The Bowl of Night, Book 3 of the Bast Mysteries, is not a comfortable book. After the highly disquieting experiences of the previous two books, protagonist Bast is not unscathed, and her yearly attendance of the HallowFest gathering makes her look at her own community with new eyes when she's the one to discover the body of a local fundamentalist Christian on their campground.
As with the previous two books, Bast must wrestle with the conflict of her community's habitual tolerance and her own internal moral code. This time around, though, it's aggravated by the clash of her own beliefs against that of the coven she's left, not to mention those of the victim. Moreover, she has to face the prospect of branching out to start her own coven--which leads her to facing renewed contact with a lover from ten years past, even as her relationship with the enigmatic Julian progresses. All of this makes for quite a bit of tension, packed into the brevity of a couple hundred pages.
The ending, though, is where this book surpasses its predecessors for me; it's shocking and yet entirely not, now that I've re-read the first two books. It's the only possible ending for this particular story, and yet its strike, athame-sharp, cannot help but sting the reader as it does Bast herself. Four stars.
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