By Jim Mcleod 
Midnight Somewhere, Wandering Through Johnny Compton’s Dark Imagination
So. Midnight. It’s just a time on a clock, right? A neat little transition from one day to the next. But you know, and I know it’s never just that. It’s the witching hour. The time when the familiar contours of your room soften into strange shadows. The time when a creak in the floorboards isn’t the house settling, it’s something listening back. Johnny Compton gets this. He understands that midnight isn’t just a moment you watch pass on your phone screen. It’s a condition. A state of being. And in his debut collection, Midnight Somewhere, he serves as a deeply unsettling tour guide through all its manifestations.
The premise is right there in that perfectly chosen title. Darkness isn’t a scheduled event. Horror isn’t polite enough to only appear after sundown in your particular zip code. It’s always lurking just sideways from someone’s reality. Compton, a Bram Stoker Award-nominated author who cut his teeth on podcasts like Pseudopod and The No Sleep Podcast, has built a collection that feels like a grand, grim proof of concept for that idea. This isn’t a book about monsters under the bed. It’s about the monsters that build the bed, that live in the history of the land your house sits on, that whisper to you through the very screens you hold in your hand.
Good horror short stories are a devilish trick to pull off. You have to establish a world, make people care, and then twist the knife, all before a reader finishes their cup of coffee. Compton doesn’t just pull it off. He makes it look easy, like he’s been waiting in the dark this whole time, just for you to turn the page.
Standouts in the Shadows: A Tour of Personal Nightmares
Talking about a collection with over twenty stories is like trying to describe a haunted house by only talking about the front door. You gotta go inside. You have to poke around. And while the whole tour is worth your time, some rooms, well, they stick with you. They change the temperature.
“The Death Grip Challenge.” Ever fallen down one of those internet rabbit holes? You know the ones. Where you watch people do something profoundly stupid for likes, a cascade of escalating dares that curdles something in your gut. Compton takes that modern itch for virality and scratches it until it bleeds.
This story isn’t about a ghost in the machine. It’s about the machine of us, our collective id dressed up in a challenge tag. The horror here is so plausible it feels less like fiction and more like a news alert you’re desperately hoping you never see. It mirrors our own psychological chaos, that desperate need for validation warring with a deep, buried impulse for self-destruction. The scariest part? No supernatural force required. Just us.
Then there’s “The Merge Monster Incident: One Year Later.” The premise sounds almost silly when you say it out loud. A roller coaster. A sentient, walking roller coaster that uproots itself from its foundation and trudges off into the woods, passengers still strapped in. Ridiculous, right? But Compton, through a brilliant epistolary format of reports and interviews, makes you believe it.
He makes you feel the ground shake. He taps into that primal fear of the giant thing that should not move. We personify our machines all the time—we give our cars names, we curse at our computers. This story asks what happens if they finally answer back. What if that vast, complex, screaming thing we built for thrills decides it has a will of its own? It’s a masterpiece of taking a wild concept and grounding it in such tangible, bureaucratic detail that the dread becomes inescapable.
And for my money, the crown jewel of the collection might be the finale, “Dead Bastards Revival Services.” Two inventors develop a method for trapping human souls in digital vials for later resurrection in robotic shells. A religious community hires them for a specific job: bring back a convicted child murderer. Not for forgiveness.
For a more… direct form of justice. This is where Compton soars. He blends theology, technology, and raw, human vengeance into a story that feels both ancient and chillingly new. It’s a stark examination of what happens when the desire to play God is dressed in the robes of righteous wrath. Is it resurrection if the goal is eternal punishment? The story sits with you, heavy and cold, long after you’ve closed the book.
What makes Midnight Somewhere more than just a spook show is the voice guiding you through it. Compton has a particular talent, one he mentions in an interview. He says starting with his short stories is a good idea because readers will quickly learn he’s “capable of dark endings.” That’s a quiet, almost understated way of putting it. But it’s crucial. That knowledge sits with you as you read. It creates a baseline of dread because you understand no character is safe. No assumption is solid. The floor could give way at any moment.
He pairs that capacity for darkness with a genuine, often surprising, sincerity. It’s the difference between a cheap jump-scare and a real haunting. You have to care about the people in the dark before you can be truly horrified by what happens to them. Compton makes you care, even when you know it’s probably a bad idea.
It’s impossible not to mention the lineage here. The book’s own description invites comparisons to Stephen King’s Night Shift, Tananarive Due’s The Wishing Pool, and the visceral nightmares of Junji Ito. These aren’t casual name-drops. They’re a roadmap. From King, Compton inherits that blue-collar grasp of everyday people in utterly un-everyday situations. From Due, he draws a profound understanding of haunting as something deeply intertwined with history and legacy. And from Ito, he borrows a willingness to let the grotesque and the surreal be, without always needing a tidy explanation.
But he’s no mere imitator. The voice is distinctly his. They have that Twilight Zone knack for a killer premise and a devastating final twist, but painted with darker, wetter, more psychologically complex strokes.
Is every single story a flawless home run? Well. In a collection this wide-ranging, personal taste will always come into play. But even the so-called weaker stories in this collection are still stronger than most horror out there.
Midnight Somewhere is more than an assortment of scary tales. It’s a statement. It’s Compton proving that his acclaimed novel The Spite House was no fluke, that his voice is one of the freshest and most compelling in modern horror. This collection has range. It can give you the creeps with a folk horror tale about a family dinner, then turn around and freeze your blood with a tech nightmare about digital souls.
Reading it feels like having a series of intense, unforgettable dreams. Some are sharp and shocking. Others are slow and sorrowful, clinging to you like a chill. They all share a common thread: a deep understanding that the most terrifying things aren’t the ones that go bump in the night. They’re the bumps already inside us.
The grief, the guilt, the pride, the desperate need to be seen, the hunger for connection or for revenge. Compton finds the perfect, horrible metaphor to give them shape. And once you see that shape, you can’t unsee it. After all, no matter where you are, no matter what time your watch says, it’s always midnight somewhere. And Johnny Compton is there, waiting, with a story you didn’t know you were afraid of. Until now.
Midnight Somewhere by Johnny Compton
From Bram Stoker Award–nominated author Johnny Compton, Midnight Somewhere is a frightening collection of thought-provoking stories perfect for fans of Stephen King’s Night Shift, Tananarive Due’s The Wishing Pool, and the work of Junji Ito.
A man gets into a car that can take him anywhere he can imagine—including the past, into the worst mistake of his life, a memory he does not want to relive, cannot escape, and is even more afraid to alter …
A seemingly harmless, forgettable film about “alien hand syndrome” inspires a wave of self-harm among viewers—and even stranger things among those who become obsessed with it …
A woman tries to bring her dead lover to life through a macabre ritual that requires attacking his corpse. Is it because she longs to be with him again … or because the two of them have unfinished business?
The assorted characters in this thrilling collection encounter horrors that range from mysterious to murderous, discovering that darkness can find anyone, anywhere, at any hour of the day. After all, it’s always Midnight Somewhere …
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