A Child Alone With Strangers – Philip Fracassi
Comparing an author to Stephen King is always dangerous.
For some, it’s an instant credibility buster — after all, King is King, endlessly prolific and creative and no one matches that. For others, it sets expectations so high that any book will fall short. Still, when I reached for a comparison with “A Child Alone With Strangers,” King was the only one that fit.
Philip Fracassi’s novel feels like a cousin to King’s work: sprawling, character-heavy, horror woven with crime and small-town decay, slowly unfolding to the point of indulgence, with flashes of brilliance. While Fracassi isn’t King (at least not yet), there are moments that clearly carry that lineage.
The book begins with a gut punch. Henry, a 10-year-old still grieving his mother’s death, thinks he’s joining his father for “take your child to work” day. Instead, his father admits he’s lost his job, they’re out of money and he sees no way forward. He leads them into traffic, where they’re struck by a bus.
His father dies instantly, but Henry slips into a weeks-long coma. When he wakes, his uncle Dave, a shark of an attorney, sues the city for millions — an act that puts a target squarely on Henry’s back. Small-time crime boss Jim Cady decides he wants the settlement money and arranges for Henry’s kidnapping.
What follows is deliberately slow, almost luxuriant in its pacing. Fracassi cycles through multiple perspectives, from Henry’s protective guardians Dave and Mary, to Cady and the misfit crew of criminals he’s assembled. It’s clear early on that these paths are heading toward collision, but the author makes us wait, layering in backstory after backstory.
Personally, I enjoyed this structure. It felt like a multi-course meal, where each dish is meant to be savored, though you risk getting full before the main course. Readers looking for a straight shot of adrenaline may grow impatient, however.
The kidnappers are grotesque in their own ways. Cady grows rattled as suspicion begins to circle him. Liam is a reluctant accomplice whose conscience keeps surfacing. Greg and Jenny, incestuous siblings with a violent history, are the most unsettling of the lot. And then there’s Pedro, all bluster and no bite.
Against them stands Henry, the heart of the novel. Emerging from trauma with strange new abilities — telepathy, heightened emotional perception, even what seems like a connection to his dead father — he’s more resourceful than his captors expect.
The novel truly comes alive once Henry is dragged to the farmhouse. The shift from crime drama to supernatural horror transforms the story as the part-human, part-insect “mother” in the cellar makes her presence — and desire to be left alone — known. The house becomes a stage for her assaults: swarms of wasps, roaches, lice and feral dogs unleashed on the captors.
Some of these set pieces are memorably grotesque, with faces melting and bodies torn apart. Fracassi has a real knack for body horror and mood without tipping into outright stomach-turning spectacle. Still, the “mother” herself never quite came into focus for me, so I defaulted to picturing some variation of “The Predator” mixed with “Jeepers Creepers.”
Yet for all the gore and supernatural chaos, this is a novel more interested in people than monsters. Fracassi takes real care with his characters, sketching their histories and flaws in ways that make even the most depraved at least understandable.
That attention is the book’s strength and also its weakness. At nearly 600 pages, the detail weighs it down. There are long stretches where the tension evaporates under the sheer volume of story. By the time the final third barrels forward with gruesome energy, it feels like a different novel entirely.
There are gestures at deeper themes — fear of what we don’t understand, the corrosive effect of grief and the ways desperation makes monsters of ordinary people — but they mostly stay on the surface.
All that to say, “Child” is a solid, if sometimes frustrating, book. It has the bones of an excellent limited series, where a skilled showrunner could trim the fat and tighten the pacing, but Fracassi shows enough here that I’d gladly give him another chance.
The audiobook narration by Sterlin Boyns deserves credit as he brings real depth to Henry’s innocence and to Liam’s wavering decency. Honestly, I might not have made it to the end in print, but Boyns’s performance kept me engaged.
Thanks to Libro.fm, Vibrance Press and the author for an advance listener copy in exchange for an honest review. This exchange of goods did not influence my opinion.
Rating (story): 3.5/5 stars
Rating (narration): 3.5/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (personal library)
Dates read: August 24 – September 9, 2025
Multi-tasking: Good to go. I listened to this on and off for about three weeks while on a long vacation. This probably didn’t do the story justice as I needed to remind myself of characters during the first half of the story, but once things become contained to the farmhouse it was smooth sailing.
