A review by watercolorstain
By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain by Joe Hill

4.0

Mommy has a killer hangover, and sends her loud and bickering girls out of the house to have some peace and quiet. It's a cold and misty end-of-summer day that will mark Gail's end-of-childhood, and she decides to head down to the lake, where she meets up with a friend... until they realize that the boulder they'd been playing on isn't actually a rock. Their discovery lets them spin out the possibilities their future holds, but also makes them confront mortality... but is it really happening, or are they just playing pretend? We are shown from the very first sentence that Gail has a lively imagination and gets invested in her made-up stories... and yet assuming it's all make-believe leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and this blurry line between reality and fantasy is what makes the story work. A rather unusual one from Hill—it reads like something that could've been written by Gaiman or Bradbury (whose story The Fog Horn must've been a very direct influence).

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This story is also published in Joe Hill's collection Full Throttle. You can read my full review here.