Experimental Film

Lois Cairns is a former film history teacher adrift after losing her job and struggling with her son's autism diagnosis when she accidentally uncovers evidence of a lost early twentieth-century Ontario filmmaker, Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. As Lois investigates Whitcomb's mysterious disappearance, the forces that haunted her subjects' films begin to bleed into Lois's own life, threatening her husband, her son, and herself. Gemma Files's Shirley Jackson and Sunburst Award-winning novel fuses personal memoir texture with creeping supernatural horror.

Morgan Hallett captures the novel's fictionalized-memoir quality with a narrator's voice that feels both unreliable and compellingly intimate, drawing the listener into Lois's mounting dread without telegraphing the horror's arrival. At nearly twelve and a half hours, the pace is deliberately atmospheric, letting the sense of wrongness accumulate rather than overwhelm. A genuinely unsettling listening experience for fans of literary supernatural fiction.