Sirius Knott was almost a priest before he became a soldier. He’s lived his life divided between faith and firepower—disciplined, skeptical, and convinced that ghosts are just stories other people believe.
But when his closest friend begs for help with a problem no one can explain—objects disappearing, whispers drifting through empty rooms, and a daughter who insists she has a friend no one else can see—Sirius reluctantly agrees to investigate. It’s supposed to be simple. A favor. Nothing more.
Instead, the house wakes up.
Doors refuse to stay shut. A child’s giggle follows him through the dark. And beneath every strange occurrence is a presence that isn’t just haunting the family—it knows him.
As the haunting grows more vicious, Sirius is forced to confront the one truth he’s spent his life avoiding: some battles can’t be fought with skill, strength, or discipline. Some wounds don’t stay buried. And some shadows cling to the places we fear most.
This haunting doesn’t want the house.
It doesn’t want the family.
It wants him.
Ghosthunters and their stories have saturated the paranormal genre, and over the past few years, many of them seem to have fallen into a cookie cutter, and almost comical, pattern akin the most overacted ghost hunting shows.
Entertaining? Sure.
Memorable? Not at all.
Mother of Shadows breaks that mold by turning the narrative on its head.
From the first page--when I said, “Oh, this is going to be amazing!”--Sirius Knott has woven a world that looks like the neighborhood around us with characters who aren’t over the top in their mission against a haunting.
The main character of the same name* wasn’t a believer, despite his experiences with the darkness. Sirius maintained a sense of skepticism, making him more valuable in any case as a staunch advocate of eliminating all the normal possibilities before considering the paranormal ones.
*I’m going to refer to the author as Knott and the character as Sirius for the rest of the review.
What started as a friend’s dinner invitation soon turned into whispers of something familiar, dark, as Sirius noticed small things. His friend’s young child began talking to the empty space in the living room. A rocking chair moved slightly, enough to be dismissed. A quiet slip of unmistakable childlike laughter hung in the air for a breath.
There was no leaving this untouched. Sirius knew too well how “something small pretending to be nothing” fed on fear and energy until it was so big, it swallowed everything within its reach.
But it’s here where the story is different. There’s no Ghostbusters proton packing, no mediumship, no big display of action. Instead, the engagement was methodical, as Sirius met up with Father Hammond, who had once tried to get him ordained, but now gave him the name, number and location of someone who could help in a way Sirius had never considered.
There was something not only about this team up or their interactions with the house and the increasingly larger displays of activity, but the way Knott adds in the personal touches, like the palpable tension between Sirius and his wife Sally, and the memories of his time as a soldier and his tours in the middle east, makes the main character more relatable, creating an investment in his well-being and overall success in all the facets of his life.
To not spoil the rest of the book, I won’t say any more. But I’ll tell you that I couldn’t help but devour this story over two days. I had to sleep, folks! I even dreamt about what I’d read in that night in between, which is a great sign of how deep I fell into this book.
This story took me places I hadn’t even predicted with intricate twists and turns, leading me along with the Sirius and Natalia into a series of realizations. Knott gave me many moments that raised my eyebrows, elicited small gasps and plenty of “oh, how didn’t I see that coming?” and “that was close!” (among other things).
If you want a great read that’ll stick with you and hope he’s got more to come, then pick up this book today. You won’t be disappointed.
Many thanks for this great story, Mr. Knott.
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