Clara’s Verdict
Supernatural horror aimed at a teen and young adult audience walks a particularly narrow path: too frightening and you alienate the audience; not frightening enough and you lose its interest entirely. Neil Sater navigates this in The Ungodly with commendable skill. What begins as a family camping trip quickly becomes something altogether darker – and the darkness, when it arrives, is genuinely unsettling without crossing into territory that would make this inappropriate for its intended audience. Narrator Brandi Baelfire carries the performance, and Sater’s twist-driven plotting gives her plenty to work with. At just over six hours, this is a well-proportioned thriller that knows exactly what it wants to be.
About the Audiobook
Emma Griffiths is eighteen, her father is terminally ill, and she takes her young brothers on a backpacking trip as a coping mechanism – simple, understandable, exactly the kind of decision that makes narrative sense. The choice of setting matters: a remote natural landscape, improperly understood, with a history of predation that the characters stumble into without knowing it. When her brothers are taken in the night, Emma is left alone with the terrifying knowledge that whatever has them is not human.
Sater draws on the folk horror tradition – the idea of a place that is simply wrong, that has been wrong for decades, where the rules of ordinary life do not apply – and blends it with the more immediate tension of a sibling in danger. Emma is a well-drawn protagonist: capable without being supernaturally competent, frightened without being paralysed. The comparison to Darcy Coates’s work, made in the book’s own marketing, is reasonably apt. The structure is tightly controlled, and the promised final twist is, by general consensus among early listeners, genuinely earned.
The book carries a PG-13 equivalent advisory – some profanity, disturbing events – and is appropriate for most adult and older teen listeners.
One element worth highlighting is Sater’s handling of Emma’s emotional situation. She is not merely an action protagonist who happens to be frightened; she is a young adult facing the simultaneous pressure of her father’s terminal illness, the responsibility of caring for her brothers, and the complete collapse of the ordinary rules of cause and effect. The supernatural threat is inseparable from the very human weight she was already carrying before the campsite was invaded. This layering – horror as both literal monster and metaphor for overwhelming circumstances – is what elevates the book above the routine supernatural thriller.
There is also something notable about the choice of the natural world as the site of the threat. Recent folk horror – from print fiction to film – has frequently returned to the idea that uncanny evil is geographically specific: not a portable, travelling malevolence but something rooted in a place, something that has always been there and that ordinary people stumble into through ignorance. Sater works within this tradition consciously, and the efficiency with which he establishes the wrongness of the location is one of the book’s technical achievements.
The Narration
Brandi Baelfire brings a focused, urgent energy to the performance that suits the material precisely. Emma’s fear and determination are convincingly rendered, and Baelfire’s control of pacing – measured during the early chapters, increasingly taut as events escalate – contributes substantially to the experience. Horror and supernatural thriller particularly benefit from narrators who understand restraint: the implied threat is often more disturbing than the explicit one, and Baelfire understands this instinctively. The production from West Kilbride LLC is clean and appropriately lean.
What Readers Say
Early responses are enthusiastic. With a 4.6 rating from 5 listeners, the consensus is that this delivers exactly what it promises. One reader praises it as “a really unique story, filled with action and twists I didn’t see coming, right up until the very end.” Another, who could not stop listening, describes it as “a great story, full of tension and unexpected twists.” The specificity of the praise – “unexpected twists,” “couldn’t put it down” – suggests a thriller that delivers on its structural promises rather than simply relying on atmosphere.
- Boyd (5.0 stars): “A really unique story, filled with action and twists I didn’t see coming, right up until the very end!”
- S. Buck (5.0 stars): “A great story, full of tension and unexpected twists! I loved this book’s setting and characters, and didn’t want to see it end!”
Who Should Listen?
Teen and older listeners who enjoy supernatural horror with a strong family-stakes emotional core will find The Ungodly well worth their six hours. It sits in the space between traditional YA and adult horror, which means it is accessible without being condescending and genuinely frightening without becoming gratuitous. Fans of folk horror and rural supernatural settings – the landscape as threat – will find familiar pleasures here, rendered with fresh urgency. A solid debut for a series that clearly has more to offer.
Listen to The Ungodly on Audible UK – the kind of supernatural thriller that earns its twist.
