Paranormal Books

Margaret Belle's The Procedure works a vein of medical thriller that fans of Robin Cook will recognize on sight: the trusted clinic that turns out to be a charnel house of ambition, the ordinary patient who stumbles onto something she was never meant to see. Melanie Allen is a single woman who simply wants a child, and the fertility specialist she has known for years looks like a gift rather than a threat. The early chapters move briskly, trading on a clean, unsettling premise and the slow dawning that the place she has trusted with her body is keeping secrets worth killing to protect. What gives the book more than one gear is how far Belle is willing to push the idea. This is not just a story about a bad doctor; it is a story about what a brilliant, unaccountable one might do with genetics, lineage, and the boundary between the living and the dead. The plot widens from clinical menace into something stranger and frankly more speculative, and the further it travels from plausible medicine, the more it asks the reader to simply go with it. When the book commits to that swing, it generates real dread, and the secret at the center turns out to be bigger and weirder than the premise first suggests. The engine that keeps it all running is Melanie herself. She is stubborn, occasionally reckless, and driven by a fear that never feels abstract, because the danger reaches her own family rather than some faceless institution. Belle is good at the personal stakes, and Dr. Neumann makes a satisfying antagonist, the kind of composed monster you want the heroine to flee a hundred pages before she does. Once the screws tighten in the back half, the pacing earns its tension, and the result is the sort of book readers tend to report finishing in one or two long sittings. It is not flawless, and the honest caveats are the ones a thriller reader will actually weigh. The science grows increasingly far-fetched as the stakes escalate, so anyone who wants their medical suspense grounded in the credible may feel the premise tip toward the operatic. A few of Melanie's sudden suspicions read as engineered to keep the plot moving rather than fully earned, and the ending could stand to linger longer on the man behind it all, leaving a couple of threads less resolved than the buildup promises. None of this sinks the book; it simply marks who it is for and who it is not. Read it for what it is: a fast, lurid, propulsive ride built on a wild what-if, anchored by a protective heroine and a villain you love to hate. It will suit readers who like their suspense plot-forward and their premises bold rather than buttoned-down, who enjoyed the paranoid clinical tension of something like Coma and do not mind a supernatural swerve along the way. Readers who prize airtight realism or a slow literary burn should look elsewhere. For everyone else, The Procedure delivers exactly the kind of stay-up-too-late momentum that makes a thriller worth pressing into a friend's hands.

The whole novel rides on Tookie's voice, and what a voice it is. She's sharp, self-mocking, fiercely literate, carrying the weight of a long prison sentence she survived by reading, in the book's own memorable phrase, "with murderous attention." Erdrich gives her a way of speaking that's blunt and lyrical at once, capable of cracking a dark joke and then, a sentence later, landing a quiet truth that stops you. When the most exasperating regular at the bookstore where Tookie works dies and refuses to leave, the haunting feels less like horror than an extension of how the dead stay lodged in the living. Whether the ghost is real or something Tookie carries inside her own head is part of what she has to work out, and Erdrich keeps that question open longer than you expect. The setting matters. Erdrich owns a bookstore in Minneapolis, and it shows in scenes that hum with the specific texture of the work: the misfiled returns, the customers who confess their lives at the counter, the handwritten staff picks slipped across the desk. She folds in book lists, the small thrill of matching a reader to the exact thing they didn't know they needed, the way reading can be a form of survival. For anyone who has spent real time in a good bookstore, these passages alone earn their keep. Then the calendar tightens. The story runs from one All Souls' Day to the next, which walks it straight into the spring of 2020, the pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd in the city Tookie calls home. Erdrich doesn't keep these events at a comfortable distance; she drops her characters down inside them. The grief and fury feel raw and close, and the haunting starts to rhyme with a larger national one. It's a bold structural move, and not every reader loves it. Some find the turn jarring, the documentary urgency of the back half at odds with the gentler, funnier bookstore comedy that opens the novel. I admired the ambition, but I understand the readers who felt the seams. What holds it together is Erdrich's interest in debt and language. The title carries every meaning at once: a prison term, a grammatical unit, a death, a thing spoken that can't be unsaid. The book keeps asking what we owe the dead, the reader, the word on the page. Tookie's marriage to Pollux, the man who arrested her years before, gives the novel its emotional center, a complicated, grown-up love built on guilt and tenderness. Their scenes are some of the best in the book, funny and tender and genuinely sad. The pacing is the honest caveat. This is a roomy, digressive book that wanders through book lists, family history, current events, and ghost lore, and the haunting sometimes sits quietly in a corner while everything else demands the room. Readers who came for a tight supernatural plot may feel it gets crowded out, and a fair number found the ending arrives more abruptly than the slow build promises. But if you're willing to follow a voice rather than a plot engine, the rewards run deep.

The setup sounds like a lark and the execution is anything but. Patricia Campbell's true-crime book club is the one bright spot in a life of carpools, casseroles, and a husband who treats her like staff. Then a charming stranger named James Harris moves into the neighborhood, children on the wrong side of town start going missing and dying, and Patricia begins to suspect the new man is feeding. Hendrix is interested in exactly the gap that makes this terrifying: she is a woman whose observations no one in authority will take seriously, going up against a predator who understands that perfectly. What surprised me is how patient the book is about its dread. The first half builds suspicion through small, deniable wrongness — a too-friendly smile, a story that doesn't add up, a town's willingness to look away from poor Black neighborhoods where the killings cluster. Hendrix lets the social horror and the supernatural horror reinforce each other so that by the time the violence arrives, and it does arrive, you've been primed to feel how alone Patricia is. There is one mid-book set piece involving an infestation that I will not describe except to say it is one of the most viscerally upsetting scenes I have read in years, and it is the moment the novel stops being charming and starts being dangerous. The craft is in the calibration. Hendrix could have played this for camp, and the title invites that expectation, but he keeps undercutting it with real stakes: a marriage curdling under gaslighting, friendships that fracture when belief is required, the specific exhaustion of being a woman whose competence is invisible until a crisis needs cleaning up. The vampire is genuinely frightening — no glittering romance here, just appetite and patience — and the climax pays off every thread of suspicion the slow build planted. Patricia and her friends earn their reckoning, and Hendrix makes you feel the cost of it. It is not flawless, and the right reader should go in knowing the shape of it. The pacing dips in a long middle stretch where the women's belief wavers and the plot marks time, and a few of the husbands edge toward caricature in service of the theme. The gore, when it comes, is unsparing; squeamish readers should be warned that this is body horror, not just atmosphere. And the social commentary about who a comfortable town is willing to sacrifice is pointed enough that it occasionally tips into being underlined. But those are quibbles against a book that delivers on a rare double promise: it is legitimately scary and it has something to say. Hendrix takes characters the genre usually treats as background and makes them the heroes of a story about being disbelieved, then rewards your patience with a finale that is both gruesome and weirdly triumphant. It is the best argument going that horror and warmth are not opposites.

Jones opens with a death that tells you the contract up front: this book will be brutal, and it will not waste your time pretending otherwise. A decade earlier, four young men hunted elk on a part of the reservation reserved for their elders, and one act in that snow set something in motion that is only now coming to collect. What follows tracks the survivors as their pasts close in, and Jones tells it in a prose style that lurches between intimate interiority and sudden, splattering violence — a rhythm that keeps you off balance in exactly the way the situation demands. The structural risk here is the engine. Jones moves the point of view around in ways that are disorienting on purpose, occasionally stepping into perspectives you don't expect and lingering where a more conventional thriller would cut away. The long centerpiece, built around a basketball game played for higher stakes than anyone can name, is a bravura sequence of dread that may be the best thing he has written — slow, sweaty, and unbearable as the supernatural pressure builds inside something as ordinary as a pickup game. He understands that horror is most effective when the everyday refuses to stay safe. What keeps the book from being merely a slasher with literary ambitions is how seriously it takes its characters' inner lives. These men are not victims to be processed; they are funny, tired, ashamed, trying to hold jobs and marriages and a sense of who they are while living inside and outside a culture that pulls both ways. The horror grows directly out of that tension. The thing hunting them is owed a debt, and Jones is unsentimental about the fact that debts to the natural world and to tradition do not forgive easily. The violence lands harder because you know these people, and because the entity has a grievance you cannot entirely dismiss. The right reader should know what they're signing up for. The gore is extreme and the deaths are not gentle; this is not suggestive horror but the explicit kind. The fractured structure and the wandering point of view ask for patience, and a few transitions are genuinely hard to follow on a first pass — Jones trusts you to reorient yourself, sometimes more than is comfortable. Readers who want a clean, linear hunt may find the design willfully difficult. The payoff, though, is a final movement that gathers the threads with surprising tenderness and gives the cycle of vengeance somewhere human to land. This is horror that respects both its scares and its subject, refusing to let either soften the other. Jones writes grief and rage and cultural inheritance into the bones of a revenge tale, then makes you feel every consequence. It is demanding and occasionally messy, but it is also one of the most original and emotionally serious horror novels of its decade, and it stays with you the way the best of the genre does — not as a jolt, but as an ache.

The premise is the kind that could curdle in lesser hands, and Rekulak keeps it sharp. Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and rebuilding a life one routine at a time, takes a live-in job minding Teddy, the quiet son of an affluent suburban couple. Teddy draws constantly, the usual small-child fare, until the day his pictures turn: a figure in the woods, a body, scenes rendered with a skill and a darkness no kindergartner should possess. The book reproduces these drawings on the page as it goes, and the device is genuinely unnerving — watching the art mature from stick figures into something accomplished and wrong is more effective than any amount of described dread. Rekulak structures the thing as a dual mystery. On one track is the supernatural question: who is drawing through Teddy, and what does she want told. On the other is the human one: Mallory's fragile sobriety, the gaps in the family's too-perfect story, and the steady erosion of whether her own perceptions can be trusted given where she's been. The book moves fast and chapters end where they should. Rekulak is good at the mechanics of escalation, raising the stakes on a tight clock while seeding the clues a careful reader can try to assemble before the reveal. For a long stretch it functions beautifully as both a ghost story and a paranoid character study about a woman fighting to be believed. The pleasures here are real and worth naming. The voice is warm and grounded, which makes the eerie material land harder; Mallory is easy to root for, and her relationship with Teddy gives the horror an emotional anchor. The middle stretch, where the drawings grow more explicit and Mallory's amateur investigation collides with the family's evasions, is tense and confidently paced. This is a writer who understands that a thriller is a promise to keep the reader leaning forward, and he keeps it. Where opinions will split is the resolution. Without spoiling it, Rekulak makes a structural choice in the final act that swaps one kind of story for another, and the swap is divisive by design — bold and satisfying to some, an overreach to others who preferred the quieter dread of the setup. A couple of supporting characters are drawn thin enough to serve the plot's needs, and the wealthy-suburb trappings can feel like familiar furniture. Readers who want their horror to stay in one lane may feel the late turn yanks the wheel. Still, this is an assured, hard-to-put-down entertainment that delivers on its hook. The drawings alone justify the experience, and the combination of supernatural mystery, addiction-shadowed unreliability, and brisk plotting makes for a book that respects your time and your appetite for a scare. Go in for the premise, stay for how cleanly Rekulak springs his traps, and decide for yourself whether the ending sticks the landing.