Diavola by Jennifer Thorne is the folk horror novel that uses a family vacation as its pressure cooker. Published in 2023, the book drops Anna, a people-pleasing American woman, onto a remote Italian island with her wealthy, chaotic in-laws for a week of wine and sunburn. What they get instead is an ancient curse, an isolated clifftop hotel, and a force that doesn't distinguish between guests and prey. It's a book that earns its scares by being genuinely funny first, and then pulling the floor out.
What the story is actually about
Anna is trying to hold together a marriage she's not sure she believes in, surrounded by in-laws who barely acknowledge her presence. The island of Caorfano is the kind of beautiful place that feels wrong. The hotel's owner is evasive. The handful of other guests are strange. And the island's folklore, involving a she-devil the locals call la Diavola, turns out not to be folklore at all.
Thorne builds the horror slowly. The first third of the book is almost entirely character comedy, with razor-sharp observations about family dynamics, class performance, and the particular misery of being the outsider in someone else's clan. It works. By the time the supernatural threat becomes explicit, the reader already cares about Anna in a way that makes the danger land.
The folk horror mechanics are well-chosen. The curse tied to the island has rules, history, and a logic that Thorne doles out carefully. It's not just atmosphere. The threat has teeth, and the book isn't shy about using them.
The voice carries everything
Anna's first-person narration is the engine. She's self-deprecating without being pathetic, observant without being cruel, and funny in a way that feels like a survival reflex rather than a stylistic flourish. Thorne keeps the comedy and the dread in the same register, which is genuinely difficult to pull off. Most horror novels that attempt this end up too breezy or too grim. Diavola mostly holds the line.
The in-laws are drawn with real specificity. They're not cartoons. Each one gets a moment that complicates the reader's easy contempt, which makes the later sections of the book messier and more interesting than a straightforward siege story. When Anna has to decide who to protect, the choices cost something.
Where it compares to similar work
Readers who enjoy horror that uses domestic tension as its foundation will find Diavola familiar in the best sense. It sits comfortably alongside novels like The September House by Carissa Orlando, which similarly uses a woman's fraught relationship with her immediate environment as the lens through which the supernatural arrives. Thorne's book is funnier and more propulsive; Orlando's is quieter and stranger. Both reward patience.
The Italian island setting does specific work here. Caorfano is hot, isolated, and beautiful in the way that makes escape feel impossible before anything supernatural happens. Thorne uses the landscape without over-describing it, which keeps the pacing tight. The claustrophobia is structural, not cosmetic. Anyone who felt the sun-drenched wrongness of Midsommar will recognise the instinct: horror in full daylight, horror in somewhere gorgeous, horror that's been waiting for you to arrive.
What holds it back slightly
The novel's final third accelerates hard, and some of what gets sacrificed is the careful character work of the first two-thirds. A few supporting figures lose their edges when the plot needs them to behave in particular ways. The resolution is satisfying but tidier than the book's best moments suggest it could be.
These are minor complaints. Thorne is doing something genuinely tricky here: writing a horror novel with a non-horror sensibility, then delivering horror that actually registers. Most novels that attempt this hedge. Diavola doesn't.
The verdict
Diavola by Jennifer Thorne is a strong, confident horror debut that gets better the further it goes. The comedy is real, the folk horror mechanics are solid, and Anna is a protagonist worth spending 300 pages with. It won't shake the foundations of the genre, but it doesn't need to. It does exactly what it sets out to do, and it does it with style.
Pick it up through Jennifer Thorne's official site or your preferred bookseller. Recommended for readers who want their horror to come with a sharp wit and a beautiful, terrible island.