Synopsis

A haunting and seductive tale of a young career woman who slides quickly into the role of stepmother, in a life that may still belong to someone else. “Vivid, addictive, and crackling with life (yes, even the ghost), House of Beth asks us to consider how and why we make the lives we make” (Lynn Steger Strong).

After a heart-wrenching breakup with her girlfriend and a shocking incident at her job, Cassie flees her life as an overworked assistant in New York for her hometown in New Jersey, along the Delaware. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend, Eli, now a widowed father of two. Their bond reignites, and within a few short months, Cassie is married to Eli, living in his house in the woods, homeschooling the kids, and getting to know her reserved neighbor, Joan.

But Cassie’s fresh start is less idyllic than she’d hoped. She grapples with harm OCD, her mind haunted by gory, graphic images. And she’s afraid that she’ll never measure up to Eli’s late spouse, who was a committed homemaker and traditional wife. No matter what Cassie does, Beth’s shadow still permeates every corner of their home.

Soon, Cassie starts hearing a voice narrating the house’s secrets. As she listens, the voice grows stronger, guiding Cassie down a path to uncover the truth about Beth’s untimely death.

Review

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for this physical ARC! I was intrigued by the cover, and I can’t resist new takes on the haunted house story. 

This was pitched in the galley email as “A ghost story unlike any other.” I honestly can’t sum it up any better than that. This was the most unique take on the haunted house story I’ve ever read. For the first time ever, I felt as if I read something true, real, possible, and yet it was paranormal. Of course there are notes of horror and thriller, but this really exists as its own thing. It’s not trying to chill or scare, it’s not blood pounding or jump scaring. Yet there is a sort of creeping eeriness to it, but that for me, came from the mundanity of her everyday tasks. 

Cassie retreats from a shocking breakup and incident at work to her hometown. She’s crashing at her father’s old place while figuring it out when she runs into her ex best friend. Things reignite, things that had previously led to their falling out, however this time, there’s no significant other in the way. This struck me as odd, because frankly, his wife had died and I thought it was quite recent. The first 50-70 pages shocked me in that way, all the things taking place seemed to come at you far too fast, too easily. But I think their familiarity, as well as her dire straits, are what led to it reading as almost effortless. And that’s why I carried on…well that, and the fact that I was waiting for the ghostly shoe to drop. 

The chapters from Beth’s somewhat-ethereal perspective gripped me the further I got into this read and I felt myself genuinely craving to know more. Cassie was interesting and dealing with a lot, but what had happened with Beth? I had to know. And honestly, who was involved—because at that point in the story, I wasn’t trusting anybody. What surprised me the most though, was how unassuming and almost laidback Beth was. It was a side to ghosts and death that I don’t feel is often portrayed. In a way it reminded me of The Ghosts of Thorwald Place by Helen Power as Beth becomes more cognizant. 

I really ended up enjoying this one as it made the mundane daily tasks of a stepparent seem much more alarming than your home or person being possessed by a ghost. That, and the calming nature of her presence against that of Cassie’s harm OCD, flooding the reader with random depictions of extreme blood and bodily harm. 

Mildly spoilery beneath…

I don’t know if this was an actual plot point of the author’s, but it continues to hold worth that you NEVER trust your partner’s “don’t worry about them” person. It just never seems to end well. 

Also a modern book finally mentioned pop punk? Might be the first time I’ve seen it, and I respect it.

Synopsis:

“This book is a literary punch to the heart.” —New York Times

After a small coastal town is devastated by a hurricane, the survivors gravitate toward a long out-of-service payphone in hopes of talking out their grief and saying goodbye to loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own. As more townspeople answer the call, friends and family believed to have been lost to the storm begin searching for a way back home.

Review:

Whichever ad wizards came up with the long-enduring ad slogan of “Reach out and touch someone” for AT&T back in the 1970s probably didn’t expect their campaign encouraging Americans to rack up their phone bills with long distance call charges to provide a touchstone for telephonic grief horror so many decades later. Of course, one doesn’t have to look hard to find a certain insidiousness in those words, to twist an otherwise cozy, cutesy corporate phrase into a threatening promise.

When Hurricane Aubrey hits the Chesapeake, bartender Jenny loses her fisherman love, Callum, to the elements. The loss unmoors her and their daughter, leaving them stranded and emotionally adrift. Their small town of only a few hundred is hit hard, but one of the things left standing is a long-defunct payphone outside Jenny’s dockside watering hole. It hasn’t been operational in decades, the booth now covered in graffiti and used as a make-out spot for local teens. It’s even where Jenny and Callum conceive their daughter, Shelby. Reach out and touch someone, indeed!

In the wake of Aubrey’s violent tantrum, the booth has attracted a new crowd. People who have lost loved ones in the storm now line up in the bar’s parking lot for a chance to step inside that phone booth, waiting for their turn to use the old, dead landline to speak one last time to their dearly departed.

Clay McLeod Chapman doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel with Stay on the Line, turning to the familiar ‘phone-calls from the dead’ trope that has largely replaced the Ouija board in the 21st Century, but he does a great job firmly grounding the story within the emotional core of grieving widow Jenny. There can still be room for worn tropes as long as they are propped up by strong, compelling characters that give us a reason to care, and Chapman succeeds in that. It helps, too, that Stay on the Line is supremely focused and the author keeps it short, knowing, perhaps, that it’s a tired premise but that his characters are young, strong, and emotionally potent. In print, Stay on the Line was only about 80 pages with illustrations, and this audiobook runs a brisk 61 minutes.

Chapman uses much of the first half of this novelette to establish the family and their dynamic. Callum is the fun parent and has turned the ancient phone booth into a fantastical story point in the bedtime stories he tells Shelby. He’s also had to convince Shelby that the phone booth was, in fact, an actual, real-life, functioning telephone that people used to make calls. She doesn’t believe him. I couldn’t help but grin at this, having had a similar conversation with both of my sons over the old-fashioned toy rotary phone they once played with. It didn’t look anything at all like the iPhones my wife and I use, didn’t take pictures or videos, and had this big dial on it. It couldn’t possibly be a phone; daddy was just pulling their leg. I think my wife talked them around eventually, and then they saw similar rotary phones in a movie from the 80s and realized we were actually serious.Thankfully, they haven’t gotten any phone calls from deceased relatives on their toy (yet).

Stay on the Line digs deeper into the supernatural in its second half, when Jenny can no longer resist her curiosity about the phone booth and whether or not it will reconnect her with her lost love. Chapman covers the usual ground one would expect from the premise, but he does offer up some neat sequences of creeping dread, and one flat-out horrific scene in which the phone booth becomes a tomb of aquatic horrors. The audio production helps to amplify the creep factor with some well-done sound effects mixed in by audio editor Eric West. Sean Patrick Hopkins’s voice work as Jenny’s other half takes on spooky, staticky, ethereal overtones that really help sell the otherworldly nature of Jenny and Callum’s conversations.

The bulk of the production, though, belongs to Patricia Santomasso, who positively inhabits the role of Jenny, bringing nuance and heartfelt emotion through the grief of her loss, the elation of being reconnected with Callum, and the wariness and fear over the concerns that follow. On a personal note, I’ve worked with Santomasso and Hopkins both in separate audiobook productions of my own work and was absolutely delighted at how those projects turned out. As such, I was expecting them to bring their talents to the fore here and wasn’t the least bit surprised to find their work to be excellent. I did my best to avoid any bias in my judgements here, but I’ll let you listen to them and decide for yourself. Let me just say, there is a reason they’re both award winning narrators with hundreds upon hundreds of titles under their belt.

Stay on the Line is an emotionally resonant horror and Santomasso brings it all to compelling life. Her narration is as richly heartfelt as Chapman’s earnest prose. If you’ve read the print edition previously, you’ll want to experience the story again as an audiobook. If you haven’t, you may want to reach out and… well, maybe not touch someone, but at least grab yourself a copy.

Synopsis

After a small coastal town is devastated by a hurricane, the survivors gravitate toward a long out-of-service payphone in hopes of talking out their grief and saying goodbye to loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own. As more townspeople answer the call, friends and family believed to have been lost to the storm begin searching for a way back home.

Quick Review

Stay on the Line is a deeply human novelette about the loss of a loved one, and a phone booth where it seems they can call the living back. It’s the kind of story you can’t help but finish in one sitting.

Full Review

Thanks to Shortwave Media for an audio ALC!

The way that author Clay McLeod Chapman makes you care so deeply for Jenny and her small family in such a short span of time should be applauded. It’s remarkable how in only a few pages, with few lines of dialogue, he makes us feel such grief surrounding the loss of her husband, and the overwhelming pressure that Jenny and her daughter feel in trying to carry on.

We’re left to linger in that grief for a long time before the supernatural elements of this novelette rear their head. There is something extremely tangible about the way this story is written with such relatable losses in the wake of Hurricane Aubrey. Even as a telephone booth begins to connect the survivors with the voices of those who died, everything remains focused on the human elements: love, loss, grief, and the strange relief at hearing the voice of somebody you loved and lost. 

Even as things escalate, there are no spectral figures around that phone booth. The voice of the dead is instead personified in the form of roots and ocean waves. Even in the supernatural, there is something extremely familiar about all of this.

I listened to the audiobook version of this novelette, which is about an hour long. The narration by Patricia Santomasso and Sean Patrick Hopkins, is absolutely brilliant, and plays with the theme of a phone line. At key moments, a voice might become fuzzy, as if it had a bad connection. I enjoyed the story, but their performances truly elevated it.

I highly recommend Stay on the Line. This novelette is the kind of story you burn through in one sitting.

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, brings readers a spine-tingling journey through a young boy’s haunted home. Winner of the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction!

“A triumph. So emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant.”
—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie

Walking through his own house at night, a young boy thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. The figure reminds him of his long-dead father, who drowned mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows, it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he ever knew. 

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his younger brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at a terrible cost.

“Brilliant.” —The New York Times

Review

Thanks to Tor Nightfire for a physical arc of this beautiful rerelease! 

And FYI, B&N is running some kind of $5 add-on for this right now!

A unique haunted house story unlike anything else I’ve read. Someone (or something) passing a doorway. A reflection caught out of the corner of the eye. A shadow where there shouldn’t be. We’ve all heard or seen or read stories like these. But what Stephen Graham Jones is offering isn’t a boy haunted by the ghost he thinks he’s seen, but a boy encouraging the ghost it could have been. 

After the death of his father, his mother moved him and his brother away from the reservation. But if his father died elsewhere, how could he find them here? Is his father returning to save him? His brother? To make his mother less lonely? To make them whole again? He certainly thinks so, and will waste away the nights just praying for another glimpse of his hero. 

As much as this story is gut wrenching, it’s also about the boy’s hope, and regardless of whether or not that can be perceived as naive, that’s what hit me so strongly in this one. A novelette length examination on the lengths in which hope can bind us to the past, to the need of a father, to the almost vampiric nature of holding on.

Synopsis:

To save her daughter’s soul, a grieving mother must battle a sinister pastor who feeds off the cremains of the dead and haunts a lake community.

“This is goddamn wonderful. It’s both beautiful and horrible.”
—Julie Hutchings, author of The Harpy
“A beautiful, seismic novel.”
—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

When Jewel Jordan dies from cancer, her father’s wish is to scatter the ashes inside their beloved Torch Lake. But after the grieving mother hears her daughter’s voice coming from inside the urn, how can she let the ashes go?

Especially after a mysterious pastor begs her to keep them and promises to reunite her with her daughter’s spirit. Who should she listen to?

Even creatures from the lake whisper to her at night, pleading for the remains of her daughter. Who can she trust?

Nobody knows the truth and the bargain she made that led to her daughter’s death. Now she has to fight to save her child’s soul, and Torch Lake holds the answers. But the lake is cold, the truth is deep, and you have to earn the right to hear such secrets, for the lake speaks most honestly to those willing to drown.


“Deep, disturbing, and beautifully rendered.”
—Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Daughters of Block Island

“An epic tale of pain, love, grief, and regret.”
—Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads

“Matthews is the reigning king of modern psychological horror.”
—Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Kin

“Matthews is a damn good writer, and make no mistake, he will hurt you.”
—Jack Ketchum, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Girl Next Door

Review:

Mark Matthews is a son of a bitch. I say this endearingly, of course, in much the same way our dearly departed Jack Ketchum promised readers that Matthews will hurt them. It’s not a condemnation as much as it is an expectation.

To Those Willing To Drown is a grief-laden elegy to Torch Lake, one of many northern lower-Michigan vacation hotspots, whose folkloric roots run deep, back to the beliefs of the indigenous peoples that once populated the region long before it became home to summer camps and multi-million dollar lakeside getaways and resorts. The lake, like so many other northern areas of the lower peninsula, are a summer destination for families handed down between generations. Maybe it’s just a fact of growing up surrounded by the Great Lakes, but the water calls to us, beckoning us near, to Traverse City, Mackinaw, Petoskey, Charlevoix, and, of course, Torch Lake. Once you’ve been there, you can’t help but go back. These lakes are in our blood, in our souls, and they demand from us.

Matthews is a native Michigander. He gets it. As a fellow Michigander, I get it, too, and To Those Willing To Drown speaks of this most eloquently. Heartbreakingly so.

Sharon worked one summer as a Torch Lake camp counselor, where she met, befriended, and eventually fell in love with Kai. She rescued a drowning boy and made a promise, but by then it was too late. As with Kai, the lake was in her and it drew her back repeatedly, until it and Kai became home. They married and had a daughter, and together they learned that life is pain. The lake demanded its due. Their daughter, Jewel, died and a promise was kept.

Sharon wasn’t the only one to make a promise to the specters of Torch Lake. Lamia, a Civil War surgeon well-versed in the art of amputation, betrays his promise – and his family – and is cursed. He cannot step foot in the lake, and he cannot die. He must inject the ashes of the recently deceased into his body, forced to feed the souls of the dead that now haunt his human vessel.

Their stories intersect eventually, of course, as Sharon and Lamia are woefully drawn together across time by older, more primordial forces. Along the way, Matthews dives headlong into the folklore of the region, as shared through late-night camp stories around the fire and the customs and practices of those who believe and who know the secrets of the lake’s dead.

Matthews may be best known for his works of addiction horror, like Mlik-Blood and a trio of celebrated anthologies, among others, and he brings similar themes and topics to this book, as well. Lamia has an almost vampiric hunger for the ashes of the deceased, moving through society across the centuries under the guise of a pastor to enthrall and seduce grieving families into allowing him access to feed his grisly addiction. An omnipresent grief blankets each of the characters here, driving their decisions and pushing them toward their destinies. A thick pall of sadness permeates the story nearly from its opening chapters and only grows thicker as things progress, to the point that I had to set the book aside on several occasions and force myself away from the darkness.

It’s no fluke that Matthews garnered praise from Jack Ketchum himself, and at times it feels like he must have read the late author’s The Girl Next Door and took it as both a mission statement and a lesson on how to inflict upon readers the maximum amount of emotional turmoil. If John F.D. Taff, who has appeared in all three of Matthews’ addiction horror anthologies, is horror’s King of Pain, then surely Matthews himself is its prince.

To Those Willing To Drown is an unremittingly bleak and challenging read, with its focus on child death, bodily dismemberments, and drug addiction, but one that is never less than satisfying and wholly engaging. Matthews pushes both his characters and his readers to their absolute limits, and then shoves them over the edge, into Torch Lake’s deepest depths.

Synopsis

There’s a ghost in the walls, and V must decide if it is an ally or an enemy. The wrong decision could destroy her and her family. 

From Schneider Honor Award winning author Meg Eden Kuyatt comes a chilling and insightful novel-in-verse.

After a hard school year, V has been sent to her Grandma Jojo’s house for the summer in order to get away from it all. But unlike neurodivergent, artistic, sock-collecting V, Jojo is uptight, critical, and obsessed with her spotless house. She doesn’t get V at all. V is sure she’s doomed to have the worst summer ever.

Then V starts hearing noises from inside the walls of the house… Knocks, the sounds of a girl crying, and voices echoing in the night.

When V finds a ghostly girl hiding in the walls, they seem to have an immediate connection. This might be V’s chance to get back at her perfect grandmother by messing with her just a little bit.

But the buried secrets go much deeper — and are much more dangerous — than V even suspects. And they threaten to swallow her and her family whole if she can’t find a way to uncover the truth of the girl before it’s too late.

A contemporary novel-in-verse with a ghostly twist by the author of Good Different, this book is about the power — and danger — of secrets. The Girl in the Walls will grab you and not let go until the very last page.

Review

Huge thanks to Scholastic Press for the physical arc of this one! I was drawn right in with the cover art. 

This was fantastic. I expected to like it, as middle grade horror is usually a hit for me, but I really loved this. It’s a novel told in verse, which I did not know until I got it in the mail! It really cuts down on things we usually find necessary and proves that they aren’t always. Really concise, engaging, and moving. 

V, after getting into trouble at school, is left to spend the summer with her neat-manners-and-all-other-things-freak grandmother, Jojo. As V is different, neurodivergent and trying to find her own way, she’s always butted heads with Jojo, so being left feels like torture. Especially when V finds out her older cousin, Cat, who also doesn’t get along with Jojo, isn’t allowed over. You see, jojo wants everything perfectly prim, otherwise, what would the neighbors think? Yet V just wants to make art and wear silly, fancy socks. Most of all though, Vee wants to be accepted and understood. 

So when V finds a ghost of a girl living in Jojo’s walls, one who has been stockpiling her grandmother’s secrets, she finds it hard to say no to playing pranks with her. Even when the girl presses for darker and more intense pranks, disagreements between them push V toward giving in to the anger. If Jojo thinks so low of V, why shouldn’t she get back at her? 

Although the ghost ties back into the storyline itself in a ‘history coming back to haunt you’ way, I found that she served as a really good voice for V’s fears, angers, anxieties and even darker processing. Because of how in your face her harsh pranks are, she begins to serve more and more as the big meanie for young readers, doubling down on how wrong anger can be. And while the short pay off may feel good, what Vee really wants is her grandmother’s love. 

I found myself actually connecting things the grandmother said and did behaviorally to someone I’ve dealt with in the past. Especially the part about appearances. And this was a really unique way to see different sides to someone that maybe I didn’t think possible in real life. Everyone is multifaceted, and everyone has a past that influenced their present. It actually hit home for me, as I wasn’t allowing myself to view them as what they are just like Jojo didn’t view the real V. This one is light on the scary/horror side of things and real heavy on the emotional family turmoil side.

An innocent game takes a turn for the worse when 7-year-old Greta pulls a bedsheet over her head and ends up becoming a real ghost. What follows is an exhilarating journey into a world of fantasy and wonder.

Ian Rogers’ “Fitted Sheet,” is a wistful, whimsical, perhaps even cute story, with a gentle moral about sibling rivalry tucked snugly inside. It meditates on familial friction and how often a little perspective is required, whether that simply be the realisation that your little brother isn’t actually that terrible anymore, or indeed nearly losing your sister to a haunted bedsheet. Read it yourself, revel in the writing, and of course, appreciate the reference to John Wyndham, before passing on the sentiment to your kids- especially if they’re at each other’s throats. 

“Fitted Sheet,” was a first, and long-overdue foray into Rogers’ work, and I’m sure now that it won’t be my last. Huge thanks to Mitch at Rapture Publishing, who is building a mighty reputation by continuing to prove that good things really do come in small, saddle-stitched packages. If you’re looking for great writing and great illustrations (perhaps maybe even by the multi-talented Chris Panatier) all quite literally sewn together in one super-great chapbook, do yourself a favour and order one, or five from Rapture here. And if you’re after ghosts, grudges, and something that might just leave you feeling a little sentimental, “Fitted Sheet,” is the one to start with. 

I can’t say too much plot-wise, there’d be nothing left, but the basic premise is as follows. Cecelia and Greta are sisters, 10 and 7 respectively, left to their own devices for 20 minutes whilst their mother hangs the laundry to dry. What could go wrong right? After the requisite sibling squabble, the two settle on playing ghosts, and Greta finds herself with her mother’s maybe Egyptian Cotton, maybe silk fitted sheet draped over her head. She can see just fine out of the fabric, but her older sister has no such luck, and being as self-centred and bratty as 10 year olds generally are, Cecelia tries to pull it off of her, ending the game. But she can’t… and Greta is unable to free herself. 

That sounds claustrophobic and terrifying, and in another author’s hands I’m sure it could have veered that way, but it’s not, and it never tries to be. In the absence of malevolent spirits or Satan himself, Rogers reminds us that horror can be as simple as a fitted sheet, a sulk and a momentary lapse in adult supervision. It’s refreshing, breezy, and demonstrates both playfulness and restraint. It’s a small story, perfectly hemmed, neatly tucked, and pressed with care, and it was nothing but a pleasure to read.

Synopsis:

Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

Review:

Stephen Graham Jones has quickly established himself as one of the major players in the horror world. His Indian Lake Trilogy is just about the final word on the slasher as a form, while also operating as a kind of meta-criticism cum fanboy love letter as well, all while delivering a character for the ages, and his upcoming Buffalo Hunter Hunter is poised to be the book of the year (see review here).

But as is often the case, the sudden explosion is not quite so sudden at all. Graham Jones had been putting out work for years before appearing to emerge fully formed with his breakout hit The Only Good Indians. And what’s better than discovering a favorite artist has a big back catalogue to explore?

And now Tor Nightfire is rereleasing Mapping the Interior, Graham Jones’s 2017 short novel, giving us all a chance to dig in.

Mapping the Interior beautifully captures the claustrophobic anxiety of adolescence, as Junior, a fifteen year old native kid, tries to come to terms with his father’s death, which happened when he was a small child. Dad is now a faint memory, but then, one night, he’s there, standing in the house, dressed in full Fancy Dance regalia. Here and gone again.

What starts as a fairly standard-seeming ghost story soon shifts into something much more troubling and complex. Junior’s brother, Dino is having trouble in school, and it appears he may be losing ever more cognitive function, and Junior believes there may be a connection between these two events. Junior is soon torn between concern for his brother and a deep-seated need to connect to his absent father.

Suffice it to say that things get very weird and very bloody, as Dad become more and more real and more and more malevolent.

As is his his M.O., Graham Jones makes up his own rules, creating a unique mythology for this particular brand of haunting that is viscerally unsettling, bearing some resemblance to the best of The X-Files monster-of-the-week creatures.

But the monsters aren’t really the focus in Mapping the Interior. Instead, it’s very much a coming-of-age story, with everything–the haunting, the violence, the totemic childhood items, even the house itself–taking on a kind of allegorical weight. This is a story about a boy on the brink of adulthood, searching for answers about his absent father, grappling with what feels like some capital F sense of Fate, figured here as a kind of compulsion to repeat generational cycles. Junior is testing out what adulthood means, specifically adult masculinity, and time after time, the answer seems to be violent and destructive.

It looks like Junior might have found a way out of this cycle, but Graham Jones is well adept at offering up hope only to punch us straight in the heart.

In the end, Mapping the Interior is beautiful and harrowing, a bloody bit of grief horror that is absolutely distinctive. A must-read for even casual fans of the author.

The new edition of Mapping the Interior is available April 29th, 2025.

Synopsis:

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train.

Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater.

So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bite marks on her coffee table. Of course, ever since Delilah was killed in front of her, Cora can’t be sure what’s real and what’s in her head.

She pushes away all feelings and ignores the advice of her aunt to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. But she can’t ignore the dread in her stomach as she keeps finding bat carcasses at crime scenes, or the scary fact that all her recent cleanups have been the bodies of East Asian women.

As Cora will soon learn, you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.

Review:

After a couple of years in which submissions would announce in all caps, NO COVID STORIES, we seem to have finally reached the place where we’re willing to address what was arguably the most important and traumatic historical event of the twenty-first century and a clear precursor to the current rise of fascism in the US. That much of this work is now being done in the horror genre is highly appropriate.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng comes at this era from a unique angle, focusing on the wave of anti-Asian sentiment (and violence) that swept the nation in 2020.

Cora Zeng’s Chinese father has already fled home, deciding that America was not quite what it had promised, and her white mother is out of the picture, part of a cult upstate, leaving Cora adrift, trying to navigate the world of New York and her extended Chinese family. Her main anchor is her half sister, Delilah, but when Delilah is killed before Cora’s eyes in an apparent hate crime, Cora begins a devastating spiral.

Months later, Cora is a crime scene cleaner, mopping up the blood and viscera of various violent crimes in New York’s Chinatown, making almost-friends with her co-workers. And then the bats begin to appear.

Showing up at multiple crime scenes, the bats lead Cora and crew to believe that a serial killer is targeting Asian people. Soon after, Cora is visited by the ghost of her sister, and things get real weird as the little Scooby Gang attempts to solve the murders (which are apparently being covered up by the authorities), as well as deal with Cora’s haunting.

The book mixes Chinese traditional beliefs in with a modern thriller plot and adds in a fair share of psychological horror to boot, and the mix should be gangbusters. Instead, Bat Eater feels a little messy. Cora’s attempts to deal with the Hungry Ghosts is compelling and, well, haunting, but the serial killer plot feels rushed, and is riddled with plot holes, resolving in a way that if satisfying, is not quite believable.

Worse, underneath all of this is the question of Cora’s mental state. Mentions of past institutionalization and oblique references to mental illness call into question just how much of this is real at all. This brand of American Psycho-style unreliable narrator is having its day right now, but it doesn’t really do much for us here. At best, it’s one piece of Cora’s characterization, but at worst it’s an answer to the aforementioned plot holes, a kind of apology for the not-quite-believable resolution that implies that none of this was strictly real anyway.

Line by line, Baker is a strong writer, and for the most part, Cora’s head is an interesting, unique place to spend time, and the novel’s conceits are unique and should work well. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a little to be desired, and that, along with characters’ penchant for speaking in dramatic monologues, keeps Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng from quite landing.

Synopsis

From the author of White Horse (“Twisty and electric.” —The New York Times Book Review) comes a terrifying and resonant novel about a woman who uses her unique gift to learn the truth about her sister’s death.

Olivia Becente was never supposed to have the gift. The ability to commune with the dead was the specialty of her sister, Naiche. But when Naiche dies unexpectedly and under strange circumstances, somehow Olivia suddenly can’t stop seeing and hearing from spirits.

A few years later, she’s the most in-demand paranormal investigator in Denver. She’s good at her job, but the loss of Naiche haunts her. That’s when she hears from the Brown Palace, a landmark Denver hotel. The owner can’t explain it, but every few years, a girl is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. As Olivia tries to understand these disturbing deaths, the past and the present collide as Olivia’s investigation forces her to confront a mysterious and possibly dangerous cult, a vindictive journalist, betrayal by her friends, and shocking revelations about her sister’s secret life.

The Haunting of Room 904 is a paranormal thriller that is as edgy as it is heartfelt and simmers with intensity and longing. Erika T. Wurth lives up to her reputation as “a gritty new punkish outsider voice in American horror.”

Review

Thanks to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for this audiobook arc. 

This is my first experience with the author, and I really enjoyed it. This is like a mix between ghost hunting and being a ghost medium, with Olivia having not only the sight, but abilities. She’s like a paranormal detective but also a kind of spirit weaver. The novel opens with her solving a few lesser incidents to get your blood flowing, but they all end up coming back in connection. 

When hired to investigate room 904, Olivia is facing far more than just a simple haunting. The room is the place where her sister was last seen alive, before she took her own life, and it’s believed that this is directly linked to the haunting itself. Every year like clockwork a woman checks into the hotel, whether or not they try to lock up room 904 tight, without fail, three weeks later there’s another death. And Olivia’s investigation is hit with another layer of desperation when she finds out her mother has been to the hotel…

The in between is filled with a couple of repetitive beats, where she is struggling back and forth with solving the mystery. There are some shared locations that made it feel like similar things were happening. But I was a really big fan of these small sections at the beginning of chapters that served as little advertisements for different ghost hunting equipment. And as my version was narrated, it added almost a comedic beat to break things up. What was kind of strange to me though, was how much research must have gone into the equipment, when the items themselves take a serious backseat in the story. The author mentions that they are there, or that they are using them, but then it always defaulted to Olivia reaching out with her powers anyway. 

The novel deals with indigenous mistreatment and culture erasure, not only in its past plot line of a massacre, but also in the way those around Olivia speak and treat her. There’s this incredibly nasty journalist after her, and she is a great example of the way people speak about American Indians in a way they feel they can claim is not a racial commentary. And I found this not only informational, but a good facsimile for readers of what people actually have to deal with. A solid first read for me.