McCammon's still got it. I mean, the last book of his I read was They Thirst, and it didn't do much for me, but I remember how much I enjoyed The Wolf's Hour, and that was a book with a premise that made me think it was going to be horrible.

The Listener is more historical crime than horror, but there's a lot of darkness here, enough to satisfy the older McCammon fans. His skills at characterization and setting are spot on, enough to make me want to bump his other historical fiction higher on my list.

This would be a five-star book for me, save for a couple of minor quibbles. There are a few events that happen near the end of the novel that feel tacked on to show the horrors of the Jim Crow era, which in turn makes me realize this is a book that (in part) talks about the Black experience in 1930s America, written by a white dude. McCammon's take feels accurate, and even genuine, but it still makes me think that white folks just aren't the people to write about the Black experience AT ALL. I know writers should be able to write about any experience without having lived it themselves, but for something as personal as that, I feel like it's best left to the BIPOC writers.