Unquiet
Things

The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan Metal band Queen Carrion returns to an Oregon cabin a year after their lead singer Brynn vanished in the woods, only to encounter fungal body horror weirdness that begins infecting and transforming them one by one. The premise had real potential – mycelium horror meets heavy metal in the Pacific Northwest, which should have been catnip for me – but Kaplan tries juggling seven different POVs while jumping between timelines, and it just never found its footing. The first half had some unsettling body horror and atmospheric moments that held my interest, but around the halfway point, it started dragging, and I found myself losing momentum as the characters kept making baffling choices (staying in a cabin with no reviews feels like extremely questionable judgment). What could have been a tight, nasty little horror novel needed serious trimming. I kept hoping it would pull itself together, but instead it just kept going and going until I was exhausted and resentful of the whole story and everyone in it. Publishing March 10, 2026

The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward A scholarship student with bipolar disorder navigates the toxic social hierarchy of an elite 1990s boarding school, where the relentless bullying from queen bee Greta Stanhope becomes entangled with her struggles to distinguish between reality and her own unraveling mental state. This isn’t the thriller the marketing promised, but rather a slow, heavy character study about mental illness and teenage cruelty that happens to include a death near the end. I found myself completely absorbed anyway. Ward’s portrayal of severe bipolar disorder felt convincing and unflinching (the way Sarah’s illness becomes its own unreliable narrator, the long dissociative tangents, the constant questioning of her own credibility), though I understand why some readers found those sections exhausting or distracting. I picked this up last year, bounced off after two chapters, then tore through it in one sitting this time; I think if you go in expecting a twisty dark academia thriller you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re prepared for something darker, sadder, and more interested in Sarah’s internal landscape than in plot mechanics, it’s pretty compelling.

Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski uses portals, sometimes literal sci-fi gateways, sometimes metaphorical escapes, to explore asexuality, difficult marriages, and the desire to be someone other than who you are. The stories share recurring characters and situations that feel like variations across parallel dimensions, which creates an interesting structural concept but also leads to a sameness that became overwhelming for me by the midpoint. I appreciated the unflinching examination of topics rarely explored in fiction (asexuality in conflict, coercive sex in marriage, the unglamorous reality of parenting neurodivergent children), and a few stories like the witch one and the AI replacement service really worked for me. The collection has ambition and Urbanski’s prose has real power, but ten stories covering such similar emotional territory felt like too much; I kept wishing for more variety or a tighter selection of maybe six or seven pieces instead of revisiting the same themes and character dynamics repeatedly.

Dollface by Lindy Ryan A masked killer starts slashing through a New Jersey suburb, targeting PTA moms one by one, while horror writer Jill tries to figure out who’s behind the murders before she becomes the next victim. Jill’s juggling her codependent relationship with her sister Kitty, trauma from her mother’s death, pressure from her editor for new pages, and desperately wanting to fit in with the Brunswick PTA despite her horror movie t-shirts and Final Girl coffee mugs. This had potential as a campy suburban slasher and the unhinged neighbor Darla (who calls everyone “dear” despite being maybe in her forties, which cracked me up) was mildly entertaining, but the killer and the twist were so obvious from very early on that I spent the rest of the book waiting for something I’d already figured out. Publishing February 24, 2026

Needle Lake by Justine Champine Fourteen-year-old Ida, neurodivergent and living with a congenital heart defect in the tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington, finds her quiet world upended when her charismatic sixteen-year-old cousin Elna arrives from San Francisco for the winter. Elna introduces Ida to shoplifting, drugs, and a kind of reckless confidence Ida has never experienced, but after the cousins witness a man drowning in Needle Lake on Christmas Eve, their relationship shifts into something darker and more complicated. I kept expecting some big dramatic reveal or confrontation that never materialized, only to realize in the final pages that the real story – Ida’s gradual understanding of herself, Elna, and their family’s secrets – had been unfolding quietly the whole time through Campine’s gorgeous, atmospheric prose. The pacing felt uneven (the ending rushed after so much careful buildup) and I wanted more resolution, but I found myself completely absorbed in Ida’s voice and the way she navigates a world that doesn’t quite make space for someone like her.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from this 1950s housewife-slowly-unraveling story, but it turned out to be more slow-burn domestic drama than psychological thriller, following Lulu Mayfield as she struggles after giving birth to her second child and becomes fixated on her new neighbor Bitsy while everyone around her dismisses her concerns as hysteria. This was on the lesser side of fine for me. There were two twists I didn’t see coming – one genuinely heartbreaking, the other feeling like it tried to tie everything up with a neat medical explanation that somehow answered too much and too little at the same time – and while the exploration of women being gaslit and dismissed by doctors resonated (because yes, that still happens), the whole thing felt like it pulled its punches when it should have leaned into the bleakness it was building toward.

Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton Thea’s third baby Lucia is born with a full set of teeth, grows at an alarming rate, and announces she wants to eat her brother, which would be horrifying enough without Thea also grappling with dark memories from her own childhood and wondering if she’s passed some monstrous inheritance down to her daughter. I liked this even though it got weird and nonsensical; Moulton uses the “monster baby” setup as an extended metaphor for intergenerational trauma and maternal anxiety, and it works until suddenly it doesn’t (maybe? I can’t decide?) veering into bizarrely fantastical territory that seemed like it was aiming for catharsis but left me uncertain whether it resonated the way it was meant to. The dark humor against the heavy themes worked for me, and I appreciated how short it stayed (173 pages) rather than dragging the metaphor out past its usefulness. It’s inventive and original in ways that don’t stack up predictably, which I found compelling even if I’m still not sure how I feel about where it all went.

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein When Dayna (39, unemployed, recently dumped via Reddit) agrees to help turn a decrepit LA mansion into an influencer hype house, the job comes with a complication: Becca, the tarot card reader who used to live there and amassed a huge following, has vanished. The mansion has a strange history and seems to exert its own influence on the young creators living there, while Dayna navigates her complicated past with Craig, the owner who she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years, gets involved with Jake, the last person to see Becca, and teams up with nineteen-year-old Olivia to investigate what happened. I actually really liked this despite some baffling character choices; Dayna was weirdly out of touch for someone who’s only thirty-nine, considering I’m 49 and more plugged in than she seemed to be at the start, but then she’d suddenly have these confident, on-point ideas about how things should work and just run with them immediately. Her observations about visibility, aging online, and the cost of being seen were pretty sharp, but Stein seems to borrow from Gothic fiction (a crumbling estate, a mysterious disappearance), without fully embracing it ….this is more a decaying mansion with Wi-Fi than a brooding psychological mystery (though at some point the mystery stopped feeling like much of a mystery anyway.) I had a good time with it anyway.

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran In the aftermath of devastating hurricanes, Vietnamese-American teen Noon and her grief-stricken mother navigate the waters around Mercy, Louisiana, where a red algae bloom has transformed the landscape and mutated sea creatures into something grotesque and unrecognizable. Noon’s mother refuses to leave, convinced her dead husband and son have been reincarnated as sea creatures, leaving Noon feeling invisible – not enough as a daughter, not enough as a person, despite being alive and right there. When the town’s local thug forces them to hunt down whatever creature is lurking in the swamp and sends his daughter, Covey, along to keep watch, Noon is navigating grief over her lost family, trauma from an assault, rage and self-loathing she can’t shake, and the growing sense that she might be undergoing her own monstrous transformation. I wanted to like this more than I did – there were so many elements I appreciated (the body horror, Vietnamese mythology, the metaphor of monstrous transformation as response to trauma and alienation from one’s own body) but they didn’t coalesce into an enjoyable whole, feeling sluggish and scattered instead. I really like Tran and their ideas though, so I’m glad I read it and will always pick up more from them.

The Haar by David Sodergren Muriel McAuley is eighty-four and has no intention of leaving her Scottish fishing village of Witchaven, not even when an American developer shows up planning to evict everyone and build a golf course. A mysterious fog bank called the Haar rolls in from the sea, bringing something ancient and monstrous with it that becomes Muriel’s unlikely ally, and what follows is equal parts gore-soaked revenge tale and surprisingly tender love story. I think if I hadn’t been listening to the excellent narrator on audiobook, this wouldn’t have kept my interest – I went in expecting atmospheric dread and creeping horror, but got something that felt more romantic than frightening despite all the visceral violence. I genuinely liked Muriel as a protagonist, and I can appreciate love and sentimentality and grief all tangled up with body horror, but this didn’t work for me as the horror story I was hoping for. Viewed as its own strange hybrid thing, maybe it’s actually pretty great, but I kept wishing I could split it apart – give me the story of the town being bought up by a rich developer with one stubborn old woman refusing to sell, or give me the ancient entity lurking by the sea, but mashing them together left me wanting each piece to breathe on its own.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison After her mother Alex dies, influencer Clio Barnes inherits the childhood home where Alex claimed a demon lived, specifically obsessed with Clio – claims that got Alex stripped of custody and labeled crazy. Clio’s sisters want nothing to do with the place, but Clio sees house-flipping content gold and begins renovations, only to discover her mother might have been right as she finally reads Alex’s out-of-print book about the possession. I liked parts of this: the sister dynamics felt real, the book-within-a-book structure worked was neat…but something was missing, like I wanted more of who Alex was before the house, more about how young Clio might have interacted with the demon, just more demon in general. What I actively disliked, though, was Clio herself, the bratty baby sister with her “I do what I want! Deal with it!” energy who dismisses her sisters’ legitimate trauma as manipulation while seeing dollar signs everywhere. I know that’s intentional character work, but I have a real problem with people who act like that (maybe because I’m an oldest sister), and her behavior grated on me so much it overshadowed basically everything else Also, blueberry bagels are Clio’s favorite, which just cements my dislike of her – sweet bagels are garbage, and if you want a round baked good with a hole to be sweet, just admit you want a donut already and stop dragging the poor bagels into it. They should be savory and loaded with fish and onions and terrifically smelly, as god intended.

The Salvage by Anbara Salam A Victorian shipwreck containing the remains of Captain James Purdie – a celebrated explorer who’s achieved near-cult status among the islanders – gets towed from Arctic waters to the remote Scottish island of Cairnroch in 1962, and marine archaeologist Marta Khoury arrives to salvage what’s inside. On her first dive down, she photographs artifacts and bones, but when she returns days later to retrieve them, everything’s gone, and she’s certain she saw a dark crouching figure in the wreck – which feeds right into the guilt she’s already drowning in from something terrible in her recent past. The Cuban Missile Crisis and a historically brutal winter strand her on the island, where she’s treated with suspicion as an outsider and has to navigate complicated relationships with Sophie (her boss/husband’s assistant, sent ostensibly to help) and Elsie, a local hotel worker she grows close to. I loved this, even though the 1960s Scottish island setting confused me initially since it’s not territory I usually encounter. The wintry atmosphere is spectacularly done and while many readers thought it dragged when the village freezes over and everyone’s scrambling for survival, I genuinely enjoyed watching the female friendships develop and spending time with these flawed, complicated characters navigating their various guilts and desires. The romance worked for me despite not usually wanting love stories in my ghost stories, though I’ll admit the casual attitude about the relationship didn’t feel entirely realistic for early 1960s Presbyterian Scotland.

The Search Party by Hannah Richell Max and Annie Kingsley invite their old university friends and their families to their new Cornwall glamping site for a trial run, but the reunion sours when the kids fight, the parents take sides, old resentments surface, and someone vanishes just as a massive storm rolls in. The setup had potential (isolated location, secrets, missing person, police investigation told through multiple timelines), but nothing about it really landed for me beyond people having predictable meltdowns in expensive tents. The one character I felt for was Kip, Max and Annie’s adopted son who has selective mutism and gets treated poorly by basically everyone. I finished it easily enough, but now all I can recall is a blur of dramatic confrontations and bad weather without any real sense of why I should have cared.

Smile For The Camera by Miranda Smith A reunion documentary brings the cast of cult slasher Grad Night back to the original Tennessee cabin location twenty years later, where they’re all hiding a terrible secret from the original shoot. Ella Winters, the movie’s final girl, finds herself navigating old resentments and cast drama before someone dressed as the movie’s killer finally starts picking off cast and crew members, which raises the obvious question of why this revenge plot waited two decades to kick in. I finished this easily enough and found parts of it entertaining, but the fictional movie Grad Night itself sounded incredibly dull (kids go to a cabin, kids get killed, there’s a final girl, the end), and there’s a weird twist that felt like it came out of nowhere and was never properly addressed in a way that made sense.

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Kinsey leads a research team at a remote desert outpost where they discover a strange, grotesque specimen buried in the sand, which she breaks quarantine to bring inside, and the longer it stays the more everyone starts unraveling because this thing is searching for a host and making everyone weirdly, aggressively horned up Gailey commits fully to the strangeness here (Kinsey is sexually attracted to viruses, for instance), and while I generally find smutty stuff boring and would rather read about literally anything else, this was so boldly weird that I actually had a good time with it. The timeline jumps between present action and character backstories disrupted the momentum when I was invested in what was happening now, but overall, this was short, strange, and entertaining.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman Forty women live locked in an underground cage with no sense of time, no understanding of how they got there, and only the vaguest memories of the world outside. The sole exception is our narrator, a young girl who remembers nothing before captivity and has grown up entirely within the cage’s fluorescent, timeless hum. When a moment of chance and a sliver of ingenuity allow them to escape, the world they emerge into is far stranger and more desolate than anything they imagined, and the girl becomes both witness and sometimes interpreter—to a landscape devoid of answers. It’s part eerie survival tale and part philosophical unraveling, as the women wander through an empty world not knowing whether they’re the last people alive or simply the most forgotten. I loved this, even though the starkness of its setting, bleak plains, abandoned structures, and a world stripped to its bones, initially felt so spare I wasn’t sure how much emotional attachment I’d find. But the atmosphere is astonishing: quiet, unsettling, and strangely luminous, especially in the scenes where the women try to rebuild some kind of life with almost nothing to anchor themselves. I was captivated by the narrator’s loneliness and the way she tries to make meaning inside a reality that offers none. The sadness is constant but beautifully rendered, and the final pages left me equal parts hollowed out and grateful. I think I’m drawn to stories like this, and even to books as seemingly different as Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Boxcar Children (which probably sound ridiculous as comparisons, but hear me out), because I love narratives about people figuring out how to survive and build something from almost nothing, finding small moments of comfort and connection in a world that’s fundamentally indifferent to their existence.

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry The abandoned house on Jessie’s Chicago street has been there her whole life, crouched and waiting, and she’s the reason her little brother Paul disappeared inside it when she dared him to go in as kids. The book follows Jessie over decades as she grows up on that same block, builds a life, and watches darkness spread from that house until eventually her own son vanishes into it and she has to confront what’s been festering there all along. I’m always here for a creepy haunted house story and loved the neighborhood friendships and support system around Jessie, but this never quite worked for me, despite wanting it to. What started as fairly standard supernatural coming-of-age/grief horror suddenly veered into something oddly fairytale-esque at the very end, a bizarrely fantastical pivot that fell awfully flat.

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson Vietnam vet Duane Minor is bartending in Portland in 1975, trying to stay sober and raise his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, when he crosses a vampire named John Varley, who retaliates by murdering Minor’s wife and sending what’s left of their family on a vengeful pursuit across the Pacific Northwest. This has a gritty 1970s noir feel and reads more like a crime thriller than typical vampire horror, which I appreciated, and while it wasn’t weird or extraordinarily wild in any way, I can say I’ve never read another vampire book quite like it. I think that uniqueness comes from getting Varley’s perspective, along with Minor’s and Julia’s, watching all three of them from different angles as the hunt unfolds. The grief and rage driving Minor and Julia felt raw and devastating; their bond developed naturally over the course of the book, and the whole thing was brutal and emotionally gutting without feeling manipulative about it. This was an utterly satisfying read and exactly what I want from horror.

Night Watcher by Daphne Woolsoncroft Nola Strate hosts a late-night radio show in Portland about hauntings and cryptid sightings, but when a caller describes something chillingly similar to her childhood encounter with a serial killer called The Hiding Man, she becomes convinced he’s back and targeting her (yet somehow does absolutely nothing to keep herself safe in ways that stopped feeling like character behavior and started feeling like the author needed her to be a reckless moron for plot reasons.) This could have been so good, but I was deeply disappointed by how it turned out, starting with the fact that the author telegraphs early on exactly how the killer is accessing his victims, which removes most of the tension. The writing felt simultaneously over-detailed about mundane things (kombucha, coffee, endless mentions of Powell’s Books to remind you we’re in Portland) and strangely flat when it came to actual character development or emotional stakes. When the killer is finally revealed, it’s someone so random and disconnected from the story that you’re left thinking “oh, that’s just dumb.”

Self Care by Leigh Stein Everyone’s got a favorite trashy genre, and for the past few years, this has been mine: something about wellness and social media and influencer culture, sometimes through the lens of a thriller, sometimes presented as sad girl/weird lit fic, but there’s something so garbagey junk food about it that I can’t get enough of. This one follows the female cofounders of wellness startup Richual as they struggle to balance their feminist values with profit margins while their company implodes from various scandals, including sexual misconduct allegations against a board member and a PR nightmare when COO Maren Gelb tweets something terrible about the President’s daughter. I flew through it and enjoyed the specificity of the brand-dropping, the absurd self-care products, the performative wokeness, and the way it captures how these companies commodify feminism while exploiting the people working for them. The ending felt abrupt and left me wanting more closure or comeuppance for certain characters, but overall, this scratched the exact trashy itch I was looking for.

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer Macy Mullins is broke, grieving her father’s death, and desperately trying to provide for her younger sister when she takes a caretaking job she finds on Craigslist that involves following mysterious rituals at an isolated Oregon Coast house to prevent some incomprehensible evil from escaping. My stress levels while reading this were off the charts—poor Macy just could not get her shit together, screwing up the instructions at every turn in ways that left me frustrated with her and for her. The plot veers into such bizarro territory that some readers will absolutely be put off, with that meandering weirdness that made me think of the r/nosleep community, and when I looked it up, I realized that’s because Kliewer was a writer there. The dread and tension were real, but I closed it feeling like it was almost good rather than anything approaching actually great. Publishing April 21, 2026.

The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church. The premise here involves haunted audio tapes from an abandoned RAF base that caused an experimental artist to murder his entire family in 1983, and decades later, true crime podcaster Cally Darker decides to investigate.  The writing had serious weird/gross/annoying problems throughout: at one point, Cally is using sex to distract her boyfriend, but the narration tells us she wasn’t trying to distract him anymore because she was “genuinely enjoying herself.’ I find this extremely doubtful, classic man-writing-women garbage. At another point, Cally puts on a pair of gold harem pants. Gold harem pants. Seriously? What!  At least two completely different interview subjects both use the word “benighted” in the span of about two chapters, and aside from that, these two very different characters spoke almost exactly the same. The same wry, sardonic tones, similar turns of phrase, etc. I don’t know that I could let that go in a book I was actually having a good time with, but in this one, it was exceptionally egregious. And the villain was such an over-the-top incel caricature that I wanted to throw the book every time he said “pretty Cally Darker.” By the end of this, I think I was hate-reading it.

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir Unnur reunites a lost black cat with its owner Ásta, a local woman who seems a bit vulnerable and squirrelly (we soon learn why); Unnur agrees to keep the cat temporarily, which leads to an unlikely friendship between the two women. I tore through this in one sitting—it’s a quiet little book (gruesome but not bombastic about it) that leans more thriller than horror, and I liked it better than Knútsdóttir’s last one. The friendship felt genuine, and I was really invested in watching Unnur transform from someone living a bland, isolated life with a terrible married boyfriend into someone who actually cares about another person, especially once it becomes clear Ásta is in an abusive relationship and things take a violent turn. Short, focused, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Publishing May 26, 2026.

Too Close To Home by Seraphina Nova Glass This is the first Seraphina Nova Glass book that didn’t quite work for me, which surprised me given how much I’ve enjoyed her other work. An upscale lakefront community is thrown into chaos when a car bomb explodes at the annual Labor Day party, killing the wrong person, and the story follows three suburban moms, Regan, Andi, and Sasha, whose lives are all tangled up in the aftermath. I love Glass for that close-knit, neighborly intimacy and the way she weaves community together, but this felt too sprawling and ambitious, with so many plot threads (bomb threats, missing persons, messy divorces, resurrected husbands) that I never found my footing. The three women were so interchangeable that I struggled to keep them straight well past the halfway point, and while everything technically came together at the end, the resolution felt both over-the-top and underwhelming. I missed the warmth and tight focus of her other work. Publishing April 14, 2026

Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard Starting over is hard enough without your new house hiding someone else’s deadly secrets, but that’s what happens when Hannah moves to 1 Delaney Row under a new name, trying to escape her past. At first her situation stressed me out because it reminded me of Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive—desperate woman, creepy house, creeping dread—but thankfully the book doesn’t bloat like Nevill’s did, dragging on for 600 pages. The dual timeline structure following two women whose stories eventually converge around the house worked well enough, but the mystery’s resolution felt unfairly convoluted: when a barely-there neighbor character suddenly becomes the keeper of crucial secrets the whole story hinges on, it doesn’t feel earned, it just feels like information was withheld arbitrarily. Readable enough, but that resolution soured whatever goodwill I had toward the book. Publishing July 28, 2026

Nothing Tastes As Good by Luke Dumas A clinical trial for a very experimental weight loss product promises miraculous results, and retail worker Emmett Truesdale, over 300 pounds and desperate for change, enrolls only to discover the side effects include lost time, overwhelming (and alarming) cravings…and a possible connection to people who were cruel to him now disappearing. You could tell this was written by an actual fat person who has experienced actual fat person struggles, from the way society treats Emmett to the constant bullying to the self-loathing, all of it felt authentic in ways that made parts of this horribly relatable, even when other parts were gross and cringe. Emmett’s childhood trauma around his weight happened in his own home, where he should have been safe and protected, which adds another layer of devastating realism to his character. The social commentary on fatphobia and diet culture isn’t subtle, but I appreciated the inclusion and found myself caring about Emmett despite knowing things weren’t going to end well for him. The ending went a bit over the top, but this worked for me more than it didn’t. Publishing March 31, 2026

The Lamb by Lucy Rose A mother and daughter live isolated in a cottage by the forest, their quiet life interrupted only by strangers who knock at their door seeking shelter, strangers they consume after feeding and caring for them. When Eden arrives during a snowstorm, everything rapidly shifts in ways both tender and terrible. Mama becomes utterly besotted with Eden in a way she never was with Margot, desperately in love, while what she’d given her daughter had always been something fraught with resentment and possession rather than genuine affection. Eden seems to care for Margot while also returning Mama’s passion, leaving Margot nowhere to belong, and whether Eden’s arrival was accident or design is never quite resolved (though in a story this dreamlike and fairytale-esque, do we even question where new entities come from?). This was weirdly beautiful and terribly, monstrously sad, told entirely through Margot’s childlike perspective.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?