Accidents Never Happen Book Review and Summary
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Camille Dubois - 01 Sep, 2026 14:14
Author: Penny Zang
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
Truth be told, September always brings out this ridiculous urge to pretend I am still twenty-two, chain-smoking cloves behind a dive bar while analyzing Edgar Allan Poe like it pays rent, which is precisely why Penny Zang’s upcoming Accidents Never Happen—slated for 2026 and currently leaning hard on the same moody atmospheric crutches as Long Bright River—has me staring down into a lukewarm cup of diner coffee and wondering if we are ever going to get past the tortured-sister trope. Zang clearly wants to bottle that specific 1980s Baltimore grit, mixing Blondie records with missing fathers and fake ghosts in an upstairs window, yet the synopsis practically begs for a tighter focus on the actual sisterly friction rather than tossing in the infamous Poe Toaster just to pad the suspense. Because nothing says heavy-handed gothic pastiche quite like a killer leaving dead roses and sherry at a crime scene, right on cue, as if serial murderers read literary history textbooks before planning their weekend errands.
Edgar Allan Poe.
Or maybe the killer is just a pretentious grad student.
Zang is riding the coattails of Doll Parts, which had its moments of sharp prose, but this new premise stretches credibility right out the gate—who honestly thinks fabricating a ghost story about a dead nineteenth-century poet to save a failing neighborhood bar won’t immediately attract the worst kind of weirdos, especially in a city already crawling with urban legends? Mad and Annabel deserve better than to be walking plot devices in a thriller that relies on cheap theatricality instead of actual human dread, though I suppose we will all pretend to be shocked when the missing father turns out to be tied up in the local lore. Or maybe not. I might have entirely misjudged the pacing based on the vague marketing copy, because the synopsis pivots so fast from nostalgic coming-of-age drama to slasher-movie pastiche that I honestly cannot tell if this is supposed to be a gritty regional mystery or an Edgar Allan Poe fanfiction written by committee.
Actually, the Poe angle is probably brilliant if executed with enough irony.
Or it is a total disaster waiting to happen.
September dampness is fogging up the cracked diner window beside me, mirroring the exact kind of suffocating hometown claustrophobia Zang is trying to sell in this book, and I can already picture the rushed third-act confrontation where everything goes up in flames because teenagers in 1985 apparently didn’t know how to call the police instead of investigating a serial killer alone. Fans of Bright Young Women will likely eat this up anyway, hungry for another nostalgic true-crime adjacent aesthetic that trades real emotional stakes for spooky set-dressing, but I am reserving judgment until I actually see whether the prose can survive its own gimmick.
Nevermore.
I have to go finish painting a terribly depressing portrait.
