Gwendolyn Kiste has been one of horror’s brightest rising stars for a few years now thanks to her short fiction and novels like the Stoker-winning The Rust Maidens and 2022’s spellbinding Reluctant Immortals. But there comes a time when the label “rising star” no longer applies, when an author achieves something that simply makes them a mainstay of the genre, a must-read storyteller whose imagination has developed into something towering. With The Haunting of Velkwood, Kiste has surely hit that mark, delivering a chilling character drama wrapped up in a high-concept horror narrative so ingenious that you might be jealous you never thought of it.
The “Velkwood” of the title refers to Velkwood Street, a tiny neighborhood that, decades ago, suddenly turned into a spectral wasteland in a disaster that’s baffled scientists of all kinds ever since. In the course of just one night, the street and everyone on it turned into a ghostland trapped in a shimmering void that’s impassable to most people. Exactly how this is possible is still a mystery as the novel begins, and why it happened is an even deeper puzzle.
But Velkwood isn’t just a street. It’s also a person, namely Talitha Velkwood, who left the street the night before the disaster to head back to college, sparing her life in the process even as her mother and her beloved little sister were trapped inside the anomaly forever. In the present day, Talitha is not a ghost like her family, but she may as well be, living a secluded and sheltered life that’s never found any true fulfillment. Years removed from the tragedy, Talitha would rather hide from what happened to her home than deal with the trauma of it, at least until a mysterious researcher comes along and offers her a chance to go back, to enter what’s become known as the “Velkwood Vicinity” and possibly, somehow, see her baby sister one more time.
But the Velkwood Vicinity isn’t just lying dormant. It’s been waiting for a moment like this, slowly changing and preparing for an encounter that will allow it to morph into something new. If Talitha’s going to survive, she’ll need all the help she can get, including a visit from her reluctant former best friend and childhood neighbor, Brett.
From the very opening pages, there’s a sense that Kiste knows she has something special on her hands, and that’s reflected in the slimness of the book and the briskness of the pacing. There’s not a lot of time spent setting the table for what’s to come as Talitha heads back to her home street. The book just flows directly into that confrontation, using Kiste’s emotional and fluid prose to chart Talitha’s thoughts and conflicts as the inevitable moment approaches. Talitha’s point of view, rich with detail and memory and a sense of dread that’s infused not just this moment but her entire adult life, is the driving force of the book, and it’s so potent and well-formed that even if she never ventured back onto Velkwood Street, Talitha’s haunted life would make a compelling novel.
But of course, Talitha does venture back to the street she left behind decades earlier, and it’s there that all the promise of Kiste’s high-concept hook comes out. Her vision for Velkwood Street, with its ghostly visages reliving the same day over and over again, is both original and deeply unsettling, the kind of horror setting that instantly sears into your brain and won’t soon leave. This book is character horror, to be sure, but there are moments of pure visceral terror in here that will make you forget you’re reading a story, and leave you momentarily lost in the darkness of your own house, checking for shadows over your shoulder.
And then, after all the careful character sculpting, the wonderful prose craft, and the great setting, Kiste goes even further, and turns The Haunting of Velkwood into a meditation on roads not taken, on the ways in which our childhood homes can become spaces we never quite leave. There’s a universality to it that makes it tug at something primal in all of us, and yet it’s so specific that it never stops feeling like something only Kiste could write. That makes it not just a triumph, but an announcement that Gwendolyn Kiste is here to stay as one of horror’s best working writers.
The Haunting of Velkwood is now available wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.