Thirty years ago, my brother went into the asylum.
Only one boy came back alive.

No body was ever found.
No one could explain what happened that night.

I grew up knowing one thing— whatever was inside that building took him.

Now, someone else has disappeared.

I’m a parapsychologist. I don’t believe in ghosts.
I believe in facts, evidence, and the truth behind the stories people tell to make sense of tragedy.

So I’m going back.

With me are Gabriel, a former TV psychic with something to prove, and Riley, a student obsessed with ghost-hunting shows and everything they get wrong.

Together, we’re going to find out what really happened inside Ghost Asylum.

This isn’t a haunting.

It’s something worse.

And when the doors close behind us, I realize the truth too late—

Whatever lives inside that asylum… isn’t done yet.

I thought I’d read this as I am currently two-thirds through the audiobook of his first Asylum series. It’s been a long while since I’ve dipped my toe into this sort of genre, so I wasn’t exactly expecting anything or going in with a closed mind. I think the most common thought I had while reading was that I was underwhelmed. So much time was spent on the buildup of the story that the climax was both over quickly and lacked the depth and exploration I would have liked.

Both Hannah and Gabriel present as good characters. I saw in them the clear trajectory the author had for their journeys, but in that regard, I feel like there was too much foreshadowing of the characters, as if setting up their future was more important than setting up their presence.

Small-town hauntings are a special twisted gem of a genre. When done right, they will leave you reeling for days. I didn’t get that sense while reading, because the asylum’s haunting didn’t feel like the main part of the plot. It wasn’t explored or evaluated by the characters; there was no explanation for their actions or lack thereof, nor for why these things had happened. Considering this story starts with a letter of help from a grief-stricken mother searching for her son, it was a bit of a bummer that the drive expected from that starting point was not the focus of the plot.

In my head, if I’m reading a haunting story about missing or dead people, I want to learn everything. I want to know the hauntings of the past. I want to know the building’s history. What horrors happened there, why those people went missing, what’s lurking in the darkness. I want the haunting to be the main focus, with the characters driven by it and evolving with it. I didn’t get any of that here. It was all secondary.

I feel misled by the title of this book, as it was very much a short insight into three individuals who were nursing their own problems, their own hauntings. And while they worked together as a team, it wasn’t explored enough to give a good indication of their character as a whole or for the reader to feel a connection to them. Everything I learned about the characters was boring trivia and didn’t help me learn more about them or feel invested in their journey.

I can see that the backbones of something good were here. I just don’t think they were presented well. I think there was too much emphasis on the present and not enough focus on the past. I also think there should have been more content on the haunting of Ghost Asylum. There should have been more detail and depth to what had occurred there. It almost played out like a 30-minute TV drama, which is great for TV, but it underperformed as a book.