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The Lights of Greyfare
With its blend of literary style and chilling suspense, The Lights of Greyfare is drawing high praise from critics. Readers’ Favorite calls
"Among the very best horror novels I’ve ever read, rivalling some of the world's top authors in this genre."
The Lights of Greyfare
A gothic horror novel about grief, obsession, and the monsters we become when the sea calls our name.
After a brutal divorce and the loss of everything she thought she was, journalist Katherine Calder is on assignment to the fog-drenched town of Greyfare. She’s come to write, to recover, and to disappear for a little while. But Greyfare has other plans.
The town is strange. Too quiet. Full of faces that seem familiar, even when they shouldn’t be. At night, something walks the shore—a reflection of Kat that mimics her, imperfectly. The harbor groans with secrets, and the townspeople cling to ancient traditions they won’t talk about.
When Kat meets Dean, a reclusive widower with a weather-beaten boat and a haunted past, she feels herself unraveling in ways that are both terrifying and intoxicating. Their bond deepens, even as Kat uncovers hints of a centuries-old pact—one that demands sacrifice to keep the devils in the deep.
But the sea is waking.
And Kat may already be part of the offering.
Darkly lyrical and emotionally charged, The Lights of Greyfare is a supernatural descent into love, memory, and the terror of losing yourself to something older than the tide. Perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House, this is a horror novel that lingers long after the last page.
"Among the very best horror novels I’ve ever read, rivalling some of the world's top authors in this genre."
The Lights of Greyfare
A gothic horror novel about grief, obsession, and the monsters we become when the sea calls our name.
After a brutal divorce and the loss of everything she thought she was, journalist Katherine Calder is on assignment to the fog-drenched town of Greyfare. She’s come to write, to recover, and to disappear for a little while. But Greyfare has other plans.
The town is strange. Too quiet. Full of faces that seem familiar, even when they shouldn’t be. At night, something walks the shore—a reflection of Kat that mimics her, imperfectly. The harbor groans with secrets, and the townspeople cling to ancient traditions they won’t talk about.
When Kat meets Dean, a reclusive widower with a weather-beaten boat and a haunted past, she feels herself unraveling in ways that are both terrifying and intoxicating. Their bond deepens, even as Kat uncovers hints of a centuries-old pact—one that demands sacrifice to keep the devils in the deep.
But the sea is waking.
And Kat may already be part of the offering.
Darkly lyrical and emotionally charged, The Lights of Greyfare is a supernatural descent into love, memory, and the terror of losing yourself to something older than the tide. Perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House, this is a horror novel that lingers long after the last page.
- GenresHorror
336 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 7, 2025
53 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Juno Guadalupe
1 book3 followersJuno Guadalupe is an award-winning author who grew up where the fog drapes low over the Pennsylvania mountains and the woods have opinions. The daughter of an immigrant and lifelong collector of oddities, she shares her home with several opinionated animals and the occasional uninvited shadow. Her work blends the beautiful and the unnerving, often inspired by things she’s sure she saw move when no one else was looking.
She has been known to keep her back to the wall in antique shops, cross the street for no reason she’ll admit to, and hold her breath when passing mirrors after dark.
The Lights of Greyfare is her debut novel. May it linger with you.
She has been known to keep her back to the wall in antique shops, cross the street for no reason she’ll admit to, and hold her breath when passing mirrors after dark.
The Lights of Greyfare is her debut novel. May it linger with you.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 16, 2026
Guadalup weaves a path through the liminal zone between not confirming anything and explaining everything, creating a tale that will appeal to fans of gothic, folk, and cosmic horror.
After mouldering in the wreckage of her divorce, Katherine Calder accepts an assignment to write about strange lights glimpsed in the small coastal town of Greyfare. She hopes doing something productive and being far away will be the first step in restarting her life; however, the fog that often clads the town is matched by an equally nebulous half-spoken loss that echoes her malaise. After glimpsing something in the water that looks like her but not, the fragments and whispers of something in the sea that takes if not held back but might be convinced to give back start to feel more and more believable; and make her wonder how far a grieving parent or spouse might go if they thought it would reunite them with a loved one.
Guadalup’s Greyfare is a fishing town surrounded by forest at the end of a steep road, a setting that will be immediately recognisable to fans of gothic, folk, or cosmic horror. Judging that the reader will be familiar with the generalities of isolated communities, Guadalup focuses more on the details that make Greyfare not just the stereotype of secluded community with something wrong beneath the surface; this both gives Greyfare a character that makes the reader more invested in what happens to it and tantalises them with vague hints of what the truth might be.
The novel opens with Kat having barely left her bed for days and, while a precise diagnosis is not given, prescribed pills to help with her situation. Shortly after, the reader sees that she is also self-medicating with alcohol. Thus, as someone who is self-aware, she is primed to doubt her physical and emotional perceptions when she starts to encounter the strangeness in Greyfare. Combined with the majority of the novel being narrated in the first person, this also gives the reader cause to wonder if the evidence presented is reliable.
Almost immediately after Kat’s arrival in Greyfare, Guadalup briefly shifts the viewpoint to an ostensibly inhuman creature infiltrating a cottage and trying to mimic the sleeping inhabitant. Although not definitively ruling out this being a human who merely believes they are a monster, this provides the reader with the strongest implication that something more than superstition, paranoia, and mundane malevolence lies behind the secrecy. This dramatic irony both reduces the chance Kat’s own speculations seem tediously overwrought and makes it less likely that rational reactions will protect her, increasing the tension.
The fragments of myth and history that Kat uncovers paint a picture of pre-human beings that are ascribed the labels of Western mythology, such as the Fair Folk, and the personalities that go with that, but are potentially much less comprehensible. Thus, although the stories of a deal with something that comes from the ocean are very different from Lovecraft’s Shadow over Innsmouth, there is an undercurrent of cosmic dread to the narrative.
In addition to the conflicts between various tales and experiences echoing the way that real mythologies change and contradict, Guadalup uses it to present equally plausible perspectives on whether the secret traditions protect against something malevolent or feed it, facing the reader with the question of what the right thing might actually be.
Alongside Kat’s investigation of what is really beneath the surface of Greyfare—too interwoven with it to easily be called a subplot—is her budding relationship with Dean, the widowed returnee who splits his time between running the local garage and a fishing boat. While this thread includes the “rapidly assuming the worst” that is often an obstacle in romance plots, the obvious secrets and presence of an actual cult in Greyfare are likely to make Kat’s leap from passion to paranoia feel entirely reasonable rather than something that could be solved if they took a moment to talk before jumping to conclusions.
The final act features a number of shifts in what the actual situation might be, some likely to be more unexpected than others but none implausible based on what has come before. Guadalup skilfully brings this to the point where Kat and other decent people take what seems to be the right action but closes the novel with a lingering doubt whether Kat has truly changed Greyfare or fallen foul of a final deceit.
Kat is a sympathetic protagonist, challenged by both her past and her imperfectly human reaction to it, but not mired in passivity and angst. Thus, the reader is likely to wish her to succeed because she deserves it as well as because they wish the threat beneath Greyfare’s surface defeated.
Dean is a balance of competence, good manners, and deep trauma over the loss of his wife and daughter that make him seem equally someone who deserves to find love again and someone who might be tempted by whispers of a deal that can return a person you’ve lost.
The supporting cast are each a good balance of secretive townsperson, USian, and individuality, supporting the sense of an isolated settlement filled with secrets that is a staple of gothic, cosmic, or folk horror without collapsing into stereotypes.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel greatly. I recommend it to readers seeking horror that is centred on the dread that seeing there is something out there but not seeing it well enough to know if it is real or just a man in a suit.
After mouldering in the wreckage of her divorce, Katherine Calder accepts an assignment to write about strange lights glimpsed in the small coastal town of Greyfare. She hopes doing something productive and being far away will be the first step in restarting her life; however, the fog that often clads the town is matched by an equally nebulous half-spoken loss that echoes her malaise. After glimpsing something in the water that looks like her but not, the fragments and whispers of something in the sea that takes if not held back but might be convinced to give back start to feel more and more believable; and make her wonder how far a grieving parent or spouse might go if they thought it would reunite them with a loved one.
Guadalup’s Greyfare is a fishing town surrounded by forest at the end of a steep road, a setting that will be immediately recognisable to fans of gothic, folk, or cosmic horror. Judging that the reader will be familiar with the generalities of isolated communities, Guadalup focuses more on the details that make Greyfare not just the stereotype of secluded community with something wrong beneath the surface; this both gives Greyfare a character that makes the reader more invested in what happens to it and tantalises them with vague hints of what the truth might be.
The novel opens with Kat having barely left her bed for days and, while a precise diagnosis is not given, prescribed pills to help with her situation. Shortly after, the reader sees that she is also self-medicating with alcohol. Thus, as someone who is self-aware, she is primed to doubt her physical and emotional perceptions when she starts to encounter the strangeness in Greyfare. Combined with the majority of the novel being narrated in the first person, this also gives the reader cause to wonder if the evidence presented is reliable.
Almost immediately after Kat’s arrival in Greyfare, Guadalup briefly shifts the viewpoint to an ostensibly inhuman creature infiltrating a cottage and trying to mimic the sleeping inhabitant. Although not definitively ruling out this being a human who merely believes they are a monster, this provides the reader with the strongest implication that something more than superstition, paranoia, and mundane malevolence lies behind the secrecy. This dramatic irony both reduces the chance Kat’s own speculations seem tediously overwrought and makes it less likely that rational reactions will protect her, increasing the tension.
The fragments of myth and history that Kat uncovers paint a picture of pre-human beings that are ascribed the labels of Western mythology, such as the Fair Folk, and the personalities that go with that, but are potentially much less comprehensible. Thus, although the stories of a deal with something that comes from the ocean are very different from Lovecraft’s Shadow over Innsmouth, there is an undercurrent of cosmic dread to the narrative.
In addition to the conflicts between various tales and experiences echoing the way that real mythologies change and contradict, Guadalup uses it to present equally plausible perspectives on whether the secret traditions protect against something malevolent or feed it, facing the reader with the question of what the right thing might actually be.
Alongside Kat’s investigation of what is really beneath the surface of Greyfare—too interwoven with it to easily be called a subplot—is her budding relationship with Dean, the widowed returnee who splits his time between running the local garage and a fishing boat. While this thread includes the “rapidly assuming the worst” that is often an obstacle in romance plots, the obvious secrets and presence of an actual cult in Greyfare are likely to make Kat’s leap from passion to paranoia feel entirely reasonable rather than something that could be solved if they took a moment to talk before jumping to conclusions.
The final act features a number of shifts in what the actual situation might be, some likely to be more unexpected than others but none implausible based on what has come before. Guadalup skilfully brings this to the point where Kat and other decent people take what seems to be the right action but closes the novel with a lingering doubt whether Kat has truly changed Greyfare or fallen foul of a final deceit.
Kat is a sympathetic protagonist, challenged by both her past and her imperfectly human reaction to it, but not mired in passivity and angst. Thus, the reader is likely to wish her to succeed because she deserves it as well as because they wish the threat beneath Greyfare’s surface defeated.
Dean is a balance of competence, good manners, and deep trauma over the loss of his wife and daughter that make him seem equally someone who deserves to find love again and someone who might be tempted by whispers of a deal that can return a person you’ve lost.
The supporting cast are each a good balance of secretive townsperson, USian, and individuality, supporting the sense of an isolated settlement filled with secrets that is a staple of gothic, cosmic, or folk horror without collapsing into stereotypes.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel greatly. I recommend it to readers seeking horror that is centred on the dread that seeing there is something out there but not seeing it well enough to know if it is real or just a man in a suit.
September 23, 2025
The book follows Katherine Calder, a burned-out journalist reeling from heartbreak, addiction, and the collapse of her marriage. She drifts into Greyfare, a coastal Maine town wrapped in fog, folklore, and menace. What begins as an assignment about strange lights and odd behavior slowly spirals into something darker, blending her personal unraveling with the creeping dread of a town that seems alive in ways it shouldn’t be. The story balances her private grief with an escalating sense of otherworldly danger, drawing the reader into a story where isolation, obsession, and the supernatural bleed together.
I found myself both impressed and unsettled by Juno Guadalupe’s writing. The prose is vivid, almost cinematic, and it often feels like the narrator is talking directly to you. The raw honesty in Kat’s self-destructive habits and inner monologue resonated with me. Sometimes I wanted to shake her. Other times, I felt her pain in my gut. The blend of humor and despair made her feel real. But the story also takes sudden, chilling turns. Those shifts, from Kat’s drunken sarcasm to grotesque encounters with what lurks in Greyfare, kept me off balance in the best way. It was like watching a storm roll in, beautiful and terrifying.
Kat’s internal spirals gave the story a raw and unfiltered rhythm. They slowed the pace in a way that felt intentional, letting me sit with her turmoil instead of rushing past it. Her reliance on alcohol and pills wasn’t easy to watch, but it made her struggle painfully real. That messy honesty reminded me how complicated people are, and that’s what gave the book its emotional punch. The horror elements, especially the mimicry and the way the environment itself seemed to breathe, gave me chills. They also mirrored Kat’s own sense of being replaced or erased, which added a clever layer of psychological dread.
The Lights of Greyfare is more than just a horror story. It’s about grief, identity, and the lies we tell ourselves just to keep going. I’d recommend it to readers who like their horror atmospheric and layered with emotional weight. If you enjoy Stephen King’s small-town dread or Gillian Flynn’s raw character work, this book will pull you in. Just don’t expect clean answers. Expect to sit with the fog, the echoes, and the ache of a story that wants to haunt you long after you close the book.
I found myself both impressed and unsettled by Juno Guadalupe’s writing. The prose is vivid, almost cinematic, and it often feels like the narrator is talking directly to you. The raw honesty in Kat’s self-destructive habits and inner monologue resonated with me. Sometimes I wanted to shake her. Other times, I felt her pain in my gut. The blend of humor and despair made her feel real. But the story also takes sudden, chilling turns. Those shifts, from Kat’s drunken sarcasm to grotesque encounters with what lurks in Greyfare, kept me off balance in the best way. It was like watching a storm roll in, beautiful and terrifying.
Kat’s internal spirals gave the story a raw and unfiltered rhythm. They slowed the pace in a way that felt intentional, letting me sit with her turmoil instead of rushing past it. Her reliance on alcohol and pills wasn’t easy to watch, but it made her struggle painfully real. That messy honesty reminded me how complicated people are, and that’s what gave the book its emotional punch. The horror elements, especially the mimicry and the way the environment itself seemed to breathe, gave me chills. They also mirrored Kat’s own sense of being replaced or erased, which added a clever layer of psychological dread.
The Lights of Greyfare is more than just a horror story. It’s about grief, identity, and the lies we tell ourselves just to keep going. I’d recommend it to readers who like their horror atmospheric and layered with emotional weight. If you enjoy Stephen King’s small-town dread or Gillian Flynn’s raw character work, this book will pull you in. Just don’t expect clean answers. Expect to sit with the fog, the echoes, and the ache of a story that wants to haunt you long after you close the book.
November 6, 2025
Sadly a DNF for me. I made it 36% of the way through before deciding I was too bored to continue.
I didn’t like the insta-love plot line and the exciting premise of mysterious behaviors, odd dopplegangers, and fog soaked towns was pushed to the back burner; instead we just get our MC wandering around the town doing a whole lot of nothing, drinking way too much, and fantasizing about Dean. The creature is also revealed pretty early on so I felt there was no “mystery” anymore.
Maybe I’m just not the right target audience for this because a lot of people seemed to really love it 🤷🏻♀️
⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I didn’t like the insta-love plot line and the exciting premise of mysterious behaviors, odd dopplegangers, and fog soaked towns was pushed to the back burner; instead we just get our MC wandering around the town doing a whole lot of nothing, drinking way too much, and fantasizing about Dean. The creature is also revealed pretty early on so I felt there was no “mystery” anymore.
Maybe I’m just not the right target audience for this because a lot of people seemed to really love it 🤷🏻♀️
⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
December 29, 2025
📚The Lights of Greyfare
✍️Juno Guadalupe
2⭐️
Journalist Kat is struggling in her personal life when she accepts an assignment to investigate missing people and general strange goings on in Greyfare; a fishing town in Maine. The book was very nicely written, very prosaic and descriptive; however I felt the dialogue wasn’t as well written and was clunky, stilted and just didn’t ring true. There were a lot of similes and metaphors crammed into the narrative, and I’m very sorry to cast aspersions, but I just couldn’t shake the thought that it was very similar to what ChatGPT churns out…
✍️Juno Guadalupe
2⭐️
Journalist Kat is struggling in her personal life when she accepts an assignment to investigate missing people and general strange goings on in Greyfare; a fishing town in Maine. The book was very nicely written, very prosaic and descriptive; however I felt the dialogue wasn’t as well written and was clunky, stilted and just didn’t ring true. There were a lot of similes and metaphors crammed into the narrative, and I’m very sorry to cast aspersions, but I just couldn’t shake the thought that it was very similar to what ChatGPT churns out…
August 14, 2025
A novel that will leave you yearning for more. The character development is truly great, and the descriptive language is out of this world! Had me dying to know what happens next! It is a definitely a page-turner and captured and piqued my curiosity from the first page. This is a story you don't want to miss! Excellent!
August 18, 2025
The setting of the place in the book makes me feel like I am really in Greyfare. I totally recommend this book if you want to get lost in a book. The author definitely creative. I expect more from this author.
August 22, 2025
I’ve watched this story grow from the first spark of an idea into the book it is today. The Lights of Greyfare is haunting, beautifully written, and full of heart. I couldn’t be prouder of her or this incredible story.
September 9, 2025
What a debut from new author Juno Guadalupe! It had me hooked from the beginning. She did a fantastic job making you feel like you were a part of Greyfare. I truly cared about Kat & Dean and couldn’t wait to see how it all ended. Wonderfully written! Eagerly waiting for her next book!
August 26, 2025
With each turn of the pages came twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat and eyes glued to the pages. A must read for all horror fans.
September 24, 2025
Music makes me cry. Books never do. Oh, I feel empathy for characters and their situations....But I don't cry.
The Lights of Greyfare made me cry. I lived in this town. I felt it.
At times I couldn't wait for this story to end. At others I never wanted it to end.
Of course, it did end and I'm back in the real world.
Now that I'm here, I'd like to meet the person who wrote this book. I want to sit at a table with her, drink a cup of coffee, and chat a while. But not near the sea. Nowhere near the sea....
Do I recommend this book? Definitely.
I have one question: “When is the next book?”
The Lights of Greyfare made me cry. I lived in this town. I felt it.
At times I couldn't wait for this story to end. At others I never wanted it to end.
Of course, it did end and I'm back in the real world.
Now that I'm here, I'd like to meet the person who wrote this book. I want to sit at a table with her, drink a cup of coffee, and chat a while. But not near the sea. Nowhere near the sea....
Do I recommend this book? Definitely.
I have one question: “When is the next book?”
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews