BookView Review

Brooks’s latest is a sharp, morally charged work of supernatural horror. Zap Rogers built his fame on the dead, turning grief into ratings and hauntings into profit. But as viewership declines and trendier ghost hunters eclipse him, he grows desperate to reclaim relevance. Then a cryptic package arrives. Equipment fails. Footage corrupts. A withered hag invades his dreams and then his waking life. When the disturbances turn violent, Zap is forced to ask himself whether he invited something home or whether it has always been there, waiting for its moment.

Zap is not written as a parody of reality television excess, but as a man who has slowly rationalized his own ethical decline. For him, manipulation is reframed as production value, and the dead are reduced to content. That erosion of conscience becomes the novel’s driving force. This structure reinforces the novel’s moral framework. A restrained 1944 prologue anchors the supernatural in real atrocity, while the present-day narrative exposes the calculated cynicism of paranormal television. One storyline is born of suffering. The other turns that suffering into profit. The entity haunting Zap operates with intent rather than randomness, and the manifestations accumulate with increasing inevitability. By pairing him with a former colleague who approaches the paranormal with humility, Brooks sharpens the moral divide at the heart of the story. The result is horror that reads not as retribution, but as revelation. 

Lovers of morally grounded supernatural horror will be gratified.

***