8/13/26
Preorders for FALLING ANGELS: THE LABYRINTH Book 4 continue to be steady. Get yours here before they are gone.
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Finished the new anthology yesterday. We have until close of business today to turn it in, so will probably give it one more pass. Can’t spend too long on it though, as I have a bunch of other stuff to get to today, and a Scares that Care charity board meeting tonight.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 102
Audrey’s Door by Sarah Langan
A woman moves into a Manhattan apartment with a haunted past—and encounters its ghosts—in this Bram Stoker Award–winning supernatural novel.
In 1861, The Breviary opened its doors on New York’s Upper West Side. Designed by an infamous architect in the Chaotic Naturalist style—slanted floors, curved lines, a black church in the parlor—it was uniquely beautiful, and the things that happened inside it were uniquely terrible.
150 years later, Audrey Lucus thinks she’s won the lottery when she discovers a cheap room at The Breviary. She’s so delighted by the prospect of more space and a break from her boyfriend that she’s not deterred even when the doorman tries to warn her off—confiding that the previous occupant, an opera singer, murdered her four children there in the bathtub. Audrey is a self-made person who doesn’t believe in ghosts. Besides, this place is comforting—the home she’s always wanted. It calls to her and its voice is sweet.
Nightmares. Daymares. She disregards them. But the signs add up. The disheveled old neighbors are strange. They spy. Audrey’s acting differently, losing track of time. Her boyfriend wants her to move back. But she’s remembering things about her past that somehow connect to this place. She’s discovering clues inside the building, about the woman she’s supposed to become. All the while, the building wants something. It demands it:
“Build the door . . .”
Subscribers to my Patreon know that what was ostensibly contracted to be a follow-up to my memoir, END OF THE ROAD, has since turned into a history of the fifth wave of horror fiction, focusing on the genre from the late-1990s to 2015, and the people who worked in it at that time. One of the things I intend to do with this memoir is talk about how important women like Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, Mary SanGiovanni, and others from that time were to the genre, and the direct line that exists between their efforts and the opportunities for women in the industry that we see now. Which brings me to today’s Women In Horror featured title.
Originally published by Harper back in 2009, Audrey’s Door by Sarah Langan has the distinction of being one of the last truly great horror novels of the mass-market paperback midlist era. (The last one published by Leisure Books before the collapse was my own A GATHERING OF CROWS, which was on sale for a full seven days before everything fell down). It was Sarah’s third novel (and the second to win a Bram Stoker award) and I personally think it’s her best of that era (which is saying something, because The Keeper and The Missing are pretty great, as well). A haunted house novel that twists, morphs, and elevates the expectations and baggage that come with that particular trope, Audrey’s Door, had it been published a decade and a half before, would have been right at home amongst the cutting-edge and subversive Dell-Abyss line. We’ve talked before about how horror is most effective when the reader is invested in the characters, and Sarah delivers a masterclass in characterization here, with a slow burn beginning that fills us with empathy and understanding for these people, before the third act when the horror kicks in full force to great effect. There are enough scares here to please even the most jaded horror fan, but with a literary sensibility and style that will win over those who normally turn their noses up at the mention of the genre.
The book has been long out of print, and copies of the first edition mass market paperback in mint condition have gone for as much as $100 on the secondary and collector’s market. Luckily, there’s a new edition now, back in print in paperback and eBook from Open Road Media, and it includes a new Introduction by Sarah herself.
