The Mourning Man review: heat and tropes

The Mourning Man: Volume One is five horror tales with a love story running under all of them, and the love story is the part that hurt. Heat 4 of 5. Supernatural lover, doomed love, and she's the one who wants first. Adult shelf. The content notes up top aren't there for decoration, so please read them before you buy.

Full disclosure: Niche of One, J.D.'s publisher, is publishing my first book. Weigh the rest of this accordingly.

I sold rings at a mall kiosk for eleven years, and every night at close I wiped palm prints off the front of the case. When people want something, they lean on the glass. Early in the title novella, Jim stands outside the window of a yellow kitchen and the woman inside puts both palms flat against it. She "kissed him through it like she meant to get through on wanting alone."

I cleaned that exact mark off my glass something like four thousand times, and it never once occurred to me to write it down. Thank God somebody did.

The cover promises a man who dies for a living and a woman who waits

Jim Rivers is thirty-four, and his job is walking the dying across. Hospice rooms, a VA ward, a care center in Kansas, a front room in Indiana. He takes the pills or opens the vein, and for a few seconds before he gets hauled back he's in a kitchen with yellow linoleum and cherries printed on the oilcloth, where a woman sits at the table shelling peas. Her fingers are green to the second knuckle. She's been waiting on him alone, and each time he comes back there's less kitchen. I'm staying inside the first act of every tale, I promise.

Five tales. The Mourning Man is the novella, and it carries most of the weight. In The Farm, Jim lies down in a body-donation field on purpose. In Lenore, a Kansas town called Lenora is stuck at ten after noon. Rest Area, One Mile belongs to a nineteen-year-old named Abigail and the sister who made her a tape. The Alamogordo Incident, 1952 is a sealed desert lab and a man in a black suit.

It's $4.99, roughly 51,000 words, and you can buy it here.

Where it keeps the promise

I gave it a 4, and on this site a 4 means explicit, with every scene doing a job in the story. I went through the whole book hunting for one I could cut. Couldn't find one.

She runs the first kitchen scene. "Come here and be early," she tells him, and she puts his hands flat on the table. "Leave them on the cherries," she says. "I want to know where you are." She leaves green thumbprints on his hips. Then: "He opened his eyes against her hair and saw the wall." And the next line: "Or didn't see it." A piece of the room is gone, right there in the middle of the best sex in the book, and I said a word out loud on my couch that I would not say in front of my mother.

In The Farm the dead have followed Jim in. They're crowded up at the edge of the room where the window used to be, watching, and she could not care less. "Me," she said. "They don't get this part. You look at me when I come." Then "a long strip of floor on the left went out without a sound."

So that's the deal they're on. Every time they have each other it costs them floor, and they keep paying. At the kiosk we'd have called it layaway, except on this plan the ring gets a little smaller every Friday you come in.

What really got me was the hands, though. In Lenore a dying woman wants her window open all the way, and the state has screwed a steel stop into the frame so nobody's grandfather goes out it into the parking lot. Jim takes the Leatherman off his key ring, backs out four screws, and keeps them in his shirt pocket. In the title novella, old Loretta Pruitt confesses that back in 'seventy-four she's the one who took the coffee-can money, to give to her sister, and Walt never knew. Walt is standing there sweating through a borrowed jacket. "I knew," he says. She tells him he did not. "Lo. I counted it every Friday."

The book says the way those two looked at each other "had sixty years of bedroom in it," and all those years he counted that can and kept his mouth shut. I had to get up and go stand in my own kitchen for a minute.

In Rest Area, One Mile, Renee gets behind the wheel of her sister's car and "moved the seat up two notches. Abby always drove too far back." I'd trade a whole chapter of somebody's yearning for those two sentences. My sister drives with her nose about on the windshield, and I can't read that line without seeing her seat.

There's a cedar toy chest, too. A father built it for his daughter's eighth birthday, dovetailed, sanded so you couldn't find the corners, and he "drilled holes in it. Little ones, along the back, in a row. So my dolls could breathe." The first time through, it's the sweetest thing in the book, and I'd hang onto those holes if I were you, because the book sure does.

And Alamogordo has the scene I'll be telling people about at parties, if I went to parties. Dr. Elena Vasquez "hadn't been looked at in eleven years." Eleven years. Same as my kiosk. I took that a little personally. The man in the black suit asks to borrow her hands, for the machine. She can see the frightened volunteer still stuck behind his face, she knows exactly what that means, she wants him anyway, and she's the one who says lock the door. "I've been careful for eleven years," she says against his throat. "Be accurate." That scene gets paid for in people. And try pulling it out: the last third of the tale stops making any sense, and that's the only test I give a sex scene.

Ann Radcliffe, who wrote gothic novels two hundred years ago, split it like this: terror is dreading what might happen, and horror is seeing what did. Jim has a room for each. The kitchen's the terror one, where you sit with him waiting on the next piece to go. His other room has a floor drain and a plywood box with air holes drilled in it, and by the time he's standing in there, whatever happened has already happened.

Where it does not

The first half of Alamogordo ran rote for me. The briefing room is a roll call: a major with a jaw like a brick, a young physicist throwing up into a trash can, a nurse with her veins going black, and a stack of lines like "Can we stop it?" "No." "Can we slow it?" "I don't know." I could see the genre coming a page before it got there. It wakes up when Vasquez does, and the last third is as good as anything in the book. But if your thumb's going to find the home button anywhere in these 51,000 words, it's in that damn briefing.

Then there's the contract. Spoiler for the shape of the book: this isn't a happy-ever-after, and Volume One doesn't pretend it is. By the end the kitchen is smaller than when we started. Jim gets the kitchen or the cell with the drain, he picks the cell, and the novella comes right out and says he "was a coward." In a romance that's the chapter where he grovels, and honestly I wanted the grovel. He admits it to himself, by himself, and she never hears a word of it. He still owes her that apology and I'm keeping the receipt. The back matter lists Volume Two and says "He's still counting."

I'm reading Volume Two anyway. I'd just like it on the record that I'm annoyed about it.

Readers ask

Is The Mourning Man a romance?

It's horror with a love story through the middle of it. There's no happy ending in this volume, so on my tag it doesn't promise one. The listing compares it to Clive Barker's Books of Blood and asks for readers who want the love story to hurt as much as the knife.

How explicit is it?

Four of the five tales have an open-door scene. Lenore doesn't. They're explicit, they stay close inside the head of whoever's having them, and each one changes something in the story.

Does Jim get his happy ending?

Not in Volume One. The back matter lists Volume Two and says he's still counting.

Is it safe for a younger reader?

No. It's adult horror with explicit sex, graphic violence and suicide on the page. Adults only, and I mean it.

Who should read it

Read it if you want a love story that hurts and you can stand to watch the room shrink around it. Read it if horror has ever made you wish the woman got to say what she wants out loud.

Skip it if the notes up top are a hard no for you, or if you need the ending in your hands when you close the cover.

If you're in: The Mourning Man: Volume One is $4.99 here. And if you want to hear J.D. try to explain himself, I interviewed him.

Sources, opened 4 November 2026: the book itself, read in full; the publisher's listing for the price and word count. The heat scale is this site's own.