I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED, what a great title!

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED
EMILY ZINNIKAS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

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My Review: Willa's desire to bury her trauma, not make theater of it, is at the heart of this creepy, atmospheric story of dread. It's impossible to decouple one's existence as a survivor of an unsolved mass murder from the event but Willa's kept her profile as low as is possible.

The exigencies of storytelling make that impossible. Willa's goin' in. Not willingly, not graciously, but in she's going. Into the past, into reckoning with her...odd...beginnings, into what one hopes can be a laying-to-rest of the horrifying truths of childhood sexual assault.

It's the season for uneasy-making reads. Based on the synopsis I rather thought this story would be more about supernatural unease, dealing with hauntings and entities and so on. Instead it's about the awful reality that some kids are not safe even in their own beds. It's very uneasy-making but all too corporeal. I was surprised to feel so compelled to keep reading. It's not exciting writing on a sentence level but it kept my eyes engaged for an entire day, difficult to achieve at this late date in my reading career, as Willa's return to the site of her trauma brings her sporadically, almost haphazardly, into contact with her unresolved pain. Normally I would be complaining that was disorganized, or lacked narrative thrust. Instead of feeling that intellectual response I felt it was me being in Willa's fragmented, damaged emotions with her, processing with her as she had to do and I was along to witness so I could stand in fellowship with her in her hours of need.

It was not the experience I'd expected to have in the read. It was in most ways a better, more real, more involving one. It was dark, and dangerous, and deliberately frightening at times; it was always Othering, intensely alienating to be with Willa in the recovered moments. They were not numerous or extended in ways that felt prurient to me-the-reader.

Horror that gets dressed in supernatural drag doesn't often work that well for me. I usually dismiss the supernatural elements, where this time I had a context for them that made them make sense to me. I won't recommend the read to all readers...check the CWs...and I suspect the truest devotees to horror reading won't get as much out of the read as I, with my self-supplied remapping of the story, did.

It was a successful, pleasurable read for me. I hope y'all will consider giving it a shot at your time and treasure.

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel, a metaphor for escape from here-and-now that makes it sound so...frictionless

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel
OANA ARISTIDE
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, darkly funny, and politically resonant novel of life under authoritarian rule.

Romania, 1989, the twilight of Ceausescu’s dictatorship: A time when every neighbor, every friend, every family member may be an informant for the regime. When news emerges of a man-eating bear terrorizing the country, two bright lives collide. Constantin, an idealistic police detective—prone to daydreaming and scribbling fairytales in his notebook for his four-year-old son—is tasked with solving the string of mysterious deaths. Lia, a rebellious, inquisitive schoolgirl pining for more color in her life, is unwittingly drawn into an elderly neighbor’s secret plot against the regime. The decisions they make amid the constant gray skies and fear of speaking out will have sweeping consequences—for themselves, for their families, and for their country. Astronaut! is a chilling, suspenseful, and resonant tale by a dynamic new novelist.

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My Review: What a claustrophobic read. At eery turn there's a wall, at every corner there's an uneasy dread of what you'll find when you turn it. Even the fun of a kid wanting to give Mama a special birthday gift...disastrous, unmitigatable harm follows.

I was uneasy, I was unnerved, and I was totally hooked. I stopped feeling like I was reading a novel pretty quickly. I winced, chuckled hollowly, got staring prickles, I felt as much a part of the cold greyness of 1989 Romania as a guy in the sunshiney summer of 2026 New York City is likely ever to feel. Lia is in the midst of things she does not realize are seismic shifts. Her sense of self-preservation hasn't taught her what safety is yet. She barrels into danger as she searches for the vibrancy and color of her home country. Honestly I wondered where she might've seen that, the eternal dankness and foggy grey of 1989 Romania was so pervasive.

Then we shift our story attention to detective Constantin, tasked with solving a brutal death, one that lends itself in its mindless ferocity of commission to the spurious explanation of a bear attack.

One that just happens to take place near the hunting party at Dictator Ceaușescu's hunting lodge.

These narratives don't appear to be connected at first. Constantin escapes from the Orwellian "investigation" he's performing to instructions from...well...Securitate (the secret police)? who can be sure, they're very secretive these secret police never doing anything directly that Constantin's seen just by innuendo and "they said"-style rumors. He writes fairy tales for his much-loved son Sandu. The fairy tales are so completely adorable and so trenchant that I want illustrated books of them!

Sandu's story-lessons in how things really are in the world are all so trenchant and targeted that they become our primary means to follow the backgrounded collapse of the Ceaușescu regime. It's a clever and enjoyable way to tell me a larger story behind the story I'm paying attention to. More violent vicious deaths occur that Constantin feels he needs to escape from absorbing, as he turns to creating stories about an astronaut (not the Party-approved term "cosmonaut" please note) to make up in his mind for the nonsensical stories titillating the people about bear attacks with escape from Earth's surly bonds entirely.

Lia's absolute unwillingness to dim down her search for color, for life, in her country and her school leads her into a dangerous association with a real honest to goodness rebel. It's something she puts her whole heart into, this small role in a small eddy of the current of rebellion in 1989 Romania, leading her into a dangerous conflict with a Party official's daughter in her school. She is clearly, obviously the winner of a contest that girl was supposed to win..."he's at the top of the page, the bravest explorer of all. She gives him a light blue helmet and matching spacesuit, and he's smiling through the visor. Why the smile? Because he has just realized that the view from the outer space is like being deep inside a Christmas tree, and he is never afraid. Lia smiles back at him. She names the drawing, flattening the black letters across the surface of the sun, 'Astronaut!'"...whose prize was a face-to-face with Ceaușescu himself. Special classes, intensive training, the usual efforts to make sure no tinge of reality can intrude on the leader's dreamworld.

Lia and her family figure in Constantin's investigation...the part without the bear story in it...and as Lia's meeting with Ceaușescu draws closer, more and more strands of story logic bind them together. We discover Constantin's dark, painful secret; we watch Lia as she draws closer to murderous scum without feeling the appropriate level of fear; we are *frantic* to save whomever we can from the explosion looming.

It's a novel with a satisfying resolution. I will say nothing of the ending.

"We've grown numb. It's like this, kid: in wars, you have to face guns and cannons and soldiers, and the situation is somehow so obviously serious that we mobilise our courage, and our will, and so on. But here, we are supposed to be heroic at our kitchen table, at the factory, on the bus. We are supposed to risk terrible consequences just for saying some perfectly commonsense thing. It never seems worth it."

{Lia}'s pretending to listen, but really she's thinking how lucky she is Comrade Mantea is her friend. He talks complete gibberish but it never feels like he's lying to her. He's nice to her, and he has ideas, not only about grown-up problems but about everyone's problems.

Don't kid yourself: Oana Aristide will show you a mirror, she will shine a harsh raking light on you while she does it.

But she sees everyone's problems in the unflattering shadows.

YOU DID NOTHING WRONG, psychological horror

YOU DID NOTHING WRONG
C.G. DREWS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark domestic suspense meets haunted house horror in this unnerving adult debut guaranteed to keep you awake for days afterward, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Let the Forest In and Hazelthorn

The walls are closing in on her perfect new life.

Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.

Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it―something strange is going on.

The question is, Is it with the house, or with her son?

And what is Elodie hiding?

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My Review: I'm not going to do content warnings because the Spoiler Stasi will come for me in a dark alley of the internet and I do not want to find out what those hatchet-wielding weirdos are capable of. I will simply say that the rule often known as "Chekhov's gun" is in force in this story.

You do the rest.

A domestic psychological thriller about a single mom who does some really sus stuff in pursuit of a good life for herself and her son. Not wrong, or evil, or even particularly stupid stuff. She just wants things to work out so fine-grained examination of her decisions goes out the window...and, my impression of her is, this is not the first time she's just done stuff without making a careful decision. Her deeply, terribly wounded self does not do calm or logical. Of course, like all people who are wounded as horribly as Elodie has been (who don't put in tons of work in therapy, which she decidedly has and will not), she can be a wrecking ball with three-foot red-hot spikes sticking out of a thousand-pound iron ball crashing, into bystanders innocent or not.

So why'd I read a book that sounds like I really hated it? Because Author Drews shows me how much of Elodie's life is really not in her control. Inner life, real life, life of the mind...none of it is under her full control. Her husband, her autistic child, no one does not have scars she has left somewhere in their psyche. It's all coming to a bitter head as this story progresses.

More mean, nasty-sounding stuff, but I'm recommending it to you? Not like me, is it, any more than horror stories are normal fare for me. As we started this journey with psychological suspense my guard was let down. As a suspenseful novel, the highest barrier to entry into this storyverse is that everyone in it is shitty to everyone else. Elodie tells us all the worst and least sympathetic things about each person most certainly including herself. It is all done in a very sincere tone, Elodie being brutally honest with herself and us.

Remember Chekhov's gun.

I will say I got to only a hair under four stars based on one thing. The epilogue. I was cruising along, too invested and interested to bail out but not more than a solid three stars, until I read the epilogue. My entire idea of the story shifted under my readerly feet. In a good way? I'm not a bit sure.

A book that does a dark and stormy life, leave aside night, and seriously commits to its reality and its truth, is deserving of praise and support. I think a reader with a taste for gothic stories and for messy women as heroes of their own stories, ought to join me in reading the book. That fractional slice under four stars is all down to my personal taste, not craft-judgment, against Bren the husband. I can't be explicit...see Spoiler Stasi fear outlined above...but I don't think my cavil will be shared by most others. (Except you, Horrible.)

I do reiterate: Chekhov's gun. Read a sample before committing, nervous folk.