Three dishes wrapped in foil are sitting on the porch when she opens the door. Nobody is there. There are no footprints in the snow, no tyre marks, no sound of anyone hurrying away. She decides they must be shy neighbours, the quietly decent Midwestern sort who believe food says everything a person needs to, and she is grateful, because she has not slept properly in twelve weeks and had not thought about dinner. She puts them in the fridge. Two days later, one of them is moving. Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose is a collection about small courtesies with terms attached, and that scene is the best thing in it.
Sometimes I Scare Myself Holds Three Novellas
Worth saying up front, because the packaging invites the wrong expectation. This is sold as a collection of horror, which is accurate, but a group should know that it contains three novellas of roughly twenty-five thousand words apiece, each with its own chapters. It is three evenings, not ten.
Rose’s introduction gives Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose its spine. She writes about the thought that arrives uninvited as a what-if and then settles in and gets comfortable: what if you opened the door, answered the call, didn’t. Every one of the three stories is then constructed around a rule that somebody breaks without ever knowing it was a rule. A circle is opened at a séance and not closed. A gift is accepted from a neighbour. An object is carried out of a shop unpaid for, as a joke.
The Story Worth the Discussion
The middle novella is the reason to bring this to a group, and it works because of an imbalance: we are certain, and the people in it are not.
Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose hands this middle section to Kristin, who has a newborn, a furious fifteen-year-old and a bargain house in a town whose entire population would fit in a school hall. Things happen to her. A switch will not stay down. Something speaks through the nursery intercom. She is run into at the only traffic light in town and then watched, politely, while four locals and a sheriff assemble an account in which the collision was hers. We are behind her eyes for all of it, so none of it is in question.
Her husband and daughter reach a different conclusion, and they reach it together. They sit her down with a coordinated plan to lift some weight off her shoulders, and they hand her the one sentence she cannot use: nobody thinks you’re crazy, you’re just tired. Her daughter has been reading about what can happen after a birth and offers the phrase as comfort, which is worse. The whole scene is excruciating for the simple reason that both of them love her.
So the story’s real subject is a woman assembling a sound case in a room that has already reclassified her evidence as a symptom. When the explanation finally arrives it turns the story inside out, and the most frightening picture in it becomes the most sorrowful.
What gives it weight is that Rose lived it. She explains in her acknowledgments that a house she had wanted was ruined by neighbours and local politics, and that it escalated into online mobs, strangers who knew her address, and threats that reached her eight weeks after giving birth. Her own one-line summary is the best writing anywhere in this book: nothing inspires a haunted house story like working out that the real monsters live next door.
Where Sometimes I Scare Myself Overreaches
Judged against its neighbours, the first novella here is the most fun and the least disciplined. It builds real claustrophobia inside a locked condominium and then spends it on a dismemberment set piece and a late massacre that are closer to choreography than to fear. The second of those in particular throws away a confinement the story had spent seventeen chapters earning.
The other problem across Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose is repetition. Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose runs the same play in two of its three stories: a woman perceives something accurately, and the people around her reclassify her as unstable. It is devastating the first time. The second time a group will spot the template. The third novella at least has an argument for it, since the man doing the reframing is an ex-boyfriend repeating exactly the behaviour she left him over, and the curse merely arms him. That story, incidentally, grew out of a single piece of background set dressing in the film Oddity, which is a nice demonstration of how little a writer needs to start with.
Elsewhere the supporting casts are thin, several characters visibly queue up to die, and one ominous instruction about keeping a fire alight is set up and never paid off. There is also a sentence pattern, the flat correction of the form it wasn’t this, it was that, which recurs dozens of times over these three novellas and becomes impossible to unhear.
For the Group
Believing versus managing. Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose gives us a family who answer fear with care rather than credence. Where is the line between supporting somebody and overruling them? Would your group have believed her?
Whose word counts. In two stories, a woman’s testimony is discounted by people who love her. Does the book have anything to say about that beyond staging it?
Rules as horror. Each novella punishes the breaking of a rule nobody explained. Is that fair, and does fairness matter in horror?
The real monsters live next door. Knowing the middle story came from the author’s own experience, does that change how you read it, and should it?
Which one gets the sequel? Rose closes by admitting that one of the three is being continued and refusing to say which. Take a vote before anyone looks it up.
Content notes before choosing this. The gore is heavy and specific: limbs removed, necks turned past where necks go, one death bleeding out in a running shower. Also a woman found hanged; children drowned beneath ice; a baby put at risk more than once; a new mother’s illness turned into a weapon against her; a whole family lost on a road; obscenity ventriloquised by a medium; a young deer caught in a gate, dying slowly and then butchered while we watch; months of being disbelieved; and a former partner with a knife.
For groups left wanting more of this register after Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose, try Dating After the End of the World, which shows how far Rose ranges between books, or The Perfect Marriage for the thriller that made her name. And for haunted houses with more patience and less blood, Solace House by Will Maclean is the better discussion, and House of Splinters by Laura Purcell does the same trick with a century’s distance.
Final Thoughts
The gore will decide whether this works for your group, and it is worth being honest that some of it is there for spectacle. But underneath the arterial spray, Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose is interested in something quieter and far more useful: what it costs a person to be right in a room that has agreed she is not.
Its last image is not a monster. It is a Realtor in a shiny-elbowed pantsuit handing over a set of keys and mentioning, brightly, that the neighbours have already been round with something for the fridge.