TL;DR: This is domestic dread with a smug grin and a knife behind its back, a ghost story that never says “boo” yet keeps tapping your spine till you jump. Munson turns a swapped-out couch into a sinkhole under a family’s feet. It works, it stings, and it sticks. If you like your horror smart, weird, and a little petty, this fucker lands.

Sam Munson has always favored cool temperature and hot implications, the kind of writer who likes a setup that looks ordinary until you notice the teeth in the trim. Here, he leans into suburban metaphysics with a precision that feels almost comic at first and then stops being funny the minute you realize the joke has you by the throat.

Our POV is Montessori, a father who comes home from the beach to find his living room couch replaced by a stranger: a wobbly, fussy old sofa tagged “MEERVERMESSER.” The police are useless, the neighbor is spooked, and the family tries to shrug it off. Then the house starts behaving wrong. A toilet flushes by itself. A hat appears. The kids change. The world tilts one notch at a time and this shit doesn’t tilt back. The family’s sanity and cohesion are at risk. Texture: quiet suburban rooms humming with wrongness, a river under a stone bridge, a yellow-green striped relic that wants to be more than furniture.

The book weaponizes smallness. A replacement couch is such a benign prank that you laugh, the way the characters laugh at the “death notification” photos of their shredded old couch under the Harrison bridge. Then the laughs curdle. Munson keeps escalating with half-steps: a neighbor’s pink-eyed anger, nocturnal plumbing that insists on being heard, a Chaplin-ish hat that should not be there and yet is there, until you’re muttering, okay, what the fuck, and checking your own hall bathroom at 3 a.m. The sly Greek names (Heraklitos Movers, Señor Periander) nudge a theme of flux and order. The tag “MEERVERMESSER” turns into an incantation by repetition. It’s petty hauntology, and it’s effective as hell.

The prose is cool and exact, with sly second-person feints that implicate you (“You know all about it.”) and a clinical eye for domestic textures: nap of fake velvet, damp smell, the cat’s phosphorescent stare, the sick little thrill of anger you swear you’re above. Munson clips his scenes cleanly. He likes to let a sensible explanation loiter at the edge, then kick the chair out from under it. Dialogue is crisp and often funny, before the funny turns mean. He paces like a good prankster: small push, smaller push, then a shove that sends the reader face-first into the coffee table. And he can do sensory: the water’s hiss, glass spider-webbing, grass stink after dusk. You feel the splinters in this thing.

This is a book about possession in every non-church sense. Possession of objects, of space, of roles, of anger you tell yourself you don’t have until you hear yourself scream at your kid. The sofa becomes a pressure test for masculinity and control; the haunting is the family’s need to explain away the inexplicable until it breaks them. Flux vs. security, order vs. decay, the thin membrane between a home and a place you’re trapped in. The horror is almost insultingly modest, which is the point: a faucet, a hat, a smell. Body dissolution equals loss of self? Here it’s domestic dissolution equals loss of self. After you close the boke, you’re left with a chilly question about what, exactly, in your house is using you as furniture.

2025 is stacked with loud, maximalist horror; The Sofa is the counter-programming. It sits neatly beside contemporary domestic hauntings that treat houses like personalities, but Munson’s restraint and deadpan menace push it closer to literary ghost-adjacent fiction than to splatter or shock. It’s a middle-lane standout: not the year’s loudest, but one of the year’s most insidious.

A tight, unnerving chamber piece where a single cursed object quietly colonizes a family. It’s smart, it’s mean, it’s funny until it isn’t, and it knows exactly how much shit to show before closing the door and letting you sit with the damage.

The Sofa by Sam Munson,
published November 11, 2025 by Two Dollar Radio.