The Curse of Hester Gardens

by Tamika Thompson

We Need to Talk about Kevin as if written by Jason Reynolds and Tananarive Due meets Model Home by Rivers Solomon in an innovative twist on the haunted house about a mother desperate to protect her sons from the twin specters of gun violence and otherworldly menace in their public housing project.

Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate. 

Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He's a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.

But then, strange things start happening to Nona and other mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons. Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely.

Nona has her secrets too. Her affair with the married church pastor has been weighing on her conscience, but that’s not the only guilt haunting her. She fears that someone—or something— is seeking revenge for an act she made in a moment of weakness to protect her family. And now everyone in Hester Gardens must pay the price . . .

Genres: Horror, Adult, Thriller, Horror Thriller, Fiction

448 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication March 31, 2026

Reviews

[Emily C. C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, heartbreaking, and deeply moving. Loved this.

[Maria Haskins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advance reading copy of this novel, and it is an utterly compelling and wrenching supernatural tale, set in a public housing project. Thompson gives us not just a haunted house but a haunted neighborhood. In Hester Gardens, the restless spirits of those who died violently linger in homes, streets, and alleyways, haunting, and hurting, the living. I especially loved the main character, Nona, a mom who is deeply flawed, but who tries to keep her sons safe, and eventually also tries to atone for her own actions in the past. Thompson handles the balance between real-world horrors (crime, gun violence, systemic racism, poverty); and the otherworldly menace with compelling skill. There’s an almost Shakespearean tilt to the tragedy that plays out here, in a place where secrets, lies, and ghosts tug and tear at people’s lives.

[Adam Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book. It’s brilliant, it’s horrifying, it’s devastating, this should be a literary event. Finding a book like this is why I read in the first place. The story of a mother trying to navigate raising three sons in a housing project haunted both figuratively and literally by the violence and history there. This book packs such an emotional punch while being extremely readable and entertaining at the same time. By the final act, I spent the entire time reading in tears from the emotional truths it contains, and how infuriating it is that these things are in fact true.