What sparked the terror that caused a crowd watching cult band Queen Carrion to surge for the exit, trampling to death a young fan in the crush? We discover this towards the end of The Midnight Muse, but first we are led into the darker background that connects the mass hysteria at the Wonder Room to the disappearance, some time later, of Queen Carrion’s singer and songwriter, Brynn Werner, while he is hiking in the Umpqua Forest of Orgeon’s Cascade range. Brynn, whose Gothic lyrics offer both chorus and kernel to the novel’s plot, is ventriloquised throughout, both in interviews and articles (the rise and demise of Queen Carrion has become a local obsession akin to the mythology around Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd), via the thoughts and memories of her childhood friend Harlow Sorenson, now Queen Carrion’s drummer. Harlow and her brother, Queen Carrion guitarist Thorn, are probably the novel’s true main characters, sharing a backstory which skilfully becomes part of the underpinning of a novel which weaves several strands into a powerful narrative.

At the time of her disappearance, Brynn was writing Queen Carrion’s concept album, The Orchid, working on the final song. Her trip to the forest was supposed to connect her with the Muse and help complete the song, enabling the finished work to set the band along the road to major success. A year after she vanished, the remaining members of Queen Carrion have hired an Airbnb in the forest—in an attempt, perhaps, to understand what happened to their leader, or at least settle the band’s future. With Harlow and Thorn are lead guitarist Rhys, cellist Wendy, and bassist Lou, with Rhys’s girlfriend Jacqueline also in attendance. Already elements are being set up: We know that Wendy wants to quit the band for a steadier career as a session musician in Los Angeles; Rhys wants both greater creative input in the band and Brynn; Harlow has a drink problem. Jacqueline is the stereotype in many rock narratives, the outsider “always hanging around,” distrusted by some of the band members, who wants to be more than “the guitarist’s girlfriend.” Then, in the rather sordid cabin in the woods, cut off from phone and GPS signals, we get the first of several signals about the kind of novel this is—the discovery of a trapdoor.

At first, it’s a joke: a reveal-and-step-back approach to our understanding that we may be reading what the publisher’s publicity calls an “ominous spiral of psychological torment.” But it is, after all, billed as a horror novel. “Haven’t you ever seen Evil Dead?” quips Thorn. Harlow goes down and finds nothing—nothing but a set of stairs disappearing into the darkness. At the bottom of the stairs is a tunnel. For some reason, she calls out. The echo sounds, for one alarming moment, like Brynn’s voice. This sets the tone for other encounters—the insect-featured figures in the forest, Jacqueline’s venture into the tunnel to hear a “faint chewing” and glimpse an apparently headless figure, the “white fuzz” that Rhys consumes and which seems to be a strange fungus. These moments edge closer and closer to the traditional horror “jump scare” only to pull back at first and reveal, well, nothing much—sometimes nothing at all. Then follow a number of unrelenting scenes which are not for the squeamish, taking us into somewhat different territory. But by then, we are rather hooked by the way Kaplan has structured her story.

The novel plays with time, juggling several elements: the scenes in the woods, entries left in the cabin visitors’ book by previous guests, the aftermath of the events which sees a disturbed Harlow in what might be a lunatic asylum, and extracts from articles and interviews which show the creepy public obsession with a band famed “not for their music, not for their talent, but because they are cursed.” All this builds a dislocation which is the book’s major strength. There is a strong sense of place in the forest locations, coupled with a growing uncertainty about key events in some of the characters’ lives. A line from one of Brynn’s songs, “The dead collect in low places,” increases in resonance.

When we discover what actually is lurking in “low places,” and why Brynn’s explanation of her songwriting as “a muse whispering in your ear” is more than a romantic metaphor, the twists and surprises are not over. There is much more to discover about the relationships between band members and, especially, the event which left Thorn permanently disfigured and Harlow nursing a profound guilt. Above all, both Brynn—who we never see in “real time” as a character but who is always recalled or quoted—and Harlow—who sees Brynn as “The one from whom you could never stand to be apart … That childhood friend whose presence was magic”—come to stand out as characters bonded in an unsettling, even problematic relationship with the Muse. We always wonder what sparks creativity. The Midnight Muse has an ingenious answer.

The histories of “real” bands are complicated enough, even dark enough, to make fiction sound tame. The accusations of dabbling in the occult thrown towards Queen Carrion are little different from those rumours swirling around some of our better-known rock/metal/goth icons. What makes The Midnight Muse interesting is that it starts by evoking the rock myths of possession and identity, with Brynn embodying a gothic construct called Queen Carrion in the same way as David Bowie invented Ziggy Stardust, but ends with the very concept of “Queen Carrion” taken over by something else entirely. The last third of the novel oscillates between the borders of supernatural fiction and science fiction, with both the reader and Harlow unsure about what is happening, again building upon a sense of estrangement.

There are elements in The Midnight Muse that break the uncanny spell which the horror-movie stereotypes and the time-shifting help to create. Chapter five ends with a sighting which is meant to be eerie, but which is part of an old joke which I remember from childhood—and the result is a giggle rather than a chill. Part of the discovery of what has been going on for decades or more evokes Stranger Things (2016-2025) rather too closely before settling upon a much more interesting, even metaphysical, focus. Whether they are inserted as knowing nods to the reader or not, these references pull us away from the inexorable progression of a story which otherwise ends cunningly, bringing various threads and implications running through the novel together. In the end, we are driven towards a climax which both jettisons and reinterprets the concept/persona of the Muse: not simply as an inspiration but a force or persona that instils something akin to obsession or mania. We finish the novel with a deeper understanding of the relationship sketched out in its first chapter, wondering whether The Orchid by Queen Carrion might be one of the great unfinished albums of all time—but also wondering whether such works might be worth the torment and danger in creating them.