The Midnight Knock – John Fram
This was a make-or-break read for me with John Fram after loving “The Bright Lands” but slogging through “No Road Home.” The premise hooked me right away: seven strangers converge on the Brake Inn Motel, an isolated spot in the West Texas desert. Each has a past they’d rather bury.
By morning, Sarah Powers — clearly in on more than she lets on — is dead. The unnerving twins who run the motel, Tabitha and Thomas, give the guests an ultimatum: name the killer by midnight or die when the lights go out. Outside, something ancient is circling, and it’s hungry.
Fram knows how to grab you early. The opening in Lola’s Den — a grim desert diner where a slur escalates to a violent act and Ethan meets a strange man in a gabardine suit — sets the tone: sunburnt noir meets cosmic horror.
That man, Jack Allen, hints at the “Dust Road” to Mexico, a place where you drive until you run out of gas and die. The Brake Inn sits just off that road, near a mountain where 12 people vanished in 1955.
The core cast is vivid enough to keep the ensemble from blurring together.
Ethan, a mechanic with more than one false identity, travels with his lover Hunter, a charming but violent drifter.
Kyla, a waitress used to surviving on her wits, is on the run with Fernanda, an economics student trafficked into crime boss Frank O’Shea’s orbit.
Teenage Penelope, sharp and stubborn, is traveling with her grandfather Stanley, who knows more about this place than he admits.
Sarah — a physicist — seems to know everyone’s secrets before the night even begins.
[spoilers ahead - proceed with caution]
About a third in, the biggest twist lands: this isn’t the first time this night has happened. It’s happened hundreds — maybe thousands — of times. The guests are trapped in a loop, their souls replaying events in a ritual meant to keep Te’lo’hi, a godlike destroyer, asleep in the mountain. Solve the murder, break the cycle, save the world.
The second “run” of the night shows us new perspectives and fills in some blanks from the first. The structure is ambitious, and the mix of small-town crime, supernatural threat, and metafictional looping feels part “Wayward Pines” trilogy, part “The Cabin in the Woods” and part “Dark Matter” with shades of “Recursion” and “Replay.”
What I liked: the propulsive first half, the horror atmosphere layered over a crime plot and the willingness to go big with the mythology. Fram has flashes of great prose and moments when the rules of the world click just enough to feel genuinely unsettling. I also liked that every character gets at least a moment to matter, which is no small feat with a cast this size.
Where it stumbles: the deeper we go, the messier it gets. The mythology balloons — hidden Indigenous worlds, vibrating stone eggs, lesbian ghosts and cartel side quests — and not all of it connects.
Some threads feel abandoned (whatever happened between Penelope and Adeline? Why does Ethan keep going by “Ethan” when everyone knows he’s Carter? Did the twins actually die?), and the rules of the loop are sometimes explained, sometimes waved away.
Jack Allen starts as a genuinely creepy antagonist but ends up paper-thin, borrowing heavily from “The Wizard of Oz.” The climax throws a lot of twists at the wall without tying them into a payoff that sticks or meaningfully connects to the original setup.
[spoilers ended]
Fram’s influence is clear: early Blake Crouch for the looping structure, puzzle-box plotting and trapped-community-meets-cosmic-threat vibe. He borrows the best parts of the aforementioned stories but doesn’t distill them into something as clean or satisfying. In all honesty, he probably owes Crouch some residuals.
I hovered between 2.5 and 3 stars. The first half had me hooked, but by the end, I was reading more for completion than compulsion. Still, the ambition is there, and when Fram’s on, he’s very good. I just wish this book had given its strongest ideas the breathing room they deserved. I’m willing to give him another try, but I hope he leans fully into literary horror next time. There are shades of it here, and it’s time for him to grow.
Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy. This exchange of goods did not influence my review.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): N/A
Format: eBook (ARC)
Dates read: July 19 – August 8, 2025
Multi-tasking: N/A
