Through The Midnight Door by Katrina Monroe
Poisoned Pen Press (August 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Who doesn’t love a good jump scare? While some dismiss jump cares as a cheap element in horror, others know that those quick, intense scares can set the stage for complete emotional collapse when done well.
Remember the car scene from Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House? It was shocking, memorable, and effective. This scene opened the floodgates of the family’s shared trauma and revealed what the lack of communication has since conjured.
Katrina Monroe’s latest release, Through The Midnight Door, accomplishes this several times.
Like the Crain siblings in Hill House, the Finch sisters once shared a close bond, spending long summers together and exploring abandoned places, but they are estranged as adults.
As kids, a strange loner takes them to a house with endless doors, though three are meant for the sisters, keys waiting for them. Within their rooms, they suffer horrific visions and sinister tauntings thought to be eerie images of the future. Grim prophecies. And for different reasons, they all feel they’re to blame for the family’s devastation.
So, they never speak of it again. That is until years later when the body of the youngest sister, Clarie, is discovered in that very house.
The pacing here is excellent. Through The Midnight Door is one of those books you’ll obsessively devour in just a few days. Each time Monroe lifts the pen, readers face this encroaching dread, terror, and heartache that grows dense in their limbs, gluing them to their seats.
The darkness is heavy. It feasts. And it comes for us all.
Behind the central plot of Esther and Meg investigating their sister’s death and trying to survive the darkness is a tragedy in the Finch family. Monroe takes her time with this reveal, sprinkling hints and flashbacks throughout the novel, leading to a gut punch of a twist. Bring tissues, your comfort sweater, whatever, because Through The Midnight Door will surely make you ugly cry.
Each character has their own method of suffering; Monroe establishes a haunting psychological depth in Meg, Esther, and Claire, the Finch girls’ parents, and the boy, Donny, who led them to the house that summer. The author traps you in her haunted house of family secrets and grief, probing at the darkest parts of human emotion. I don’t think I’ll shake this read anytime soon.
The psychological element lent itself well to the story as it developed, and some of the scariest scenes I’ve read came from it. When you get there, fight the adrenaline and urgency and savor each of Monroe’s horrific and brilliant words. The images are stunning. This is a hellish nightmare that readers will be all too enthused to witness. Soon, they’ll realize the only light offered in this deeply unsettling tale is the power of sisterhood.
If you like haunted house stories, The Haunting of Hill House (Flanagan’s or Shirley Jackson’s), horror with psychological flares, and books about family secrets, you will love Through the Midnight Door.
It is my new favorite from Katrina Monroe.
