Joshua Chaplinsky’s The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night is a surreal, multi-timeline haunted house novel about the ways abuse gets passed down through a family like an heirloom nobody wants. The first third asks more patience than it gives back, but once the Vogel House’s true shape emerges, this becomes one of the more genuinely upsetting horror novels of the year.
Joshua Chaplinsky charts the two hundred and fifty year history of the haunted house novel, from Pliny the Younger’s cursed Athens letter through Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King’s The Shining and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It lands as his own contribution to the subgenre, The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night, arrives from CLASH Books.
