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Book Review: Find Me Where It Ends by Cassandra Khaw

 

Find Me Where It Ends, by Cassandra Khaw

Tor Nightfire, October 2026

ISBN: 9781250877895

Availabie: Hardcover, paperback, electronic (pre-order)

Buy: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

 

Find Me Where It Ends is a stripped-down novella, a well-done suicide-oriented tale with ghosts and spectral animals. It fixes all the problems that plagued Khaw’s last novel, The Library At Hellebore: there are no more confusing plots or poor word choices, and it gives a good insight into the psychology of the main character, who is considering such a choice.

 

Antigone is a single woman who just hit forty. She gave up a chunk of her life to help her rather miserable mother, and she also works as a part-time paranormal investigator/ghost banisher. She’s got two overriding problems: she’s been considering suicide for some time, and a ghostly black dog– a harbinger of her own demise– shows up on her doorstep and moves into her house. As the story quickly counts down the weeks, days and hours towards her chosen time of death, Antigone interacts with various people and ghosts who help, and also hurt, her perspective on life. The final hour quickly hits at the end of page 130, and a decision needs to be made, based on whether she has seen enough inside this short time frame to change her mind, or follow through. Does she? That, dear readers, I will of course not tell you. Read and see for yourself.

 

Let’s break it down. First thing with a topic like this, is that the protagonist has to be one that readers will find believable. You don’t have to agree with the character’s reason for desiring to end their life, but the narrative has to be one the readers will buy into. Khaw is a gifted writer, and she handles explaining Antigone’s reasons and how she got to this point with deft prose throughout. Here, it’s because Antigone’s life is one of unrealized dreams, there is nothing happy in her life, and she feels… tired. So very tired. Tired enough that living seems like more work than it’s worth. I suspect some people may relate to such sentiments. Khaw handles it well, without the poor word choice that plagued her last book, which was loaded with words so rarely used that Dickens himself would have been left scratching his head. This time, any reader can handle the vocabulary.

 

It is during Antigone’s interactions with others that the narrative really shines, perhaps even more so then the parts concerning Antigone’s state of mind. And, the parts about her psyche were very well done. Most people want to help her, but the story shows the difficulty of trying to do so, as many of the ideas of “helping'”prove more detrimental than beneficial. It feels true to life: as anyone who has been in the same boat knows, dealing with suicidal people is like working with a very volatile substance. That’s why this story works so well. Despite the ghostly trappings with the black dog and others, this is a beautifully written narrative on a very touchy subject, one that could happen to many people.

 

Bottom line: if you want a touch of well-written, relatable, real-life darkness, this is the way to go. Recommended.

 

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

Posted on September 20, 2026 by , Reply

Book Review: Observer by Nicholas Russell

Observer bookcover

Observer by Nicholas Russell

HarperCollins, 2026 (pre-order)

ISBN-13: 978-0063452398

Available: Hardcover, Audiobook, Kindle, MP3CD

Buy: Bookshop.org

 

A threatening landscape, the arrival of all of a mother’s worldly goods without explanation, and the mysterious world of a suddenly closed Nevada observatory, set the stage for this debut novel.

 

Observeropens in a canyon where signs of life are vanishing as the inanimate remnants anticipate the return of a “flying creature” that might be responsible and is now lying in wait to end “you.” From this strange start, the story quickly transitions to Renata and the two family members with whom she lives. Renata struggles to find out about the mother she barely knew, a woman who seems to have chosen a career in science over having a daughter, and quickly realizes that the desert her mother studied is not the empty place one might imagine. Their past and current interactions and how they are now responding to what they assume is the death of Renata’s mother, Corinne, are complicated and suggest that each person has unrevealed and unresolved feelings about their family and about Corinne.

 

As Renata reads from a journal about her mother’s work in the desert, she is fascinated by connections to a diary written in the early twentieth century by a surveyor whose notes have similarities to those written by her mother. This propels Renata into a journey through what becomes, simultaneously, a dream-memory landscape and a desert death-nightmare. Time and human contact seem less real and the hidden life of the desert more real.

 

Nicholas Russell’s writing is infused with mystery and is, at times, phantasmagoric– which corresponds to Renata’s experience of her mother as a type of mirage. This image contrasts the experiences of the surveyor with her mother’s scientific account while casting doubt on the science. Francis Brown’s diary records how he “witnessed visitations” and “experienced them.” He did not view them as “encounters with the devil” but “failures of the rational mind to comprehend its surroundings with any reliability or discernment.” Brown concludes, “We imagine monsters” but “what frightens me is not their existence, but our fatal sensory impotence.”

 

While Brown opines a human lack of awareness, Russell recognizes where horror comes from and draws us slowly to it, all the while making us wonder when it will rear its supernatural head. This promising novelist’s work conjures a Western Gothic feel through prose that sketches the recognizable yet odd characters and delineates the menacing setting in that disquieting way you can’t quite put your finger on. What will Russell do next? Whatever it is, hopefully it’s soon!

 

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on August 17, 2026 by , Reply

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson
Erewhon Books, 2026
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1645663195
Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook
Buy:  Amazon.com  |  Bookshop.org

 

Hester Gardens is a housing project cursed by a history of violence, especially gun violence, and the residents are haunted by its victims.

 

Nona believed she was living a law-abiding life, until ten years ago, when she stumbled on her husband pistol-whipping a drug-addicted teenager to death in an alleyway and helped him cover it up. Now her husband is in prison for drug-dealing, and her oldest son is dead, a victim of a gang shooting. Her youngest son, Lance, is just starting to join in the activities of the local gang.

 

If only there were a way to escape Hester Gardens. It is possible– Nona’s nephew Harlan, an investigative journalist, made it out, and nursing student Kiandra is only held there by her younger brother.

 

Nona’s second son, recent high school graduate Marcus, has a ticket out, with a full scholarship to Brown University in the fall… if he can only make it through the summer. But Marcus, always the “good kid”, has a lot of anger and grief over Kendall’s murder, and he can’t quite keep it under the surface anymore. Thompson creates a disorienting atmosphere in Nona’s apartment, which already has an unstable feeling to it ,due to the disturbing changes in Marcus. It is just haunted enough to make her and her sons uneasy… until it suddenly escalates into a life-and-death situation.

 

Thompson’s talent is not just in creating an uncanny atmosphere, but in bringing the neighborhood and characters to life. There are ghosts… maybe… in the alleyways, and a smart person keeps a sharp eye out. While mainly told from Nona’s point of view, we also occasionally get the point of view of other characters: Harlan, Nona’s nephew; Lance, her youngest son and Marcus’ brother; Gretchen, Marcus’ girlfriend and gang leader Peter’s baby mama; Donnell, a gang member; Kiandra; and police officer Sgt. Victoria Prager, who was in charge of Kendall’s case and is involved in the ending of the terrible, shocking, night where six young people were silently executed with a rifle.

 

Readers will grow to care about, cheer for, and fear for characters who could easily have been cardboard cutouts. Gretchen, for instance, as a point of view character, is shaped by the trauma of having her twin murdered in a drive-by shooting right next to her and the stress of raising a child in an unpredictable environment. She’s much more fleshed out than she would be if we were limited to only Nona’s judgmental mindset. We get to see Donnell’s regrets and terror because he did not stop the execution of a boy about to escape Hester Gardens for college, and now can’t escape his ghost.  In a “closed community” like Hester Gardens, lives are entangled because everyone knows everyone: the same kids who were friends with your own kids, could grow up to be the killers of someone you loved, and Thompson does a great job of revealing that complexity. Thompson convincingly creates a claustrophobic and terrifying atmosphere: to escape Hester Gardens, its history of violence, and tangled relationships, isn’t easy. It’s a place that doesn’t want its residents to leave alive.

 

There’s a lot packed into these pages, and I found myself going back to this more than once. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on March 31, 2026 by , Reply
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