Review of 8114 by Joshua Hull ,
My Rating : 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Pub date:26/08/25 publisher:CLASH Books
#8114 #NetGalley

Thank you, NetGalley,and publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Description:
8114 is a terrifying horror novel that explores the mysterious death of a high school friend through the lens of an embattled podcast and hallucinatory hauntings. After returning to his hometown, Paul, the host of a small-time podcast, discovers that his old friend died by suicide in the decaying remains of his childhood home. Desperate for answers, Paul begins interviewing locals and old acquaintances, hoping to make sense of the tragedy. However, what starts as an investigation soon unravels into a chilling journey through Paul's past, blurring the line between memory and something far more sinister.Joshua Hull, known for his work as the screenwriter of Glorious, expertly combines horror film sensibilities with themes of trauma, grief, and small-town decay. 8114 peels back the layers of a town’s darkest secrets and forces readers to confront the memories we carry to survive the present.

My Thoughts:
This is my first complete horror read, and it absolutely messed with my head. 8114 was a feverish experience that left me unnerved, checking my surroundings, and staring at my hands to reassure myself I was safe. The book plunges deep into themes of haunted memories and death, and the atmosphere is thick with dread—featuring mold-infested ruins, disturbing deaths, and overwhelming horror.
Reading this book was genuinely unsettling. There were times I had to stop just to regain my composure. It even affected my sleep—I couldn't help but feel uneasy long after I’d put the book down. Hull’s writing draws you into Paul’s downward spiral, making every page more intense than the last. The decaying house at the heart of the story almost feels alive, adding to the creeping sense of danger throughout the narrative.

If you enjoy horror that grips you and doesn't let go, 8114 is a must-read. But be warned: it will crawl under your skin and stay with you long after you finish.

Surprising Fact:
The 8114 house is real! Hull was born, raised, and still lives in Pendleton, the town where the story takes place. Knowing the house exists adds a chilling layer of reality to the story, making it even more haunting.

This is very, very scary. Creepy house/property story. Paul is in deep shit because he started a podcast about a childhood friend he believes has gone missing. Turns out that friend wanted to be under the radar for safety reasons and now this friend is exposed. Paul gets a plea to return home because another childhood friend, a best friend, has committed suicide. At his old house. Things get worse from there. Gruesome deaths and horrifying memories. I understand why the terrible things are happening but not exactly the when. Why are these things happening now? Is it because of the podcast and opening up old wounds? I really don't know. I do know this book will scare you. Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC.

Inspired by his childhood home, the author has written a novel that is both modern and terrifying.

I dont usually like horror as I never think the endings are good enough, they usually end up with me thinking 'was that it'.


Paul Early, is a podcaster who returns to his hometown of Pendleton following the death of a high school friend.
Seeing if he can discover the what's and whys paul sets himself a task that can only end badly.

I loved this read, the author is not one I have come across but I will be on the lookout for more.
I loved his writing style and the storytelling is amazing.

I wasn;t disappointed..

It's likely not a surprise that I find myself a fan of the creative world of Joshua Hull, an Indiana-based author, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose work I've been reviewing since his early days as a filmmaker and whose co-writing of the indie horror film "Glorious" helped land him the Hoosier Award from the Indiana Film Journalists Association of which I'm a member.

So, it's also not likely a surprise that when the I came upon the opportunity to check out Hull's first full-length novel "8114" I jumped at the chance.

While it may seem as if I approached this review with an inherent bias, I've never been shy about writing middling or even negative reviews when necessary. Friends included. Okay, mostly ex-friends.

Hull has always been immersed in the indie horror scene, or so it seems, but it was the 2022 film "Glorious," which he co-authored with David Ian McKendry, that largely vaulted him into a bit of a hazy national spotlight. Hull followed that up with the winning novella "Mouth," in which Hull's creative sensibilities burst to life and it became apparent that he was a burgeoning literary voice and one of the more refreshing horror voices to arise on the scene in quite awhile.

With "8814," Hull cements his growing stature as a horror writer with a novel that is both terrifying and terrifyingly funny at times.

If you're familiar at all with the creative world of Joshua Hull, it won't surprise you that he sets the story in "8114" smack dab in the real-life town of Pendleton, Indiana where he really has spent a good majority of his life.

It may be a little more surprising that "8114" is inspired by his childhood home, a thought that becomes a little more terrifying the deeper one dives into the compelling, difficult to shake novel.

"8114" centers around Paul Early, the beleaguered host of a small-time, somewhat controversial podcast who returns to his hometown of Pendleton following the mysterious death of a high school friend.

One of Hull's many gifts as a writer is character development, a gift that comes vividly to life in "8114." Hull's Paul is a spiritually demented sadsack, the kind of guy you want to like but can't and the kind of guy who seems destined to live out some sort of life on the fringes. Much of "8114" centers around Paul's childhood home, now an abandoned house with a sordid history that keeps getting more and more sorded.

114 is a terrifying horror novel investigating the mysterious death of a high school friend through an embattled podcast and hallucinatory hauntings at the abandoned house of his childhood. While you don't necessarily like Paul, he's nearly impossible to hate thanks to Hull's ability to keep us wondering about the full spectrum of what's going on in "8114." Are we dealing with something supernatural? Are we dealing with the otherworldly perpetuating of the cycle of trauma?

Either. Or. Maybe both. You'll have to decide.

While it's easy to compare Hull to any number of other indie horror writers, I must confess I found myself time and again flashing back to my time with Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho," a similarly bold, demented, and thoughtful novel with strong characters and a relentlessly "go for it" narrative. Hull brings this small-town haunting to life in a way that makes you want to catch the first bus to Pendleton to check out the house that inspired this story, which is similarly decrepit and abandoned. Yet, against the supernatural horrors Hull immerses us in the cyclical nature of trauma that can't always be healed or resolved or broken. In the end, "8114" seems to be saying that individually and collectively we have to face our past if we want to survive our present.

I suppose this means I'm ascribing some deeper meaning to "8114," though I'd venture a guess that others will take away different lessons and some will just cringe and look away.

But yeah, I think in the end that Hull is reminding us that looking away isn't really an option if we want to survive this thing called life. The alternative? At least in "8114," it's pretty horrifying.

This is a fast and scary book about a disgraced podcaster going back to his hometown because of the death of his best friend, and it gets weird and scary really fast from there. It’s hard to go into too many details without approaching spoilers, but wow, this is a real haunted house of gore, ghosts, and nightmarish imagery.

Podcaster Paul Early is not the man of the moment. After making huge errors regarding an old school friend that he had made a subject of on his podcast, Paul is very much persona non grata.

When Paul receives a call from his best friend back home in Pendleton, Indiana, urging him to return to his hometown asap, he has no idea what’s in store. Suffice to say it’s not the welcome/outcome he expects.

This was a book I was excited to read, after reading the blurb. Not easily frightened by horror stories, I was expecting a scorcher .

Yes, it does exactly what it says on the tin, terrifying, gory and disturbing in equal measures. A proper horror story that keeps on rolling. A nice twist at the end that was not entirely unexpected, but gave a conclusion. However, I was unsure about the writing style and felt the actual events/hallucinations scenarios could have been handled better, and Paul was a character that needed more depth to make the plot less rushed.

A fair amount of Googling needed to get some of the references, but that may be down to me.

A good Afterword and Acknowledgments.

All in all a good read that will be enjoyed by many.

Thank you NetGalley and Clash Books.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

This anodyne horror novel largely fails to deliver on its intriguing premise but also shows glimmers of promise and very well be entertaining to readers other than myself.

8114 is the story of true crime podcaster Paul Early, a man of dubious morality and suspect sincerity who is drawn back to his small hometown and the cursed property he grew up on after a personal tragedy. While trying to find concrete answers for the bizarre and tragic instances that begin to pile up around him like dead leaves, he starts another podcast about the events and reconnects with the people and town he left in the rearview decades ago.

The set up was promising and I was excited to read something by the screenwriter for Glorious, a bizarre but very original film I enjoyed. However, I found reading this novel somewhat frustrating and not at all satisfying until the final pages. The podcast segments of the novel were the best parts, and should have been utilized more. The author makes overly liberal use of shockingly violent hallucinations to the point where they quickly lose their punch. The writing itself is clunky and hard to follow at times despite the simplicity of the prose and any character other than Paul may as well be a cardboard cut out. I found myself wishing time and again that this had been a short story, a novella, or an episode of a show, basically anything other than what it was trying to be, a novel.

The book is bogged down principally by being almost exclusively an internal monologue from our main character Paul, this wouldn't be such a bad thing except that Paul’s thoughts are exclusively of the most surface level, matter of fact variety. Thoughts the reader has as well or can easily infer, not much that gives us any new information or context. I.e. This is terrifying, I’m sad this person died, I feel like I’m losing my mind, etc. etc. The overall effect is of someone repeatedly breaking a cardinal rule of tale spinning which is to show, and not just tell.

Some of the horror was genuinely frightening but here too the novel gets in its own way. There are too many elements that never really lead anywhere so that in the end it feels like a bit of an incoherent mess rather than a thematically harmonious series of supernatural scares driving to a central point or threat. In this respect the book may have benefitted from closer editing. Limiting the horror elements to either Paul’s hallucinations, OR the Circle of Light, OR the demonic forces only obliquely shown, instead of juggling all of them, may have given time to better develop each aspect and made the story more cohesive and powerful.

Some genuinely grotesque horror elements and an absolutely stunning twist towards the end of the novel couldn’t quite save it from being largely uninteresting, if inoffensively so. However, I would encourage others to see for themselves. I don’t think the book is fundamentally without merit and my reaction to it may be largely due to personal preferences and taste.

(I received this book from the editor and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review)

The premise of this story is a very interesting one: a podcast about a haunted house where people have committed suicide and other dark things have been seen? Count me in. Unfortunately, the way this was written felt very confusing, sometimes rushed, sometimes repetitive. I understand we as the reader need to see the different facets of the main character, but I got the impression that it was such a complex character that some of his actions, or the way to describe them, got out of hand.
To sum up, I really liked the story and the podcast bits were interesting to read, but it just was not the book for me.

This novel is a nightmare inducing supernatural horror that gets more horrific as it goes along. Some of the images and scenes will stay with you for a long time after you've read it.

A man has a podcast about a missing friend from his childhood, attempting to get to the bottom of where he went. But everyone soon turns on him when it's revealed that his friend was never missing. He and his mother have been hiding from an abusive man. Now, because of the popularity of that podcast, he has put their lives in danger.

When our protagonist is summoned home, he's informed that his best friend has committed suicide and horrific details soon come to light. He decides to get to the bottom of it because he, and everyone else, believes his childhood home is cursed and in that long abandoned home is where his friend went to kill himself.

And, man, from that setup this book takes us on a terrifying and unrelenting ride that doesn't stop. Dreadful things begin to happen, horrifying deaths occur, and brutal supernatural events take place. It's a gruesomely disturbing narrative which I love.

There are many pop culture references which give some dark humor along the way. Our protagonist is the narrator and he's not an altogether good man at all. In some ways he's deeply flawed and has many regrets. But as he tries to get to the bottom of what's happening to him and his friends, it gets progressively more unsettling and bloody.

I thought this book was a banger and would highly recommend it for horror fans.

Wow. What a great first novel. This author knows how to write horror. Haunted house story like you have never read before. There is some familiar tropes but that is ok. Great twist at the end as well. If you like gory, demonic, podcast, type stories this is for you!

It's rare for me to find a book eerie or creepy, but this book had moments that were just that. It was a little stressful to read, but in a good, suspenseful kind of way.

The storyline I thought was interesting and I felt so bad for the MC. I thought that the horror factor in this book was very well handled and that it makes for a good... haunted property? story. Everything flew well and the pacing was spot on. Like I said, I don't get easily creeped out but there were a few scenes in this book that had me wanting to crawl under the blankets, so good job to the author.

As far as the writing went, I enjoyed it. It was engaging and easy to read. I enjoyed this book enough that I read it it one sitting and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good, creepy book.