The Haunting of Velkwood Book Review

A risk is always easier to take when it doesn’t belong to you.

Synopsis

From Bram Stoker Award­–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a chilling novel about three childhood friends who miraculously survive the night everyone in their suburban hometown turned into ghosts—perfect for fans of Yellowjackets.

The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.

Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?

Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste has created a suburban ghost story about a small town that trapped three young women who must confront the past if they’re going to have a future.

REVIEW

“What did you do with yourself then?” she asks, and her question hits me like a grenade. Because I have no answer for her. No list of accomplishments. Nothing at all.

“I survived,” I say, and it feels like everything and nothing at the same time.

Quiet, sad, and strange in its own way.

The Haunting of Velkwood had all the ingredients for something truly special: a unique premise, an eerie suburban setting warped by supernatural isolation, and a tragic sapphic relationship at its core. From the start, the novel feels like it’s reaching for something weighty—about memory, trauma, and the way girlhood haunts us into adulthood.

The pacing is consistently on the slower side, with a dreamlike, drifting quality that evokes a steady sense of melancholy. That tone certainly fits the story’s themes of emotional paralysis and detachment, but it also dulls the narrative urgency. Big reveals arrive quietly, sometimes so subtly they barely register. The result is a story that gestures at horror and grief without always landing the emotional blows it sets up.

The horror elements themselves are compelling in theory— three women who mysteriously escaped a haunted neighborhood that remains locked in time—but they feel more conceptual than concrete. The haunting is hazy, more of a metaphorical weight than a tangible threat for the most part. This might have worked if the emotional stakes were sharper, or if the characters felt more grounded. But they often stay at arm’s length, their inner lives blurred by vagueness or absence.

The characters, too, remain frustratingly distant. Talitha’s anguish and guilt are compelling on the surface, but never fully come into focus the way you’d want it to. Her relationship with her former best friend, I assume, is supposed to be the most emotionally charged aspect of the book, yet it’s mostly told in retrospect and never feels fully alive in the present. The other characters blur together, and the book never really digs into why this happened to these women, or what it all adds up to beyond misery.

That said, I’m glad I read it. There’s a quiet sadness here that lingers, and certain lines stick in your mind long after. At its best, the novel captures the eerie stillness of unresolved trauma—the kind that suspends you in time, just like Velkwood itself. But ultimately, the story feels more like a beautiful sketch than a finished portrait—evocative, atmospheric, but missing the deeper emotional and narrative layering that might have made it unforgettable.

Thank you to Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for the free copy for review!

Original publication date was 5 March 2024.