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The Babadook: Monster of grief
Paperback
Series: The Terror Lineup (13-Book Horror Anthology Series), Book 13
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 25 2025
Pages: 76
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.16 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some books you read. This one reads you back.
Fourteen months after his wife died in the little back bedroom of their terraced house, Tom Hale still cannot open its door. He cannot say the word, either. Then a book turns up on his seven-year-old daughter's shelf that nobody bought: grey cloth, no title, a pop-up house on the first page that looks exactly like theirs. On a later page, something tall and flat unfolds out of the dark, with long folded fingers and a pale face with two small holes for eyes.
Evie calls him Mister Hollow. She says he comes when you are sad. She says he lives in houses where nobody says what happened.
Tom tears the book up and puts it in the bin. In the morning it is on the doormat, stitched back together. The clocks stop at ten past four. Black water drips through the kitchen ceiling from the room upstairs. The baby monitor plays a breathing he has not heard since the hospice. And once he finally falls asleep, something flat and cold slides into him and makes him quiet, and calm, and very dangerous.
Between the chapters are true sections, headed Reading the Dark, on Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook and the real fears beneath it: the bogeyman and the power of names, the Hat Man of sleep paralysis, the lost silent film that inspired the creature, Victorian mourning, intrusive thoughts, prolonged grief disorder and the heart that grief can break.
The Babadook: Monster of Grief is a story about the fear of a sorrow that grows a shape of its own, and a clear-eyed look at why that fear is so true. Read it with the lights on.
This is an unofficial work of fiction and commentary. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders of The Babadook. This second edition has been fully rewritten, and every fact and quotation in the Reading the Dark sections is checked against the sources listed at the back. It is part of The Terror Line-Up from JD Arden: the fears we carry, told as stories you cannot put down.
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