What do you think?
Rate this book
Temple Fall
Not yet published
Expected 17 Feb 26A macabre and chilling supernatural gothic horror about a group of teenagers cursed to die on their 18th birthday from the Stoker Award shortlisted author of The Book of the Baku. Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman, The September House by Carissa Orlando and The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.
Flynn heads with her boyfriend, Jackson, and a group of their friends to spend the night in Temple Fall, a mysterious house up on the moors with a strange history. Breaking in for a night of drinking and teenage debauchery they instead find themselves trapped in a strange nightmare after a joke seance goes wrong. Suddenly forced into strange acts and behaviours outside their character, the tight-knit group starts to fall apart - and then Jackson falls to his death.
In the aftermath Flynn must confront the traumas of her childhood, her upbringing in captivity with her mother who suffered from crippling paranoia and OCD. As a foster child she has been forced to make her own place in the world, to forge a new family out of the few scraps of hope and compassion she has been offered in her life. And everywhere she looks she sees the ghostly figure of a Victorian woman, that no one else can see.
The woman that pushed Jackson.
Reeling from the tragedy the group find themselves split apart, each grieving and trying to survive on their own. But when they start to die, one-by-one, on the very second of their 18th birthday, Flynn must keep them all together to keep her found family alive. And she must dig into the lost secrets of her family past, to stop the curse being passed down to the next generation again.
Flynn heads with her boyfriend, Jackson, and a group of their friends to spend the night in Temple Fall, a mysterious house up on the moors with a strange history. Breaking in for a night of drinking and teenage debauchery they instead find themselves trapped in a strange nightmare after a joke seance goes wrong. Suddenly forced into strange acts and behaviours outside their character, the tight-knit group starts to fall apart - and then Jackson falls to his death.
In the aftermath Flynn must confront the traumas of her childhood, her upbringing in captivity with her mother who suffered from crippling paranoia and OCD. As a foster child she has been forced to make her own place in the world, to forge a new family out of the few scraps of hope and compassion she has been offered in her life. And everywhere she looks she sees the ghostly figure of a Victorian woman, that no one else can see.
The woman that pushed Jackson.
Reeling from the tragedy the group find themselves split apart, each grieving and trying to survive on their own. But when they start to die, one-by-one, on the very second of their 18th birthday, Flynn must keep them all together to keep her found family alive. And she must dig into the lost secrets of her family past, to stop the curse being passed down to the next generation again.
- GenresHorror
336 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication February 17, 2026
262 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Read
December 10, 2025Unfortunately, I'm dnf'ing this one at 50%. I was expecting to be dragged into this abandoned mansion and learn its secrets etc. but so far the time there was minimal and the present/past time jumps have been jarring. Just not connecting with this one.
December 29, 2025
This book takes way too long to get good but once it does, it’s GOOD. It takes a while to get there though, they don’t even get into the seance that kicks off everything until about 20% in and aside from the flashbacks of Flynn’s backstory, the rest is just filler. But once it gets at around 40% in, it not only picks up, it becomes an intensely delicious horror story. This is one of those cases where slogging through the beginning does pay off!
I don’t know why I was surprised because clearly the book is advertised as horror, but this is full fledged horror in a way I wasn’t expecting in a YA novel. I read this at midnight and had to turn on a light 😂 It’s annoying that you have to get through almost the first half before it starts to get interesting, but when it starts to get good, it’s actually really scary. The backstory of the house, how terrifying the villain is, it becomes a REALLY good read.
The concept of this book is a fun popcorn horror plot. Horror story about teens messing with the supernatural in a haunted house (TERRIBLE idea to begin with but even worse with this house in particular) then all of them start to die the moment they turn eighteen. The house in question is one of the most evil, horrific haunted houses I’ve ever read about in horror.
I was fairly certain (after around the 50% mark) that I was going to give this 4 stars, but this ended up being a not as satisfying as I wanted. I don’t always expect the ending of a horror novel to be satisfying, that’s just how the genre is sometimes, but the biggest drawback is there is no explanation for why the villain is so evil. Someone who’s THAT evil without being given a backstory, a reason, an explanation, it just makes the villain feel cartoony. My feelings on this book was the first half was boring, the middle was great, and the ending was lackluster. Not a bad read by any means, but it was just missing something!
Thank you to Netgalley and Titan for sending me an advanced copy in return for my honest review.
I don’t know why I was surprised because clearly the book is advertised as horror, but this is full fledged horror in a way I wasn’t expecting in a YA novel. I read this at midnight and had to turn on a light 😂 It’s annoying that you have to get through almost the first half before it starts to get interesting, but when it starts to get good, it’s actually really scary. The backstory of the house, how terrifying the villain is, it becomes a REALLY good read.
The concept of this book is a fun popcorn horror plot. Horror story about teens messing with the supernatural in a haunted house (TERRIBLE idea to begin with but even worse with this house in particular) then all of them start to die the moment they turn eighteen. The house in question is one of the most evil, horrific haunted houses I’ve ever read about in horror.
I was fairly certain (after around the 50% mark) that I was going to give this 4 stars, but this ended up being a not as satisfying as I wanted. I don’t always expect the ending of a horror novel to be satisfying, that’s just how the genre is sometimes, but the biggest drawback is there is no explanation for why the villain is so evil. Someone who’s THAT evil without being given a backstory, a reason, an explanation, it just makes the villain feel cartoony. My feelings on this book was the first half was boring, the middle was great, and the ending was lackluster. Not a bad read by any means, but it was just missing something!
Thank you to Netgalley and Titan for sending me an advanced copy in return for my honest review.
January 2, 2026
A genuinely unnerving haunted house story. I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.
We follow a bunch of teenagers on a camping trip for one of their eighteenth birthday. They plan to camp on the grounds of an old, derelict house but a storm drives them inside. They mess with things they really shouldn’t and of course there are dark consequences.
The characters are quite immature and it’s easy to see how they become quickly out of their depth. I quite liked this approach from the author. They were making such bad choices and it was believable how things could go so wrong. At the same time, they aren’t bad or particularly awful so you do feel quite sorry for them with what follows. This is quite prevalent at the start of the book and was an interesting parallel as we learn more around the history of the house later on and you see the impact on people far better equipped to deal with what they encounter.
The house and what it contains are genuinely unnerving. There’s an insidious consequence that the teenagers experience and it’s extremely creepy. There’s an element of ticking clock to this story that worked really well.
I found this to be a creepy and entertaining haunted house story. An enjoyable read.
We follow a bunch of teenagers on a camping trip for one of their eighteenth birthday. They plan to camp on the grounds of an old, derelict house but a storm drives them inside. They mess with things they really shouldn’t and of course there are dark consequences.
The characters are quite immature and it’s easy to see how they become quickly out of their depth. I quite liked this approach from the author. They were making such bad choices and it was believable how things could go so wrong. At the same time, they aren’t bad or particularly awful so you do feel quite sorry for them with what follows. This is quite prevalent at the start of the book and was an interesting parallel as we learn more around the history of the house later on and you see the impact on people far better equipped to deal with what they encounter.
The house and what it contains are genuinely unnerving. There’s an insidious consequence that the teenagers experience and it’s extremely creepy. There’s an element of ticking clock to this story that worked really well.
I found this to be a creepy and entertaining haunted house story. An enjoyable read.
November 16, 2025
Temple Fall is a gothic fever dream—macabre, surreal, and steeped in the kind of dread that clings to the skin long after the final page. R.L. Boyle, Stoker Award-shortlisted author of The Book of the Baku, returns with a tale that feels like a séance in prose: intimate, spectral, and utterly consuming.
Flynn and her friends enter the moors seeking mischief and escape, but the house they choose—Temple Fall—is no ordinary ruin. It’s a place that reshapes reality, warps time, and refuses to let go. What begins as teenage bravado quickly curdles into horror, as the group fractures under the weight of grief, guilt, and something far older than any of them can name.
Boyle’s writing is lush and disorienting, like fog rolling over memory. The spectre of a Victorian woman haunts not just Flynn’s waking hours but the very structure of the story, which slips between past and present with eerie fluidity. There’s a quiet elegance to the way Boyle explores trauma—how it isolates, how it binds, how it echoes through generations.
Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman and Lauren Beukes, Temple Fall is not just a ghost story—it’s a reckoning. A tale of cursed youth, fractured friendship, and the lingering question: what if the house never let you leave?
My thanks to RL Boyle, the publisher and netgalley for the ARC.
Flynn and her friends enter the moors seeking mischief and escape, but the house they choose—Temple Fall—is no ordinary ruin. It’s a place that reshapes reality, warps time, and refuses to let go. What begins as teenage bravado quickly curdles into horror, as the group fractures under the weight of grief, guilt, and something far older than any of them can name.
Boyle’s writing is lush and disorienting, like fog rolling over memory. The spectre of a Victorian woman haunts not just Flynn’s waking hours but the very structure of the story, which slips between past and present with eerie fluidity. There’s a quiet elegance to the way Boyle explores trauma—how it isolates, how it binds, how it echoes through generations.
Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman and Lauren Beukes, Temple Fall is not just a ghost story—it’s a reckoning. A tale of cursed youth, fractured friendship, and the lingering question: what if the house never let you leave?
My thanks to RL Boyle, the publisher and netgalley for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
(I received this book from the editor and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review)
A group of friends go to the ruins of a mansion, Temple Fall, to celebrate an 18th birthday with booze, weed and some music and it somehow ends with a cadaver and the rest of them disappearing from the face of earth for several months. And then they start to mysteriously die on the day of their birthday.
Easy, straightforward, and with a beautiful prose. A little bit of Final Destination, a little bit of Shirley Jackson, a Ouija board… and, sadly, many, many detours due to miscommunication or lack of communication at all. I do understand that some of these are the result of the house playing with the characters’ minds, but they only seemed to happen when it was convenient for the plot and relentlessly dragged some of the conversations or scenes.
I liked the idea of the haunting staying inside the characters (very Hill House-sque), but I feel that in the end, if we put all the trinkets and odds and look at them all, this novel did not quite work for me. I enjoyed the flashbacks to Flynn’s childhood and the Outsiders more than anything else, I’m afraid.
A group of friends go to the ruins of a mansion, Temple Fall, to celebrate an 18th birthday with booze, weed and some music and it somehow ends with a cadaver and the rest of them disappearing from the face of earth for several months. And then they start to mysteriously die on the day of their birthday.
Easy, straightforward, and with a beautiful prose. A little bit of Final Destination, a little bit of Shirley Jackson, a Ouija board… and, sadly, many, many detours due to miscommunication or lack of communication at all. I do understand that some of these are the result of the house playing with the characters’ minds, but they only seemed to happen when it was convenient for the plot and relentlessly dragged some of the conversations or scenes.
I liked the idea of the haunting staying inside the characters (very Hill House-sque), but I feel that in the end, if we put all the trinkets and odds and look at them all, this novel did not quite work for me. I enjoyed the flashbacks to Flynn’s childhood and the Outsiders more than anything else, I’m afraid.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Temple Fall was not what I was expecting it to be from the plot summary. It states that fans of The September House by Carissa Orlando would love this, but I felt that they were not very comparable in terms of enjoyment or story. I'm not too sure if this is being marketed as young adult or adult. However, it read young adult to me mostly. This turned me off the story majorly. I thought about DNFing it, but I decided to push through.
The only portion of the story I enjoyed was the aspects of the house. I liked the descriptions and everything that came with that. When the story would shift to something else, I would instantly lose interest. The gothic atmosphere was definitely there; that's a favorite of mine. Overall, it was very easy to read. I just wish it landed better for me.
Thank you NetGalley, Titan Books, & R.L. Boyle for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The only portion of the story I enjoyed was the aspects of the house. I liked the descriptions and everything that came with that. When the story would shift to something else, I would instantly lose interest. The gothic atmosphere was definitely there; that's a favorite of mine. Overall, it was very easy to read. I just wish it landed better for me.
Thank you NetGalley, Titan Books, & R.L. Boyle for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I really enjoyed this creepy haunted house novel. It had a few twists in it that I did not see coming.
Flynn and her four close friends, including her boyfriend Jackson, decide to camp out near Temple Fall for Jackson’s eighteenth birthday. They’ve chosen Temple Fall because Flynn has been researching her ancestry and discovered that her several times great grandmother used to own it. When an unexpected thunderstorm breaks out during the camping trip, the five teenagers seek refuge inside Temple Fall. This turns out to be a huge mistake.
This book is intense and clips along at a fast pace. I liked the history of the house and its inhabitants. I thought the first half of the book was perhaps YA, given the age of the main characters and the plot. But then things got darker and I realized it’s very much a book for adults.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange of an honest review.
Flynn and her four close friends, including her boyfriend Jackson, decide to camp out near Temple Fall for Jackson’s eighteenth birthday. They’ve chosen Temple Fall because Flynn has been researching her ancestry and discovered that her several times great grandmother used to own it. When an unexpected thunderstorm breaks out during the camping trip, the five teenagers seek refuge inside Temple Fall. This turns out to be a huge mistake.
This book is intense and clips along at a fast pace. I liked the history of the house and its inhabitants. I thought the first half of the book was perhaps YA, given the age of the main characters and the plot. But then things got darker and I realized it’s very much a book for adults.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange of an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Temple Fall by R.L. Boyle is a macabre supernatural tale set on the eerie moors. The story follows a group of teenagers whose night of rebellion at the mysterious Temple Fall spirals into a surreal nightmare following a botched seance.
The Good:
Boyle excels at atmosphere, crafting a sense of dread that fans of The Book of the Baku will recognize. The central hook—a curse involving a Victorian baby farmer—is uniquely unsettling, and protagonist Flynn’s history of trauma provides a strong emotional anchor.
The Bad:
The pacing is uneven; after a gripping start, the middle section loses momentum. Some character actions feel driven more by plot necessity than organic development, and the repetitive supernatural imagery begins to lose its chilling impact toward the climax.
The Good:
Boyle excels at atmosphere, crafting a sense of dread that fans of The Book of the Baku will recognize. The central hook—a curse involving a Victorian baby farmer—is uniquely unsettling, and protagonist Flynn’s history of trauma provides a strong emotional anchor.
The Bad:
The pacing is uneven; after a gripping start, the middle section loses momentum. Some character actions feel driven more by plot necessity than organic development, and the repetitive supernatural imagery begins to lose its chilling impact toward the climax.
December 20, 2025
It was an intriguing read. I liked to read the parts about the house and its story, but I did not care very much for the characters in the present. I was more interested in the past. It was very easy to read though, which was great. I definitely recommend this story, if you’re looking for a feeling similar to the Haunting of Hill House tv show. It has the same grim and gothic atmosphere, with a well thought-out story about a bleak house. It truly felt like a character, more than just an entity in a way.
Thank you to Netgalley for an e-ARC in exchange for a honest review.
Thank you to Netgalley for an e-ARC in exchange for a honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
fantastically intense and gothic horror book with some fantastic plotting and excellent vibes throughout. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews