General Fiction (Adult)/Horror/Thriller
Pub date: 19 November 2026
4.5/5 ⭐️
Summary:
Lock the doors and live through the night…
A quiet roadside convenience store, in the heart of Appalachia. The customers mind their own business, focused on the long journeys ahead of them. Until, that is, two men stumble in, one of them mutilated beyond recognition and claiming to have been attacked by a monster.
At first, no one believes the man’s ravings, but then the next person to leave the store is brutally killed. And when, impossibly, he returns and begs to be let back in, it seems that a local legend might be true,
There’s a beast in these mountains who feasts on guilty hearts… and someone among them has lured it out of hiding. As the creature’s attacks become bolder, cracks start showing within the group. The dwindling survivors begin to turn on each other, desperate to save themselves by uncovering the guiltiest among them.
If the group can’t band together and survive the night, they’ll surely become the monster’s next victims…or worse, become monsters themselves.
Review:
It’s a beautiful night , she thinks. The sky is clear, the stars are endless—yet somewhere in the shadows, Death waits.
Is there anything worse than being stuck in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of strangers, on Thanksgiving Eve? Well, waiting for your parents to announce they’re getting a divorce Thanksgiving would be up there. Oh! And there’s a bloodthirsty entity that wants to rip out the hearts of guilty people.
The Appalachian horror is absolutely serving it this year and I’m absolutely loving it! I’m a fairly slow reader but I absolutely blitzed through this one.
It’s claustrophobic, atmospheric and bloody, but never in a way that feels unearned. A great exploration of grief, guilt and the burdens we carry.
We mostly stick to our siblings POVs but we do get glimpses of the other characters and the potential reasons for being haunted by the entity. Having it play out with a group of strangers, instead of a potential family group, was honestly such a good move. They have absolutely no reason to trust each other and that paranoia is almost as terrifying as the creature lurking outside.
Jane’s character arc is definitely the most compelling one as she learns to accept that she’s actually a victim and not a villain in her story. The drip feed reveal of Jane and Thomas’ backstory did annoy me at first, I usually prefer a more comprehensive lore drop, but by the end it absolutely make sense and it works very well with the overall pacing of the book.
And I certainly did NOT see that last plot twist coming.
Honestly this would’ve been a 5 star read but I took the half star away mostly for (1) lack of prior disclosure on whether the dog survives (it does! I would have dnfd at any point if it didn’t) and (2) one particular scene that was very much giving “typical white people in a horror movie” that had me screaming at my kindle in the middle of the night.
If this is a debut novel I truly can’t wait what the author will share with us next. If you love the tv show FROM, or enjoyed The Watchers this is a book for you!
Leave a Reply