I’m pleased to say that Scurry feels like a big step up for Seann—a culmination of all these years of grinding in the indie space and building an audience. Right up to the end, I was dialed into this book, giving it every spare minute I had. It feels at once like a throwback to a time when popular literature was more patient, yet also like something unique that moves through its plot at close range, really holding tight to the perspective of the character.

Haven is a mindfully-written and masterful haunted house story that uses its characters to their full effect. Once you’ve gotten to know the Bakers and seen them to the crossroads where redemption and despair intersect, the mysteries inherent to Aunt Gussie and her strange old lakehouse reach out and drag them along another route entirely. Equal parts Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, Haven succeeds at being both human and haunted, and Mia Dalia has made an immediate fan out of me.

Datlow’s newest anthology, Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror, considers the aspect of dread and its influence on our mental state as we experience the world around us.

The novel is the best I’ve read in some time, marrying the strongest elements of Ramsey Campbell’s and Shirley Jackson’s respective styles together in what is very nearly a perfect horror novel. It is one of those novels where you become very conscious of the dwindling number of pages remaining, and when the story ends, you spend hours mulling over the mysteries that remain.

Every character, setting, and arc is an askew, asymmetrical thing that shuffles at the edge of the reader’s perception showing a side that does not match its shadow.