These Familiar Walls
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 14, 2026
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A spine-chilling, heart-pounding suburban horror novel at the heart of the genre, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Catriona Ward.
In 1998, desperate loneliness pushes preteen Amber to ignore the misgivings of her family, particularly her younger sister, when she befriends the troubled new kid in the neighborhood—a boy with dead eyes, a fascination with fire, and no remorse. Their turbulent relationship is brief but creates lasting consequences.
Twenty-two years later, in 2020, he resurfaces to kill Amber’s parents, and is in turn betrayed by his accomplice and killed in Amber's childhood home.
After the deaths, Amber inherits the house and, in an effort to save money, moves in with her husband and two children, hoping to reclaim some sense of stability in the grief and chaos surrounding her. Instead, she finds that the familiar walls are haunted by more than just bitter memories and lockdown stress. She shifts in and out of dreamlike trances, her reflection won’t meet her gaze, and a menacing voice whispers to her from the gathering shadows. Although she tried to brush off the strange happenings as stress-fueled hallucinations, Amber is soon forced to admit that something much more real—and more dangerous—haunts her family. But Amber has deadly secrets of her own, and she must resolve these long-buried truths or lose the life she’s contrived for herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dotson (The Cut) keeps the twists coming in this ambitious but not entirely believable haunted house story. The narrative toggles back and forth in time between 1998, when Amber Walker endures teen turmoil with her scolding mother and father, and 2020, when adult Amber; her husband, Ben; and school-age children Xander and Marigold have newly moved into her parents' old homestead in northern Ohio. By then the house has a grim reputation—her parents were murdered there by masked intruders only a few months before the move—and shortly after settling in, Amber and Ben begin seeing strange reflections in its mirrors and hearing disembodied voices in its vacant rooms. As Amber struggles to cope with the weird influence that appears to be manifesting in their home, troubling aspects of her past come to light—including her contentious relationship with her younger sister, Hannah, who died in a mysterious fire years earlier, and her fraught teen friendship with juvenile delinquent Nathan Teldegardo—that cast suspicion on her motives. Dotson propels her tale to a pyrotechnic finale replete with shocking revelations that stretch credibility even as they make sense of the mystery. Readers able to set aside their skepticism will be pleased.
