Observer

by Nicholas Russell

A disquieting, atmospheric debut horror novel about a young woman investigating her mother’s disappearance at an abandoned Nevada observatory, for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and Mariana Enriquez

On a scorched summer day, Renata Scarborough comes home to find the contents of her estranged mother Corinne’s life on her doorstep. Her aunt and cousin seem eager to conclude that the troublesome Corinne is dead. Renata isn’t convinced and begins poring over her mother’s journals for answers. Among descriptions of Corinne’s work at the McNairy Observatory, Renata unearths a hidden obsession with an early twentieth-century surveyor whose encounters with a mysterious entity bear a startling resemblance to her mother’s reports. Compelled beyond reason, Renata journeys to that now-abandoned outpost in the Nevada wilderness to search for the truth.

But in McNairy, a thorny, decades-long clash between science and the desert only complicates Renata’s questions. The town’s scarred and suspicious residents refuse to discuss the observatory’s closure, leaving Renata to wonder if Corinne’s version of events reflects reality. As she ascends the peak that looms over McNairy, Renata witnesses unnerving phenomena she can’t explain and feels a creeping dread that what is waiting for her isn’t her mother at all.

Haunting, darkly comic, and captivating, Observer reveals the pure cosmic terror of the desert, a place of wonder and menace, asking what happens when we look out at nature and find something inhuman looking back.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Mystery, Adult Fiction, Audiobook

331 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2026

Reviews

[Erin]

This ARC about a mom (who was never present in her daughter’s life) who may have died or disappeared was just such a slog I couldn’t go on past 23%

[Denise]

Thank you to Libro.fm and Ecco for providing access to this audiobook. All opinions expressed are solely my own.

Observer is an atmospheric, slow-burn cosmic horror story that touches lightly upon racism and dysfunctional family dynamics, but doesn’t provide a deeper exploration into character motivations or a concrete explanation regarding the mystery surrounding the abandoned observatory at the center of the story.

Told from multiple perspectives that include: journal entries, field notes and the point of view of the main character Renata Scarborough as she journeys to the isolated Nevada desert town where her mother Corinne was conducting research, Observer is at times disorienting as the reader is abruptly thrust from one viewpoint to another.

There are aspects of audiobook that I enjoyed: narrator January LaVoy gives an excellent performance as Renata and the voices of the secondary characteries within the story.

Even though the pacing of the novel does slow towards the middle of the audiobook, I was still engaged by her efforts and also appreciated the vocal shift from level-headed to more unsettling as the certain situations abruptly changed.

The isolating aspect of the desert; the constant dryness, the suspicion of the townsfolk, the growing feelings of dread as Renata draws closer to her destination and the moments of unpleasant body horror were also well done.

Nevertheless, I felt that the novel had the capacity to delve deeper into certain themes but chose not to do so, the shift in perspectives sometimes hindered the story’s momentum and aspects of the ending were slightly vague and unfulfilling.

While the premise of Observer had wonderful potential, regrettably it was simply not the book for me.

[Wyetha]

Thank you to NetGalley and ECCO for the advanced copy of this title.

I realize Observer is supposed to be atmospheric horror, and I get some of that. Did it create a sense of the unknown and an overall eeriness? Yes. Is that horror? Well, I think that depends on your definition of a horror novel.

There are some graphic moments, but nothing that really ruffled my feathers or scared me, and I think a lot of that comes down to the way the story is laid out and the pacing of what’s happening.

It took me a bit to even understand that Renata’s mother is missing and presumed dead—at least, that’s what I gathered from the first part of the story. Renata still has questions, so she goes searching for answers about what may have happened to her mother. That’s also where things started to get a little muddled and foggy for me because I didn’t always understand what was happening in context with what had already been laid out.

She travels to the town where her mother worked and was last seen, and everything about this place screams LEAVE, yet she stays. At first, I thought there may have been some type of accident at the lab where her mother worked, but then the story seems to talk in circles about her mother simply disappearing without anyone really knowing what happened to her.

Toward the end, the story shifts from something that felt like it could have been light horror or a thriller into something much more sci-fi, and I think that’s where it lost me. I didn’t completely understand what it was trying to explain or some of the metaphors used. By the time everything started coming together, it just fell flat for me. We get a little explanation about what happened and why Renata is the way she is, but not enough for everything that came before it to really click into place.

There’s also a bit about the family—or cousin—who raised Renata, but that part never felt significant enough to make much of a point or add something meaningful to the overall story.
Again, the premise is good, and there were definitely elements that interested me, but the execution just didn’t follow through with what I thought I was getting from the synopsis. In the end, I was left with more confusion than horror.

I gave this title 3 ✨✨✨ stars.

[domsbookden]

DNF 29%

I'm becoming increasingly impatient with novels that seem to be committed to never-ending exposition.

I'm no stranger to a slow burn or long books (my favorite horror novel of all time is over 600 pages), but there's a difference between a slow burn and a slog—a slow burn makes you wait for something to happen; a slog makes you wait for the story to start. Unfortunately, Observer is the latter for me.

Despite the writing, which I did like, I cannot make myself continue. There's family history and backstory and scene setting and they're all fine in themselves, but I was never given a reason to care in the moment. There's no reason I should still be waiting for the premise to arrive or an inciting incident to occur at a third into a horror novel; the fact that I am let's me know that this story was started in the wrong place.

[G Flores]

2.5 Stars

To start, I want to say that there is plenty to like in this book. It almost feels like this was written specifically at my request with many of my preferred elements thrown in. And while I believe that there are many people who might enjoy this book, to my dismay, I was not one of them.

The characters seem to be unlikable by design, but this is always a bit perilous. Unlikable characters can still be interesting or even sympathetic, but fully halfway through this book, I found myself wondering why I should care about our protagonist's problems. This is not helped by the slow pacing. Slow, bordering on ponderous. I'm all for a slow burn and taking time to build, but there's a difference between deliberate pacing and a story fully sagging. By the time we got to the town at the heart of the mystery, I found myself less excited to look forward and more relieved that I had cleared the first act.

I also feel like we hint at a lot of deeper themes or even baldly state them here and there. There's an ongoing current of racism throughout that never quite links to anything in the main narrative. I can't know this for a certainty, but it feels like the author was going for "this is my observed reality" but failing to put that framing on it. While it may be so, to continuously bring it up, makes the reader believe it will figure into the story in a significant way beyond what's literally on the page. Some weird use of slurs for persons with intellectual disabilities and LGBTQ+ persons feel similarly "that's just how people talked in the 90s, man." Which is true, but much like with the race thing, it's just a heavy spice to add willy-nilly without some kind of deeper thematic connection. A major character in this thing is non-binary which leads me to think that there was an intentionality to some broader theme of discrimination across various axes of difference, but if there was one, it evaded me.

Despite unlikable characters, a slow-moving plot, and some weird choices, Russell is clearly a very good writer. The prose is well done and while it wasn't particularly to my taste, the telling of a multi-generational story has handled well with each story adding to the narrative and the mystery in a believable way.

Strangely, one of the main things that is lacking is horror. Others have referred to this as psychological horror or cosmic horror or whatever, but it's almost non-existent. It feels to me like the author was going for "understated" but then understated so much, he never stated much. What you end up with then is less a horror novel and more an inter-generational family mystery with weird sci-fi elements thrown in. Frankly, marketing it that way might've helped me adjust my expectations and enjoy it more.

Simply put, I can recommend this only to people who read the description of the book, said "hell yeah!" read my review and said "none of those things bother me." They will probably like this book a great deal. While it clearly did not connect with me, I saw enough good there that I'm quietly adding Russell to my little stack of authors to watch. Maybe I'll connect with the next one.

[Nicole Austin]

Thank you NetGalley and Ecco for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

If you go into “Observer” by Nicholas Russell expecting straight-up horror, then you might come out a little confused but also kind of impressed.

This book is one of those weird genre-blenders that doesn’t fit neatly into a box. It’s marketed as horror, but it reads more like a slow-burn sci-fi mystery with cosmic horror vibes lurking in the background. There are creepy moments, but they’re spaced out, and the real focus is on atmosphere, perception, and unraveling a mystery that may or may not make sense by the end.

The story follows Renata, who starts digging into her estranged mother’s disappearance after receiving her belongings, including a bunch of unsettling journals. These journals (which all have distinct voices and writing styles) slowly pull her toward an abandoned observatory in the Nevada desert. And from there, things just get increasingly strange.

The setting is easily one of the best parts of the book. The isolated desert town, the abandoned observatory, the feeling of being completely alone in this vast, empty landscape - it’s all done really well. You can practically feel the heat and silence pressing in on you. It has that eerie “something is wrong here but no one will explain it” energy the whole time, which keeps you hooked even when the plot slows down.

And the pace does slow down. A lot. The pacing is definitely on the medium-to-slow side, especially in the middle. It takes a while for Renata to actually get to the town, and even longer for the horror elements to really show up. By the time things start getting intense, the ending kind of rushes in, which makes it feel a little uneven overall.

The horror itself leans more toward cosmic and psychological; think unsettling, reality-bending, “what am I even looking at” type of fear rather than gore or jump scares. It plays a lot with perception, surveillance, and the idea that maybe we’re not meant to fully understand what’s out there. If you like that quiet, creeping dread, this will work for you. If you want constant action or scares, then maybe not.

There are also some deeper themes here like racism, family dynamics, and generational tension, but they don’t always feel fully explored. The book brings them up, but doesn’t dig quite as deep as it could have, which is a bit frustrating considering how much potential they had.

As for the writing style, it’s definitely experimental. The multiple journal entries and shifting tones are cool in theory and help build the mystery, but they can also be a bit hit-or-miss.

That said, it is a compelling read. There’s something about the mystery, like what happened to Renata’s mom, what’s going on at the observatory, what exactly is out there, that keeps you turning pages even when the pacing drags.

Overall, “Observer” is eerie, atmospheric, and a little disorienting in a way that feels intentional. It’s not a traditional horror novel, and it definitely won’t work for everyone, but if you’re into slow-burn, cerebral stories with cosmic horror vibes and unsettling desert settings, it’s worth checking out. Just don’t expect it to hold your hand or to fully explain itself by the end.

[Allie Snyder]

Russell can certainly create an ~atmosphere.~ The setting of McNairy and the abandoned observatory is *chef’s kiss*, and by far the novel’s strongest feature. Between the scorched desert scenery and the off-kilter cast of characters, spookiness abounds. Outside of this pristine atmosphere, the rest of the novel is a bit of a mixed bag.

You definitely have to be down for a slow, slow burn if you’re going to enjoy Observer. I like a slow burn, but even I ended up putting the audiobook narration on 1.5 speed. Between the diary entries and the strangely thorough monologues from the town’s residents, nearly the entire plot is told in exposition, and it definitely drags. And although part of me appreciates an open ending, after all of that waiting and anticipation, the resolution of the book feels incomplete and a bit unsatisfying.

Fans of cosmic horror will enjoy this one, I think. It strayed a little too far into sci fi territory for my taste, but that’ll be a draw for some readers.

I’m torn between a 3 and a 4. The prose is well done, the atmosphere is excellent, and the characters and sense of dread created warrant a good review, but I can’t say I ever felt engaged in the actual story. 3.5 stars, rounded up ✨

Thanks to Ecco and Libro.fm for my advanced listening copy!

[Renee Godding]

I hate giving 1-star ratings... Most books that end up with that rating, I actively hated or found harmful. Observer was a little different. Rarely have I been this extraordinarily bored by a book that, by all means, should be exciting. Nothing about this book managed to engage me; not the plot, not the characters, not the mystery and certainly not the horror.
I slogged my way through it, hoping for an ending that would make it all worth while, but honestly ended up with nothing but frustration and apathy.

TLDR; impressively uninteresting...

[The Blog Without a Face]

Nobody in This Town Is Going to Tell You What the Rash Is

TL;DR: A woman drives north to bury a mother she never knew and finds an observatory with a mirror made of poison. Russell gives his monsters no face, no voice, no motive, and they are terrifying for it. The dread is patient, the body horror unforgettable, the middle a little too talkative.

Renata Scarborough has had psoriasis since she was small, long enough that the cracking and the flaking and the bent aluminum tube of ointment gone soft as a dried banana in the bathroom drawer are simply the terms of owning a body. She knows the pain’s schedule. She knows which fabrics bite. So when the desert begins doing something else to her, something that was never psoriasis and never will be, she is the last woman alive equipped to notice it, because the hurt arrives in the one place she has spent her whole life training herself not to look. That is the engine of this novel. It is the best idea anyone has had about body horror in some time, and Russell does not explain it, he just turns it over slowly in the light for four hundred pages like a man turning a stone he found in a dry wash.

The setup is plain. A Las Vegas summer breaking its own records, cicadas scraped off casino glass with a wide broom, a twenty year old Forerunner losing its front bumper to a hit and run in a parking lot while Renata develops other people’s film inside a print shop her boss hopes will fail. She comes home to a U-Haul’s worth of her mother’s belongings stacked among the mail: journals, bank statements going back to 1988, a coloring book, a purse, a safe, a jewelry box with four necklaces wound on their pegs and an empty locket in the last slot. The aunt who raised her says this is simply how Corinne says goodbye. A check for three hundred thousand dollars arrives in the cul-de-sac mailbox with no letter. Renata does not believe her mother is dead, which is the only ground on which a book like this can be built, and she buys a car with the money and drives two hundred and fifty miles north to a town called McNairy that sits under a mountain that holds a decommissioned observatory whose telescope used a mirror made of spinning liquid mercury.

Three records run through the book and Russell keeps them honest. There is Corinne’s own hand, clipped and abbreviated, using a plus sign where a softer woman would write and, a voice so efficient it seems for a hundred pages to have no interior at all until it opens without warning onto a hospital room and will not let you leave. There is Francis Brown, a river surveyor logging water levels on the Colorado in 1905, who writes long and sonorous and addresses his diary to his wife, a man of the age of Bierce and the Reclamation Service who wants above all to be understood. And there is the present, Renata in the town, asking. What is bracing here is how little Russell protects his diarists. Brown speculates about the blood of a colleague with the easy poison of his century and about his own father’s lips and brow, and Corinne, seventy years later and no better, sets down slurs in her own notebook for the pleasure of hearing herself be precise. Both are meant to be lived with rather than liked. The book is smarter for it, and so is Renata, who reads these people the way a daughter reads, which is to say for herself, and finds herself in the wrong one.

McNairy itself is the finest sustained piece of construction in the book. A bar called the Spyglass with a chalkboard on wheels that gets turned to face the room at last call so the drinkers can guess who wrote the word on it. A post office holding a hundred parcels for a town of seventy souls, its western wall still sooted from a firebomb the postman declines to be upset about. A bald bartender who came out of Maine and never went back to the ocean. A woman who is either everybody’s aunt or somebody’s parole officer. Every last one of them has a rash. They pump their water from a well ten miles west and they are calm about it in the way of people who have already decided, and whatever afflicts these people, whatever they are all quietly not saying to each other, is laid into the town so patiently that by the time it surfaces you have been breathing it for two hundred pages.

The prose is not showy. It is close and dry and it runs long when the eye runs long, and Russell has the desert writer’s one indispensable gift, which is knowing that the horror of that country is not the dark but the distance, the finger of rock on the horizon that stays the same size for ten miles, the man on a ridge who is a man for an hour and then is a stone. But the writing gets up on its hind legs in the possession scenes and those are where the book earns everything. Renata stands rooted in the road under a full moon and cannot move her neck while spines two inches long push up through her arms and the entire world arrives through them at once, coyote shit and yucca pollen and trailer smoke and, far off and unmistakable, water. Later she cannot open her hand around a tarantula. Later still she can feel what a thing feels as it stops feeling. These passages are written from inside the failure of the body, the panic of a woman relearning where her own spine is, and they are goddamned frightening in a way almost nothing else in current horror is, because they do not threaten her with death. They threaten her with detail.

Between the book’s three parts sit two short interstitials in the second person, spoken by something high up and patient, watching a canyon lose its trees over four days. They are the oldest trick in weird fiction, the impersonal watcher, and they should not work this well. They work because Russell refuses the thing every writer alive wants to do with a monster. His creatures have no faces, no speech, no motive a reader can shake hands with. They move at the speed of geology. They want water and they want eyes, and what little of their mind gets through to us arrives as scent and season and pressure, a grammar with no verbs for mercy.

Where it slackens is the telling. The middle of the book runs on testimony, and testimony means people sitting down across from Renata and talking at length, and there are two long turns in the back half where a character opens a vein of exposition and the novel holds still while it drains. Russell knows this and tries to earn it by making the tellers strange, by having Renata note that they seem possessed by the past rather than remembering it, but a monologue is a monologue and the second one comes too soon after the first. The mercury cover-up, likewise, does a great deal of tidy load-bearing. A few of the townspeople exist mainly to withhold. None of this is fatal. It is the difference between a book that never lets go of the throat and one that sets you down twice to catch your breath.

Nicholas Russell is thirty years old, was born and raised in Las Vegas, and has spent close to a decade selling books at the Writer’s Block downtown, which is where he will launch this one. He came up as a critic and not a novelist, a columnist at Defector and formerly Gawker, with essays and film writing in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Baffler, Sight and Sound and Reverse Shot, and he has said the novel began in a dream of its own last scene and took years of freelance nights to reach. He set out to write the most Nevada book he could and to do it without the usual furniture, without shadows, betting instead on cloudless sky and squinting and never knowing how far away anything is. Of the creatures he has said he did not want them to vocalize or communicate or have faces in any way that would let a reader empathize with their motivations, and he kept his word. When asked for five words he offered: desert, skin, mothers, poison, spores. A critic who can summarize himself that accurately is a critic who has finally stopped reviewing and started building, and the next book is a story collection, and the one after that has werewolves in it.

Renata knew her own pain’s schedule. She knew which fabrics bit. That knowledge was the door, and it was standing open the whole time, and the desert simply waited, as it does, as it will, for her to walk through it on her own two feet.

[Reggie]

I received an advanced copy thanks to a Goodreads Giveaway!

Sadly, I found Observer to be very slow paced and lacking in scares. There’s a bit of spookiness to be found before the weirdness runs off the cliff but this book felt like a long, dry walk up a mountain and failed to hold my interest. I skimmed towards the end. Maybe would have worked better for me if it was shorter? There’s a lot of characters that feel disconnected from The Horror element of the book and don’t really get resolved in the end. Also there’s a bunch of weird slurs used in journal entries that felt like callbacks to the unsavory parts of Lovecraft, but really stuck out for me. 1.5 ⭐️

[Katherine Silva]

While I enjoyed Russell's use of language and descriptions of the desert and the observatory, I'm not sure this story was quite for me. It felt a bit discombobulated, like if pieces had been moved around a little, it might have helped the flow of the story and not lost its momentum with journal entries.

[Ruby]

Absolutely loved this book and am recommending it to everyone I know! I don't typically go for the horror genre, but this book has me rethinking that. Do yourself a favor and to read it!

[Tj]

Moody and atmospheric and nothing more. Plodding along, just waiting for anything to happen.

[Sara Vogt]

**Netgalley ARC, publishing September 2026**

I think the bottom line for this story is that the creatures in it were just too weird for me and I didn’t get a sense of closure at the end. And not in a good way.

My favorite parts of this were the diary entries about Francis and I wanted to hear more about him as well as Corinne. Also, I did enjoy a lot of the atmosphere of the story.

What exactly are these creatures? How did Corinne become one? Where is Renata leading them to? These are some of the questions I have.

QUOTE: “I do not actively believe myself to be writing in any way for posterity—I simply hope to know my own mind…I cannot shed this impulse to clarify all that might be misconstrued and in doing so, new revelations peek out from behind the thistle and chaff of my thoughts.”

[Wyetha]

Review coming soon!

[Thye DeForest]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Well…I wanted to love this so bad. I haven’t read much horror this year, and the Annihilation comp really sold me at first, but this was really not that similar other than the cosmic horror elements. And I may have set myself up for failure, considering Annihilation is probably my favorite book of all time. I enjoyed parts of it, mostly the journal entries and Renata trying to piece together their meaning. But the rest was just not it for me. Uninteresting and unimportant scenes dragged on forever, and endless run-on sentences forced me to go back and reread to try to parse out their intended meaning. Maybe it’s a personal preference in horror, but I feel like some of the appeal is flipping through pages as fast as you can to find out what’s about to happen, and that feeling only really overtook me once or twice. With some editing and maybe generous cutting of scenes, Pullen could have a work worthy of an Annihilation comp. I know it’s his debut, so I am excited to read whatever he puts out next, but still…the climax of the book didn’t hit for me at all. None of the questions that are meant to get answered are resolved, and Renata, for whom these questions are her driving motivation the entire story, just... doesn’t seem to care. I don’t know, man. This may sound contradictory, but to write successfully in the cosmic horror genre and to instill that fear of the unknowable in the reader, you have to have such clarity of voice and command of language, which I fear Pullen does not yet possess. I did enjoy some of this, but it dragged on far too long in the quieter moments, and the actual horror parts were too muddled and confusing to resonate in any meaningful way.

[Haley Mariotti]

I really wanted to rate this one higher because overall it's very good! There are some super interesting and freaky concepts at play, I love the desert observatory setting and I'm always a fan of journal entries in books. However, unfortunately I struggled with the pacing. As much as the novel's strengths kept me invested, I found much of it somewhat dry and tedious to get through. It felt as though much of the more riveting horror and intrigue is reserved for the last third of the novel. I would advise the curious to stick with it, but I can't say my experience was entirely positive.

[Serena]

I received an ARC of this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you to Minotaur Books for giving me a chance to read this book in advance of its release (2 copies actually, since this got delivered right before a huge storm hit and the first copy, so double thanks). The following is my honest review.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a few days because once again I enjoyed most of the book, but the ending really lost me. Ultimately, I gave this book a C-, which I’m converting to be 3 stars here. It’s a book I think some people could find a lot of enjoyment in although it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

Let’s start from the positives of ‘Observer’: I loved the characters and the desert setting. The family dynamics were the cornerstone of the storytelling and I found it to be so real. The further Nat grew from her aunt and cousin the more unmoored she became, and the same is the true of the narrative. I’ve been fighting my own dermatological issues, so the frequent discussion of Nat’s condition caused sympathy pains in my hands. When the body horror started kicking it, it was extremely effective and difficult to read (in the good way). The mystery at the center of her journey was intriguing and I was eager for the resolution of it, which is where we get to the cons of this novel…

I don’t know if I can say, “I don’t like the ending” so much as “I have no idea what happened in the ending.” The final chapters were so surreal and described in such abstract ways that I honestly could not describe it to someone if my life depended on it. Cosmic horror is full of descriptions of the indescribable and I’m generally on board with that, but this felt like the motives, decisions, and results were not being described in a way that landed with me. Some books are good enough for the entire ride that some let downs at the end don’t ruin the experience, but ‘Observer’ doesn’t really clear that bar. It is a very slow burn and maybe it’s just my Midwestern upbringing getting in the way, but the many descriptions of the desert scenery were very hard for me to picture. This is a book that would have benefited from the inclusion of a map of the mountain and surrounding area.

tl:dr- This is a slow-burn/atmospheric cosmic horror with interesting family dynamics, but might not be a good fit for all fans of those genres. As the author’s first novel I feel I can look forward to more horror from him, but hope he can tighten the writing for this medium a bit more.

[Erika]

Can we talk about how a book having mixed reviews does NOT mean it’s bad?

Hot take: some books just get handed to the wrong readers who judged a cover or won a giveaway! Observer is a HEAVY literary nightmare that will leave folks in the dust if they come in expecting fast action instead of creeping dread. 🏜️🖤

─── THE MEAT ────────────────
After learning the mother who abandoned her at birth has died, a woman travels to an isolated desert town to unpack her mother's estate. Guided by a left-behind diary and shifting timelines, she unfurls a terrifying history.

Inside, you'll find:

🏜️ A desolate desert setting
📖 A secretive diary revealing hidden truths
⏳ Dual timelines slowly unraveling secrets
💔 Deep explorations of grief and identity

─── THE VIBE ───────────────
Slow-burn atmospheric horror meets disorientation, grief-stricken family drama, and trippy cosmic dread.

─── MY THOUGHTS ────────────
This is a sauntering, atmospheric tale built for when you want to be scared of the shadows lurking behind you in the dark! It is a deeply heavy story about grief... coming to terms with losing a mother you never really knew, while trying to figure out how you're even supposed to feel about that loss.

As you piece together what happened behind her mother's eyes, the book leans heavily into metaphors, analogies, and mind-bending cosmic horror. It literally breaks the boundaries of your brain and offends standard physics!

It's trippy, confusing, and wild. If you love big feelings, disorienting darkness, and ending a story completely baffled in the best way possible, this book is built for YOU.

─── THE SAVE ───────────────
If you love slow-burn, atmospheric tales of grief laced with mind-bending cosmic dread, save these to your TBR:

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
└─ A mind-melting, disorienting masterpiece about terrifying concepts that defy memory, logic, and human understanding.

The Shadows Tomorrow by Noelle Michel
└─ For a haunting, atmospheric exploration of humanity, greed, science, and the inevitable overreach that will eventually be our end.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
└─ A disorienting, atmospheric journey into the unknown that defies physics and logic.

[Sara Planz]

SYNOPSIS
Renata comes home to find the contents of her estranged mother Corinne’s life on her doorstep. Her aunt and cousin seem eager to conclude that Corinne is dead. Renata isn’t convinced and begins poring over her mother’s journals for answers. Among descriptions of Corinne’s work at the McNairy Observatory, Renata unearths a hidden obsession with an early twentieth-century surveyor whose encounters with a mysterious entity bear a startling resemblance to her mother’s reports. Renata journeys to that now-abandoned outpost in the Nevada wilderness to search for the truth. But in McNairy, a thorny, decades-long clash between science and the desert only complicates Renata’s questions. The town’s scarred and suspicious residents refuse to discuss the observatory’s closure, leaving Renata to wonder if Corinne’s version of events reflects reality. As she ascends the peak that looms over McNairy, Renata witnesses unnerving phenomena she can’t explain and feels a creeping dread that what is waiting for her isn’t her mother at all.

First of all, congratulations to Nicholas Russell on his debut novel. Nicholas is a bookseller at our local indie bookstore here in Vegas, The Writer’s Block, and I was so happy he was there to sign it when I came in to purchase this book. So lets’s get into what I loved about this book. Observer is a fantastic genre blend of horror and sci-fi with a cosmic undertone, mystery, told not only through Renata’s journey but also incorporating journal entries from her mother and a scientist from the early 1900s. This slow burn draws out the mystery, the character building, but the most impressive part of this novel was Russell’s use of atmosphere. For those that live in or have visited Nevada, the desert can be a backdrop for anything you can imagine, and setting this story in this isolated location made it feel even stranger and disorienting. If you are looking for something different and eerie for your spooky season stack, I highly suggest this one.

[BethFishReads]

Note that I listened to the audiobook. Goodreads doesn't have that edition listed yet.

A science fiction/horror story set in the Nevada desert.

Let me start out with a disclaimer. I should have DNF'd this book long before the end. It's not that the novel is poorly written, it's more of a case that this isn't my kind of book. I have always had trouble with reading horror.

Here's the general setup. Renata, abandoned by her mother, was raised since infancy by her aunt. One day she comes home from work to find the house she shares with her aunt and cousin filled with boxes. In those boxes are her mother's possessions and research. She also finds a $300,000 check. Here's the question: What happened to her mother? There's no death notice or criminal report.

Against all advice, Renata decides to visit her mother's observatory, 4 hours away from Los Vegas in a remote part of Nevada, to find answers. All she has is her own wits, her mother's journal, and the diary of a 19th-century surveyor.

Everyone she meets in McNairy is a bit off, and everyone discourages her from visiting the now-closed observatory. As she hikes up the mountain, she gets the sense that she's not alone and that there may be someone watching her. Regardless of all warnings--including mercury contamination--she keeps going. What will she find at the top?

Okay, I don't think I fully understood what was going on, so I ended up being more confused that spooked. I felt some tension when Renata was in the town of McNairy (thanks to the creepy people she meets), but I became less invested the closer she came to the observatory. I don't know. I think it's a me thing.

The audiobook was performed by January LaVoy. I love her work, and I'm sure it was her narration that kept me from quitting the novel.

Thanks to Ecco via Libro.fm for the review copy.

[Paul]

Title: Observer
Author: Nicholas Russell
Release date: 9/15/26
Rating: ⭐️⭐️/5

One day, Renata Scarborough receives her mother Corinne's belongings on her doorstep. Her extended family, Aunt Tara and Cousin V, quickly assume she is dead. Renata, refusing to believe her mother is dead without proof, pours over her mother's personal journals and find's Corinne's obsession with her workplace, the McNairy Observatory. After further reading, Renata notes erie similarities with Corinne's experience, documented in her journay, and 100 year-old field notes from a desert surveyor detailing their encounters with an ancient entity. Needing to find the truth, Renata travels to McNairy and is met with townspeople who refuse to talk about the abandoned facility. Questioning whether her mother experienced real horror or was havin a mental breakdown, Renata goes up to the observatory. Anomalies occur, and the line between Renata's mind and her mother's journals is blurred. She quickly learnes that an inhuman force is at work.

This was unfortunately a book I wasn’t able to get into. The Prologue was good, so I had high hopes. Unfortunately, it was very slow. Not a slow burn, but ponderously slow. By the time the pace started to pick up, I had already lost interest and just finished the book out of a feeling of obligation. Strike one. As the book progressed, there were relatively frequent perspective changes. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as the story was already very slow, the change in perspective felt like it halted any momentum the story had built. Strike 2. Finally, the characters, particularly the protagonist, were rather dull and unlikeable. As well, the protagonist was deeply involved in the story for at least 90% of it but at the end, felt very one dimensional and boring. Strike 3.

Some people will enjoy this for sure, it just wasn’t for me.

[Nastassia Glover]

Received This ARC Via A GoodReads Giveaway

📚 The Observer by Nicholas Russell
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5

Okay… I really wanted to love this one, but unfortunately, The Observer was a slow burn that burned a little TOO slowly for me. 😩

The biggest issue? The pacing. There were moments where I kept thinking, Okay… when are we getting somewhere? The story takes its time building the mystery around the sisters and their missing mother, but for me, that buildup didn’t always translate into enough tension or urgency.

I actually found the sister relationship and family drama more interesting than the horror. Watching the sisters navigate their complicated history while trying to figure out what happened to their mom added an emotional layer to the story. Their search eventually leads them to a strange, isolated town where they discover their mother—and THAT part definitely had me paying attention. 👀

But let’s talk about the “horror” label… because honestly, I wouldn’t personally categorize this as horror. 🫣 There are unsettling moments, eerie surroundings, and an overall feeling that something is off, but I was expecting much more fear, suspense, and creepiness.

The premise had potential, and I liked the mystery of uncovering what happened to their mother, but the execution just wasn’t gripping enough for me.

Final verdict: A mysterious, atmospheric family drama with some unsettling elements, but not the horror story I was expecting. The sister dynamics and missing-mother storyline were the highlights for me, but the slow pacing made this a 3⭐️ read.

Would I recommend it? Maybe if you enjoy VERY slow-burn mysteries with an eerie atmosphere and family drama—but if you’re picking this up expecting a true horror novel… manage those expectations. 😅

[Kimmy]

The story’s opening is a rough read, not in horror but in engagement. We are introduced to a vast grouping of characters who dump a massive amount of information/set up to the reader then make us stew on it. None of these characters are likeable, not in the way the author intended either. Not only do we not trust these characters but I do not care about their past, present, or future. Moving forward… it takes until act 2 for something of meaning and interest shows up. I seriously considered DNF-ing this story multiple times. While there are interesting bones to this story, I find that the actual writing and execution failed. By act 3 we finally are getting introduced to the mystery and horror more. Honestly I wished that we got this all along, give us a little set up and then let the creepy begin. I agree with some of the other reviews that say the diaries are some of the best parts, they unfortunately become redundant when the same information is repeated through the main characters conversations. I think this story would have benefited by being cut down to a shorter amount of pages and faster paced actions.

I skimmed the ending of the story, unfortunately the creepy body horror came to late for me. I believe this story would benefit by 100 less pages. The beginning takes too long to set up and there is way too much repetition. It lost my attention way too early and never had enough to draw me back in because so much was repeating past discoveries and new ones.

Thank you NetGalley and Ecco for letting me read this book early.

[Rudi McKay]

Observer by Nicholas Russell is the kind of horror that creeps under your skin rather than jumping out at you.

I loved the eerie Nevada desert setting and the feeling that something was deeply wrong long before I could figure out exactly what it was. Renata’s search for her missing mother pulled me into the mystery, and the journals, abandoned observatory, strange history, and increasingly unsettling discoveries created this wonderfully uncomfortable sense of dread.

The horror here is definitely more cosmic, psychological, and atmospheric than outright terrifying, and I really enjoyed that. There’s something incredibly unsettling about staring into the unknown and realizing that maybe the unknown has been staring back at you the entire time.

The audiobook worked especially well for this story. January LaVoy’s narration helped build that isolated, dreamlike feeling and made the strange moments feel even more immersive.

This is a weird, atmospheric, slow-burn horror debut that won’t give you every answer—and honestly, I think that makes it even more unsettling. I finished it still thinking about the things Renata encountered and wondering how much of the world around her could actually be trusted.

Thank you to NetGalley, Ecco, and the author for the advanced audiobook copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Laura (crofteereader)]

I liked the first ~2/3 as Renata gathers information about Corinne and Francis through the journals, experiences the town, and meets some eccentric characters; I also liked getting snippets of Renata’s and Corinne’s childhoods (and Percy’s at the end too). But once the creatures started really being present I think things kind of fell apart? By that point, Renata has lost all sense of self and isn’t conveying what’s happening logically or reliably so it’s difficult to follow.

Also I’d really have loved to understand a bit more why Renata was so driven to find her mother after a lifetime of never doing so, never even trying. Particularly after seeing in Corinne’s diary that she was kind of a shitty person.

There were also a lot of loose threads with the townies (who each basically acted like infodump jukeboxes; once Renata got them talking, they’d spit out their backstory and then conveniently leave). And the Observer (who we finally figured out is not one of the creatures) and the interstitals didn’t fit in with the rest of the story - who was the “you” being spoken to? What does that add to the story?

{Thank you Ecco Books for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review; all thoughts are my own}

[Oz Paszkiewicz]

So, I listened to the audio book and I think this is a story that benefits from being read visually. I'm sure I missed things because I got a little lost in the abstractions. That's not a reflection of the writing itself or the VA, I just wish I had the opportunity to reread certain parts. Otherwise, I was pleasantly surprised by the end. The twist was not overtly obvious, and the reveal was well paced. If I could change anything about the book it would be to spend more time with the Observer (I won't say anything more about it to avoid spoilers).

The characters are complex and compelling. There are several moments where I am disgusted and delighted by the same person. Part of me wants to hate Corinne, the same part of me that wanted to like Ken, probably, but by the end, I was able to accept their motivations. Too often I find myself disliking a book because the characters do things that don't make sense. But here even when they're illogical or impulsive, I still understand them.

Essentially, I liked the story. I found it compelling, but I finished wanting more. And sometimes that's a good thing. I'm not sure. I may revisit this in the future.

[Beas Chattaraj]

Cosmic horror has a special place in my heart. So, when I came across this audiobook and read the blurb, I just knew I had to read it. The writing pulled me in and the audiobook was narrated beautifully, but I felt that something was missing. I wish I could know more about the creatures and the haunting of the observatory. There was this slow buildup of atmosphere, the creeping dread and the loneliness of the vast empty desert seemed contagious. But there was too much of this character back story and exposition that took away the urgency of the narration. Yet all was not explained to my liking. The characters were not so memorable and I did not like the main character much. The premise was promising, and I expected so much more from the story.

[DeniseMarie]

Don't know how popular this author is to everyone else? It is the worst book I have ever read. I thought I was getting a mystery about a girl wanting to find out if her mother is still alive and what happened at the observatory. What I got instead is a very long drawn out story that is so easy to fall asleep with. What normally takes me 2 weeks to read took the whole month!!!! I sentence becomes a paragraph and a description takes sooooo long that one has to go back and figure out what was being said. And if I was aware it was suppose and I will say it again suppose to be a Sci-fi ? Wouldn't have bothered in the first place. My first Sci-fii was Ray Bradbury in high school and swore off imaginal creatures then. Hope my next book is worth reading!!!!

[Virginia]

Rating: 4.5/5
Spice: I read this one a bit ago, but I don't really remember any

Whoa - this book was delightfully weird and creepy. It's not a fast paced horror, so if you're looking for that, this one will probably not scratch that itch. It definitely reads almost like a literary horror. The writing is really well done, and the plot definitely kept me guessing. I wasn't sure until it was hitting me over the head what was actually happening. This almost had a sense of folk horror, which I loved. This was definitely a worth while read. If you like slow scares with literary writing, then this one is a good one to pick up!