Panic at the graveyard: Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh

Tillinghast is an old New England surname. I know it well. At the previous institution where I worked, Bridgewater State College (now University) in southeastern Massachusetts, Tillinghast Hall is a former dorm that now contains faculty offices. It was named after Nicholas Tillinghast, the school’s first principal in the mid-19th century, back when it was a teachers’ training college. Later Tillinghasts were well-known members of the campus and community when I was there.

Published by Viking (US/Can), June 2026.
Also pub. in the UK by The Borough Press.

So when I heard about Clare Cavenagh’s debut novel, I was hoping for an entertaining read soaked in regional lore, and I got it. Although I don’t typically choose literary horror, the subject intrigued me. Cavenagh based her story in real-life history, namely the New England vampire panic of the 18th and 19th centuries, which was new to me.

The word “vampire” never appears in the text, but it’s exactly what Stutley Tillinghast is, to his everlasting regret. By 2017, he’s been around for over a century, under various pseudonyms and guises to hide his unnatural longevity. Some decades ago, he returned to his rural birthplace, near the Rhode Island town of Uxford, resuming the name and role of the Protestant minister he once was.

He has no close friends or family, and every 70 days, he must, well, feed, the resulting bodies buried neatly in his basement. He’s tried to put an end to himself to escape this horrific cycle, unsuccessfully. This time he has a plan he hopes will work.

Before carrying it out, Tillinghast pens a full confession as part of his life story. Then a local hotel owner phones about a very ill young Englishwoman, name of Sarah Tillinghast, in a room there. In a brief coherent moment, Sarah had asked for him. Is she some relation?

Wary but curious, Tillinghast brings Sarah back to his house, where he’s alarmed to see what appears to be her transformation—into a being like himself—in full progress. Even more worrisome is that Sarah resembles the woman who, so long ago, turned Tillinghast into what he is.

More cerebral than most in its genre, Tillinghast is grippingly thought-provoking in its evocation of the inherent darkness of his reality and how tries to make sense of it:

If the world was unfolding according to God’s plan, and if everything was part of God’s creation, what was a thing like Tillinghast doing in it? Why had a predator like him been released into the garden? He didn’t know. Why would another emerge? He didn’t know.

The level of violence is on par with your typical non-cozy crime thriller. Because of the descriptions of the attempted cures for Sarah’s illness, though, anyone overly squeamish may want to skim those sections. Plus, it is about vampires. Enough said.

A heads up that the historical component, Tillinghast’s written declaration, comprises less than a third of the book in total. The rest is set in the near-present, but there’s a feel of 19th-century formality about the writing style, emphasizing that Tillinghast doesn’t genuinely belong in this time. His house isn’t wired for electricity, and you get the sense his personality hasn’t changed much over the years.

I wondered how Tillinghast avoided getting caught for so long, with so many people's disappearances within a small geographic area, but I appreciated how well his story linked up with actual events from Exeter, Rhode Island, in the 1890s. I won’t reveal them here, but you can check out this Smithsonian Magazine article on the "vampire panic" if you’d like to read more. There’s also a brand new history book, Exhumed by Aaron Mahnke, that promises to dig into the origins of the Vampire Panic, showing how New Englanders took their superstitious beliefs to disturbing extremes. 

Kudos to Cavenagh for bringing a historical tale of the supposed undead back to unsettling life.