The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow

The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow by Kelley Armstrong has a classic horror premise: to earn a family inheritance from her grandfather, Samantha Payne must stay at the family’s lakeside cottage for one month.

Sam has been estranged from her grandfather since her father’s suicide at that same property 14 years ago - after she had seen him burying the body of a local boy.

Her grandfather maintained his son’s innocence and apparently believes Sam will realize her mistake by staying at the cottage which was the Payne family’s summer home - which looks exactly the same as it did back then down to her father’s coat draped on the back of a chair.

With her mother’s medical care expenses for her unnamed memory-impacting illness becoming untenable and her aunt’s offer to go with her to the lake, Sam begrudgingly agrees to the terms of her grandfather’s will and goes to Payne’s Hollow - the Bermuda Triangle of upstate New York.

Mysterious things start happening almost immediately, from a creepy figure in the shed to her aunt’s disappearance, and Sam starts uncovering family secrets and unearthing her own memories of what happened here when she was a teenager.

The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow is a thrilling modern gothic with elements of folk horror and the supernatural with a satisfying, unexpected conclusion and definitely a fun read for the Halloween season.

Note: Narration of the audiobook by EJ Lavery was a pleasure to listen to in conjunction with reading the ebook.

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Macmillan Audio for the advance copies for my honest review. Pub. date 10/14/25

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