Worry Box

By Chris Panatier.

What happens when you can no longer tell the difference between an intrusive thought and something that might actually happen?

Worry Box begins with what appears to be an unusually happy and emotionally healthy family. Alison and Nathan Martin have moved with their daughter Dru and foster daughter Lailah into a new home in Tumbling Hills, just as they prepare for Lailah's adoption to become official.

For Lailah, the house even offers somewhere she can retreat when her intrusive thoughts become overwhelming. She knows the frightening things that enter her mind aren't instructions and doesn't want to act upon them. But when increasingly disturbing incidents begin happening around the house, that certainty becomes much harder to hold onto.

I loved how much time Chris Panatier spends establishing the Martins as a family before really allowing the horror to take hold. Alison and Nathan communicate, support their children and genuinely try to create a safe environment for them. I became invested in all four of them, which made watching that security gradually disappear considerably more unsettling.

The house itself is wonderfully sinister without immediately announcing itself as such. Small details begin to feel wrong, suspicions develop and suddenly the comfortable family home established at the beginning feels completely different.

The multiple perspectives work particularly well because I constantly questioned what I could trust. Different characters interpret the same increasingly frightening situation through their own experiences, and there were points where I genuinely couldn't decide whether somebody was hiding something, misremembering events or being completely truthful.

More importantly, I never felt that the mental health elements were being used as an easy explanation for frightening behaviour. The treatment of intrusive thoughts in particular felt much more thoughtful than the casual way the term is so often used. Lailah isn't reduced to her thoughts, and neither are the other characters reduced to the difficult experiences that have shaped them.

That empathy extends to Alison and Nathan too. Watching two capable, loving parents reach the limits of what they can cope with was far more effective for me than simply filling the story with obviously dysfunctional characters. Their growing fear and mistrust feels frightening precisely because we've already seen how much they love one another.

And once those cracks begin appearing, the tension becomes relentless.

By the final section I was questioning practically everyone. There were moments when I desperately wanted to warn characters about something while simultaneously wondering whether I had completely misunderstood what I'd witnessed myself. That uncertainty made the later chapters incredibly difficult to put down.

There is plenty here for horror readers, but what impressed me most was how grounded everything feels beneath the increasingly disturbing events. Worry Box is as interested in family, empathy, trauma, parenthood and trust as it is in frightening you.

I went into this expecting horror. I wasn't expecting to care quite so much about the family trapped at the centre of it.

Thank you to Raessa and the team at Angry Robot Books for running this book-tour! The book is out now and available to purchase.

Support a local and independent bookshop and purchase the book here.

Purchase the E-Book here.