SPOILERS AHEAD
Your past will always find you. It will always find you and you alone to have a reckoning of past sins.
What if your past came in a book? One so brilliant everyone else was horrified and deeply interested in it, your most horrifying horror yet... the only problem being that you didn't write this book and you cant find who did...
This horror novella by author Ronald Malfi was one of the books that I was most excited to read in 2025. Yet this book is, for me personally, one of the least horrifying or unnerving horrors that I have ever read. The story was quite predictable to me and the scary elements just seemed like a mystery to be solved not an unnerving situation from which the character can't escape. It felt disjointed with the marketing as a horror and fell flat for me for that reason. If this book were to be marketed as a mystery thriller or a literary fiction/mystery I would have given the book a higher rating and maybe enjoyed it more.
The book is about an author, Wilson S. Paventeau, who encounters a fan at one of his book signings that mentions and shows him a book of his that really unsettled them. The author looks at the book only to be surprised by a book that he doesn't remember writing or publishing. The book is titled Mr Cables.
The rest of the story follows the author as he sees the effects the book has on others and their perception of time and how he starts to feel haunted by the mere presence of the book. As everything continues the authors life starts to fall apart. He losses a dear friend and housekeeper and his new book seems to fall flat with his agent and he is certain that it is the book that is ruining it. The malevolent nature of the book becomes one with him as he carries the book everywhere in search of the real author or artist that made the cover so that he can inquire why he was chosen to receive this accursed book and how he can atone so that his life return to normal.
In finding his answer he sees his own past coming at him, watching him from afar and coming ever closer (his past being connected to the figure Mr. Cables from the book) He then sets off to make everything right, to right the deed he had committed in the past, but he still falls short and due to his duplicitous nature and lies he follows the unsettling Mr. Cables.
Some might say that the ending shows how he has died due to maybe frostbite or an accident. Others believe that it shows forgiveness by the person he had wronged. I believe that the ending shows or permeates his death.
All in all, it was well written and the symbolism and connotations that can be made is beautiful and makes this an ideal book club book. I just wouldn't have marketed it as a horror. I will still read any other books by the author as this book was at its worst mid, not bad but leaving some want.
3 stars