Annie Neugebauer is a Texas horror writer and nationally award-winning poet who’s twice been a Bram Stoker Award finalist for short fiction. She’s published all over the genre map and teaches, blogs, and generally spreads charming dread online. The Extra is her debut novella from Shortwave Publishing, with two follow-ups announced in the same universe: The Other in 2026 and The Spare in 2027. She also has a debut short story collection, You Have to Let Them Bleed, on the way from Bad Hand Books.

A university outdoor-rec leader hauls a gaggle of students into the Arkansas wilderness for a classic backpacking trip. Rain. River crossings. Headlamps. Team-building. Then something goes sideways. Ten people left the van. That night, eleven are in camp. No one is “new.” Everyone swears everyone else belongs. Lights die in a weird surge. A too-green circle of grass appears by the river like nature got Photoshopped. The trip leader starts counting obsessively while the rules of the outdoors and the rules of reality stop shaking hands. That’s all you get. The terror here is the wrongness itself, and Neugebauer refuses to hold the reader’s hand while the headcount keeps… shifting.

This is wilderness horror tightened with psychological zip-ties. The book uses the Leave No Trace vibe as both structure and taunt: chapters riff on backcountry rules like “Plan Ahead and Prepare,” “Stay on the Trail,” and “Leave Only Footprints, Take Only Pictures,” while the story shows how useless rules feel when the world cheats. It’s a gorgeous formal trick. The more the narrator clings to best practices, the more the uncanny elbows him aside. That irony supplies a slow, nauseous dread. You will never look at a cheerful gear checklist the same way again.

Under the hood, the book gnaws on responsibility and duty of care. Our narrator is the adult in the room, the one who must keep everyone calm. Watching his leadership style deteriorate under pressure is the horror. Neugebauer turns counting into a sacrament. Numbers are supposed to be safe. Here, arithmetic becomes an unreliable narrator. That’s delicious.

There’s also the outsider motif baked into the title. “The extra” is group dynamics made flesh: the uninvited factor, the stowaway variable, the malignant thirteenth doughnut in a box of twelve. The forest isn’t evil so much as indifferent. The more human the logistics get, the more inhuman the interference feels. Call it cosmic-adjacent without tentacles. The horror is as much epistemic as it is environmental.

Neugebauer writes clean, unfussy sentences that still glow. She knows when to shut up and let the river talk. The pacing is a steady hike with bursts of sprint, exactly like a real backcountry day: slog, breather, oh hell moment, regroup. Dialog rings true for students and staff. The leader’s inner monologue is pragmatic, a little wry, and increasingly frayed. The wilderness details feel lived-in rather than Wikipedia’d. When the weirdness lands, it lands hard because the realism is solid.

The novella format helps. We don’t get pages of lore or a Scooby-Doo reveal. We get the thing that matters: the gut-level knowledge that something is wrong, and the ethically messy choices that follow when you’re the one in charge. It’s The Ritual meets Blair Witch filtered through the bureaucratic headache of trip forms and headcounts.

At its mean little heart, The Extra asks whether leadership is possible when reality refuses to play fair. What do “best practices” mean in a scenario that erases cause and effect? The narrator keeps trying to solve a math problem that might not be solvable, and the book suggests that human systems break not with a bang, but with a miscount. It’s the terror of ambiguity. The moment you realize the world doesn’t owe you a coherent answer is the moment you’re alone in the dark even when you’re surrounded by people.

It’s also a parable about consent and containment. The van only has ten seats. That’s not just logistics. It’s an ethical boundary. Who do you bring home? Who gets left behind? The ending (no spoilers) doesn’t moralize; it forces you to ask whether survival is always nice. The last chapters felt like a slow hand pressing on my sternum.

Strengths

• Concept from hell. Ten in. Eleven out. That’s a stick of dynamite wrapped in a premise. It lights itself.
• Atmosphere. Rain, river, headlamps dying in a single unnatural surge, a circle of spring-green grass in November. The sense of “nope” is thick enough to butter on toast.
• Character voice. The trip leader’s competence makes every crack believable. When he starts rationalizing, you can hear the fracture lines.
• Form. The “rules of the outdoors” framing is smart and evil in equal measure. It rubs theme into the prose without preaching.
• Length discipline. The novella never overstays. No stuffed subplots. No lore-dump migraine.

Critiques

• Clarity fiends may twitch. If you need a labeled monster and a tidy origin story, this book will smirk at you and keep walking. I loved that, but some readers will call it coy.
• Character depth is functional, not operatic. Most students are sketched effectively, but this is the trip leader’s book. If you crave multi-POV interiority, wrong trailhead.
• One or two beats repeat. “Count again” is a feature, not a bug, but a hair of variation midway through wouldn’t hurt.

Some final notes:

• Originality: High. The “extra person” trope exists, but Neugebauer weaponizes it with outdoors realism and rule-based structure. The green circle image alone is fresh enough to feel contaminated.
• Scary: Hell yes, if ambiguity unnerves you. This is dread horror, not jump-scare gore. The scariest thing is the confidence you lose in your own counting.
• Pacing: Tight. Miles flow. Set pieces pop. Quiet dread stretches just long enough, then something awful intrudes.
• Characters: The guide is fully realized. Students are distinct silhouettes that matter because he must keep them alive. That’s the point.

TL;DR: A tight wilderness novella where one extra body breaks math, leadership, and your pulse rate. Neugebauer uses backpacking rules as a sadistic chorus while reality cheats. Moody, pragmatic, and unnervingly ambiguous. You’ll never trust a headcount or a circle of grass again.