Why You'll Love This
Something is hunting the most ordinary man in town — and he has no idea he's already been chosen.
- Great if you want: small-town mystery with a slow creep of supernatural dread
- The experience: breezy but unsettling — pulls you forward with quiet momentum
- The writing: Vall keeps chapters short and secrets close — efficient and hook-heavy
- Skip if: you want grounded thriller with no genre-blending elements
About This Book
Something strange is happening in Wormwood, and the man at the center of it all just wants to run his gaming shop in peace. Eric Vall's Dangerous Girls opens in comfortable, familiar territory — a quiet life, a small town, a guy who keeps his head down — and then systematically dismantles all of it. Lost time. Unexplained sounds. Women from his past and present orbiting him with an intensity that feels equal parts flattering and threatening. The tension between ordinary life and something deeply wrong underneath it gives the story a pull that's hard to shake.
What makes this book work as a reading experience is how Vall manages tone — he keeps things grounded and often funny even as the strangeness escalates, so the atmosphere never feels overwrought. The pacing is tight without feeling rushed, and the small-town setting does real work, making the creeping wrongness feel genuinely unsettling rather than theatrical. At 329 pages, it moves fast, reads clean, and ends with enough unresolved threads to make the next installment feel necessary rather than optional.