Reprieve: A Novel

Written by James Han Mattson

Narrated by JD Jackson

""Like Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching or Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl, Reprieve straddles genres in the best possible way. . . . Sure to spark conversation and debate at book clubs across the land."" –LOS ANGELES TIMES

“An eventual American classic that is unrelenting in its beauty and incisive cultural critique.” – KIESE LAYMON

Recommended by New York Times • Los Angeles Times • NPR • Today • Esquire • O Quarterly • Boston Globe • Chicago Tribune • Harper’s Bazaar • Shondaland • Thrillist • The Millions • Crimereads • XTRA • Tor • Literary Hub • and more!

A chilling and blisteringly relevant literary novel of social horror centered around a brutal killing that takes place in a full-contact haunted escape room—a provocative exploration of capitalism, hate politics, racial fetishism, and our obsession with fear as entertainment. 

On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize—a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house’s long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.

Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view: Kendra Brown, a teenager who’s been uprooted from her childhood home after the sudden loss of her father; Leonard Grandton, a desperate and impressionable hotel manager caught in a series of toxic entanglements; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay international student who came to the United States in a besotted search for his former English teacher. As each character’s journey unfurls and overlaps, deceit and misunderstandings fueled by obsession and prejudice are revealed, forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe.

An astonishingly soulful exploration of complicity and masquerade, Reprieve combines the psychological tension of classic horror with searing social criticism to present an unsettling portrait of this tangled American life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063079953

James Han Mattson

James Han Mattson is the acclaimed author of The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of awards from the Copernicus Society of America and Human-ities North Dakota. He was a featured storyteller on The Moth and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the George Washington University, the University of Maryland, Murray State University, and the University of California–Berkeley. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen magazine. He was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in North Dakota.

Reviews for Reprieve

[Real Facade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I almost gave up in Chapter 4, so glad I didn't.
If you like "Dolores Claiborne" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you'll enjoy this book.

Like in those novels, the horror comes from people, not the paranormal.

[Imeobong · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it exceeded it. Thank you.❤️

[Joyce · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW! The most surprising horrific story. When I started this I had no idea what I was getting into! Social commentary that dares expose our society and culture for what it is. Thank you dear author for this very engaging and eye opening book! My kids will be reading this too.

[Destiny Fountain · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The order of events could have been clearer. It was hard to follow.

[Julia Shaw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’m not sure how I feel about this book. I think much of it starts way too early, but it’s still interesting and I liked the build up. It’s really about the everyday horrors we face in America, rather than one singular outlandish horror. Very poignant and leaves you with a feeling of melancholy.

[Nina Quartuccio · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent. Great writing and narration. Powerful back stories with a melting pot of strong characters that lead you to the crescendo which kept me turning pages. Horror comes from the "House" and was also very well done, there was not a lot but what was there was significant. This story touches on so many topics dealing with racism from black to Asian to gay and even gothic, the author even slides into Taiwan prostitution and smacks you with how desperate people become and how far they would go for love. Excellent.

[Jason Doerr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A cast of self-righteous characters can only worsen over the course of the novel.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I would call this well-written novel an experiment in literary horror that trips over itself a bit in the last act. The story centers around an "extreme" haunted house attraction in Lincoln, Nebraska--the Quigley House--and is set in the late 1990s (the time is important). Contestants vie to make it through the house's cells and win a cash prize while being terrorized and even physically assaulted by the actors. From the outset, we know that something horrific has happened during one of these tours, and there is a trial going on as a result.The three point-of-view characters all have ties to the house. Kendra is a teenage Black girl who moved to Nebraska with her mother to live with her aunt after her father died. She feels out of place there and gets a job at the Quigley House at the urging of her boyfriend back home, who is a horror fan. Jaidee is a young Thai man attending the University of Nebraska but really stalking his former English teacher, a white American man with whom he is in love. He ends up becoming a contestant at Quigley with his former English teacher as well as his college roommate (and Kendra's cousin), Bryan--don't worry, the book makes sense of this eventually. And Leonard is a white man who works at a Lincoln hotel and befriends the charismatic owner of Quigley House, John Forrester. Besides the house, each of these characters have other things in common: they feel isolated and lack belonging; they latch onto a love interest who likely isn't all that into them; and they make bad choices in the name of "love."The Quigley house is really a metaphor for the horrorscape of modern American life, especially for people on the outside. Mattson makes this point in many different ways and from different viewpoints. Seeing Jaidee try and fail to become American is painful. Watching Leonard get twisted into a prototype incel is frightening. The scenes in the house itself are both exciting and shocking. I think it kind of falls down at the end. It gets a bit too heavy-handed, too much on the nose. Maybe Mattson is trying to juggle too many themes at once. But by that time, we've already been through the ride, which I enjoyed. I appreciate it when writers try to do different things in the horror genre and when they use horror to shine a light on the horrors we all live with everyday.

[muddyboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a weird one. The plot centers on a house of horrors known as the Quigley House. Different from typical haunted houses the actors are allowed to touch the patrons. The goal is to gather envelopes in a series of rooms to ultimately get a cash prize if you make it the whole way through. The characters are from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. So, parallel to the somewhat gruesome "house" plot there is an undercurrent of racism, homophobia and pedophilia. If it sounds like a lt, it is, but I liked it.