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Book: “Kill Beth” by Jon Cohn
Publishing Info: Deadbolt Books, June 2025
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eBook from the publicist.
Where You Can Get This Book: Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: After a horrific incident fifteen years ago, theater director Mike O’Brien never planned to return to Seattle. But when his estranged best friend sends him a script he can’t ignore, Mike finds himself back in the city with a spotlight on his troubled past.
As rehearsals begin, so do the nightmares. Strange figures keep him up at night, the production is plagued by one horrific accident after another, and everywhere he goes he can’t help but see the same message: Kill Beth. The strange thing is, Mike doesn’t know anyone named Beth, or how he could ever be capable of killing anyone?
When his world descends into chaos, Mike has to ask if he’s being haunted by his past, or if there is some sinister force working behind the curtain to derail his life.
Review: Thank you to Beverly Bambury Publicity for sending me an eBook of this novella!
For a few years of my life, I was a theater kid. It was just high school, but I was in drama for the entirety of it, acting in multiple plays each school year, even working on set building on Saturdays. I still have a medal that our one act play won in the Minnesota State High School Semi-Finals (we were robbed in the finals and that is all I will say). Once I got out of high school I left my theater stuff behind, but I associated with theater kids for a few years. So I do know some ins and outs of theater and how high pressure it can be (memories, MEMORIES of trying to do homework between moments where I had a scene during tech week rehearsals knowing I wasn’t getting home until 9pm or later). So while I’m not in theater now, I definitely felt the non-supernatural/main plot horrors of “Kill Beth” by Jon Cohn of a theater production revving up to put on a performance while its director may or may not be losing his marbles. That wasn’t the main point of the book, but boy did it resonate! Tech week is hell, even when there isn’t perhaps a ghost or a mental breakdown or whatever plaguing the captain of the ship!
“Kill Beth” is a shorter read (it is a novella after all) but it packs quite a wallop. We have our protagonist Mike returning the the Seattle theater scene after a fifteen year absence after a horrible tragedy that still unsettles him to this day, coaxed back by old friend Nate who has a great new script that Mike just has to direct. But as he starts the process of bringing this play to life, strange things begin happening. He has strange bouts of therapeutic writing that make little to no sense. His OCD symptoms start to ramp up. And he keeps hearing the directive ‘kill Beth’ in random places from random people. The big question of the book is whether this is him having a mental break, if this is something supernatural going on, or if there is someone in his life messing with him. Mike is frantic and on edge basically from the jump, and we see him slowly start to break down through first person narration and his therapeutic writing exercises he does for therapy, and it’s a solid combination that ratchets up the tension and makes effective use of its less than two hundred pages. I was genuinely wondering what was going on, and had many questions and theories that were never quite correct. Cohn weaves a very tangled web, but still manages to pull it all together before the curtain call, as it were. I was left guessing for sure.
I also enjoyed our cast of characters, as Cohn made me truly believe that they were a theater troupe that is trying to come together to bring a play to life in the face of multiple disasters, diva performers, and a perhaps fully unwell director. Heck, even Mike himself is an interesting character who I found to be unnerving as well as very sympathetic. A few of them also acted as pretty reliable red herrings, but that’s about all I will say about that.
“Kill Beth” is a fast and tense read, and I think that I need to go back and read more works by Jon Cohn. Very satisfying!
Rating 8: Surprising, suspenseful, and fully unhinged in a very positive way, “Kill Beth” is a stellar horror mystery with a deliciously unreliable narrator.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Kill Beth” is included on the Goodreads list “Best Unknown But Must Be Known Books”.
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