2025 appears to be having a minor liminal spaces renaissance between the releases of S.H. Cooper’s novelette, Reap, Sow, in March and Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods in April. Interestingly, Wendig’s book became a flashpoint of controversy over the last 24 hours, as the perpetually online youth crowd who haven’t even had the opportunity to read his forthcoming release discovered, likely to their chagrin, that books can and do often share similar elements or concepts, especially when involving real-life occurrences such as the existence of staircases in the woods, and that such conceits are not plagiarism, especially when executed in such starkly different manners. Nobody tell them about the superficial similarities in synopses between Stephen King’s IT and Dean Koontz’s Phantoms that caused such a dust-up in the 80s and occasionally reoccur online as new readers discover these works. Let them discover that particular joy for themselves. Nobody tell them, either, of the initial and quite modest similarities between Cooper’s short work of grief horror and Wendig’s much longer novel, lest they stir up yet another tired hornet’s nest of attack against Wendig simply because they don’t like the man. Eventually, one of them is bound to accidentally trip over the concept of simultaneous invention and eat crow.

But I digress.

Reap, Sow opens with the familiar conceit of liminal space horrors — a young woman, Lucy, aka Lucky, finds herself in a foreign but familiar hallway, which she has inexplicably appeared in. She has no idea how she got there, and things only get stranger as she proceeds along the corridor and through the doors it offers. The architecture makes no sense and the doors lead only to the inexplicable and illogical, opening into rooms that shouldn’t be there or that exists in entirely different settings, like the inside of a barn or an apple orchard. Yet, all have some deep, personal connection to her, and as she goes from room to room both Lucky and readers become privy to her forgotten past and the secrets she has so deeply buried.

To say much more, though, would ruin the surprises Cooper has crafted. What she has built here is a memory palace that’s like Russian nesting dolls by way of Pandora’s box. The surprises hit like deft, well-placed punches to the kidney and ribs, and the reveals all make sense in the grand scheme of things. What has been crafted here is a humane and empathetic construct about mistakes and their consequences. Reap, Sow is a smartly built and deeply personal puzzle, and that Cooper does all this with such economy is a testament to her skill as a storyteller. I’ve read longer works with similar story beats that don’t land even half as well, nor as memorably, as they do in Cooper’s 60-some pages.