Your Shadow Half Remains (Tor Nightfire, February 6, 2024). Cover by David Seidman

Nightfire is Tor’s new horror imprint, and it’s made quite an impact on the field in the the past two years. Some of its releases include the Locus Award-winning What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw’s Stoker nominee The Salt Grows Heavy, and Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey’s The Dead Take the A Train.

Sunny Moraine’s novella Your Shadow Half Remains arrived from Nightfire last month, and while I was browsing Sally Kobe’s booth at Capricon it leaped enthusiastically into my hands.

The Casting the Bones series from Masque Books: Crowflight
(September 15, 2013) and Ravenfall (August 4, 2014). Artist unknown

Sunny’s previous books include Labyrinthian (2015) from Samhain Publishing, and the Casting the Bones series from Masque Books. I haven’t seen much early press about Your Shadow Half Remains, though I did see recently that Publisher’s Weekly called it ”A freaky and masterfully constructed tale… Read this one with the lights on,” and that sounds promising.

Library Journal published a rave review by Becky Spratford last year; here’s an excerpt.

Riley lives alone on the shores of an isolated lake in the home that belonged to her grandparents — that is, before they murdered each other. She lives in a slowly collapsing world, where for the last two years, looking a human in the eye, be it a real person, an image, or even a reflection, will spur them to violence, causing them to kill everyone near them. Then Riley meets Ellis on the road and dares to connect with another person…

Creepy from its first lines, this deceptively quiet roller-coaster of intense unease, palpable emotional trauma, and engrossing menace will appeal to a wide swath of readers.

Your Shadow Half Remains is a slender novella (162 pages) that even I can read in a few days. It’s at the top of my TBR pile. And every time I pass by my night stand it leaps into my hands.

Your Shadow Half Remains was published by Tor Nightfire on February 6, 2024. It is 162 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by David Seidman.

See all our recent coverage of the best new science fiction and fantasy here.