Review of “The Haunting of Paynes Hollow” by Kelley Armstrong

Plot:

Twenty-six-year-old Samantha (but call her Sam) Payne is taking care of her ill mother when her fabulously wealthy grandfather dies. She’s not expecting an inheritance. The family doesn’t speak to her. Years earlier, when she was a child, she saw her father burying a child, a boy who had been pestering her, and reported it to the cops. Her father took his own life before he could be tried for murder. The family believes it was all Sam’s fault. Her father was not the kind of person to harm a child.

At the reading of the will (which her grandfather demanded she attend), she learns that he left her ten million dollars, provided that she stay for one month at Payne’s Hollow, the family property on Lake Ontario, where they used to spend their summers and where all the horror happened. Sam could walk away from the money, but things are tight with her mother.

She agrees. Her aunt Gail goes with her. Aunt Gail, a social worker, has already received her inheritance and has no stake in the Lake Ontario property.

Things get uncomfortable. To ensure that Sam stays on the property, the law firm handling her grandfather’s will requires Sam to wear an ankle monitor. The interior of the cottage is exactly as Sam remembers it from fourteen years earlier, and she cannot change anything for thirty days. She can’t even put new sheets on the beds. ICK

Yeah, it could happen.

The surly caretaker, hired years earlier by Sam’s grandfather, is the older brother of the boy that Sam saw her dad burying.

And then things get weird. Sam doesn’t believe what she sees and hears. Lights under the water of the lake? How can that be? And—and butchered animals left where she’s certain to come across them? It gets all so ICKY.

Sam and Aunt Gail argue one evening. Aunt Gail grabs her arm. Sam pulls away, slips, and bangs her knee on the steps. Early the next morning, Sam wakes up to the screen door banging in the wind. Though her car is still parked outside, Aunt Gail is nowhere to be found.

Thoughts:

The reader is dropped right in the middle of things. Sam questions her grasp on reality at several points. After her father died, she sleepwalked. Is she sleepwalking again? This confusion is palpable and understandable.

The book’s pacing is nice and fast. Poor Sam hardly catches a break. The book is a quick read.

So… why didn’t I like it? I didn’t hate it exactly. I just didn’t buy it. The characters are not believable. While Sam has a rich interior life, she behaves like a character in a book, not like a human being. She makes several plot-convenient poor decisions. The same applies to all the characters. The plot itself is rather, well, plotty.

A headless horseman named Brom (think back to English class and Halloween stories) appears on the opposite side of the state from the one from Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown. This headless horseman inspired Washington Irving’s tale. Uh-huh.

Some nice reveals show up toward the end of the book, but these weren’t enough to redeem what I saw as the shallowness of the characters. They were the kind of reveals you’d expect in a book or maybe a cartoon. It had the force of watching Fred and Daphne pulling the mask of the bad guy and hearing, “If it hadn’t been for you meddling kids…”

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Reading gushing reviews makes me wonder if I’m missing something, but I don’t think so.

I regret that while the book has a lot of fun elements and is a quick read, I cannot recommend it.









Title: The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow
Author: Kelley Armstrong
First published: 2025
Length: novel