The cover of In Between Rooms gives you a perfect preview of what you’re in for: a bloodied stuffed elephant sitting alone. It’s a fitting image for Adrian M. Mompoint’s second horror novella, which continues to draw heavily from Stephen King. Where his previous novella, The Performance Review felt more like a King short story crossed with corporate satire, In Between Rooms leans into 1408 or Gerald’s Game. It features a domestic space that turns against its inhabitant, a protagonist whose grip on reality slips further with every chapter, and childhood trauma that refuses to stay buried. The book was released in May 2026 and runs a brisk 115 pages, making it an easy one-sitting read.
Mirah wakes up in a bare, sparsely furnished apartment with no memory of her name, her past, or the events that landed her there. What starts as an amnesia mystery turns into something stranger fairly quickly. The apartment itself doesn’t behave normally. Hallways lengthen and tighten without warning. A bedroom clock stays stuck on the same five minutes no matter how many times Mirah smashes it, unplugs it, or throws it across the room. Every door seems to lead somewhere that it shouldn’t, and each room she enters reveals a little more of a past she doesn’t want to remember.
This isn’t my first time reading Mompoint. I reviewed The Performance Review fairly recently, and going into this one I expected something in a similar register. However, The Performance Review was dark, but it had a subtly comedic edge running underneath it with the office setting, the deadpan wrongness of the coworkers and the occasional absurdity of it all gave the reader some room to breathe. In Between Rooms doesn’t really offer that release valve. This is non-stop horror from start to finish, with barely a moment of levity anywhere in the book.
The story is bleak, almost unrelentingly so. Mirah moves from one horrifying scene to the next with very little pause, and the emotional register stays locked on dread and survival the entire way through. For most of the book’s length, it may feel like an exercise in misery, and I think some readers may find it to be simply too much. Be that as it may, personally I really appreciated its dark tone.
Almost the entire story also takes place within a single environment. The apartment itself never really expands beyond its four walls, even as it warps and reshapes itself constantly. In my interpretation at least Mirah is essentially reckoning with her past through a series of increasingly disturbing hallucinations, each one built out of a different piece of her buried memory. It’s a clever, claustrophobic way to structure a story with such a limited setting: the horror comes almost entirely from what the apartment does to her, rather than from any outside threat.
One of the most memorable of these hallucinations is a terrifying, talking centipede that turns out to be the twisted version of one of Mirah’s former students. Even though it towers over her, at one point tells her, “I hope you’re doing okay. We all miss you.” It’s one of the few moments in the book that softens the dread rather than escalating it, and it stands out because the rest of the book rarely lets up.
The book gradually reveals why Mirah is trapped there in the first place, and that slow reveal is genuinely one of its strongest features. You learn more about her backstory piece by piece, who she is, what happened to her family, what she’s been avoiding. It’s enjoyable in the way a good mystery is enjoyable, even when the content itself is rather upsetting. The pacing of these reveals is well handled; Mompoint doesn’t front-load too much information, and doesn’t withhold so much that the book feels frustrating either.
All of this builds toward a twist that recontextualizes the entire story. I won’t spoil it here, but the twist is perfectly guessable if you’re paying attention. There are enough hints scattered through the book that an attentive reader may see roughly where things are headed before it’s spelled out. That said, predictable doesn’t mean weak. The ending is great and surprisingly fitting, ending the book on an ambigious but hopeful note.
In terms of the writing itself, the book is generally well constructed. The prose is leaner than in The Performance Review, with mostly short, clipped sentences that mirror Mirah’s disorientation and panic. It reads more like a novella than a full-length novel, and that shorter length works in its favor here. A book this consistently intense probably couldn’t sustain itself at twice the length without losing impact.
The supporting cast is a little thin, which is apt given the nature of the story. Family members mostly appear through flashback or dream logic rather than as fully developed characters in their own right, existing mainly to serve the larger emotional arc rather than standing on their own. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this book’s unique structure, and in particular its unapologetic treatment of repressed and traumatic memories. I also appreciated the nod to The Performance Review, suggesting the two books take place in the same universe.
What lingers most after finishing In Between Rooms is how sad the book actually is underneath the horror. At its heart, this is a story about getting past your own history and regrets, no matter how burdensome they feel, whether that be consciously or unconsciously. Mompoint uses the dream logic of the apartment beautifully, letting the story wander into strange, illogical territory the way real dreams do, while still keeping everything tethered to what it’s actually about underneath. It’s a book that understands the past doesn’t loosen its grip until you finally turn and face it.
Final verdict: For fans of Hereditary, or writers like Shirley Jackson or Paul Tremblay, In Between Rooms delivers a tightly constructed, unsettling piece of grief-horror. As a well-paced, single-setting horror story, it’s a good example of what the format can do.
You can get your copy of In Between Rooms or read for free on Kindle Unlimited here!
