Nine voices, silenced at midnight—and sealed in wax.
Wren Vale and her cousin Theo won't walk home from rehearsal tonight. Neither will the other seven kids in the Nightingale Youth Choir of St. Dymphna, who vanished after a storm knocked the lights along Harbor Street in Blackshore, Maine. But snatched children are only the overture to the nightmare.
Lenore Vale, interim curator of the Blackshore Museum of Maritime Curiosities, blames herself. She promised the choir director she'd keep the old music hall open for their fundraiser, just like she once promised to watch her younger sister the night the candle factory burned three years ago. She swears she won't fail again.
Awakening behind bolted iron to a secret gallery two levels beneath the museum, Lenore, Wren, Theo, and the others find themselves surrounded by rows of lifelike mariners—wax sculptures with glass-blown eyes—while a self-playing pump organ begins a nocturne on its own. A figure who calls himself the Maestro insists that if the children perform beautifully for the Patron and obey, all will be released at dawn. But the chamber is lit only by dozens of dripping tapers, the vents are plugged with resin, and the air grows sweet and heavy with beeswax.
Wren isn't sure they can breathe long enough to see morning. Neither is Lenore. The walls soften and creep, the floor grips their shoes, and every verse they sing warms the pipes that feed the organ and the candles that devour their oxygen. On a workbench: a tide chart marked with red wax, a cracked diver's helmet, a ledger of names that match the brass plaques beneath the statues.
With time—and air—running thin, Lenore and the children must read the Maestro's music backward, retune the organ to collapse the waxen conduits, and flood the gallery using the museum's old seawater intake—or they will be lacquered over, one by one, into the choir that never stops. The Waxen Nocturne was sparked by fragmentary 19th-century newspaper accounts and the burned foundations of a defunct coastal waxworks.
Inventive premise, but the people felt as stiff as the mariners and the menace faded into a waxy fog.
Reads like Tidepool meeting The Silent Companions in a basement full of candles. I admired the coastal folklore texture and the sinister mechanics of the organ, but the suspense ebbs in places and a few reveals feel telegraphed. If you like slow-blooming, suffocating chamber horror, this hits, even if it never fully shocked me.
Blackshore feels salt-bitten and haunted. The museum's underbelly is tactile with resin, glass-eyed mariners, and a pump organ that seems to breathe. The concept that every verse warms pipes and feeds candles is chilling and ingeniously grounded in the setting. Even the tide chart and cracked diver's helmet make the escape plan feel earned without ruining the mystery.
Form-wise, the novel treats song as structure, with sections rising and resolving like movements. There is a trade-off: the lush sensory prose can slow the middle while the alternating viewpoints sometimes blur cadence. Still, the final sequence snares all motifs introduced early and releases them with satisfying resonance, and the line-level writing is carefully tuned without purple excess.
I read The Waxen Nocturne with my chest tight, listening for that ghostly pump organ that refuses silence. The book hums with the fear of running out of air and the ache of promises kept too late.
It sings about art and coercion, about beauty extracted under threat. The Maestro's bargain is a mirror to any performance culture that prizes the perfect note over the people who sing it.
Family threads hold fast. Lenore's guilt over fire and curatorship meets Wren's defiance, and the museum's relics become moral instruments. The ledger of names is not just a record, it is a chorus of memory.
I loved the musical logic. Reading the score backward, retuning the organ, making sound into sabotage, it turns survival into composition. That reversal feels like agency reclaimed from ritual.
The refrain lands hard, echoing the line about "nine voices silenced at midnight and sealed in wax" until it becomes a promise to break the seal. I finished buzzing, like a struck string, wanting to breathe and sing at once.
