The archive doesn’t just hold demons — it holds Michael Stein up to the light.

Laura R. Samotin has never been subtle about the weight she expects her fiction to carry, and The Way It Haunted Him , her debut horror novel from Titan Books, carries considerable weight indeed. Part queer dark academia horror, part psychological descent, the novel places Michael Stein inside the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies, a demon-infested archive in upstate New York, with his guilt, his grief, and the late boyfriend whose research he has come to complete.

Samotin draws on Ashkenazi Jewish folklore to build something genuinely unsettling, something that understands the distance between study and possession is shorter than any rationalist would like.

The Way It Haunted Him Review: Laura R. Samotin’s Dark Academia Horror Is the Real Thing

Michael Stein arrives at the Schechter Institute bleeding through his shirt, half-medicated, and so committed to self-punishment that penance has become his only remaining theology.

That image, a man who has turned grief into a discipline, is where The Way It Haunted Him begins, and where Laura R. Samotin plants her flag. This is not the dark academia of locked reading rooms and competitive scholars, of midterms and petty rivalries and whatever Donna Tartt’s long shadow still casts over the subgenre. This is something older, stranger, and considerably more willing to hurt you.

The Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies sits in upstate New York inside a converted former synagogue, and that reconsecration matters. A space once built for prayer, reshaped into a repository of dybbuks and mazzekin and sheyds, now inhabited by two men who are both, in their respective ways, possessed.

What Samotin builds in The Way It Haunted Him is claustrophobic by design. The Institute is a pressure cooker with a card catalogue. There are a few exterior scenes, a few exits for the reader’s eye. The archive presses in from all sides: cryptic texts, whispered histories, the particular darkness of a space where human grief has been catalogued alongside supernatural threat.

The pacing is intimate and deliberate. This is not a novel that lunges at you in the first fifty pages. It earns its dread through accumulation, through the slow revelation that Michael’s rational scepticism is not armour but vulnerability. He has come to complete his dead boyfriend Nate’s dissertation on demonic entities, a sceptic’s attempt to touch the superstitions his beloved took seriously.

What makes the dread architecture so effective is that Samotin refuses to let Michael’s disbelief function as ironic safety. His rationalism doesn’t protect him; it delays him. By the time the archive’s shadows start behaving in ways that can’t be explained away, the reader has already been unsettled not by jump scares but by the ambient wrongness of a man trying to grieve through paperwork.

The horror operates on two frequencies simultaneously. There is the folkloric, Ashkenazi strand: dybbuks, those malevolent spirits of the wrongly dead seeking possession; mazzekin, the invisible damage-doers; sheyds, the demons of the Kabbalistic tradition.

Samotin is working from a rich and genuinely ancient tradition of Jewish supernatural belief, and she deploys these entities with historical specificity and earned weight. Then there is the interior frequency: the demonic that Michael already carries. His guilt, his tendency to mistake punishment for love, his susceptibility to obsession. The genius of the book is that these two registers are never fully separable.

When Michael begins to believe, it is never entirely clear whether the archive is doing something to him, or whether he is simply becoming visible to himself for the first time.

Samotin’s prose reads with precision but knows when to let a sentence breathe. She can do compact and clinical; there are passages where Michael’s emotional dissociation is rendered in language that is almost diagnostic, stripped of flourish, and it lands harder for that. Then she opens the aperture and the writing becomes atmospheric and dense, the kind of slow-rolling Gothic sentence that maps the contours of a room and a psyche simultaneously.

Her POV choices are confident. The close third person centred on Michael is the correct call here; it gives the reader full access to his interior deterioration while maintaining enough distance to let us see what he cannot. We understand before he does that his growing obsession with Jacob Schechter, the archivist’s grandson who has inherited the Institute after his grandfather Eleazar’s death, is both genuine emotional response and something darker feeding beneath it.

Jacob himself is handled with care. He is enigmatic without being withheld to the point of opacity; Samotin gives him interiority through accumulation of detail, small moments in which his own grief for his grandfather and the weight of the Institute show through the brooding surface.

The structure serves the horror. Samotin lets the academic framing do genuine work: the sections in which Michael engages with Nate’s research are among the most interesting in the book, not just in terms of texture but as thematic machinery.

The argument that Eastern European Jewish folk communities preserved in their supernatural stories something literally true about the nature of demonic presence runs directly counter to Michael’s rationalism and allows Samotin to stage, via theology and folklore, an argument about the nature of belief itself. Whether demons are real is almost beside the point; what matters is what we let ourselves be possessed by.

The dialogue is economical and carries subtext efficiently. Samotin doesn’t overexplain. Characters say what they cannot say around the edges of what they’re actually saying, which is exactly right for a novel about two people who are each, in different ways, keeping a terrible truth from themselves.

Grief is not what this book is actually about, though it is everywhere in it. The Way It Haunted Him is a novel about atonement and how, when turned inward, it becomes indistinguishable from self-destruction.

Michael has come to the Schechter Institute not simply to honour Nate but to punish himself for Nate’s death. The completion of the dissertation is penance, not tribute. And Samotin is precise about this distinction: the book is quietly forensic about the ways in which guilt masquerades as love, and duty masquerades as devotion. This connects directly to her broader thematic territory.

The Jewish folkloric tradition the novel draws from adds layers of meaning that are not incidental. The dybbuk, in classical understanding, is a spirit of the wrongly-dead that possesses the living in order to complete unfinished business. Michael is, structurally, a living dybbuk, trying to complete Nate’s business through an act of will that is also an act of self-erasure.

And the archive, a space designed to contain and study demonic forces, becomes the perfect environment for someone whose interior life is already a controlled study of his own guilt. What the demons want and what Michael wants are not so different: to remain close to someone they lost.

This is also, with remarkable lightness of touch, a novel about queerness and visibility. Samotin codes Michael’s scepticism about the supernatural as connected to his broader history of having his perceptions questioned, his reality reframed by others.

The gradual shift from disbelief to belief shadows his journey toward trusting his own experience; including, crucially, his own desires. The queerness here is casual and integrated, not foregrounded as event but present as texture, which is precisely how it should be, and which makes the moments when it does surface with full emotional force considerably more powerful.

Samotin published The Sins on Their Bones in 2024 to considerable attention. That novel, her debut, was a Gothic queer dark fantasy set in a Jewish folklore-inspired reimagining of 19th-century Eastern Europe: Dimitri, an exiled Tzar, engineers his return alongside his spymaster Vasily while navigating the scorched wreckage of his marriage to the usurper Alexey.

It was praised widely for its combination of intimate emotional depth, political intrigue, and unsparing engagement with trauma, abuse, and grief. Samantha Shannon praised it for how carefully Samotin worked through trauma and depression while leaving room for hope. The formula of queer Jewish protagonists navigating grief and magic within psychologically rigorous frameworks was fully established there.

The Lure of Their Graves followed in 2025, completing the Cursed Crown duology. Dimitri and Vasily faced new political threats in the sequel, and the novel was received as a satisfying and emotionally resonant conclusion that deepened rather than merely extended the first book’s concerns.

What The Way It Haunted Him represents is a genuinely distinct evolutionary step. Moving from fantasy to horror, and from epic-scale political stakes to the intimate single-setting claustrophobia of the Schechter Institute, Samotin has narrowed her lens to remarkable effect. She carries her signature concerns with her: grief-laden queer protagonists, Jewish mysticism as lived framework rather than genre decoration, the architecture of trauma and how it shapes desire.

But in compressing her canvas from a sprawling Eastern European fantasy world to one building in upstate New York over the course of weeks, she has done something that the Cursed Crown books, for all their strengths, didn’t quite attempt. She has made the interior life of a single man the terrain of horror.

Dark academia horror has had a productive few years. It attracts writers who understand that knowledge can be as dangerous as any monster. T. Kingfisher, cited on this book’s cover, has carved out a particular corner of this territory, combining tight first-person dread with characters who think their way toward and through their fear. Tori Bovalino has brought teenage intensity and folkloric depth. Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters shifted the coordinates further toward literary horror with queer and mythological weight.

The Way It Haunted Him sits inside this conversation but occupies territory that none of those books quite claim. What it does that is singular is bring Ashkenazi Jewish folklore into the dark academia framework not as flavour but as argument.

The dybbuks and mazzekin here are not equivalent to generic demons given a cultural coat of paint; they carry the specific theological and historical weight of a tradition developed by communities living under sustained external threat, for whom the supernatural was not entertainment but explanation.

In that context, a man who arrives at a Jewish archive to study Jewish demons while being possessed by his own guilt is doing something that connects the horror to a specifically Jewish understanding of haunting and responsibility that has very little precedent in contemporary horror fiction.

For readers who know Hailey Piper’s A Game in Yellow or Sacha Lamb’s When the Angels Left the Old Country, The Way It Haunted Him will feel like a natural companion, though darker and more compressed than either. For readers who loved Samotin’s debut and are wondering what she’s capable of in a tighter register, the answer is considerable.

It is a book about an archive, but what it is really keeping on its shelves is every form of damage a person can do to themselves while calling it love.

The archive doesn’t just hold demons; it becomes a mirror, and that is the precise and pitiless logic of Samotin’s horror. Some books ask whether the monsters are real. This one asks whether that question was ever the right one to begin with.

The Way It Haunted Him by Laura R. Samotin

A terrifying and powerful dark academia novel about Jewish folklore, grief, and other things locked in the archives. Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Tori Bovalino and Sunyi Dean.

“It’s real. You’ll see.”

Michael Stein arrives at the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies in upstate New York, battered and broken after the death of his boyfriend seven months prior. Blaming himself for the accident that killed him, Michael has come to the Institute to complete his boyfriend’s dissertation as part of his effort at repentance. While Michael’s own past leads him to condemn superstition as a way to mask prejudice and old-fashioned beliefs, his boyfriend’s research argues that the folktales told in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were based in truth, and that demons and other creatures walked the earth, wreaking havoc on peoples’ lives.

Instead of the Institute’s infamous archivist, Michael is met by his grandson, Jacob Schechter, who has taken over the archive after his grandfather’s death. A firm believer in the existence of the supernatural, Jacob explains that the archive plays host to a coterie of household demons. Michael insists that he is a skeptic, but strange and frightening occurrences plague his research, causing Michael to question both his sanity and his view of the world.

To cope with his guilt, grief, and the terrifying shadows following him, Michael must reckon with the events leading up to his boyfriend’s death—and his role in it—by trusting the enigmatic Jacob to help uncover the truth. As untangling the mysteries of the past bring Jacob and Michael closer together, their respective secrets threaten to tear them apart. Because Michael is not the only one with darkness on his conscience, and if he and Jacob discover the truth of each other, only one of them may survive the fallout.