Just like the ceaselessly falling rain, unusual even in Scotland’s wet climate, there is something eerie from the start in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater (2020). It was a similar feeling to that aroused by the opening scene of bog sacrifice in her Ghost Wall (2018). Both begin with scenes that portend harm, that set an ominous tone. And yet, there is also something so everyday about so much of the human experiences and interactions in Moss’s slight books. Something so recognizable takes form amid her characters. It is that tension—the foreboding and the mundane—that make her books so compulsively readable. The reader wonders, will she go there, will it get that dark, that startlingly disturbing; it is not until the final pages that the reader can grapple with answers to such questions.