Price range: £5.99 through £9.99
The Omen meets A Head Full of Ghosts in this haunted-house horror story with a mysterious twist from celebrated voice in horror, Chris Panatier.
The Martins need a new home for their growing family. For Alison, Nathan, daughter Dru, and foster child Lailah, it’s love at first sight when they see the house in Tumbling Hills. It even has a cozy attic, which is great for Lailah; she needs a quiet place to be alone when her intrusive thoughts creep in.
(crack an egg into the coffee machine)
The family gets settled. The house is perfect, and so is the timing – Lailah’s adoption will soon be finalized.
(push your sister down the stairs)
But as the date approaches, her intrusive thoughts get worse, and Lailah fears she’s losing control.
(burn them alive in their beds)
“Panatier’s Worry Box remodels the haunted house trope into a sharply written, emotionally charged trap that leaks horror from its drywall like sweat from pores. With a strong emotional foundation, and an attic full of secrets, Panatier has constructed something uniquely haunting.”
– William Sterling, Editor of PUNK Goes Horror
“Sinister, intimate, and deeply unsettling. Worry Box stakes its place among the pantheon of iconic family-centered suburban hauntings. It descends into the fragile space where love becomes denial with suffocating tension. “Buckle up,” sure, but I promise you: it won’t be enough.”
– Peter Rosch, author of What The Dead Can Do
“Chris Panatier will be a household name before long. Too bad all of those houses are haunted. Worry Box may just be his best yet, building up from the Spielbergian blueprints of Poltergeist, annexing Mike Flanagan’s Bly Manor, then expanding upon Richard Mattheson’s most heartfelt haunts to create a cursed house unlike any other, while still leaving plenty of room for his own preternaturally talented voice to flourish. Some books settle into your psyche after you read them. Worry Box moves into your mind and makes itself right at home. It’s never leaving.”
– Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“Chris Panatier’s Worry Box is a suburban, white-picket dream turned nightmare and a fresh take on what it means to haunt and be haunted. This book crept under my skin and preyed on my most maternal instincts. I was scared, sad, hopeful, and sick to my stomach by turn — sometimes all in the same chapter. I couldn’t put it down.”
– Lora Senf, Bram Stoker Award winner and author of The Clackity
“This house is not what it seems.”
– Jess Hagemann, author of Mother-Eating
“Worry Box is an extraordinary nightmare. The kind of book you’re too scared to put down because you fear it will remember you abandoned it, and won’t wait for you to come back to it, but will come looking for you in your house at night.”
– Johnny Compton, author of The Spite House and Dead First
“Worry Box puts a completely fresh spin on the classic ‘haunted house’ trope, but Chris Panatier isn’t content with mere novelty. Instead, readers find themselves in the hands of a storyteller at the peak of his craft, teaching us to love his characters… and then making us watch as he puts them through absolute hell. Cannot recommend this one highly enough.”
– Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters
“Panatier’s Worry Box toys with you enough to keep you on your toes before delivering a creeping, eerie hook.”
– Robert P. Ottone, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Triangle and There’s something Sinister in Centerfield
“Panatier is developing a reputation for taking a terrifying premise and exploring it in unexpected and heartfelt ways. Worry Box might remind you of something King would have written early in his career, but there’s a depth of feeling and warmth here, an empathy for the struggles of family, that is uniquely Panatier’s own. Beautiful and horrifying in equally devastating ways, this book will shake you… and make you rush to hug a loved one.”
– Benjamin Liar, author of The Failures
