The Forty at the Crooked Lantern Review: A Cozy Gothic Halloween Prequel

📖 ARC by the author | 📱📖 Read on Kindle
📃 110 pages | ⏱ Duration: 2 hours
Published: September 25, 2026
Genre: Puzzle
🏷️ Publisher name: Independently published

Book Blurb:

Once a year, forty chairs are set at the Crooked Lantern Inn, and the people who belong simply arrive. This Halloween, Mara Wick hosts the Forty Supper for the first time. A lantern swings in a closed room, a sealed note tells her to count her guests, and a place card in her own handwriting names someone who cannot belong at the table. When the grandfather clock fails at 7:40, a living guest vanishes and knocking sounds from inside a wall that shouldn’t open. Trapped by storm and secret, Mara and the village regulars must face what they owe the Lantern, and what it owes them.

Let’s talk about the book:

G.D. Mercer writes with light and sound. From the first pages of The Forty at the Crooked Lantern, the prose pulls you into the inn: the swinging lantern, the storm, the weight of forty empty chairs. If you’re a focused reader, you’ll be there immediately, and because the book is just over 100 pages, you stay there. There’s no room to drift, which is a real strength. A short story is arguably harder to write than a full-length novel, since there are only a few pages to draw the reader in, and Mercer does it beautifully.

The plot is where I hit a few bumps. The backstory and pacing made the mystery more complicated than it needed to be, and the suspects kept shifting. Just as I settled on a theory, the focus moved on, which left me confused rather than intrigued. Surprise elements like movable walls and multiple entrances to the house made the puzzle harder to solve fairly, since I couldn’t reason about the locked-room element with information I didn’t have.

I also had questions about the premise. The tradition of setting forty chairs every year is a lovely image, and it makes sense for a while, but I found it hard to believe it would be kept up for ages. The explanation for why the Forty need to meet so often didn’t sit well with me either, and since the whole story rests on that obligation, it weakened the stakes a bit.

Even so, the atmosphere carried me through, and I’d read more from Mercer on the strength of the writing alone. I could almost hear the storm rolling outside while I was reading the book.

Would I recommend it?

The Forty at the Crooked Lantern is a short, moody read that pulls you in from the first page. The plot got busier than I needed and the premise asked me to accept a few things I couldn’t quite buy, but the writing carried me through all of it. If you love a cozy-gothic village, a storm outside and an atmosphere you can almost hear, add this one to your TBR. It’s out September 25, 2026, so mark your calendar.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

5 book recommendations

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. If the storm-trapped, everyone-has-a-secret setup was your favorite part of the Lantern, this is the grand original, and it plays fair with its clues.

Crooked House by Agatha Christie. A big, strange family house full of people who are all hiding something, which is the same itch the Crooked Lantern scratches.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. A gothic house, a night that keeps going wrong and a puzzle with plenty of twists, for readers who didn’t mind the busy plot.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. A village full of regulars with secrets, but lighter and warmer, if you want the cozy side without the uncanny.

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure by Alice Kimberly. A cozy mystery with a hint of the supernatural, which is a good next read if the ghostly touches in the Lantern worked for you.

What do you say? Count Your Guests

If the Lantern set a chair for you, who would you want sitting in the other thirty-nine? And have you read a cozy where the setting felt more like a character than the people in it? Tell me in the comments.

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