In any other writer’s hands, the pure potential of this setup would be scary enough, but because this is a Damien Angelica Walters novel, what starts as an unsettling and deeply human tale of loss and fear gradually transforms into something far more nuanced, frightening and absolutely marvelous. The story follows Alison, a horribly scarred young woman navigating the trauma from the loss of the life she used to know, who soon discovers a photo album in a curio shop that is far more terrifying and alive than it seems at the outset. Some of the scariest hauntings are borne out of trauma, and in no other book is this fact examined with such dread and empathy as Damien Angelica Walters’ Paper Tigers. The Photo Album – Paper Tigers, Damien Angelica Walters But the fact of the matter is that some of the scariest haunted houses in fiction aren’t houses at all. Whether it’s Shirley Jackson’s (or Mike Flanagan’s) Hill House, Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, The Good House from Tananarive Due’s novel of the same name or the Freeling home in Poltergeist, every horror fan has a haunted house that’s burned into the center of their imagination. There are few tropes in the wide world of Horror that are more enduring, evocative, or terrifying than the haunted house.
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