TL;DR: Twenty-one stories of deals, curses, memes, and miracles that all curdle into horror, Midnight Somewhere is a sharp, mean little playground for Johnny Compton’s obsessions with guilt, performance, and resurrection. The hit rate is high, the lows never tank the collection, and the best pieces are clever as fuck and surprisingly tender under all the blood.

Johnny Compton comes in already decorated: Bram Stoker Award finalist for The Spite House, long time short fiction guy with credits at PseudoPod, Strange Horizons, NoSleep, plus his Healthy Fears podcast where he nerds out about horror history and tropes. Midnight Somewhere feels like the place where all those lanes collide – podcaster brain, working writer grind, and a Texan fondness for grimy crime stories. A lot of these tales originally lived in audio venues, and you can feel that storyteller cadence baked into the bones.

The throughline of the collection is ordinary people making desperate choices in a world where the rules of reality are slightly fucked. A grieving woman beats her dead lover back to life for a snuff syndicate in “Ffuns.” A viral flop of a horror movie spawns a self mutilation craze in “The Death Grip Challenge.” A screw up criminal literally steps outside his own death in “Safety in Numbers.” Elsewhere you get generational doom via the family curse of the charakakon, wrestling stunt lore that goes cosmic, and “The Happy People,” where torture experiments turn laughter into a survival mechanic that works until it absolutely doesn’t. The stakes are usually simple: live, atone, or protect someone you love, in a universe that wants receipts.

Compton’s real weapon is how he blends internet age horrors with old school moral comeuppance. “The Death Grip Challenge” should not work as well as it does. On paper it is “creepypasta about a meme that makes people hurt themselves.” On the page it hits like a brick because he grounds it in a fractured family, a one handed dad trying to laugh off his trauma, and the way online “challenges” seduce damaged people into staging their own destruction. It is sad as shit and then it suddenly turns properly terrifying.

“Ffuns” takes what could have been grimdark edgelord nonsense (resurrection snuff tapes for rich freaks) and flips it into a revenge story where love and rage coexist in one brutally controlled woman. “Charakakon” is almost a folk tale told over drinks, the curse not being the disaster itself, but the knowledge that you are doomed. And late game pieces like “The Happy People” or “Dead Bastard Revival Services” hit that bleak, slightly absurd vibe that feels like Tales From the Crypt after a philosophy seminar.

Compton keeps the sentences lean and conversational, with occasional poetic spikes when the moment needs to hurt. He likes direct POV, often first person or tight third, and he trusts the characters to ramble, joke, or bullshit their way into horror. The pacing is brisk. Most stories are built around one big turn of the screw, but he still makes room for weird sensory details, like the uncanny weight of a resurrected body or the stink of a not quite human stranger on a city street. Dialog crackles, especially in crime adjacent pieces where gangsters sound like actual guys who fuck up for a living instead of Tarantino parrots. When stories stumble, it is usually because the concept is cooler than the emotional landing, not because the writing itself falls apart.

The big recurring engines here are guilt, performance, and the urge to fix what death or fate already stamped out. Characters beat corpses back to life, carve up their own bodies to prove a point, or bargain with entities that only offer information, not mercy. Family is everywhere, estranged siblings, exhausted parents, found partnerships in trauma, and the horror usually hits hardest when someone realizes they cannot protect the person they love without becoming something monstrous themselves. Body damage and resurrection become metaphors for living with trauma that never quite heals. You’re left with the thought “Jesus, people will do some wild shit not to feel powerless,” plus a chilly little whisper that the universe is watching and taking notes.

Midnight Somewhere feels like the logical bridge between Compton’s debut novel and whatever bigger, weirder project he tackles next: proof that he can do high concept horror that still cares about people, not just plot mechanics.

Midnight Somewhere is a strong, nasty, surprisingly emotional set of tales where even the weaker entries are decent company, and the best ones are the kind of fucked up, thoughtful horror stories you want to shove at friends while saying, “You have to read this shit right now.”

Midnight Somewhere by Johnny Compton,
published December 9, 2025 by Blackstone Publishing.