Strange Unearthly Things

by Kelly Creagh

🦆🦆🦆3/5 ducklings

tl;dr: Reincarnation is a bitch.

I’ll be very honest, the only reason I picked this book up at all is the cover. I love this cover. It’s the right mix of romance and emo and wooooOOOOoooo wiggly fingers (even if her feet look weird).

It was exactly what I wanted out of a paranormal YA romance; it was angsty, it was packed with yearning, and full of witty quips that I’m sure are hilarious to an 18-year-old. I want to caveat everything I’m about to say with: I genuinely enjoyed this book. I wanted to read it—every time I had to put it down, I couldn’t wait to come back to it. I was invested in the characters and their survival. So with that said, here’s the rest.

(Edited to add: Apparenty this is a Jane Eyre retelling. Jane Reye is an anagram for Jane Eyre, and in my defense, I’ve never read Jane Eyre, but this is definitely a Jane Eyre retelling and I feel silly for not having realized that until right this moment. Read the synopsis below if you don’t believe me.)

Jane Reye is a psychic artist—she can draw ghosts and spirits, often giving them more power when she does so—who grew up in an orphanage in the US. So it’s unexpected when she, and two other psychics, are hired to investigate a haunting at Thornfield Hall in England. Things get weird even before she arrives, and the other psychics don’t make things easier. At least one of them is hiding a big secret that pulls his judgment into question. But the particularly strange thing is Jane’s attraction to their employer, even before she knows who he is.

Elias Thornfield has a stick up his ass, but so would you if you were 100+ years old and cursed to look like 18. Add in a demon problem and the festering guilt of a Faustian bargain, and it’s no wonder he calls in three teen psychics to help. Ingrid is a Tarot reader, Giovanni is a psychometrist, and Jane is, well, Jane.

The gothic horror escalates quickly, with Jane opening doors to find a Hell realm where there should be a kitchen, Giovanni touching demon necklaces, and Ingrid playing Cassandra while no one believes her readings. And something isn’t quite right about Mr. Poole, the groundskeeper.

Jane’s irrational feelings for the mysterious Elias only grow the longer she stays at Thornfield, even after she finds out he’s way older than he looks and is still in love with his dead wife.

Shit goes down, Giovanni gets the kiss of his life only to realize Jane is hopelessly in love and horny for Elias, Elias reveals the real reason he wears an eye patch, and Ingrid tries to leave, guilts herself into staying against her better judgment, and Mr. Poole plans a birthday party.

Things come to a head when Elias finally admits that he made a deal with a demon to trade his soul for 118 years with his wife, who died while trying to find a way to free him from his bargain—and that 118 years is up on his 19th birthday.

Jane is distraught at this and vows to find a way to free him from his bargain (eyes emoji), only for Elias to tell her that he’s going to die even if they free his soul.

But Elias has one final bombshell before he dies: Jane is a reincarnation of his dead wife. Jane, who is an orphan and has no family and no roots, is the reincarnation of a woman who has been dead for more than 100 years.

The three psychics fight the demon and manage to free Elias’s soul. He dies anyway, as he said he would, but not before he and Jane confess their love for each other and share a weirdly graphic spicy scene for a young adult novel. It turns out the real reward was the friends made along the way.

I found this book delightfully predictable. I guessed pretty early on that Jane was the reincarnation of the dead wife, Elias was half demon and had sold his soul, and that Mr. Poole was more than he seemed.

I was wrong about a couple of things, which was nice. Giovanni did not, in fact, fuck up the entire plan (Jane did that all on her own), Mr. Poole was not the demon (though he is definitely supernatural), and no one sacrificed Jane to the demons.

All of that said, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It was exactly the right amount of predictable I like in a YA romance. It (doesn’t?) help that I recently rewatched the movie adaptation of Fallen by Lauren Kate, which is a reincarnation love story that doesn’t land nearly as well as this.

There was the right amount of angst, and it subverted my expectations of the love triangle trope, but I still felt like Jane had a life outside the boys in the story (until she didn’t).

I love a book that forces me to like a character. I hated Giovanni right off the bat—I’ve known too many people like him not to. He’s overconfident, flippant, not a bit gaslight-y, and pretty much sails past any rules of consent. If you’ve read Fourth Wing (and I hate that I’m using this comparison), he gives me Dane vibes in a very not good way. But I found that I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into liking him. He really comes into his own over the course of the book, growing a spine and some integrity and empathy along the way.

And Ingrid was there, too.

Really, she was my biggest issue with the story. She just sort of disappears part way through and then reappears when it’s convenient. No one believes her Tarot readings, so she’s useless for most of the book, and it feels like deus ex machina when they all start believing her at the end.

If you’re looking for a work of Literature to change your life, this isn’t it. But it is a perfectly adequate YA romance that is an enjoyable angsty romp cloaked in gothic mystique. If absolutely nothing else, Kelly Creagh knows how to create an atmosphere.

Released August 22, 2025

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