By Jim Mcleod 
Chris Sorensen’s Balancing Act: The Haunting of Sorrow’s Leap Merges Heart and Humour
You can always tell an audiobook narrator wrote it. There’s a rhythm to the prose in The Haunting of Sorrow’s Leap, a cadence meant to be heard. Chris Sorensen builds his sentences with a performer’s ear. It gives the whole reading experience a particular momentum, a forward drive that pulls you through the creaking halls of Utter Hall, whether you meant to turn the page or not.
And what a setting it is. A gothic mansion perched above the Hudson, nicknamed Sorrow’s Leap. You know the deal from the moment it’s described, all looming shadows and inherited misery. It’s a classic stage for a reason. Sorensen clearly revels in it, sketching the environment with a confident, atmospheric hand. It feels both familiar and freshly painted, a testament to his skill in portraying the locale.
The real energy, though, comes from the cast he assembles. Ellen Marx, a psychic who’s lost her mojo, is a fantastic anchor. Her grief is palpable, a low hum beneath the action. But she’s not drowning in it. Surrounding her is this wonderful ensemble of paranormal investigators, each with their own quirks and damaged histories. They talk over each other, they crack jokes at inopportune moments, they feel less like archetypes and more like a group of coworkers you might actually know. The dialogue here crackles with a natural, often humorous, back-and-forth. It’s this human element that grounds the supernatural shenanigans.
This is where Sorensen’s balancing act really shines. The book never stays in one emotional lane for too long. A moment of genuine, skin-prickling dread might be followed by a perfectly timed one-liner. That shift could be jarring, but here it often works. It feels less like a tonal mismatch and more like a very human reaction to the impossible. People deflect with humour. They break the tension with a silly remark. This lightness doesn’t undercut the scares. If anything, it makes the darker dips feel starker and more effective. The hauntings disrupt the rhythm of these characters’ interactions.
Speaking of the hauntings, Sorensen knows his craft. The scary bits are expertly staged. He understands that the suggestion of a shape in the corner of your eye is often worse than the full reveal. He builds set-pieces with a keen sense of rising action, using sound and memory as effectively as any spectral apparition. The horror often feels personal, tied intimately to the characters’ past wounds. Ellen’s struggle with her mother’s legacy provides a strong, emotional throughline that gives the spectral events real weight.
Looking at Sorrow’s Leap, you can spot the throughline from those earlier books, the ones that really let Sorensen cut loose. I’m talking about Bee Tornado and Suckerville. Pure creature features. Unabashed B-movie joy.
Readers described those as a “fun giant creature action adventure” and “the literary version of a B horror film,” the kind of stories where you can imagine the author “smiling and cackling with glee” as he writes. They’re built on a foundation of pulpy carnage and heart, where the humour comes from the sheer, ridiculous commitment to the premise.
That instinct, to undercut tension with a well-placed joke or to balance horror with a wink, didn’t just vanish when he returned to a haunted house. It evolved. In Sorrow’s Leap, that same playful energy is channeled through the ensemble cast—their banter, their quirks, their very human reactions to the inhuman. It’s less about laughing at the monster and more about the humor that flickers between people in the dark.
Some folks might say the tone he perfected for “SyFy Channel shlock” doesn’t always carry over seamlessly to weightier themes of trauma, but you can’t deny it’s part of his signature now. That light touch, that refusal to let the darkness completely swallow the narrative, it’s a direct inheritance from battling tornadoes of prehistoric bees.
Is the book breaking entirely new ground in the haunted house genre? Perhaps not. But it executes its vision with such warmth and charm that it hardly matters. It feels like a loving homage to the stories we tell in the dark, complete with jump scares and emotional payoffs. The resolution leans into themes of closure and confronting the past, offering a kind of catharsis that is ultimately satisfying. It leaves you feeling like you’ve been on a journey with these people, and you’re glad to have seen them through it.
In the end, The Haunting of Sorrow’s Leap succeeds because it prioritises heart. The spooks are fun, the mansion is gloriously creepy, but it’s the messy, talking, joking humanity at its centre that you remember. Sorensen uses the ghost story not just to frighten, but to explore how we carry our histories and how we might, finally, put them down. It’s a spooky, often funny, and genuinely moving ride. A perfect read for when you want a chill that doesn’t leave you cold, but one that reminds you of the warmth on the other side of the dark.
The Haunting of Sorrow’s Leap: a Contemporary Gothic Ghost Thriller by Chris Sorensen
Publisher : Harmful Monkey Press
Ellen Marx used to talk to the dead. Now they’re ghosting her…
With her psychic gifts on the fritz, she’s been demoted to hawking discount crystals at third-rate paranormal conventions. But when she inadvertently solves a supernatural challenge at New Jersey’s Hooky Spooky Convention, she catches the eye of the event’s reclusive sponsor: a washed-up horror author with a haunted mansion in need of a serious cleansing.
Reluctantly, Ellen joins his ragtag crew of psychic misfits (a near-death survivor, a paranormal tech bro, and a woman who may or may not be possessed) to investigate the mystery lurking inside his crumbling Hudson Valley estate.
But as the haunting escalates, Ellen realizes that to uncover the truth behind the manifestation, she must first confront some ghosts of her own…
From the bestselling author of The Nightmare Room comes a darkly humorous journey into a haunted heart.
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