The Girls in the Cabin

• Author: Caleb Stephens
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: December 2, 2025
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Brilliance Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

DISCOVER ONE OF THE MOST GRIPPING THRILLERS YOU’LL HEAR THIS YEAR.

A father will do anything to keep his daughters safe. But the phone lines are down. The roads are blocked. And the woman in the cabin is hiding a terrible secret . . .

This camping trip is Chris’s last chance to repair his relationship with his daughters, Kayla and Emma. Nothing’s been the same since they lost their mom. But things go wrong as soon as they get to the mountains.

When they make camp, nine-year-old Emma runs off into the woods. By the time they find her, there’s a snowstorm rolling in. And Emma’s leg is badly broken. They need to find shelter, fast.

They think they’re safe when they come across an old farmstead. The woman inside welcomes them in from the howling blizzard and straps up Emma’s leg.

They settle down for the night, but when Chris wakes at dawn and looks over . . . Emma is gone.

And this family’s nightmare is only just beginning.

An utterly breathtaking thriller perfect for fans of Harlen Coben, Gregg Olsen, Mary Kubica, Lisa Jackson and Stephen King’s Misery.

Set in the stunning wilderness of the Colorado Flat Tops, this addictive thriller packed with shocking twists will make you question everything you think you know about family.

I’m always ready for a good mystery/thriller/suspense story, but if you’ve hung around on my blog at all, you probably know that I have severe wuss-ism, and tend to stay away from anything heavier than horror-lite. I wasn’t expecting this story to veer this far into horror, but it wound up being not too scary, more gory.

I have mixed thoughts on this book. I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by a full cast, which is my favorite way to listen to a book. Amy Bentley, Kelsey Jaffer, Chris Ciulla, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, and Courtney Fabrizio all narrate, and I love a full cast audiobook because each character has a completely different voice and speaking style. This made it really easy differentiate characters, since there are a bunch of characters and it could get confusing otherwise.

Once I got close to the 25% mark, I wound up having to go back because I got a bit confused. I missed something important, but once I restarted it, I understood better. There are two groups of characters—Chris, who is camping with his daughters, Emma and Kayla; and the people in the cabin they encounter. Reminiscent of Stephen King’s Misery, the trip goes terribly wrong.

Both Kayla and Emma are struggling hardcore after the death of their mother from cancer: Kayla has lost faith in her father and doesn’t trust him, and Emma has gone completely silent over the last year. This was my favorite aspect of the story—the family dynamic that Chris, Kayla, and Emma have developed during their year of grief. Trying to improve his connection to his daughters and help them heal, he decides to take them camping in the Flat Tops of Colorado. 

Things go wrong immediately. It is extremely cold, and when they get to the campsite, Emma sneaks off to chase a bunny. Except the bunny disappears, and Emma has a fall that leads to a severely broken leg, crushed by a boulder she can’t move by herself. Once they find her and free her, it has begun to snow, which wasn’t in the weather forecast. It’s clear that they need to find shelter and get Emma medical attention, so Chris carries Emma and they walk with Kayla to find any type of shelter they can. 

Except the shelter is probably the second worst place to be, aside from trapped under a boulder in a blizzard when you’re nine. Inside, they find a woman who seems sweet, with her adult son, who has a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Billy, the son, experiences volatile moods, yet he seems more like a young child. Naturally, he is fascinated by Emma, who he can connect with on his level. 

There are some triggers to be aware of if you read this one: TBI, child physical and sexual abuse, violence, and excessive gore, along with multiple miscarriages. I struggled with differentiating Kayla from Clara, since they sound alike, and at first, I thought the flashbacks were from Kayla, until I realized that the woman in the flashbacks is much older. Turns out the flashbacks are from Clara’s life, giving the reader important information that explains a lot about Clara. She has experienced severe trauma and abuse throughout her life, and having this information from Clara’s past made her more of a likable character, since we have some insight into the factors that made Clara the way she is. If I was just reading about Clara in the present day, she wouldn’t be sympathetic at all.

Unfortunately, after wrapping Emma’s leg as well as she can, Chris realizes that Emma needs medical care, and tries to call an ambulance. However, the phone lines are down because of the storm, and the roads are impassable, leaving them stuck in the cabin with Clara and Billy. It quickly becomes clear to Chris that this is not an ideal situation, which devolves when he realizes that Emma is gone and they won’t allow him to have any contact. 

There is a lot of tension in the story, starting really early on, and maintaining a pretty fast pace throughout the book. It kept me intrigued and glued to the pages to see what would happen next, and there were a ton of plot twists that are written beautifully. I was consistently surprised by what happened next, and despite how over the top things get, it still felt like this could possibly happen, much like the aforementioned Misery. Since they can’t leave until the storm passes, they’re trapped in a cabin of horrors. Gore was very prominent in the story, which usually doesn’t bother me, but this one involved a lot of gratuitous discussion of a severe eye injury, and when it comes to eye injuries, I immediately get the ick, so the repeated mentioning of the eye injury wasn’t a fun experience for me, although it was definitely less fun for the character. 

Overall, this was a middle of the road read for me, mainly because I was expecting this to be a mystery/suspense novel rather than horror, which is my least favorite genre to read. I tried reading Dreamcatcher by Stephen King, and it got so scary I had to put the book in the back of the closet and barricade it until I could donate it the next day. Luckily, this wasn’t *that* level of scary, but the gore made it more uncomfortable for me.  Many of the characters fall somewhere along the spectrum of morally gray, at least all of the adults. The character with a TBI felt realistic to me, since I’ve worked with people who have TBIs in the past, although I didn’t love how he was voiced and portrayed as mentally retarded (MR), and that gave me a little of the ick. There is some additional mental illness representation, but it wasn’t great rep—the vast majority of people with a mental illness are not violent or dangerous, but this book fell back on the tired trope of ‘violent person with mental illness’ as a major part of the plot, so I struggled with that aspect as well. This was a tense, well-plotted book that teeters between thriller and horror, heavy on the gore and triggers, but a story I was caught up in and couldn’t stop reading. It probably would have gotten a better rating from me if was a genre that I prefer, so this is a case of ‘it’s not the book, it’s me.’ Take this review with a grain of salt, especially if you like an over the top locked door horror story.

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