A magician’s abandoned house. Two curious friends. And the secret that refuses to stay buried.
In Mia Dalia’s Alakazam, the line between illusion and reality dissolves like salt in Atlantic City’s humid air. This supernatural horror novella (PS Publishing, August 2025) follows two timelines: a mixed-race gay magician’s rise to fame in post-war Atlantic City, and two friends who trespass into his abandoned home decades later. Dalia subverts the haunted house trope, treating the titular Alakazam not as a malevolent entity but as a wound bleeding history. Her restrained prose and empathetic characterisation elevate this dark urban fantasy into something genuinely unsettling. For readers who crave atmospheric horror with emotional depth, Alakazam delivers.
Alakazam by Mia Dalia Review: A Haunting Novella About Ambition, Identity, and the Cost of Disappearing
Atlantic City has a way of holding onto its secrets. The salt air corrodes everything eventually – boardwalks, dreams, the distinction between a trick and something darker.
The novella (published August 2025 by PS Publishing) clocks in at a lean runtime, but its echoes linger like the smell of stale popcorn and regret in an abandoned casino lobby. Dalia has built something strange here. Not quite a haunted house story, though a house haunts it. Not quite a tragedy, though loss runs through every page like a watermark.
The book splits itself across two timelines. In the past, we follow Archie Bowman, a mixed-race gay man in post-World War II Atlantic City who reinvents himself as The Amazing Archibald, a stage magician of considerable skill and unbearable loneliness. The city then was all glitter and grift, a place where a man like Archie could hide in plain sight if he learned the right sleights. In the present, two friends – an unnamed first-person narrator and his overly enthusiastic buddy Logan, pose as interested buyers to tour Archie’s abandoned house, a crumbling wreck called Alakazam that nature seems eager to reclaim.
The structure isn’t revolutionary. Plenty of horror novels shuttle between then and now. What Dalia does differently is the texture of her time travel. The past sections don’t feel like exposition dumps. They feel like memories bleeding through wallpaper. When the narrator walks through a room, we cut to Archie standing in that same spot decades earlier, and the transition happens so smoothly you barely notice the shift until you’re already immersed.
Short sentences. Plain vocabulary. No literary pyrotechnics. But when she wants to land a punch, she knows exactly where to aim. Consider this line about Archie’s relationship with a lover: “If you half-closed your eyes and let it blur, it could almost pass for love”. That’s seven words that do more work than some novels manage in three hundred pages. The conditional phrasing – “could almost pass” – says everything about what Archie has settled for, what he’s learned to accept because the alternative is nothing at all.
Compared to Dalia’s previous work, Alakazam feels darker and more solemn. I’ve read her novels Estate Sale (2023) and Haven (2024). She’s always had a sharp eye for domestic unease , the kind of horror that hides in basements and attics and family photographs. But those earlier books often included moments of levity, dry humour that punctured the tension before it could become unbearable.
Alakazam still has some sarcasm, mostly supplied by the unnamed narrator who seems permanently exhausted by Logan’s enthusiasm. But the humour feels thinner here, more like a reflex than a release valve. The darkness underneath has thickened. It’s as if Dalia decided that some stories don’t deserve the comfort of a joke, and she’s right. This one doesn’t.
There is a sense that something could go wrong at any moment. The prose never quite smooths itself out into easy readability. Dalia leaves deliberate rough edges: fragmented sentences, abrupt transitions, dialogue that trails off into ellipses. It’s not clumsy. It’s choreographed clumsiness, designed to keep you slightly off-balance, never quite trusting what you’re seeing.
And that’s perfect for a book about a magician. Because magic, real magic (if such a thing existed), wouldn’t look like a smooth performance. It would look wrong. It would have burrs and snags, moments where the fabric of reality didn’t quite line up.
The haunted house trope gets twisted here. Usually, the house is malevolent; it wants something, hungers for something, actively threatens the characters. Alakazam (the house) feels more like a wound than a monster. It’s not trying to hurt anyone. It’s just leaking. Past events have saturated the walls, and now anyone who walks through the threshold absorbs that history whether they want to or not.
The Faustian bargain trope also gets a workout. Archie, we’re told, makes a deal with someone who offers him everything he wants. But Dalia rejects the cliché in which the protagonist realises the cost too late and tries to bargain their way out. Archie understands the transaction perfectly. He accepts it. And that acceptance, cold, deliberate, pragmatic, is more unsettling than any last-minute moral panic.
Comparisons to other books? If you’ve read Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, you’ll recognise that sense of ambiguity where you’re never quite sure what’s supernatural and what’s just trauma wearing a costume. Or Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street, which also uses unreliable architecture (houses with secrets, rooms that don’t quite make spatial sense) as a container for fractured identities. But Dalia’s voice is her own, less baroque than Ward, less tricksy than Tremblay. She writes lean, and she trusts the reader to keep up.
The present-day narrator functions as our surrogate. He’s sceptical, slightly annoyed, fundamentally decent in the way that weary people often are. Logan, his friend, is the opposite – all manic enthusiasm and magical thinking, convinced that Archie’s house holds something worth finding. Their dynamic feels real, lived-in. You’ve been on road trips with this exact pairing: the believer and the pragmatist, neither quite understanding why the other cares so much.
“Mia Dalia’s Alakazam is a lean, atmospheric novella about ambition, identity, and the houses that remember everything we try to forget. The dual timelines weave past and present into a single haunting image – a magician who traded everything for his spotlight, and two friends who discover that some doors shouldn’t be opened. Dalia writes with surgical precision, cutting straight to the emotional core without ever over-explaining. It’s darker than her previous work, but richer for it. Fans of Shirley Jackson and Catriona Ward will find familiar pleasures here, though Dalia’s voice is entirely her own. A must-read for anyone who’s ever wondered what happens after the applause fades.”
Near the end (I’ll be vague), the house decides to cooperate. Logan gets what he wanted. And it’s wrong – not in a gory, jump-scare way, but in a quieter, more intimate way. The revelation doesn’t explain everything. If anything, it raises more questions. That’s the point, I think. Magic, real magic, wouldn’t come with an instruction manual. It would be slippery, ambiguous, and impossible to fully understand. Dalia commits to that ambiguity, and the book is stronger for it.
Dalia doesn’t romanticise the decay. She doesn’t polish the rust. Atlantic City here is sad and faded, a place where the boardwalk creaks under your feet and every empty hotel lobby smells like stale cigarettes and broken promises. The house, Alakazam, fits perfectly into this landscape. It’s not an anomaly. It’s a symptom.
Dalia sticks the landing in a way that feels earned. No last-minute reversals. No explanatory monologue where someone reveals The Truth About Everything. Just consequences, quiet and irreversible, settling over the characters like dust.
Some books entertain you. Alakazam moves into your peripheral vision and waits for you to notice it’s still there.
Alakazam by Mia Dalia
What is the greatest trick of all—survival or disappearance? How far would you go to find out?
In the heyday of Atlantic City, a man determined to rise above his circumstances and make a name for himself in a world hostile to people like him, finds his calling in the art of illusion.
In the present day, two friends pretend to be interested buyers to gain access to the house where a famous magician once lived — before mysteriously vanishing.
Once the night falls, all secrets will be revealed… to those who dare cross the threshold of Alakazam.
GO ON, SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
How far would you go to change your life? How far would you go to uncover a decades-old secret? In an abandoned house, built by ambition and sustained by dark magic, fates cross—and past and present bleed through.
One deadly night. One trespass. Finding the way in was easy. Leaving it alive will take a hell of a trick…
Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
