A young couple – Mavis and Jerrod – have what seems to be a wonderful marriage despite the tension that has been simmering for years between Mavis and her parents. The novel’s action kickstarts early when Mavis gets into a very bad car accident. The first oddity she realizes is that she knew the other people in the car accident, they were members of the church in which she grew up as a congregant. Many wounds are opened up because of this accident and Mavis’s life begins to unravel.
Mavis broke from her parents’ congregation years ago, but she still hasn’t recovered. Their impossible expectations and soul-shredding critiques have dug deep into her mind, and she’s taunted by the knowledge that even when she’s done nothing wrong, she’ll never be right.
Now Mavis is afraid she’s about to lose the only thing she has: her husband, Jerrod. The man she’s always known was too good to be true. No one thinks she deserves him—not even after surviving the serial cheater they wanted her to stick by—and soon they’ll all find out they were right.
Mavis is already unraveling when a brush with death shows her what real fear looks like. Soon, she’s under constant attack from all directions. As the assaults turn increasingly vicious and bizarre, Mavis realizes that Hell isn’t reserved for the afterlife.
And sinner or not, no one is coming to save her.
Morrow weaves in some backstory for Mavis about her prior unhealthy relationship with a man named Cyrus as well as the extremely toxic relationship with her judgmental parents, her mother Marie in particular. I found myself rooting for Mavis early in the novel, I was happy that it seemed like our protagonist found a good husband in Jerrod, a man who seemed to love and respect her like she deserved. Initially, there were enough details about Mavis’s life before the events in the novel to start building sympathy for the character. Off to a good start and I was pulled into the novel.
That car accident is the start of strange occurrences. The car accident seems like it could be explained away, but as more events occur, Mavis seemed to be targeted with these events as they escalate in their bizarre and violent nature. Mavis was stalked, or alternatively one could say haunted, by members of her old church. Could it be that the church wants her and Jerrod to return to its loving embrace? Maybe? Is the church punishing her for leaving or for some past transgression? Possibly?
As these events intensified, Mavis seemed to get more willfully ignorant (or just plain dumb) with her actions. The way she hid things from her husband, the way after a particularly violent incident she low-key abandoned him felt rather severe. She grew from a character with whom I could initially find myself empathizing into a character I grew to dislike with each passing page. A character with an interesting starting point who quickly grew into a caricature. What frustrates me even more is that I don’t want to dislike a character who is clearly a victim, a character who suffered for many years. I want to be able to empathize and root for a character like Mavis, as I reader I don’t want to be put into a victim-blaming situation. Maybe that more than almost anything else about the novel frustrated/annoyed me.
Another issue for me was the lack of real substance that flavored the whole novel. Anything resembling menacing detail was largely absent from this church – it was simply a controlling church with a strange wedding ceremony. I guess Mavis’s mother’s unwavering devotion to the church could be seen as a element in the church’s sinister hold, but aside from just being a devoted member of the church, additional depth was not given or reason for Marie’s devotion was not clear in the narrative. Bottom line, in and of itself the church didn’t feel like something sinister despite some of its congregants acting strangely. While I get some stories are intentionally minimal with their details, **some** details are required (like motivation, perhaps) so the reader can empathize with characters and understand their situation – especially if it is a pervading presence that is presented as an evil organization threatening the protagonist.
Despite a fairly strong start, decent enough prose, and an interesting premise featuring a cult like religion and spousal stress – elements that can work well in a horror novel, I found myself being increasingly annoyed with each turn of the page. The narrative on the whole is very disjointed – things just happen with the protagonist kind of plodding along because the plot required it. All the characters were annoying with little reason explaining why and I felt as if they were acting intentionally stupid and oblivious just to keep the plot moving, I didn’t feel as if their actions had any logic outside of that. The novel was short enough for me not to set it aside and persist in reading because I was holding out hope for *something* to make sense or any kind of empathy to return to these characters. To my frustration, these things did not happen.
Unfortunately, this is not a novel I can recommend on any level and a rare miss for me from an imprint that has largely delivered superb horror over the last few years since it was launched.
© 2026 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | Tor Nightfire
February 2026 | 288 Pages
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor Nightfire
