Review: The Sundowner's Dance - Todd Keisling

Genre: Horror, Supernatural

Published: Shortwave Media, April 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars

Fans of Iain Reid’s We Spread will delight in this cosmic horror story about the terrors of growing old… Highly recommended!

“Who am I without you? He’d spent every moment of their marriage terrified that she would be the one to die first, not only because it would break his heart. Because her death would mean resetting himself back to zero. (…) Jerry hadn’t merely stood in her shadow, he was her shadow. Her passing had freed the sun to erase his definition.”

Following the death of his wife Jerry Campbel isn’t so much looking for a new start, as a place to spend his final years in peace. Elderly, aching (physically and mentally) and grief-stricken, he expects to be among likeminded people when he moves into a retirement community in the Poconos. But life at Fairview Acres isn’t what he’d imagined it to be. What begins with strange noises at night and the homeowners-associations chairman’s almost cultlike obsession with forcing Jerry to join in with their neighbourhood-parties, soon turns into something far darker.

Some neighbours exhibit strange behaviour at night, which the others chalk up to “sundowning”, a form of dementia. But Jerry suspects there may be more at play; something that goes beyond these individual cases and affects the community as a whole…

What I loved

Five-star horror novels are rare for me, but The Sundowners Dance fully deserves the distinction! This had so many of my favourite things balanced and blended into the perfect concoction. Cosmic horror, cult-like-vibes in American suburbia, and that age-old universal fear that gets me every time: the fear of growing old and all that comes with it. The Sundowners Dance wraps all of that up in a tight suspenseful narrative with some genuine moments of terror, sparks of levity and a whole lot of emotional core. At its heart, the story explores themes of the grief of outliving your spouse that you can barely remember living without, the fear of losing yourself and your dearest memories to dementia, and the relentless cosmic horror of ever-progressing time and aging. It (incredibly!) wraps all that in a supernatural story without ever cheapening the emotional weight of its themes ánd without using dementia as a cheap plot-device for memory-loss. I genuinely didn’t expect this story to have the emotional impact on me that it had, yet there I was near the end, silently grieving (with) our protagonist…

A story thís emotionally impactful couldn’t happen without well-written characters. I always appreciate a little variation on the ‘dumb-teenage-protagonist” cliché in horror. Jerry wasn’t born yesterday (literally); he has enough life-experience and baggage to know when things don’t add up, and acts accordingly. He’s emotionally and literally mature enough to carry the book on his shoulders, and does so brilliantly.

If all of this talk of the stories “emotional core” made you worry whether you’ll be having a good time along the way; Todd Keisling has got you there too. Thanks to the tight pacing and the occasional moment of levity, friendship and humor, I flew through this book in 2 sittings and wished I could’ve started it all over again by the end.

What I didn’t love

If you’ve somehow avoided the Goodreads description and are interested in this book based off my synopsis, or the tagline alone, please don’t go back to read it before you delve into this book. The synopsis gives away two spoiler-y elements about the direction of the plot that I would’ve loved to discover organically through the story. The element of surprise might have elevated it from a 9.5/10 to a full on 10/10.

Overall, this was one of my favourite horror-reads of the year so far, the ideas of which will linger in my mind for quite a while after flipping the last page.  

Many thanks to Shortwave Media and Highbridge Audio for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.