We Are for the Dark by Gretchen McNeil: An unsettling descent into Newfoundland horror

What if a missing-person investigation led you to an island where nothing is quite what it seems—and something ancient beneath the ground is very, very hungry? Gretchen McNeil’s We Are for the Dark, releasing September 1, 2026, takes that premise and turns it into a fast-paced supernatural horror story filled with isolated communities, religious unease, strange traditions, and a growing sense that the people arriving on the island may have made a terrible mistake.

McNeil’s novel begins with Father Shane Ryan, a recently ordained Catholic priest with an unusual past as an FBI analyst. When a priest disappears from a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland, Cardinal Jacobs calls on Ryan to investigate. At roughly the same time, Royal Newfoundland Constabulary constable Miriam Rideout becomes concerned about a frantic call she received from the missing priest. When her superiors refuse to authorize a wellness check, Miriam takes matters into her own hands and travels to the island herself. Naturally, the two eventually end up together—and neither is particularly thrilled about it.

Miriam and Ryan make for an interesting pairing. They don’t trust one another, and Miriam has an obvious distaste for the Catholic Church, while Ryan’s background makes him considerably more complicated than the stereotypical sheltered priest. Their uneasy alliance gives the story some of its momentum as they begin to realize that the island itself—and the people living there—are hiding something much bigger than a missing priest.

And that brings me to one of my favorite aspects of We Are for the Dark: the setting. I love reading books that take me somewhere I haven’t been before, and Newfoundland is definitely unfamiliar territory for me. McNeil does an excellent job establishing the island’s atmosphere and making the remote setting feel like much more than a backdrop for the horror.

In fact, the setting almost functions as another character. The isolation of the island is essential to the story’s growing sense of dread. There are no convenient ways to leave, no familiar amenities, and no easy way for Miriam and Ryan to determine whom they can trust. Even ordinary details become unsettling because the environment feels so foreign and disconnected from the world the characters know.

There are some wonderfully strange details, too: a fishing port without boats, a town without stores or cars, and those bizarre purple flowers that seem to be appearing everywhere. McNeil gradually builds the feeling that the island is operating according to rules that the outsiders don’t understand.

I also appreciated the attention to the specific details of Newfoundland. At one point, I became curious about Miriam’s surname, Rideout. I was convinced McNeil had simply made it up because it sounded like a cool name for a cop. Instead, when I looked it up, I discovered that Rideout is a surname with deep and authentic roots in Newfoundland. That little discovery made me appreciate the author’s attention to place even more.

That kind of detail made me appreciate the setting even more. Whether readers are familiar with Newfoundland or, like me, are encountering it primarily through fiction, the book creates a strong sense of place.

We Are for the Dark is a horror story that doesn’t waste much time—it moves.

Once Miriam arrives on the island and Father Ryan enters the picture, the story keeps pushing forward. There is always another strange discovery, another unanswered question, or another indication that something is seriously wrong.

That made this an easy book to keep reading. The mystery surrounding the missing priest provides an initial hook, but it doesn’t take long for the story to reveal that we’re dealing with something considerably darker than a conventional missing-person investigation.

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The religious-horror elements are particularly effective because the story doesn’t simply use Catholicism as spooky window dressing. Father Ryan’s faith, his past, and Miriam’s distrust of the Church all become relevant to the way the two characters approach what they encounter. The result is a story that gradually shifts from mystery into supernatural horror without feeling like it’s changing genres entirely. And once the nature of the threat becomes clearer, the book gets increasingly strange.

As much as I enjoyed the book, there were a couple of places where I had trouble suspending my disbelief. The biggest was the extreme misogyny Miriam encounters in her job. I have absolutely no doubt that misogyny continues to exist within police departments, including in ways that can have serious consequences for women working in law enforcement. But the particular way it manifests here felt so overt to me that I occasionally found myself thinking less about the story and more about whether this really would happen in quite this way in the present day. It sometimes felt more like the workplace culture of the early twentieth century than contemporary North America.

That may be completely unfair on my part. My own experience with police culture is extremely limited, and I’m certainly not qualified to make sweeping statements about the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary or policing in Newfoundland. Workplace cultures can vary enormously from one organization and location to another, and perhaps what McNeil depicts is entirely plausible in this particular setting. Still, I found myself questioning it while I was reading, which pulled me out of the story.

I also had a similar reaction to Miriam’s decision to invite herself to stay at the rectory on Bale Island with a priest she’d never met. This seemed particularly strange because Miriam is otherwise portrayed as a fairly cautious and capable woman. She also has an openly negative attitude toward the Catholic Church, making her willingness to stay in the rectory with a complete stranger—let alone a priest—feel even more out of character to me. I kept thinking that surely she’d have considered another option. These aren’t necessarily flaws that will bother every reader, but they were moments when the story’s logic didn’t quite work for me.

Despite those reservations, I found We Are for the Dark genuinely entertaining. The book succeeds particularly well at creating an atmosphere of isolation and unease. The island feels increasingly wrong as Miriam and Ryan uncover more about it, and McNeil makes good use of the setting to heighten the sense that these characters are trapped somewhere they don’t understand.

I also appreciated that the story doesn’t linger too long in the setup. The mystery develops quickly, the supernatural elements arrive without requiring an enormous amount of patience from the reader, and the tension continues building toward a horror story that becomes increasingly strange and disturbing.

If you enjoy religious horror, isolated communities, supernatural mysteries, or stories in which an unfamiliar landscape becomes part of the threat, We Are for the Dark is worth adding to your September reading list.

For me, the strongest element was the setting. Newfoundland gave the story a freshness that I really appreciated, and the island’s isolation made the supernatural elements considerably more effective. Even when I wasn’t completely convinced by some of the characters’ decisions or circumstances, I was still invested enough in the mystery to keep turning the pages.

We Are for the Dark is a creepy, atmospheric horror novel that takes a missing-person investigation somewhere much darker than its protagonists could have anticipated—and it makes Newfoundland feel like exactly the kind of place where an ancient darkness might be waiting beneath the surface.

What do you think makes an isolated setting especially effective in horror? Let me know in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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