A delightfully dark collection of horror stories.
Dalia pushes her characters to terrifying extremes in this horror collection.
In this set of disquieting tales, it doesn’t take much to turn a normal person into something monstrous. In the title story, a man loses his job, and instead of telling his wife, he just starts going on long walks in a nearby wood. There, he discovers an abandoned house littered with graffiti, along with a pentagram and the corpse of an animal that appears to have been sacrificed. When his job search comes up short, he discovers he’s desperate enough to try making a sacrifice of his own. In another story, a boy is convinced that a man on his paper route is responsible for the recent disappearances of local girls…until he is forced to consider the real killer might be someone closer to home. A third story tracks a bullied young bookworm and a new father pushed to his limits—their lives converge by way of an old handgun hidden in a hollow stump in the park. Both have reasons to use it, but what would happen if they did? (“Maybe he’d leave it there, in the stump,” thinks the bullied boy. “Maybe just knowing it was there, should he ever need it, was enough.”) In “The Trunk,” an immigrant who long ago escaped from a warzone discovers an old trunk in the basement of his newly purchased home—and in that trunk, a seemingly mummified dead body. Across these eight stories, the author walks her characters right up to the point of the inconceivable, challenging them to make sense of the world’s underlying darkness. Dalia’s premises and prose possess an imaginative directness reminiscent of Stephen King’s work. “Sometimes you could see them coming and get a chance to steel yourself in preparation,” she writes of life’s pivotal moments. “Sometimes—usually, in Bogdan’s experience—they snuck up on you, like a clown in a haunted house attraction.” Horror fans will find much here to gasp and squirm over—in a good way.
A delightfully dark collection of horror stories.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781963355314
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Brigids Gate Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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