When the corridor sang, Anya Rusk pressed Record. A freelance archivist living above a bait shop in Port Mercy, Maine, she had come to St. Dymphna Hospital to map its acoustics before the demolition crews arrived. The first take was only a low hum, a pressure in the ribs; the second, silence so whole it felt like a door closing far away. An hour later, she woke shivering on the shoulder of Route 9, salt-stiff coat, palms bloodied, her Nagra IV-S loaded with fresh tape that never once spiked its meters. Deputy Colleen Rourke drove her to the station, where the hospital's caretaker, Silas Hall, unrolled a crackling blueprint and produced a brass ring of keys and a waiver bearing Anya's careful signature. He swore she toured the East Wing with him at dusk. Her field log said she'd been at St. Brigid's bell tower. In her pocket was a pewter key stamped "Ward C" and an unlabeled Polaroid of a corridor that wasn't on the plans. In the photograph, a shadow turned the corner as if listening.
Jonah Pike, a dockworker everyone in town knew by his tide charts and temper, had argued with Anya at the ferry slip the night before. When she slips away again—vanishing into St. Dymphna's after a phone call cut to a hiss—the chatter along Wharf Street fingers Jonah for whatever happened. Forget pleading innocence; he needs the truth that lives in the walls. Guided by the hum captured on Anya's tapes, a pocket level, and a flashlight with a dying filament, Jonah breaks into the hospital after midnight. Stairwells loop back. Doors return to where they should not. On Side B, a voice that sounds like Anya tells him, by name, to avoid the corridor with the water stain shaped like a gull's wing. The longer Anya is missing, the fewer clean minutes exist on the reels, and the more the building seems to remember in his place—etched into plaster, soot, and an old wax cylinder in a velvet case labeled only with a date. Tide will flood the boiler room by dawn. If Jonah can't find Ward C before then, the only thing anyone will hear of them is the last click of the leader tape.
I wanted the blueprint-haunt to click, but instead I got static.
If Brian Evenson's clinical dread shook hands with Laird Barron's coastal rot, you'd get this book's ambiance. The acoustics-mapping hook adds a welcome nerdy edge.
As a whole, I enjoyed the mood but the middle goes a bit foggy; I wanted firmer narrative buoys while the hiss grew louder. Analog-haunt fans will be satisfied.
Shadowed Corridors leans hard into the idea that buildings keep a ledger of our passage, and that recording is a kind of ritual: who remembers whom when the medium fights back? The recurring dance between capturing sound and losing time gives the novel its chill.
Best of all is how silence is reimagined; Anya's note about "silence so complete it felt like a far door closing" turns absence into presence, letting town gossip act like a chorus of partial archives. The resonance lingers.
I am feral for this kind of horror, the kind that rustles the air before it touches skin. St. Dymphna's doesn't just creak; it breathes.
The sound on the page is witchcraft. I could hear the leader click, the hum like pressure in the ribs, the terrible hush that makes your ears ring.
And the architecture! Stairwells that fold back on themselves, hallways that listen, doors that remember where you've been. The building feels tidal, dragging you out and in, out and in.
The relics are perfect: the pewter Ward C key, the blueprint crackle, the velvet case with its sleeping cylinder. Every object is both breadcrumb and revenant.
Jonah stumbling forward on a dying filament had me whispering no like that would help, and then the tape says his name and I forgot to breathe. The hospital has a memory; the tape has a memory; we're the ones getting erased.
This book doesn't haunt a night, it haunts a frequency. I'll be carrying that hum for weeks.
Jonah's rough-edged resolve makes sense of his trespass; he's not noble so much as stubborn, and that stubbornness keeps the search honest. Anya's compulsion to archive is rendered with affection and cost, giving the voice on Side B a raw ache.
Deputy Colleen steadies the town noise, and Silas hovers between keeper and gate. The relationships feel true even when conversations break off just before they deepen.
Rusk writes with a tactile ear: the prose is tuned to thrum and lull, and the analog details feel beautifully handled without showboating. The structure toggles among field logs, rumor, and blueprint snippets that act like stanzas.
The maze effect, though, occasionally dulls urgency. Looped stairwells and returning doors repeat a hair too long before the narrative tightens around Ward C; once the chapters shorten, the book finds its pulse.
A haunted-hospital mystery that coils time and space; the tape reels tighten with every step Jonah takes.
Cold, clever, and salty as Port Mercy, it leaves a perfect after-echo.
