It Waits in the Woods
Josh Malerman
From the Creature Feature collection for Amazon available free through Prime as a member

From the same collection as The Pram by Joe Hill, at 51 pages this novella follows a young woman as she seeks answers about her sister’s disappearance three years before. A budding documentarian, Brenda goes into the wilderness with a theory about a creature there that may be responsible for her sister’s disappearance and death; a death which Brenda has already accepted and which her parents have openly blamed her for.
I had initially been reading this story them stopped myself and started over because I felt I was reading it too quickly. It’s definitely a story to be savored so that the build is satisfying. It follows traditional horror novel plotting and slow, crawling progress buffered by world building.
On my second reading, I really enjoyed the way the world was plotted. It’s not something to listen to idly as an audio book or skim over. It also featured a first If seen in quite a while—an actual goddamn monster. Harkening to creature features it’s a wonderful homage to horror stories of 70s film when much of mainstream horror transitioned from Universal Monsters to the unknown, human, and perverse.

10/10, read it babes