Mephistopheles is ordinarily a deceiver, but in Reprieve, James Han Matson's allegorical tour de force, he is depicted as an illusionist and a liar. The owner of Quigley House—a renowned full contact haunted escape room—John Forrester offers what people need: the allure of love, family, belonging, and whiteness wrapped in a bath of fake blood, costumes, prosthetics, fear, racism, misogyny and adrenaline. Most of all, it offers what people truly desire: the illusion of reprieve. This is an immersive rip tide of a reading experience which mirrors a trip through Quigley House with pulse pounding complicity, entangling readers in the moral intensity of a book with no easy escape for either its heartrendingly vulnerable characters or its readers. This is a rare, powerful, and deeply important book.
