Book Review: Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden

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The Details

Media Type: Ebook
Title: Carry Me to My Grave
Author(s): Christopher Golden
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pages/Length: Hardcover; 331
Release Date: July 21, 2026
Source: Netgalley

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From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden comes a high concept horror novel about a man trying to protect his dead mother’s body from the evil that is hunting them.

Maggie Wise will take your eyes.

When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.

But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.

From the moment she takes her last breath, before her remains are even loaded aboard the baggage car of the Imperial Limited, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise. Violence erupts on the train, evil preys on its passengers, and once the sun goes down, those long-buried things are coming to make Maggie Wise pay for her past. God help anyone who stands in their way.

The Review

This book and I had quite the journey together, let me tell you. When I saw the synopsis of Carry Me to My Grave, I was so intrigued. A dying mother, a dark figure with nefarious intentions, and then a cross country trip via train while pursued by evil? Count me in. It all sounded so exciting! I had absolutely no idea what the unnamed evil was, but I was definitely ready to find out. And, for the first few chapters, this book lived right up to my expectations. Things moved quickly, darkness lurked on the periphery, and I was absorbed by it all. Until, I wasn’t.

I think what this book really suffers from is pacing problems. There’s a lot of backstory that has to be unraveled, and the book tries to feed it all to the reader in between pockets of action. That means much of the reasoning behind why Malcolm is fleeing for his life is a just a blank page for the longest time. New characters pop in and out quickly, and it’s really hard to get invested in any of them. Even Malcolm’s family members felt paper thin, which made anything that happened to them a lot less impactful if I’m being honest.

On that note, my other big issue with this book was that it is just terribly gory. I have zero problems with gore in my books. I’m a horror reader through and through, and done correctly I feel it adds considerably to the tension in a story. This book never felt like it fit. Instead, it felt like all of that blood and viscera was simply thrown in for shock value. Which is odd, because this book is written with the kind of language that you wouldn’t expect that from. It almost felt too sophisticated for that. I can’t say much more without potentially spoiling the main plot points, and I know a lot of people will still choose to pick this up for themselves. However I will end with the fact that lore in this book, the very thing that explains Malcolm’s mother’s odd final request, just felt very disjointed to me.

Carry Me to My Grave ended up not being what I expected, and I can’t deny that I was a bit disappointed. Still, the writing style held a lot of promise, so I’ll likely end up trying out whatever comes out from this author next.