Why You'll Love This
Grief cracks Eloise Montgomery open — and what floods in is something she never asked for and can't ignore.
- Great if you want: character-driven paranormal fiction rooted in real emotional loss
- The experience: quiet and atmospheric — more haunting mood than plot momentum
- The writing: Unger grounds the supernatural in grief with restraint and precision
- Skip if: short story length leaves you wanting a full novel's depth
About This Book
Some losses break you. Others crack you open in ways you never expected. In The Whispers, Eloise Montgomery survives a devastating accident that shatters her world—and in the wreckage, something strange and undeniable begins to surface. Unger uses this first entry in her Hollows Shorts series to explore what grief does to a person, and what it might awaken. The stakes here aren't just personal survival but the lives of others—women and girls who have no one else coming for them—and that weight gives this slim story a reach well beyond its page count.
Unger is a precise, efficient writer, and this format suits her. There's no fat here, no meandering—just sharp character work and an atmosphere that builds quietly until it has you. Her prose carries an emotional undertow that pulls harder than you expect for something so brief, and she uses Eloise's internal disorientation to blur the line between trauma and the supernatural in ways that feel genuinely unsettling. For readers new to her work, this is an ideal first encounter; for those already familiar, it's a reminder of exactly why they stay.
