Philip Fracassi, USA Today’s Bestselling Author of The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, brings us a fresh new horror novel, Sarafina, a grim, feral work of historical horror that refuses us comfort at every turn. Set in the days of the American Civil War, Sarafina follows three Confederate brothers who desert the battlefield and the moral rot of a bloody cause. Bleak, visceral, and beautifully controlled, Sarafina is a haunting mediation on warfare, sin, and the horrors that await when men believe they can outrun their demons. Let’s talk about it.
As the three boys flee the blood-soaked and gory frontlines, they stumble upon an isolated cabin in the wilderness. What ensues takes us down a road of ever fracturing sanity and ever increasing fever-like dream. The brothers meet Sarafina, a mysterious woman living in the cabin with her unnervingly quiet son, Titus. What initially seems like a sanctuary and salvation quickly reveals a sinister undertone. A creeping danger in a place where the land itself seems sentient, hostile, and hungry. And what is up with this strange river that surrounds the property? Soon, the boys must fight: for survival, their sanity and their bodies.
Fracassi excels at using history not only as a backdrop, but an active wound. The Civil War in Sarafina is not romanticized or treated with nostalgic reverence. It is presented as brutal, exhausting, and morally corrosive. The brothers carry the psychological detritus of war with them. Violence normalized, faith weaponized, cruelty justified by survival. Their desertion, however, does not cleanse them. Instead, it leaves them unmoored, vulnerable, and primed for the horrors to come. Fracassi deeply examines what these young men become when the structures that once told them who they were collapse. The landscape they flee into is not the freedom they’d hoped, it is exposure.
Sarafina‘s horror operates on multiple levels, blending mounting dread with visceral horror in ways that feel inevitable and shocking. There is a sense early on that something is wrong. Not hidden but incompatible with human understanding. Everything just feels … wrong. But, not immediately to the naked eye. Fracassi leans heavily into the uncanny. The strange behavior, ominous silences, and moments where reality seems to warp just slightly out of alignment. The woods surrounding the cabin, and the rooms within it, feel alive with menace, evoking a primordial force that is out of reach of all comprehension. This is not an evil that can be reasoned with or repented away. It simply IS.
Sarafina herself is a compelling and unnerving figure. She exists somewhere between protector and predator. A saint and a heretic. Fracassi avoids flattening her into any familiar tropes. Instead, she is rendered with mythic mystery that makes her impossible to fully grasp. Her relationship to the land and forces at work is complex, intimate, and deeply sinister. She is not a guide through the horror. She is a reminder that survival can often mean complicity. The question Sarafina poses to the reader is not “How do you escape evil?” but “What are you willing to become to endure it?”.
Religion plays a supporting role in Sarafina in how it intersects with violence and fear. The brothers’ faith, once a source of justification and comfort, becomes increasingly hollow as they are confronted with horrors that scripture cannot explain. Fracassi highlights that the universe is far more indifferent and cruel than any human-based theology would allow. The evils of the world are twisted into something grotesque and blasphemous, reinforcing the sense that the boys’ beliefs are inadequate armor against the vastness pressing on them.
The body horror in Sarafina is used in a purposeful way. Fracassi does not shy away from transformation, decay, and violation, using the body as a site of terror and truth. Flesh becomes mutable, fragile, and expendable. This mirrors the ways war has already taught these young men to see both the enemy and themselves. These moments are graphic, but never gratuitous. They underscore the novel’s central focus of survival at any cost. In Sarafina, the body is not sacred, but used as currency.
Stylistically, Sarafina reads like a blood-tinged folk tale whispered sitting around a crackling fire. Fracassi’s prose is muscular and atmospheric. It is steeped in dread and inevitability. There is a nightmarish quality to the narrative, as though the characters are trapped in a story that has already decided their fates. Time feels slippery and morality conditional. This surreal lens amplifies the horror, lending the novel a timeless quality that makes its violence feel ritualistic and not random.
What makes Sarafina especially effective is its refusal to offer easy catharsis. There is no true hero here, no redemption neatly tied with grace. The brothers are flawed men shaped by a brutal world, and the horror they face does not absolve them. Instead, Fracassi challenges the reader to sit with this discomfort: that the recognition that survival does not always arrive from the outside. Sometimes it is already within, waiting for the right conditions for it to surface.
In the end, Sarafina is a savage meditation on war and the terror of a world that does not care if you understand it. By blending historical fiction, body horror, and cosmic elements, Fracassi crafts a story that feels immediate yet vast. Tethered to human cruelty yet dwarfed by something far older and much more merciless. It is a novel that gets in your head, like a half-remembered nightmare or a story whispered in he dark. No help is coming, you have to save yourself.
Sarafina was previously published in a limited special edition run by Earthling Publications in 2024. It has since been picked up for rerelease in paperback! Great news for horror fans. Thank you so much to CLASH for the early copy. I am a Fracassi STAN and this novel is fantastic. You can preorder Sarafina via Clash Books. It publishes April 07, 2026 so do not miss out!
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