Ronald Malfi has quietly become one of horror’s most consistently inventive and emotionally intelligent voices—sort of a Raymond Carver of dread, if Carver had more corpses and fewer Raymonds. Over the past decade, he’s gifted readers with brutal, elegant genre gems like Bone White, Come With Me, and Black Mouth. With Senseless, Malfi continues his genre-shifting evolution, this time delivering a dread-soaked noir-police procedural-horror hybrid that throws you headfirst into the cracked sidewalks and sun-scorched psychosis of Los Angeles. And while it’s not his cleanest book, it may be one of his most audacious.

Let’s dig into this unholy thing.

For those unfamiliar, Malfi has been on a hell of a tear. Bone White (2017) solidified his reputation with its frostbitten existential horror. Come With Me (2021) proved he could balance grief and genre in a way that made your stomach ache. He’s also a master of the novella—see Mr. Cables or They Lurk if you want concentrated weirdness. His prose rarely falters, even when his stories get slippery. He writes like a man who understands that every horror story is ultimately about some kind of loss—of control, of reality, of self.

Senseless braids together three disparate storylines in a puzzle-box structure that’s either masterful or maddening, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity:

• Detective Bill Renney, who’s investigating a murder eerily similar to one from a year ago, while nursing guilt over his wife’s death and a secret connection to one of the victims.
• Maureen Park, a novelist newly engaged to a hotshot Hollywood producer whose adult son, Landon, is exhibiting some seriously “Dexter goes to therapy” vibes.
• Toby Kampen, aka “The Human Fly,” a socially withdrawn man-child locked in a parasitic relationship with his mother (aka “The Spider”), who spirals into obsession after meeting a vampiric seductress at a nightclub.

Each plotline has its own genre flavor—procedural, domestic thriller, body horror—but they swirl together into a final act that is, frankly, bananas. Malfi’s noir-LA is boiled, cracked, and full of shadows.

If Malfi has a thesis here, it’s that trauma corrupts perception. Every character in Senseless is haunted—not by ghosts, but by their own misinterpretations of reality. The title isn’t a throwaway. These characters lose or question their senses: Toby believes he is literally becoming a fly; Maureen can’t tell truth from manipulation; Renney doubts his instincts and is paralyzed by guilt.

The novel leans hard into symbolism. Ears, eyes, and tongues are mutilated. There’s talk of flies and spiders. Vampires bite but may not be real. It’s Cronenberg meets Chandler with a dash of Jacob’s Ladder paranoia. Malfi suggests that horror is not what lurks in the dark, but the inability to trust what you feel or see in the light.

There’s also a moral rot under the LA gloss. The story quietly skewers the entertainment industry, faux-intellectual men, parental neglect, and inherited cycles of violence. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be.

Malfi’s prose remains sharp as a scalpel, but Senseless sees him experimenting with form. Each POV has its own rhythm: Renney’s is clipped and weary, Maureen’s is anxious and domestic, and Toby’s is pure surreal fever dream. That last one is a double-edged knife. While Toby’s storyline contains the most striking imagery and horror, it also teeters into incoherence—some will find it brilliant; others, unbearably indulgent.

His sentence-level writing remains top-notch. His metaphors are often visceral without being purple. That said, pacing becomes an issue in the middle third. The book spends a lot of time building mood, which means you’ll either be fully immersed in the dread or yelling “get on with it!”

Strengths:

• The thematic cohesion. This is horror with purpose, not just atmosphere.
• The narrative ambition. Malfi trusts his readers to work for it.
• Atmosphere. He paints LA like a corpse that was never embalmed—decaying in the daylight.
• Toby’s madness. Easily the most terrifying POV, and the best argument for editing your own thoughts.

Critiques:

• The final act feels rushed. The twist connections are clever but not always emotionally satisfying.
• Maureen’s storyline, while creepy, lacks the weight of the others and sometimes feels like filler.
• There’s a lingering sense that Malfi is doing three different novels at once—and only one of them is firing on all cylinders.

Senseless is ambitious, stylish, and genuinely unsettling. It’s the kind of book that dares you to keep up—and punishes you if you don’t. It doesn’t hit the transcendent highs of Come With Me or Black Mouth, but it’s still a gnarly, fascinating entry in Malfi’s catalogue. Thematically rich, structurally daring, but narratively uneven. A standout mid-tier Malfi, which still puts it above 80% of horror books released in a given year.

If you like horror that refuses to hold your hand and leaves you wondering if you yourself are the unreliable narrator—you’ll find much to savor here.

TL;DR: Senseless is a twisted crime-noir-horror cocktail with a triple shot of unreliable narrators and a chaser of existential dread. It’s David Fincher’s Se7en by way of Kafka, spiked with hints of King and Tremblay.

Recommended if: You’ve ever thought The Fly needed more daddy issues, or you want to feel like your brain is melting over three separate plotlines.
Not Recommended if: You require closure, clarity, or coherent protagonists. Or if bugs freak you the hell out.

Titan Books
Published April 15, 2025