TL;DR: Hailey Piper has built a movie that isn’t there and made it the scariest thing in the building. The 1994 opening is the best forty pages of horror this year: a sticky floor, a licorice straw, a man in a coat one row closer each time you look. A cosmic-horror love letter to cinema that ruins the multiplex on purpose.

I read this in two nights with the box fan going and both mornings I got up and could not look at the television. That is a compliment. The set is a Zenith my wife left me in the divorce because it weighs more than she does, and I had never once been afraid of it before.

Here is what Piper has done. She has built a movie that isn’t there. Blood-Curse of the Toad Man, late seventies, a swamp, a detective with sideburns, a woman in a red dress, a rubber monster with plastic eyes, a song sung by women who sound like children and mean every word of it. No distributor. No VHS, no Betamax, no Anchor Bay disc, no Scream Factory reissue, no soundtrack on Varèse Sarabande, nothing in the ledgers of a Louisiana town where the cheap crews used to shoot before 1983. An IMDb page with nothing on it. And one night only, November 1994, it played Auditorium 4 of a four-screen brick pile in a strip mall called the Morrows Quadruplex, and three girls went in.

Valerie McQueen is fifteen. She has a twenty and some ones out of her mother’s purse. She has her sister Ash, ten, in a pink coat over a D.A.R.E. shirt, and her friend Colette, sixteen, who wants Interview with the Vampire and is not going to get it. The Lion King is back on the marquee because the manager needs a moneymaker and it’s too early for The Santa Clause. Sour Patch Kids. Root beer. Licorice for straws. A big man in a crushed hat and a coat with no shape to it comes in late and sits several rows back. Then fewer rows back. There’s a wet sound behind them, lips. The girls laugh at the Toad Man when he finally shows, and then they quit laughing, and the root beer tastes like a pond. Valerie goes to the bathroom. When she comes back there are two purses and two cups and nobody, and by the time her parents get done with the detectives the little gold lights by the door are lit around Tom Cruise instead. I sat in a theater like that in 1994. I know that floor. So does Piper. She knows the ice sliver that comes up the licorice and hits your teeth. Those forty pages are the best horror I’ve read this year and I have read the ones with the blurbs on them.

Thirty years. Val now, forty-five, two hundred and thirty pounds of woman with skulls and roses up both arms, inking strangers at a place called Black Vine Body Art an hour from Morrows, living in a basement outside Baltimore with one slot of window at the top. She hasn’t been in a theater since college. She has two prayers, only the moment and none of my business, and she says them the way a Baptist says grace, fast, to get to the food. On Christmas Eve she wrecks two men in a bar for a stranger in a pink winter coat and does not let herself know why the coat matters, and Piper does not know it for her, and that’s when I sat up. A true-crime podcaster books a tattoo and asks about 1994 with the needle still in her thigh, and Val gets up and leaves the roses half done. I loved this woman. I don’t say it about many people in books. She’s got a curtain in her head and something walking around behind it, and the author leaves the curtain shut a long time. That is discipline. Most of them can’t.

Then Roxie. Roxie de la Fontaine was the manager’s girl, fifteen the same night, and handed Val a bag of popcorn with no salt on it while the cops had her parents in the office. Now she’s outside D.C. with a wife who’s forever off to London on government business and a Rottweiler named Fella, and she hunts lost media for old men who want a candy jingle back from when they were six. She thinks she’s Denzel in Devil in a Blue Dress for about a page and tells herself to quit it. She knows things. Robert Shaye driving film cans around in his trunk before New Line was anything. A silent King in Yellow that might have burned. The spider pit they never shot for the ’33 Kong. I’d have listened to her all night on a porch. When she was nine, Halloween, in a Freddy Krueger costume with a pink coat over it, a man with a gun in a car window told her to get in, and she said I’m the wrong one, and said it again, and he drove off, and she has never in her life known what she meant. Piper puts that at a plastic table outside a closed frozen yogurt shop and walks away from it. I’ve said it twice myself since. It works.

The scare in this book is a sound. A slurp. A synthesizer keeping a pulse. That rhyme. Pond water in the soda. And a room at the Marriott on Woodland Drive, 313, torn to splinters one night, bed frame through the mattress, laptop and phone crushed, something dark on the other bed, and when Val knocks again a father opens up with his little girl behind him and there isn’t a scratch on the wall. Piper does that more than once. The first time, it stopped the beer halfway to my mouth.

Whether the movie exists is the question, and Roxie changes her mind about it, and that is all I’m telling you. Except this. The answer comes at a kitchen table at one in the morning over a black pepper ham sandwich with the pickles sliced flat, and it comes by way of a butterfly, and it is the truest page in the book, and I put the book down and went and stood in the yard. A real idea. Then she says it again. And again. There’s a four-word sentence in italics that comes around ten times by my count, and by the seventh I was saying it along with her like a hymn I’d gotten tired of. She’s got a pond and a fish and a sock puppet and a tongue all doing the work one butterfly already did. The middle is phone calls. Reddit, a Discord stakeout, a fellow named Barnaby who has read too many books about things from other dimensions and will tell you so. Kate the podcaster is drawn with a pencil and made to carry a piano. The similes get loose and run, a saffron bob turning into a tense sunrise, two detectives turning into an amoeba with a badge, and then she’ll hit one square, that ice sliver, and you forgive her the others. And the last act gets big. Very big. The most frightening thing this book owns is a man in a coat one row behind you, breathing, and for a stretch near the end it forgets that.

None of it touches the November. Piper wrote 1994 as one long piece and Daniel Carpenter, her editor at Titan, made her chop it up and spread it through the present, and you can see the cuts, and he was right, because it lands the way the past lands on Val, in the middle of something else. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder at the back door. Her father at the kitchen table with one candle the night before she turns sixteen. Colette’s family at the curb on the first anniversary, holding hands, watching the building like it might apologize. Roxie gets the line I wrote on my hand: what kind of father isn’t relieved to see his little girl is alive.

Piper‘s from New York and lives in Maryland with her wife. She came up through the little presses, The Worm and His Kings, Benny Rose the Cannibal King, and then Queen of Teeth took the Bram Stoker for a first novel in 2021, and Titan has had her since: A Light Most Hateful, All the Hearts You Eat, the collection Teenage Girls Can Be Demons, a Stoker finalist this year. Saga put out her King in Yellow book, A Game in Yellow, last August. She has said Lovecraft was short on “consideration for the perspective of the other,” which I read as a note she left herself. This one started as “Toad Man, Toad Man,” a story she wrote in 2019 for a Kevin J. Anderson anthology called Monsters, Movies & Mayhem. She’s said she wanted horror out of joy this time instead of out of hurt: “I love going to the movies, so why not use horror to ruin that a little?” The book is dedicated to Stan Winston. In the acknowledgments she says that while she was drafting it in 2024 the monster picked up a real-world echo in the machine that pretends it’s art, and that she wrote every word herself. She says it the way Roxie would say it. Mad.

Colette wanted the vampires. If they’d gone to the vampires, something was playing in Auditorium 4 anyway, to an empty room or to somebody else’s little sister. Piper never says which. I sat on the steps with that until the streetlight came on. Then I went in and unplugged the Zenith.