Author: Emily Zinnikas
Publication: St. Martin's Press (September 15, 2026)
Description: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.
Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.
When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.
As her past pulls her back to the place where she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind―and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.
My Thoughts: This horror novel tells the story of Willa Renfri Greene. Willa was raised in Rapture, Maine, and was an odd child. She made friends with the nightmare under her bed and refused to ever go to the basement where the people in the basement lived.
But the strangest thing in Willa's life was the time she went into the woods with six friends and was the only one to come back alive. Someone butchered her friends. She has always blamed the forest because she had forgotten to leave it meat the night they all went to party.
The rumors about Willa more or less drummed her out of town. The families of the victims all blamed Willa for the deaths. And the local sheriff also blamed Willa and released inappropriate things to the press.
What was worst for Willa was that the incident in the woods came after she was groomed and assaulted by her high school soccer coach. She turned him in causing him to lose his job but somehow, she was the one who was blamed.
Her only refuge was the art room and the art teacher who provided a safe place for her in her last years of high school. Willa left Rapture right after graduation with no intention to ever visit again. She changed her name and became a famous artist.
But when the art teacher dies of breast cancer, Willa feels she has to go back if only to honor her teacher. Someone doesn't want her there and she suffers all sorts of harassment from notes to bricks through her windows. She's certain that the perpetrator of the harassment is her former soccer coach who has reinvented his life and come back to Rapture.
But there are other potential sources of the notes and things. TV psychic Nathaniel Lennox has begun a campaign of harassment since Willa has refused to appear on his show and rehash the deaths of her friends. And reporter Joyce Kimura is also digging into Willa's past by showing up on her porch in Pennsylvania and following her to Rapture looking for a big story.
This was a creepy story. I had to keep reading to discover what was going on and whether or not Willa would survive her homecoming to Rapture.
