Which is how I find myself in places like this, dragging my sister back to reality. She won’t have it she wants to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity. How could she think this place is the answer? Throughout our lives I’ve tried to teach her to be more skeptical, even heartless when necessary. She’ll let you use her, but only to a point. She assumes the best in a person until they give her a reason not to.

The Kit I know is trusting but has a bullshit detector. But the staff strikes Nat as being deeply weird, with cultish overtones that further convince her that she needs to rescue her sister and bring Kit home: Most of the guests at Wildwood seem ordinary enough, with many being Type A personalities like herself, who have just burned out and need respite from their overachieving lives back home. Spurred into action, Nat immediately takes a leave of absence from work and heads north to find her sister. For most guests, that means six months, which is about the amount of time Kit’s been away when Nat gets the alarming missive, warning her that the sender will tell Kit what she’s done unless she comes to Wildwood to confess in person. It’s the kind of place where you surrender your cellphone at the gate, and commit yourself to cutting yourself off from the outside world for the duration of your stay. Kit has apparently gone on a long sabbatical to an exclusive island resort in Maine called Wildwood. Natalie Collins is a hard-charging marketing executive whose underlying guilt at not being a good enough caretaker for her younger sister comes to a head when she receives a cryptic e-mail. Delving deep into the subject of trauma and how it warps people, it examines the lengths some people will go to in order to overcome the phobias born of their pasts, no matter what the cost.

Told from multiple perspectives, Stephanie Wrobel’s sophomore novel is a dazzling feat of sleight of hand. This ongoing struggle to master fear, and to inspire others to do the same, forms the backbone of this complex psychological thriller. On the screens the audience watches a tongue split in half. “Fear is not real,” she says, unless we make it so.” This Might Hurt starts with a gory bang, as an unnamed artist performs a gruesome act of self-mutilation in defiance of fear:

This might hurt by stephanie wrobel