Slightly less polished than its NoSleep kin (Felix Blackwell’s Stolen Tongues and Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal)—but perhaps more engaging, effortful, and film-adaptable—Nick Botic’s Daughter’s Drawings is an edgy, thoughtful, carefully-paced psychological thriller that explores—sometimes with nuance, sometimes with spectacle—the anxieties of predatory stalkers.
Daughter’s Drawings begins with a David Fincher-worthy opening: a vacationing family has their van ransacked; the weird thing is, however, nothing is stolen but the . . . well, cue the title of the book. Seemingly trivial, but it exudes with anything but benignity. The stolen drawings says nothing and everything and, as a reader, you need to find out the why. A great hook.
Botic is an effective storyteller, has a great sense of chapter length and when and where to place a revelation (he’s particularly good at the end-of-chapter cliffhanger, whether a creepy or shocking revelation or foreshadowing), and has noticeably realistic and/or likable dialogue, especially among some of the side characters.
As alluded to in paragraph one, Daughter’s Drawings is a little rough around the edges. But being what it is—a spawnish work derived from the depths of Reddit—it adds to its charm as an indie gem rather than detracting from it. The story is what elevates this novel, and Botic effectively communicates it to the reader.
I definitely recommend this if you like psychological thrillers, and if you like the other two NoSleep books I mentioned—Stolen Tongues and Penpal. In fact, it pairs very nicely with Felix Blackwell’s Stolen Tongues. Very. So much so that I legitimately wonder—even now as I write this—if Blackwell is Botic’s pen name (don’t hate me I’m right and I just ruined the elaborate façade) and Daughter’s Drawings and Stolen Tongues is like Stephen King’s Desperation and Richard Bachman’s The Regulators.
Read it. Botic is a beast. And I can’t wait to read his next novel.
4/5
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