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
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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