Doe by Rebecca Barrow is a YA supernatural horror novel written in verse, and the form is everything. This dual-timeline story follows cheer captain Maris and an ancient deer-like creature bound by a blood ritual, their desperation mirroring each other in sharp, breathless lines. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t just frighten; it changes your breathing. In this review, I examine how Barrow’s craft transforms jealousy and the hunger to be seen into a relentless, ritualistic reading experience that cements her place among the best YA horror authors working today.

Doe by Rebecca Barrow | Nancy Paulsen Books | June 2026 |

I knew Maris Larsen was going to wreck me about twelve pages in. Not because Barrow telegraphs tragedy, though the architecture of dread in this novel is exquisitely calibrated, but because Maris burns with a kind of desperate, feral hunger for recognition that reads like an open wound dressed in a cheerleader’s uniform. She wants to matter. She wants to be seen. She wants, in a town that offers her nothing, to have one thing that is hers, and that one thing is her place at the top of the cheer pyramid. When that starts to slip, the creature waiting in the dark knows exactly what to do with a girl whose anger has nowhere else to go.

Doe is a horror novel written in verse, and the form matters more than I can easily convey. A lesser writer would have used the verse structure as decoration, a stylistic flourish laid over a conventional narrative. Barrow uses it as a weapon. The line breaks are cuts. The short chapters, which Publishers Weekly rightly calls “brisk, incantatory,” accumulate like small wounds that you do not notice bleeding until you are already lightheaded.

There is a ritual quality to the reading experience, a sense that you are participating in something old and dangerous simply by following the cadence of the language. The verse form does not just serve the horror; it becomes the horror, its rhythms mimicking the incantations that bind Doe to the human world, its white space on the page feeling like the silence after a scream.

What Barrow is attempting here is genuinely ambitious. She has built a dual-perspective narrative that moves between Maris’s present-tense desperation and Doe’s decades of trapped, spectral wandering. Doe is an ancient entity, deer-like and decaying, bound to human bloodlines by a ritual performed half a century ago by a group of girls who are now dead. Those girls burned in a fire, and Doe has been wandering ever since, unable to die, unable to access full power, tethered to a world that has forgotten it.

When Doe discovers Maris, the last blood connection to those original girls, the creature sees a path to freedom. And Maris, seething with jealousy over newcomer Genevieve Ray, who has displaced her as the coach’s favourite, sees a path to vengeance. What neither fully understands is that the deal they are making is a trap for both of them.

The parallel structure works because Barrow commits to it fully. Doe’s sections are not mere interludes; they are a second narrative with its own emotional gravity. Kirkus rightly notes that Doe’s perspective “poetically captures the creature’s decades of loneliness and isolation,” and that loneliness is the bridge between the two protagonists. Maris is lonely too, in ways that her cheer captain status conceals. Her mother’s depression has made her a ghost.

Her father is absent. Her situationship with Nell, a girl who is leaving after graduation, offers no real anchor. Cheerleading is the only thing that gets Maris out of bed, the only place where her body feels like power instead of burden. Barrow understands something essential about the teenage experience of despair: it is often indistinguishable from fury.

And the fury in this novel is magnificent. Maris’s resentment toward Genevieve is not painted as irrational or petty. It is rendered with such psychological precision that you understand exactly why a smart, perceptive girl would burn her own life down to feel powerful for five minutes. Genevieve has not done anything wrong. That is almost the point. The injustice is structural: Maris has given everything to this team, and the world simply pivots its attention to the next girl, as if Maris were never there. That is the fear at the heart of this book. Not being hunted. Not dying. Being erased. Being replaceable.

Barrow’s prose in verse is lean and sharp. There is no excess fat on these lines. A passage describing the cheer team as a collective consciousness, a “hive mind” as Kirkus puts it, manages to be both beautiful and deeply unsettling. The team is Maris’s identity; when the team stops looking at her, she starts to disappear. The horror is psychological and social before it ever becomes supernatural, and that is why Doe’s arrival lands so hard. The creature does not have to break Maris. Maris is already breaking. Doe just gives her a direction.

The craft of the verse deserves close attention. Barrow modulates line length like a composer working with silence. Some sections are dense, almost prose-like, the lines running to the margin with the breathless momentum of Maris’s racing thoughts. Other sections are sparse: three words, a line break, two words, another break. The visual rhythm on the page communicates panic, or stillness, or the slow creep of a realisation the protagonist does not want to have. This is not a gimmick. This is a writer who understands that form is meaning, that how a story arrives on the page shapes what it does to the reader’s body. Reading Doe is a physical experience. Your breathing changes.

One of the most striking achievements here is the way Barrow makes Doe sympathetic without softening the creature’s menace. Doe is dangerous. Doe’s agenda is ultimately selfish. And yet, the decades of wandering, the inability to die, the loss of the girls it loved even in bondage, all of this accumulates into a sadness that feels ancient and earned.

Doe is not a monster in the sense of being evil. Doe is a monster in the sense of being something other, something that operates by a logic humans cannot afford to share. The horror is not that Doe wants to hurt Maris. It is that Doe wants to be free, and Maris is the price, and Doe has convinced itself that the price is acceptable.

This leads to the thematic core of the book, which is bigger than jealousy and bigger than revenge. Doe is about wanting to be seen, wanting to matter, wanting to escape a life that feels like a cage. Maris and Doe are mirrors. Both are trapped in forms that limit their power. Both ache for autonomy and control in a world eager to deliver pain and punishment, as Kirkus observed. Both make choices that look like liberation but feel like damnation. The novel asks, without ever stating it directly: what would you trade for the chance to be powerful? What would you burn?

That question lands with particular weight because of who Maris is. She is a Black girl in a dead-end town, treated as a troublemaker by the adults around her, written off before she has even had a chance to write herself. The cheer squad is not just an extracurricular. It is the only space where Maris is seen as something other than a problem. When Genevieve arrives, the threat is not just personal. It is existential. Barrow does not moralise about this. She simply shows it, in sharp, unflinching verse, and trusts the reader to understand.

The pacing is relentless in the best possible way. Barrow has always known how to build tension, from the slow-burn dread of Bad Things Happen Here to the survivalist pressure cooker of The Tournament. But Doe moves differently. The verse form compresses everything. There are no long descriptive passages to hide behind, no leisurely scene-setting.

Every line has to earn its place. The result is a novel that reads like a countdown, each short chapter ticking toward a convergence you can feel coming but cannot look away from. The dual timeline, which could have been cumbersome, instead creates a sense of inevitability. We know what happened to the first group of girls. We know what Doe is capable of. We watch Maris walk toward it anyway, and the watching is exquisitely painful.

Barrow’s evolution as a writer comes into sharp focus when you place Doe alongside her earlier work. Her debut, You Don’t Know Me but I Know You, was realist contemporary fiction, grounded and emotionally honest. This Is What It Feels Like expanded her range with a multi-perspective structure and a deeper engagement with recovery and queer identity. Bad Things Happen Here and And Don’t Look Back moved her into thriller territory, each darker than the last, each more comfortable with ambiguity and menace. 

The Tournament was the pivot point: a full embrace of genre, a dark academia survival thriller that earned a place on Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2025. But Doe is something else entirely. It is Barrow’s first novel in verse, her first supernatural horror, and arguably her most formally ambitious book to date. The writer who once said she writes about “who you are and who you want to become” is now writing about who you might be willing to destroy to become it.

Within the horror genre, Doe occupies fascinating territory. It is creature horror, yes, but the creature is not the antagonist in any simple sense. It is psychological horror, but the psychology is rooted in material conditions: poverty, dead-end futures, the particular cruelties of adolescence. It is folk horror in its engagement with blood rituals and ancient bindings, but the folklore is invented rather than borrowed, which gives Barrow more freedom to make it mean exactly what she needs it to mean.

The deer as a horror figure is having a moment, from the “not-deer” stories circulating in Appalachian creepypasta communities to the enduring power of the Deer Woman in Indigenous traditions. Barrow taps into that archetype without being confined by it. Her Doe is not a symbol. It is a character, with wants and wounds and a voice that sounds nothing like a human’s and everything like grief given form.

Comps inevitably come up. The publisher suggests fans of Krystal Sutherland and Tiffany D. Jackson, and those make sense: Sutherland’s House of Hollow shares the dark, lush prose and the exploration of sisterhood as both bond and bondage, and Jackson’s The Weight of Blood shares the willingness to use horror as a lens for examining racialised experience. But Doe also recalls, for me, the work of Nova Ren Suma, particularly The Walls Around Us, which also uses a dual-timeline structure and a supernatural presence to explore the savage intensity of teenage female relationships.

And there is something of Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake in the central relationship between a human protagonist and a supernatural entity that is both threat and object of strange sympathy. What sets Doe apart from all of these is the verse. The form changes everything. It makes the horror more intimate, more interior. You are not watching Maris make terrible choices from a safe distance. You are inside her, breathing at her rhythm, and the verse ensures you never get comfortable.

The YA horror space has been expanding rapidly, and the best of it, like this book, refuses to condescend to its audience. Barrow writes for teenagers without ever softening the darkness or simplifying the moral complexity. The novel in verse, which could read as a literary affectation, instead feels like the only possible form for this story.

The incantatory rhythm, the ritualistic feel, the way the white space functions as held breath, all of it serves the central idea that words have power, that saying something aloud can bind you to it. That is what horror does, at its best. It speaks something into existence and then refuses to let you look away.

Barrow has been building toward this book for years. The psychological acuity of her early contemporaries. The tightening tension of her thrillers. The formal daring of The Tournament, with its three interlocking perspectives. Doe synthesises all of that into a novel that feels both inevitable and surprising. It is the book you did not know she had in her, except that looking back, of course she did. Of course the writer who has spent a career writing about girls and all the wonders they can be would eventually write about what happens when wonder curdles into resentment, when the hunger to be seen becomes a hunger to consume.

The deer is waiting. It has been waiting for decades. And you will not be able to stop reading long enough to catch your breath before it starts moving.

Doe by Rebecca Barrrow

Thrilling crossover YA Horror perfect for fans of Krystal Sutherland and Tiffany Jackson, where the captain of a high school cheer team is caught in a bitter rivalry and turns to an ancient, supernatural creature for help, not knowing she’s just  made a deal with a devil and could lose everything that matters, including her life.

Maris Larsen is the captain of the West Eaton High cheer team. She’s Coach’s favorite and the team worships her. Being on the team makes her feel special—powerful. When she’s leading the girls on the mat, Maris doesn’t have to think about her dead-end life in a dead-end town. She can forget about her depressed mother and absent father and the fact that her girlfriend doesn’t really love her.

But when newcomer and Coach’s new golden girl, Genevieve Ray, joins the team, the only thing going right in Maris’s life is suddenly in jeopardy. A bitter rivalry develops between the two, but Maris is determined to take Genevieve down. The knife she needs to wield comes to Maris in her dreams.

While sleepwalking, Maris is visited by a monstrous, decaying beast in the shape of an enormous deer. Doe is an ancient, tired creature who has been wandering, trapped in her current form for decades. She cannot die, but she cannot go on living as she has. Only a girl related by blood to those who bound her in this form can free her, but those girls she loved died years ago—murdered in a fire.

But Maris is somehow linked to Doe’s beloved girls—linked by blood—and so she has the power to free Doe, to unleash her immense power. In Maris’s dreams, she and Doe form a bond, but Maris doesn’t know the creature from her dreams is real. Maris doesn’t understand the danger she’s in. She only knows Doe has promised her a way to win her battle with Genevieve. But for Maris to win, someone has to die, and the only real winner in the end will be Doe.

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