A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.
In Harrison’s latest horror novel, a woman with a history of mental illness is haunted by a crime committed in her new house.
Kathryn Fields has just bought a run-down Victorian town house in Washington, D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood in the hopes of fixing it up. Her wealthy mother thinks Kathryn has made a rash decision purchasing the property, which has ties to a 35-year-old murder from 1984. Kathryn, however, hopes the house will anchor her following a psychotic break she experienced several months ago. “The things it must have seen and heard in its hundred plus years,” she thinks on her first night in her new home, “the intrigues and passions that must have seeped into these walls, embalmed beneath successive coats of paint and varnish, recorded in the scars on the flooring, preserved in the smells of its woodwork.” The house contains more than just abstractions, she soon learns; it turns out there’s a secret dressing area with a marble-topped vanity hidden behind the wall of her bedroom. Why would someone do such a thing? Perhaps it has something to do with the antique box Kathryn finds there, containing a torn photograph of a beautiful woman—and a loaded handgun. Soon she’s seeing and hearing things that seem related to the unsolved murder of someone who once lived in the house. But are these things real, or evidence that Kathryn’s psychosis has returned? Harrison is adept at creating a sense of true creepiness, as when Kathryn discovers that someone’s rearranged her possessions and has an unexpected reaction: “All the furniture had been moved. The whole house had been rearranged. And yet as Kathryn stood there stunned and disbelieving, the place looked right. Everything exactly where it should have been in the first place.” Several elements of the story will be familiar to horror fans, since they’re relatively common trappings of the haunted house subgenre. In Harrison’s hands, however, they feel like a fresh homage rather than a rerun. Many readers will find it a perfect book for a spooky late-night read.
A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781680574234
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Wordfire Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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