The Glass Demon

Starred review from April 11, 2011
Grant (The Vanishing of Katharina Linden) turns in a spectacular mix of history and horror that expertly draws from numerous genres. Obsessed medievalist Oliver Fox moves his family to a castle on the edge of a German forest in search of the Allerheiligen glass, a supposedly cursed set of stained-glass church windows lost or destroyed 200 years before. The Glass Demon, Bonschariant, said to inhabit the windows, shadows the search from the moment Fox's unhappy teen daughter Lin discovers a corpse surrounded by shattered glass. As Lin gets to know her young neighbor, Michel Reinartz, she becomes aware of the locals' hostility toward any investigation of the lost glass, while a series of uncanny incidents escalates horrifically. Skillfully mixing the strains of a dysfunctional family with the rising terror of the supernatural, Grant has produced a mesmerizing page-turner that brilliantly depicts the claustrophobic fear of a young woman grappling with the deadly secrets of the forest and the demonic nightmare lurking within.