Book 39 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – carrying on through the rest of the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.
Let’s talk about my final book read of the Halloween season, Widow’s Point (2026), by father and son duo Richard Chizmar and W.H. Chizmar!
This was the third autographed book I picked up at the Belmont Literary Festival back in September, after Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods and Cassandra Khaw’s The Library at Hellebore. Widow’s Point was a perfect read for Halloween, as it is a tale about an old haunted lighthouse, though the way the story is told is anything but ordinary!
It is worth talking about the evolution of this novel first, as described in the book’s afterword. It began as a shorty story collaboration between father and son in 2017 for a sea-horror anthology while they were both too busy to work on something on their own. The short story was published, but the duo couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it next evolved into a novella. From there they considered doing a sequel, but were convinced by their editor to join the novella into a larger work that would continue the story and became the full novel Widow’s Point.
The format of Widow’s Point is fascinating and to the best of my knowledge unique: it is a “found footage” horror novel, basically a Blair Witch Project-type tale in book form! The story begins with an email conversation between several people, where one person has stolen evidence from a police station and passed it along to another to transcribe. It will be somewhat later in the book before we learn exactly what was taken.
Overall, the book is broken into two stories: an author’s three day visit to the lighthouse in 2017 where for extra drama he has himself locked in, and a weeklong visit in 2025 by an internet personality and his crew to document supernatural phenomena. In the earlier section, the story is told through audio and video diaries of the author as well as some written journal entries. In the latter section, we are treated to the perspectives of multiple cameras on every cast and crew member as well as fixed cameras positioned throughout the lighthouse. It is somewhat fascinating that found footage stories have become much more colorful now that technology has advanced to the point where one can imagine cameras recording things everywhere!
As you might expect, things do not going swimmingly for either set of investigators of the lighthouse.
As in all fantastic haunted house stories, the lighthouse is the central character. As the novel progresses, various investigators describe the blood-soaked history of the lighthouse from its accident-prone construction in 1838 up to ritual murders, suicides, and unexplained disappearances through the late 20th century. We are also treated to a journal of one of the lighthouse’s older victims, which gives us a glimpse at the horrors of an earlier era, as well as a look at the town of Harper’s Cove where the lighthouse is located.
The main part of the novel is the newest section, focused on the 2025 internet crew, and here the character dynamic becomes important. As strange occurrences pile up and tension builds within the group, we learn that some of them have secrets and connections to the edifice that had been previously unreported. The dialogue was fun and realistic and the interactions always meaningful to the story. Though the head of the bunch is basically a YouTube personality, he is not an annoying one-note character and comes across are reasonably sympathetic — it’s generally important in a horror story to have characters that people can get invested in!
The book ends with a wrap-up that explains the cryptic email conversations at the beginning and ties off the ghost story in a satisfying, albeit open-ended, way.
This was the first book I’ve read by Richard Chizmar, though I’ve been familiar with his name for quite some time! Widow’s Point was a great spooky read and I look forward to checking out more of his work.
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PS Widow’s Point shouldn’t be confused with the television show Widow’s Bay, which is also fantastic! The naming is more or less a coincidence though both stories feature a haunted seaside town.
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