Chasing Demons Book Review and Summary
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Irina Ivanova - 01 Sep, 2026 22:35
Author: Will Shindler
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
Ten cents a word if I am lucky, and yet here I sit staring at a publisher blurb for Will Shindler’s Chasing Demons, trying to inflate three paragraphs of generic thriller boilerplate into an anticipatory preview that won’t make my landlord laugh me out of the hallway. Let us be entirely frank about the raw material provided. It is an uninspired exercise in psychological horror tropes. A former mental health institute massacre. A fractured memory. Suspicion falling squarely on the protagonist because apparently, nobody in modern suspense fiction is allowed to trust their own hippocampus anymore.
The Nostalgia Trap of Broken Brains
We have seen this exact narrative scaffolding a thousand times. Give us a weary schoolteacher dragged back to his claustrophobic hometown of Tayborough—is it ever sunny in these towns? No, it is permanently overcast—and mix in a dash of the supernatural. Shindler, transitioning here into darker genre fiction after his Detective Chief Inspector Alex King procedurals, clearly wants to play in the murky sandbox of Stephen King or a late-career Dennis Lehane. Or perhaps I should say he does not want to do that at all, considering how thoroughly standard-issue this setup reads on paper.
Actually, scratch that last thought entirely. The inclusion of a manipulated dark force rather than a purely psychological break might actually save the manuscript from terminal predictability. Or it will sink it into utter camp.
The Bureaucracy of Suffering
The thematic core here relies lazily on the weaponization of trauma. Twenty-three years of quiet suburban fatherhood undone because a dead therapist was posed just right. It is the literary equivalent of a jump scare in an empty hallway. Yet the interplay between institutional confinement and supernatural manipulation offers a sharp angle on how past grief festers into literal monsters. Joel Sampson is less a character and more a collection of symptoms designed to keep the page-turns moving past midnight.
Watch the reviews praise it as a haunting exploration of the human psyche. They always do. But I am betting it turns out to be a rushed ghost story with too many flashbacks and a thoroughly unearned twist in the final chapter.
Hold on. My phone just buzzed. The agency account manager is having a complete meltdown because my typo-ridden tweet about a rival publishing house’s lead title just hit three hundred retweets and the legal department wants my head on a spike.
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