A terrifying and powerful dark academia novel about Jewish folklore, grief, and other things locked in the archives. Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Tori Bovalino and Sunyi Dean.

“It’s real. You’ll see.”

Michael Stein arrives at the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies in upstate New York, battered and broken after the death of his boyfriend seven months prior. Blaming himself for the accident that killed him, Michael has come to the Institute to complete his boyfriend’s dissertation as part of his effort at repentance. While Michael’s own past leads him to condemn superstition as a way to mask prejudice and old-fashioned beliefs, his boyfriend’s research argues that the folktales told in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were based in truth, and that demons and other creatures walked the earth, wreaking havoc on peoples’ lives.

Instead of the Institute’s infamous archivist, Michael is met by his grandson, Jacob Schechter, who has taken over the archive after his grandfather’s death. A firm believer in the existence of the supernatural, Jacob explains that the archive plays host to a coterie of household demons. Michael insists that he is a skeptic, but strange and frightening occurrences plague his research, causing Michael to question both his sanity and his view of the world.

To cope with his guilt, grief, and the terrifying shadows following him, Michael must reckon with the events leading up to his boyfriend’s death-and his role in it-by trusting the enigmatic Jacob to help uncover the truth. As untangling the mysteries of the past bring Jacob and Michael closer together, their respective secrets threaten to tear them apart. Because Michael is not the only one with darkness on his conscience, and if he and Jacob discover the truth of each other, only one of them may survive the fallout.

The Way it Haunted Him is out today from Titan Books – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

Superstition and Survival in Today’s World

Every time I move to a new home, the first things I bring across the threshold are bread, salt, and something sweet. This isn’t to stave off hunger during the move—the salt is to ward the home against demons, the bread is to ensure the home’s inhabitants prosper and are never hungry, and the sweet treat is to placate any spirits currently living in the house. (“Official” superstition calls for jam, but I’ve usually defaulted to either Oreos or a brownie, and I’ve never had an issue with malevolent household spirits, so I suppose the substitution must be acceptable.)

I do this every time I move not because I truly and deeply believe that putting certain things in the corner of a new apartment can actually ward off danger or ensure success. I’m a logical person, and there’s nothing I can point to to make it make sense. I can’t even tell you that the ritual works—how could I “prove” that I’ve kept invisible demons out of my house using salt? How can I show you that my success is due to bread being one of the first things to cross a new threshold?

I can’t, and yet I do it anyway, every time. And I’ve brought bread, salt, and sugar friends’ new homes, to do the ritual for them. I do it because it feels good, and reassuring, and safe. It feels meaningful to take an action that my ancestors would have taken when they had to move. It feels like there’s an invisible thread of protection stretching back through the generations, reassuring in a way I can’t really put a finger on. The crazier the world starts to feel, the more I feel drawn to this, and many other, ancestral practices and superstitions.

In The Way It Haunted Him, my dark academia horror out on June 9 th , Michael Stein visits the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies, an archive of Jewish folklore. One of the biggest conflicts he faces is whether or not he believes in the ancient superstitions documented in the archive—especially when he sees superstition and belief as completely opposed to modern rationality, and very especially when things start happening around him that he can’t explain.

I won’t spoil whether Michael’s skepticism ultimately turns to belief. But I do think that sometimes superstitions are worth holding on to, serving as sources of comfort in a crazy world and a connection to one’s past, even if it’s not entirely rational. There’s a logic to the illogical pursuit of security through superstition—and we shouldn’t look down on long-held coping mechanisms that got generations past through uncertain times. Sometimes, those superstitions, practices, and beliefs can work for us too.

I’ve noticed that as the world has continued to devolve into instability, people—myself included—have found comfort in superstitions, religions, magic, and ancestral practices. I think in times of rising danger and uncertainty, many of us pit modern rationality against ancient sources of comfort and have some level of conflict in doing so. Can talismans, charms, rituals, spells, and other “old” methods of protection really help keep us safe and grounded? Intuitively the answer might be yes for many people, even if from a scientific basis there’s no way to prove this to be true. It was interesting for me to be able to explore this in the context of Michael’s story, given that in the book he is very firmly rooted in rationality—that is, until he has no choice but to question whether or not myth and magic play a much bigger role in the world than he’d care to believe.

So the next time that you feel compelled to do something objectively strange because who knows, it just might help? Go for it. Believe. Do what those who came before you did, even if it seems silly to the modern eye. There’s beauty in anchoring yourself with this kind of continuity. And these days, that’s a very worthy thing.

The Way it Haunted Him is out today from Titan Books – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

Laura R. Samotin has a PhD in international relations and enjoys using her academic background on military tactics, power politics, and leadership to enliven and inform her creative writing. Her adult fiction is grounded in Jewish myth, mysticism, and her Eastern European Jewish heritage.

She served as a 2021 #DVMentor mentor and a 2021-2022 WriteMentor Summer Program mentor, and also runs the website Query101 to help authors on their writing journey. She lives with her spouse, and when she’s not researching or writing, she relishes her role as a full-time cat servant.