A flawed but inventive selection of four creepy stories.
Bratton collects four previously published horror stories in one chilling volume.
Urban legends inform these four spine-tingling tales, each of which works as a stand-alone story even as their characters and frights occasionally intersect. The lengthy opener, “Who’s at the Door,” riffs on the familiar sleepover legend of Bloody Mary. Following a car accident that breaks her foot, a 17-year-old girl stays home in suburban Ohio while her parents fly off on a two-week Hawaiian vacation. As an added measure of security, her father has installed a motion sensor on the front porch before leaving; using an app, the girl can check to see who’s at the door without having to walk downstairs. But what happens when the sensor starts going off every day at the same time—when, according to the camera, there’s no one there? In “Parasomnia,” a woman has trouble sleeping after the death of her father and the dissolution of her marriage. One night, after a mere five hours of slumber, she experiences a strange hallucination: “Upon waking, something very bizarre happened—before my closed eyes were a series of rapidly moving images in succession: crisp, high-resolution stills of unrelated people and places moving quickly along my field of vision.” One of these images is of a perfectly handsome man—so perfect that the woman tries to solve the mystery of his identity. It turns out he’s dead…and his intrusion into her life may be the opposite of perfect. “Dollhouse” concerns a man’s ill-fated purchase of a handmade Japanese dollhouse and its three toy occupants. His wife is not amused by the acquisition, and she’s thoroughly unnerved by the handwritten book that accompanies the house, which details the alarming backstories of each of the dolls. The culminating “Who’s Back at the Door” is a sequel to the first story, picking up seven years later, featuring disappearances, murders, role reversals, and more, further building on the legend of Bloody Mary.
Bratton’s prose is conversational and breezy, moving the narratives quickly from scene to scene. This approach sometimes prevents the tension that fuels these stories from fully developing, leading to moments that aren’t quite as scary as they should be, such as this passage from the collection’s first entry: “I looked at my phone. It was 3:33 AM, and there was a message saying there was motion at the door. I played the video, and I screamed in terror! There was someone at the door…” It’s a shame, because the premises are usually solid ideas that would benefit from a bit more space to breathe, particularly “Parasomnia” and “Dollhouse,” which construct intriguing worlds that don’t fully pay off. The balance feels wrong; each plot complicates itself with unnecessary exposition when it should linger in its ambiguity. The book lives up to its urban-legends theme, however, with the stories capturing the unsettling familiarity of tales passed through multiple tellers. Fans of quick, efficient thrills will likely enjoy Bratton’s collection and will anticipate the promise of future volumes to come.
A flawed but inventive selection of four creepy stories.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781736771532
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Blue Milk Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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