locked basement door. Most distressingly of all, Piper, who was not Marigold’s biggest fan prior to their move, only grows more aloof and hostile towards her the more time she spends playing with her imaginary friend “Ms. Suga.”

Still haunted by the mistakes of her past and aware of the tenuous status of her parents’ trust in her, Marigold hesitates to immediately approach them with her observations and concerns. Even when she does risk suggesting that something is not quite right with Piper’s behavior and definitely off with their house, her parents dismiss her fears and warily question whether she’s reverting to her troubling old ways. Hoping one of the longtime Cedarville residents can help shed some light on the town and Maple Street house’s history, Marigold turns to her classmates and friends Yusef and Erika, Yusef’s family, Sterling Foundation contractor Mr. Watson, and Mr. Sterling himself for information, but is met with more reticence and vague warnings than actual answers. As the disturbances within the house increase in severity and occurrences outside of it among the townspeople become more suspicious, Marigold realizes her family are in mounting peril the longer they stay in Cedarville.   

The protagonist, atmosphere building, external conflicts, and central mystery are all mostly strong, however, the tautness of the claustrophobic haunting narrative flags a bit in a few instances aimed at illustrating the depth of Marigold’s preexisting anxieties. The ending is expectedly disquieting, though feels unfinished and somewhat unsatisfying. Those things notwithstanding, White Smoke is an ambitious, occasionally funny, and fast-paced work of horror with cinematic potential that challenges readers with its treatment of gentrification and various forms of societal unease, while also creeping them out with many paranormal elements.

LOGLINE: In search of a fresh start after enduring multiple family crises, teenage Marigold Anderson-Green and her blended, interracial family move from Southern California to the up-and-coming Midwestern community of Cedarville. But Cedarville is a desolate ghost town shrouded in secrecy, and their new home is anything but welcoming—hiding a menacing presence that wants them gone.

MOOD: A propulsive and perplexing read that combines the social terror of Parasite with the psychological suspense of Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching, all wrapped up in a YA haunted house story. 

TITLE: White Smoke

AUTHOR: Tiffany D. Jackson

GENRE: Horror, Haunted House, Ghost Story, Psychological Thriller, Social Thriller, Young Adult

PUB DATE: 14 September 2021

PUBLISHER: Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books

LENGTH: 384 pages