Order HERE

or ask your local bookstore!

(Also available at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble)

In 2007, Beck Randall moves with his wife and teenage daughters into a cabin built in 1907 by his grandparents. Once there, daughters Tina and Lucy discover that their predecessors have left an imprint of suffering and violence the girls refer to as "The Whistler," an eerie presence infused in the nature that surrounds them. As the 1907 and 2007 storylines braid together, characters and events intrude upon each other, blurring the boundaries between eras and illustrating that people and lives are not forgotten; instead, they are woven into the fabric of the land itself. With gritty, lyrical storytelling, Let Gravity Seize the Dead is an intergenerational literary horror story featuring a blend of suspense, beauty, and terror.

Read an excerpt from Let Gravity Seize the Dead

at Vol. 1 Brooklyn: HERE

Praise for Let Gravity Seize the Dead

“Fans of small-town horror will find plenty to pique their interest . . . Fans of the recent television series Chapelwaite (based on Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot), will pick up on similar atmospheric vibes in the 1907 portions while the 2007 time line will remind readers of the work of Bentley Little, who finds horror within the quotidian. As the ending nears, readers will reel from the ghosts that have tormented this family in more ways than one.”

BOOKLIST (full review HERE)

“With precise language and an intense rush of suspension that doesn’t relent, Let Gravity Seize the Dead is a propulsive and atmospheric horror novel. It’s the kind of book you read in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down.”

Southern Review of Books (full review and interview HERE)

“Doyle excels at bringing the natural world alive with electric prose and imagery that conveys the beauty and occasional menace of the forest. Let Gravity Seize the Dead has echoes of William Faulkner, Stephen King, and Raymond Carver, but above all the book is Darrin Doyle at his original best.”

Cease, Cows (full review and interview HERE)

“Rather than ostentatious, gut-churning gore, it relies on poetic writing to create a psychological, even spiritual and existential, minefield. The past mysteriously and hauntingly blends with the present so that the events, much like bloodlines, DNA, and family lore, become inseparable.”

Heavy Feather Review (full review HERE)

“Doyle is the Aronofsky, Fincher, or Nolan who paints every crevice of the screen — whose vision is too defining and worlds too full to fail . . . you’ll be rewarded with beauty and nightmares.”

Morbidly Beautiful (full review HERE)

“. . . casts a spell from its first pages, drawing readers ever deeper into its mind-bending world, right up to its shattering, revelatory ending.”

Small Press Picks (full review and interview HERE)

“. . . a hard, fast, fever-dream of a horror story to stack on your summer book shelf.”

April Baer, “Stateside,” Michigan Public Radio (interview HERE at the 12-minute mark)

"Let Gravity Seize the Dead is a truly haunting example of what happens when a setting is treated as a character. Never in my life have I felt so frightened of the woods of Michigan. This is one truly disturbing story . . . nothing short of terrifying."

Stranger Sights (full review HERE)

“It’s one of the spookiest, most headlong books I’ve ever read. It might remind you, as it did me, of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived at the Castle and also of Stephen King’s The Shining. But really, it’s all Darrin Doyle, who for years has been writing marvelous books about our best intentions and our worst impulses. This is his best yet. Fair warning, though: once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop.”

—Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

“‘Want to know a person, look under the soil. That’s where the story is,’ Darrin Doyle writes in his grim and tautly interwoven ghost story, Let Gravity Seize the Dead. Violence and trauma may run deep as the forest roots through the Randall family property, but so does Doyle’s gift of language, which haunts these lean pages with lines like ‘window tarps flap like flightless birds in the night wind,’ to deliver a moody, pitch dark novella that will linger in my nightmares for quite some time.”

—Sara Lippman, author of Lech