Call Off the Dark by Hallie Shepherd: A haunting thriller about grief, isolation, and the things that follow us

Sometimes grief makes us do things we would never do if we were thinking clearly. In Hallie Shepherd’s Call Off the Dark, one grieving widow makes a series of increasingly questionable decisions that leave her isolated on a remote farm with a husband she barely knows—and eventually face-to-face with a man who is supposed to be dead.

Call Off the Dark is an atmospheric thriller that blends psychological suspense, supernatural uncertainty, and a surprisingly tender story about love and loss. The result is a strange and unsettling novel that kept me engaged precisely because I was never entirely sure what was happening—or who I could trust.

Helen has broken the number one rule of the widow’s club: don’t make any major life decisions for at least a year after losing your spouse. Then again, Helen has just watched the love of her life die in the most brutal way imaginable, so perhaps conventional wisdom doesn’t seem particularly useful to her anymore.

After Tyler’s murder, Helen is devastated and desperate to escape the broken life they built together in Seattle. So when Wade comes along, she makes the impulsive decision to marry him and move with him to his isolated farmhouse in rural Washington. She trades her old life for a strange sort of off-grid, tradwife existence, spending her days gardening, cleaning, sewing, washing clothes by hand, and preserving food. It does not take long to become apparent that this is not exactly Helen’s dream life.

In fact, Helen hates cooking. She doesn’t particularly enjoy gardening. She doesn’t want to pinch worms off Brussels sprouts. And wearing a petticoat while trying to perform physical labor is, understandably, not improving her quality of life.

Then there’s Wade. Wade is a bit of a spoiled man-child, and watching Helen cater to him is one of the more maddening aspects of the novel. When he comes home from a long day working the timber, she takes off his boots for him because her fingers are smaller and less stiff than his. This is despite the fact that Helen has spent her own day working just as hard—gardening, cleaning, sewing, and washing their clothes by hand. Then she runs him a bath and prepares dinner according to his preferences.

It’s the sort of domestic arrangement that might be idyllic if Helen actually wanted it. She clearly doesn’t. And what makes it worse is just how isolated she has become.

Helen and Wade make the trip into town once a month for supplies. At least, they used to. Then Helen makes the mistake of suggesting pizza for dinner during one of their trips, and Wade suddenly finds reasons to go without her. Two months pass without Helen making the trip into town, which means she hasn’t spoken to her family in three months because the farm has no phone.

The only person Helen gets to talk to, aside from Wade, is a young woman who lives nearby and occasionally makes the trek through the wilderness to visit. Helen actually keeps a running list of things she wants to discuss with her neighbor so she won’t forget them before the next visit. That detail says a lot about Helen’s life. She is desperately lonely. And the person who is supposed to be her companion has very little interest in actually being her companion.

Of course, Helen still has someone else to talk to. Tyler.

She has a small altar hidden in the cellar, complete with candles and a photograph of her dead husband. When the loneliness becomes too much, she pulls the items from a box on the bottom shelf and attempts to contact him through séances. Sadly, Tyler never answers. At least, not at first. Which leaves the reader wondering whether Helen is grieving, traumatized, losing her grip on reality—or perhaps some combination of all three.

And then Isaac arrives. There’s just one problem: Isaac is Wade’s brother, and Wade insists Isaac is dead. According to Wade, Isaac died in a horrific farm accident on their family’s farm. So the mysterious man who has suddenly appeared at their isolated home cannot possibly be Isaac. Unless he somehow is.

At this point, Call Off the Dark becomes particularly effective because Shepherd keeps multiple possibilities in play. Maybe Isaac really has returned from the dead. Maybe Wade is manipulating Helen. Maybe Helen is experiencing hallucinations brought on by grief, PTSD, insomnia, and prolonged isolation. Maybe Wade is unraveling, too.

Or maybe something much stranger is happening. The novel doesn’t make it easy to settle on an explanation, and that uncertainty becomes one of its greatest strengths. Every time I thought I had figured out what was happening, the story gave me another reason to reconsider.

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The dual timeline helps make that uncertainty even more effective. The present-day storyline follows Helen’s increasingly disturbing existence on the farm, while the other timeline takes us back to her relationship with Tyler—from their meet-cute through their marriage and ultimately to his death and the aftermath. Seeing the two versions of Helen side by side makes the transformation more complicated than simply watching a woman fall apart.

We understand what she lost. We understand why she is desperate to escape. And we also see how easily grief and trauma can make someone vulnerable to circumstances that pull them in directions they never would have chosen under different circumstances.

That’s ultimately what I found most compelling about Call Off the Dark. Beneath the ghost story and psychological thriller is a story about how profoundly loss can alter our sense of ourselves and the world around us. Helen is trying to escape her grief, but instead of escaping it, she carries it with her into an increasingly claustrophobic existence.

Even the farm, which should theoretically represent freedom from the outside world, becomes another kind of prison. There’s something especially effective about the contrast between Helen’s memories of her life with Tyler and her present-day existence with Wade. Her relationship with Tyler gives the novel a genuine emotional center, making it clear why his death has left such a devastating hole in her life. At the same time, it makes the reader understand just how wrong her new marriage feels.

And then there’s Isaac. The arrival of a supposedly dead man adds another layer of unease to the story, and Shepherd uses it to deepen the novel’s uncertainty about what is real and what isn’t. The novel constantly plays with the boundary between psychological and supernatural horror, and that ambiguity works particularly well within a story so deeply concerned with grief.

The pacing is also one of the novel’s strengths. Call Off the Dark has plenty of questions to answer, but it doesn’t spend too much time sitting around waiting for those answers. The story keeps moving, gradually adding new complications and shifting our understanding of the characters.

And while I wouldn’t necessarily describe Helen as an easy character to understand, I think that works for the story. She has made some truly baffling decisions, and watching her continue down paths that seem obviously dangerous to the reader can be frustrating. But that frustration is also part of the point. Helen is not making decisions from a place of emotional stability. She is grieving, isolated, sleep-deprived, traumatized, and increasingly unsure of her own perceptions. She is also lonely enough to desperately want someone to believe her. Or perhaps desperately want someone to tell her what is real.

That makes Call Off the Dark a particularly effective psychological thriller because the central mystery isn’t simply “What is happening?” It’s “What happens when you can no longer trust your own understanding of what is happening?”

There are moments when the story leans heavily into its stranger elements, and readers who prefer their thrillers firmly grounded in reality may find themselves frustrated by some of the ambiguity. But for me, the weirdness is part of what makes the novel work. Call Off the Dark is at its best when it leaves you sitting in that uncomfortable space between explanations.

Is Isaac a ghost? Is Wade telling the truth or is he manipulating the situation? Is Helen losing her mind? And if the answer to any of those questions is yes, what does that mean for everyone involved? I’m not going to answer any of those questions here because discovering the answers—or at least discovering what Shepherd wants you to believe the answers might be—is part of the fun.

What I will say is that Call Off the Dark is strange, unsettling, and deeply engaging. It takes the familiar ingredients of the psychological thriller—grief, an unreliable protagonist, an isolated setting, a suspicious husband, a mysterious stranger—and mixes them with supernatural uncertainty and a surprisingly poignant meditation on love that refuses to end simply because someone has died.

For a debut, it’s an ambitious combination, and Shepherd manages to keep the story moving while maintaining the sense of unease that makes the novel so difficult to put down. If you’re looking for a strange, atmospheric thriller to add to your fall reading list, this one is worth putting on your radar.

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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