Why You'll Love This
M. Ennenbach writes horror like someone confessing sins they're not sorry for — and the darkness here feels uncomfortably personal.
- Great if you want: short, punishing horror fiction with emotional teeth and range
- The experience: jarring and uneven in the best way — tonal whiplash between stories keeps you off-balance
- The writing: raw and unpolished on purpose — Ennenbach leans into visceral over refined
- Skip if: you prefer psychological dread over blunt, graphic darkness
About This Book
Some books ask you to sit with the dark. Notches pulls you in whether you're ready or not. M. Ennenbach's debut collection moves through horror with the kind of emotional rawness that suggests these stories weren't just written — they were survived. Each piece cuts at something genuine: grief, obsession, the particular loneliness of people who have stopped pretending the world is safe. The humor that surfaces in certain stories doesn't soften the edges; it sharpens them.
At 163 pages, Notches is lean and deliberate, the kind of collection that earns its brevity. Ennenbach's prose has a confessional quality — direct, unguarded, occasionally poetic — and the range of tones across the stories keeps the reading experience from ever settling into comfort. A long dark poem anchors the collection and reveals a writer as interested in form as in fear. What distinguishes this book isn't gore or shock value but the sense that someone is telling you the truth, badly lit, in a voice that doesn't waver. That's harder to shake than any monster.