Book Review: Eminence Front by Rebecca Rowland

Eminence Front is a chilling winter horror novella that leans heavily into atmosphere, dread, and the slow suffocation of inevitability. Set on a quiet suburban street in New England, the story unfolds as a winter storm descends—bringing with it something far older and far more dangerous than snowdrifts and power outages.

This was my first experience reading Rebecca Rowland, and her writing immediately stood out. The opening of the novella does an excellent job establishing both setting and character. Rowland’s prose is clean, controlled, and evocative, grounding the reader firmly in the everyday lives of the residents before unsettling that normalcy piece by piece. The creeping sense that something is wrong—the whispers beneath the snow, the storm that seems to know each resident intimately—is handled with restraint and confidence, echoing the quiet unease found in classic suburban horror.

Where Eminence Front truly shines is in its buildup. The tension escalates steadily as the storm intensifies and the entity reveals itself not through spectacle, but through suggestion—voices, secrets, regrets. The idea of a malevolence that knows its victims so intimately is compelling and deeply unsettling, and Rowland taps into that fear effectively.

However, once the action fully ignites, the novella comes to an abrupt conclusion. Given the careful groundwork laid in the first half, the ending feels rushed by comparison. The payoff doesn’t quite match the scale of the buildup, leaving the reader wanting a bit more exploration—more consequences, more aftermath, more room to sit with the horror that’s been unleashed. It’s not that the ending is ineffective, but that it feels compressed, as though the story needed just a little more space to fully breathe.

That said, Eminence Front is still a strong entry in modern horror. While I wished the finale had been more fully fleshed out, the novella left a lasting impression—and, perhaps most importantly, it made me eager to read more of Rowland’s work.