The Long Low Whistle (Killer VHS Series #7) by Laurel Hightower
Shortwave Publishing (November 2025)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
The seventh installment in Shortwave Publishing’s Killer VHS Series is gory, claustrophobic, and probably the most terrifying book you’ll read all year. Laurel Hightower’s The Long Low Whistle swells with an aching grief that throbs through the pages from start to finish and will thrill fans of cryptid and survival horror. Not only would this be a great introduction for readers new to Hightower’s work but it will make fans of the Bram Stoker-nominated author absolutely giddy because, like most of Hightower’s books, The Long Low Whistle is packed with creative, but brutal body horror you won’t be able to shake for days.
Endless dread commences with catastrophe in The Long Low Whistle. The sound of the whistle from Honeydew Mine was “a backdrop to the personal hells being enacted, a fellow mourner at this impromptu wake.” As it sounded through the town for days on end, Patricia (Trish) and her mother, and dozens of other families, awaited news about their loved ones’ survival and recovery status. But the disaster claimed nearly every life and Honeydew Mine is soon declared too dangerous to continue to search. It’s sealed, and Patricia spends the next twenty years fixated on this great divide inside her, one that split her life in two: life before her father’s death, and life after. She has to know what happened to him.
A group of amateur cryptid hunters comes to town in hopes of unveiling the truth behind centuries-old accounts and sightings in the area. They know it’s not ghosts in the sealed, abandoned mine. Seismographs don’t pick up ghosts. They’re dealing with some kind of creature, or more frighteningly, many creatures. Cave-dwellers. Undeterred, Trish joins the group in their excursion in hopes of excavating the truth behind the buried mystery of her father’s death.
As the ghostly scene of Trish’s grief turns into a heart-pounding fight for survival, The Long Low Whistle becomes unputdownable. Readers will find themselves wanting to step back after each horrifically surprising moment, but the need-to-know-what-happens-next angst is unbearable. Readers are the reluctant strays tailing Trish and the cryptid hunters through black tunnels and creature-infested waters.
A powerful pillar of this book is how Trish’s grief evolves. It’s single-minded and reckless, but with the lives of her new acquaintances — dare she say friends? — on the line, and chances of her own survival dwindling as the walls close in, it becomes something new. Something hard-earned but long overdue. Hightower takes readers through hell and back in this book, dragging them through the bones of fallen and forgotten men, but they will come out forever changed. Scarred? Triggered? Traumatized? Sure. But isn’t that why we’re all here?
Cathartic horror of the highest tier, The Long Low Whistle is a standout addition to the acclaimed Killer VHS Series. Readers who enjoyed Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters, Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, Hightower’s novella Below, or the 2005 horror film The Descent must pick up a copy of this book.
I am eager to read additional Killer VHS titles. Hightower recommends Melonhead Mayhem by Alex Ebenstein.
