The professor by day knows something about buried things. Laura R. Samotin, who holds a PhD in international relations and teaches at the United States Military Academy, has spent years researching military tactics and power politics. But the monsters she writes about are older than any battlefield. Her acclaimed debut, The Sins on Their Bones, announced a voice grounded in Jewish myth, mysticism, and Eastern European heritage. Now she returns with something altogether more claustrophobic. The Way It Haunted Him arrives from Titan Books in June 2026, and it arrives carrying weight.

Her fiction centres queernorm and Jewish-normative worlds, rejecting the Christian narrative structures that dominate speculative fiction. In The Way It Haunted Him, Michael’s unreliability becomes the engine of dread. The reader watches a man unravel in real time, uncertain whether the shadows are real or the product of a mind punishing itself. Samotin calibrated that tension carefully with her editor, leaning into the horror of watching a car crash you cannot stop.

The Laura R. Samotin interview that follows digs into all of this. We talk about Jewish folklore’s hidden creatures, about calibrating an unreliable narrator, and about why Michael Stein might have a few pointed questions for the woman who wrote him. The conversation is raw, specific, and exactly what horror readers are hungry for, something that bruises should sink their teeth into.

Laura R. Samotin: On Grief, Demons and Dark Academia, All Because it was The Way it Haunted Him

Michael is described as a “gay Jewish dark academia horror” set in a demon-infested archive. What drew you to blend Jewish folklore with the dark academia genre?

I’ve always been very drawn to dark academia—it’s an occupational hazard of being a professor for a living. I think there’s so much richness to be explored in a genre that routinely delves into societal expectations, social class, intellectualism, truth, othering, and privilege. In a way it’s the perfect setting to explore other questions of identity and belonging, whether that be because of religion, culture, gender, sexuality, race, etc. 

One of the benefits of being a professor is that I have a lot of unique source material when it comes to writing dark academia. We see a lot of dark academia and horror set in colleges or universities, but some of my most interesting (and most unsettling) work experiences have been in freestanding archives.

Archival work is not something that most people get to do, and so I was excited to be able to transport readers into a unique setting based on some of my own experiences. It was very natural to me to have this archive be one that stored Jewish folklore documents, because it was a unique way to include intersecting identities for Michael, the main character, to grapple with.

Michael arrives at the Institute burdened by guilt and determined to complete his late boyfriend’s research as an act of repentance. Why was it important for you to centre the story around a character navigating such a complicated form of grief?

Michael is grieving the traumatic death of his boyfriend and grappling with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It also becomes apparent through the book that Michael blames himself for his boyfriend’s death—although whether or not he should is a question I ultimately leave up to the reader. His trauma is unique in its specificity, but I think it’s also more universal than you’d think in its complexity.

And what I think is most important, at least to me to explore in fiction, is that life is oftentimes far messier than we’d like it to be. I think that’s valuable for people like me who grapple with these issues in real life and don’t get that neat resolution or perfectly tied-up ending—seeing the messiness of healing reflected in fiction is validating for me, and I hope it’s similarly validating for my readers. There’s no clear path from A to B when it comes to healing, and unlike many survivor narratives, Michael’s healing isn’t linear, and his story is not necessarily tied up in a neat ending. 

Michael is a self-described sceptic, while Jacob believes wholeheartedly in the supernatural. What drew you to that push-and-pull dynamic, and how does it reflect a larger conversation about belief and trauma?

I’ve noticed that as the world has continued to devolve into instability, people—myself included—have found comfort in superstitions, religions, magic, and ancestral practices. I think in times of rising danger and uncertainty, many of us pit modern rationality against ancient sources of comfort and have some level of conflict in doing so. Can talismans, charms, rituals, spells, and other “old” methods of protection really help keep us safe and grounded?

Intuitively the answer might be yes for many people, even if from a scientific basis there’s no way to prove this to be true. It was really interesting for me to be able to explore this in the context of Michael’s story, given that in the book he is very firmly rooted in rationality—that is, until he has no choice but to question whether or not myth and magic play a much bigger role in the world than he’d care to believe. 

I think this reflects a larger conversation about belief and trauma because it speaks to how we get through life’s most difficult times. We all have our own coping mechanisms, and sometimes there is internal or external pushback against those habits. It also speaks to how perception differs among every person, and how trauma can cause the very way we perceive the world to change radically. 

Michael’s unreliability drives the story as a narrator: his guilt, his scepticism, his gradual unravelling. How did you calibrate the reader’s trust in his perceptions while still foreshadowing the true supernatural elements?

This was one of the most interesting things to work on with Daniel Carpenter, my amazing editor! I’m new to the horror genre and two things were the trickiest for me – pacing the dread, and selling Michael’s unreliability. I needed the reader to buy into the way that Michael sees things, while also being able to recognize that he’s unraveling but not being able to do anything about it.

I think that’s where the horror comes from – that tension between seeing the car crash about to happen, and knowing you can’t do anything to stop it. Whether any of this at all is “true” is ultimately up to the reader, but my job as the author was to subtly highlight where Michael sees truth versus fiction. We don’t go around in our daily lives thinking about what’s real and what’s not, so it took some work to give readers that internal monologue without it seeming forced, or being too analytical for a man who may or may not be losing his mind. 

Jewish folklore includes various classes of demons (such as shedim). Can you talk about which specific demonic traditions you drew upon, and how you adapted them to fit a horror narrative while remaining respectful to the source material?

This book was a great way of exploring some of the creatures of Jewish myth and folklore. I won’t spoil the book by listing them all, but the ones that you meet immediately are the mazzekin, which are mischievous demons that Eastern European Jews believed caused trouble in and around people’s homes. They certainty wreak quite a bit of havoc inside the archive while the main character is there working. My absolute favorite Jewish creature also appears in the book, and I’m sure readers will be able to guess exactly what or who that is by the time they’ve reached the last page. 

I didn’t need to do much to adapt them to the narrative – that’s the beauty of writing horror. These were scary entities to the people who believed in them long ago, and it doesn’t take much to make them scary now as well. 

If Michael Stein could speak directly to you, the author who created his pain and his impossible choice, what would he ask you—and what would you want to say back to him?

Being honest, I think he’d ask me why I did this to him! And I’d have to apologize and say it’s in the service of a compelling narrative – but that at least I gave him a cute cat companion to guide him through it.

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 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.