The Denizens by Brennan LaFaro: Southern Supernatural Gothic Grief
Living with ghosts isn’t a metaphor here. It’s the town policy.
That’s the first thing you learn in Brennan LaFaro’s The Denizens, a southern-tinged slice of grief horror that settles in your bones like a damp chill. Forget haunted houses. Maylene’s Hollow is a haunted municipality. The dead don’t get to rest there, not peacefully anyway. They’re forced to wander the woods, a restless, centuries-old congregation with a mounting grievance. Into this exquisite dysfunction staggers Sam Everett, a man hollowed out by his wife’s sudden death. He thought he was running from memories in the big city. He didn’t realise he was running toward a place where the past isn’t just remembered; it’s animate, it’s pissed off, and it’s reaching through the gaps in the garden fence.
LaFaro, a writer known for mashing horror with other genres in wild and wholly effective ways, pitches this as Salem’s Lot meets Dawn of the Dead with a dash of something wicked and witty. He undersells it. It’s an unsettling exploration of the grief we cling to, the stories towns tell about themselves to sleep at night, and what happens when the repressed, both personal and communal, decides it’s had enough of being quiet.
The genius of Maylene’s Hollow isn’t just its central, chilling premise. It’s the texture of the place. LaFaro builds this small Southern town with such tactile detail you can feel the Georgia sun struggling through the canopy of clutching branches, smell the damp earth, hear the oppressive tick of a clock in a tense silence. The town operates on a “loose understanding” of its own supernatural history, which is a fantastic bit of writing. It means everyone knows, but no one talks. It’s the town’s dirty secret, a foundational rot everyone agrees to build on top of. This collective, willful ignorance is almost more horrifying than the denizens themselves. It’s a bureaucracy of the bizarre.
Sam’s arrival as the new pharmacist is the pebble that starts the landslide. He’s a wound in human form, and his raw, unprocessed sorrow acts like a beacon in the spiritual damp of the Hollow. The town, he learns, has healing to do, but it’s a festering, gangrenous kind of healing that might require amputation.
Sam doesn’t face this alone, thank goodness. LaFaro populates the Hollow with a roster of characters who are anything but stock horror victims. They’re collaborators, in one way or another, in the town’s enduring nightmare.
- The Mysterious Widow (Who Might Be a Murderer): Because of course. In a town like this, you need a guide who knows the shadows intimately, perhaps because she casts the longest one. She’s a reminder that the living can be just as dangerous as the dead.
- The Town Matriarch With Powers of Her Own: Every insular community has its keeper of secrets and its source of quiet, formidable power. She’s the one who maintains the “loose understanding,” the one who decides what’s remembered and what’s politely forgotten.
- The Crotchety Giant Who Sides with the Dead: This might be the masterstroke. In a story about the oppressed dead, having a living ally who actively believes in their right to rebel upends the usual dynamic. He’s not just fighting against something; he’s fighting for something. It adds a layer of moral complexity that resonates deeply.
They’re facets of the town’s broken soul, each with a different idea of what “fixing” it might mean. Sam’s journey is learning to navigate their conflicting agendas while wrestling with their own, the desperate need to let go of their wife to survive, warring with the horrific reality that in Maylene’s Hollow, letting go is exactly what you’re not supposed to do.
If you’re familiar with LaFaro’s work, you know he can write dark. But there’s something different here, a matured and focused potency.
LaFaro has a knack for weaving raw emotion into genre frameworks. In The Denizens, grief isn’t a theme; it’s the antagonist, the catalyst, and, paradoxically, the only potential weapon. Sam’s journey from passive mourner to active participant in the Hollow’s existential crisis is the bruised heart of the novel. The book argues, painfully, that sometimes to truly live, you have to learn how to let the dead go, even, especially, when the world around you is built on forcing them to stay.
In a genre landscape often obsessed with fast shocks and relentless pacing, The Denizens is a potent reminder of the power of atmosphere and accrued unease. It belongs on the shelf with novels that understand horror is a feeling, a location, a consequence of history. It’s for readers who want their terror steeped in sorrow, their supernatural tales grounded in human frailty.
For fans of LaFaro’s Slattery Falls trilogy or his weird west tales like Noose, this represents a confident evolution. It consolidates his strengths, character-driven plots, emotional honesty, and a love for ghostly underpinnings into his most cohesive and chilling work yet. For new readers, it’s a perfect and devastating entry point.
The book releases on February 17, 2026, from Nefarious Bat Press. Pre-orders are live. You should probably secure your copy. Just be prepared. After reading, the rustle of leaves outside your window might sound less like wind and more like something stirring, something old, something that believes it has overstayed its welcome in the ground and has every intention of rectifying that situation.
Maylene’s Hollow waits. And its denizens are done waiting.
The Denizens by Brennan LaFaro
“Mesmerizing, with a quiet but profound sense of dread” — Rachel Harrison, USA Today Bestselling author of Play Nice and So Thirsty
“The Denizens destroys you from the get-go, then has the audacity to resuscitate you with a simple flip of the page. LaFaro has the uncanny knack to equally decimate and resurrect his readers, chapter after chapter, a grief-stricken Prometheus, weighing his writing down with an ache that just keeps us coming back for more.” — Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“The Denizens is a gripping, yet somber apocalyptic novel filled with the occult, the roaming dead, and disparate relationships mended and strained.” — Ai Jiang, author of Linghun and A Palace Near The Wind
“Brennan LaFaro builds dread with the best of them, and The Denizens is a creeping and macabre passage through grief and regret, terror and devotion, hope and pain. What lurks on the outskirts of Maylene’s Hollow will come for you no matter how prepared you think you might be.” — Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Daughters of Block Island and How to Fake a Haunting
“Brennan LaFaro delivers a haunting Southern Gothic where grief, small-town secrets, and ancient horrors converge. In Maylene’s Hollow, the living and the damned walk side by side—and once you enter, the denizens never let you leave. Exceptionally terrifying!” — Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Shoemaker’s Magician
Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it’s allowed to rest…
A small southern town surrounded by a living cemetery was the last place Sam Everett expected to find himself after the sudden death of his wife. Desperate to get away from the city and its memories, Sam flees to the tight-knit community of Maylene’s Hollow.
Except the Hollow holds a secret. The town won’t allow its dead to rest. Forced to wander the earth for hundreds of years, the denizens of the woods have had enough.
With the help of a mysterious widow who may also be a murderer, the town’s matriarch who seems to possess magical abilities, and an ornery giant who believes the dead may be right to rebel, Sam must learn to let go of the dead in order to truly live.
Facebook Post:
Just finished Brennan LaFaro’s upcoming horror novel, The Denizens, and my nerves are still jangling. This isn’t your average ghost story—it’s a deep, Southern-gothic dive into grief, haunted towns, and the secrets we bury. If you like your horror atmospheric, emotional, and genuinely chilling, you’ll want to know about this one. My full review is ready. 👇 (Link in the comments!)
Bluesky Post:
Review for Brennan LaFaro’s The Denizens is up. Southern gothic horror at its finest—a tale of a grief-stricken man and a town that won’t let its dead lie. Atmospheric, haunting, and deeply affective. A must for horror readers. #HorrorFiction #BookReview
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