Why You'll Love This
A horror novel that uses grief, autism, and silent film to build dread so gradually you won't notice it's swallowed you whole.
- Great if you want: literary horror rooted in motherhood, obsession, and Canadian film history
- The experience: slow, creeping unease — atmosphere builds long before anything overtly frightens
- The writing: Files writes in a confessional register that blurs memoir and haunting
- Skip if: you need a likable protagonist — Lois is deliberately prickly and unreliable
About This Book
Lois Cairns is not doing well. Jobless, exhausted, and still finding her footing after her young son's autism diagnosis, she is not the obvious candidate to uncover a lost piece of Canadian film history. But when she stumbles onto evidence of Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb—an obsessive early filmmaker who vanished without explanation—Lois can't let it go. What begins as an intellectual rescue mission darkens steadily into something far more dangerous, as whatever haunted Whitcomb's strange, silent films begins to bleed into Lois's own life and family.
Files writes this as a kind of fictionalized memoir, and that structural choice is everything. Lois narrates from a position of survival, which means dread accumulates differently here—not through surprise, but through the unbearable slow approach of something inevitable. The prose is sharp, candid, and unexpectedly funny in places, grounded by a protagonist whose grief and self-awareness feel genuinely lived-in. This is horror that earns its darkness through character first, atmosphere second, and refuses to let either one overwhelm the other.