Read @ Joe’s

Author Christopher Golden is a master in taking everyday human messiness and letting something monstrous crawl right on in. His latest, Carry Me To My Grave, is grief with teeth. Family drama with fangs. And yes, it absolutely rips.

Carry Me To My Grave is a road trip from hell – with something chasing in the rearview.

Title: Carry Me To My Grave (2026) Author: Christopher Golden Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Book jacket: A high concept horror novel about a man trying to protect his dead mother’s body from the evil that is hunting them. Joe says: Carry Me To My Grave is a road trip from hell. And yes, it absolutely rips.

The Wise family is already accustomed to emphasizing the “fun” in “dysfunction” by the time matriarch Maggie dies. But this is a Christopher Golden story, so death ain’t the hard part of this tale; it is merely the beginning. Maggie’s death doesn’t bring closure, it kicks open the door to something ancient, hungry, and very much awake. Malcolm Wise – a Korean War vet with more baggage than a cross-country train – and Violet, his sister-in-law and unspoken love, are tasked with the creepy-cool command to carry Maggie’s body to her grave in Shediak, Maine. Simple job. Except for the undead swarm determined to make sure that body never reaches it.

Golden builds this story like a pressure cooker with no release valve. Malcolm’s buried feelings, Violet’s quiet desperation, older brother Elias’ contempt, sister Jennie’s misplaced superheroics, keeps the Wise family drama simmering; the horror makes it boil. Then, young Benjy, a boy who loses his parents to the darkness, becomes an emotional focal point; he’s a kid caught in a nightmare that doesn’t care about innocence. The tragedy lands. The terror doubles down.

And when Golden lets the panic loose, he doesn’t do it politely. The vampires here, led by the chillingly relentless Root, are not brooding romantics. They are predators. They feed, they hunt, they brutally close in. Snow falls (one of Golden’s hallmarks), darkness stretches, and the Wise family runs – trains, cars, vans, whatever moves faster than fear. Spoiler alert: nothing does. The pace is relentless, the tension constant, the pages practically dare you to stop reading. And dig it: you won’t.

There’s a near cinematic quality within each chapter. You can feel the headlights cutting through the night, hear the distant howls getting closer, sense the inevitable collision between past sins and present survival. This is horror, yes, but it’s also a Jerry Bruckheimer chase thriller with emotional stakes that bite. And they bite deep.

Horror is at its best when it’s personal. Golden knows how to make the genre so damn intimate.

Carry Me To My Grave has a mythic feel. This is like a campfire story with a grounded moral. A reminder that monsters are terrifying, but family is… complicated.

And by the time the final page flips, one thing is clear:
Some things don’t stay buried… and some books aren’t meant to be put down.

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Thank you, St. Martin’s Press, for this invitation to Christopher Golden’s latest nightmare.