A haunting set of tales that balances horror with heart.
Foley offers a horror short-story collection that explores the shadows of everyday reality.
A middle-aged writer on retreat is haunted by predatory snowmen in “Snowman, Frozen.” In “Room 413, Silver Spruce Hotel,” a ghostly bride attaches herself to a visiting journalist. A tech support agent in “Beetles” becomes convinced that the titular insects are crawling under his skin. These are just a few of the paranormal tales in Foley’s compilation, each crafted to evoke a sense of dread amid the ordinary. From the haunting guilt of “Aneurism” to the demonic taxi of “Flowers Along the Seawall,” each story reveals how terror can manifest itself in the most banal moments. Across the collection, the author deftly delivers sharply drawn, multifaceted characters, whether a story is depicting a strained marriage (“The House Opposite”) or a man’s brief, grief-stricken vision of ghostly kids in “The Sound of Children Playing”: “Two of the swings were moving, leaping upward, shapes riding in the saddles. On the monkey bars, shadows seemed to tumble and flow.” Overall, the author’s attention to emotional nuance gives these chilling stories a rare tenderness, grounding surreal elements in believable emotion. The unnamed narrators of “Galen’s Closet” and “Emir” are especially memorable, rendering their accounts believable, even as the lines between reality and delusion begin to blur. Other entries forcing readers to question their own perceptions with the surreal language of “The Figure on the Sidewalk” and “An Effect of the Moonlight.” Most tragic of all are the doomed spirits of “Nineteen Sixty-Five Ford Falcon” and “The Ghost of Niles Canyon,” whose spectral suffering lingers long after the last page is turned. Foley doesn’t shy away from hard topics, either, confronting such concepts as the psychological aftermath of war with restraint and compassion. Some stories feel less developed than others—most notably, “On the Pier at Midnight” and “A Hitch”—but they are exceptions in an otherwise remarkable collection.
A haunting set of tales that balances horror with heart.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781803943404
Page Count: 258
Publisher: PS Publishing, Hornsea
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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