The Whistler

I’ve been wanting to read Nick Medina since his first novel came out a couple years ago. Now that his third novel has published, I decided to start there. The Whistler follows Henry Hotard, a man in his early 20s who’s devoted to his growing YouTube channel about ghost hunting. But after going after a particularly gruesome story, Henry wakes up to find he must now use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. What happened that night? And why does it feel like he’s still haunted all these months later?

What I Liked:

• An intimate look at becoming a quadriplegic. Henry was a young man full of goals and excitement until a terrible accident left him paralyzed from the waist down and with limited use of his arms and hands. Where this book shines is in diving into Henry’s mind the year after waking up from his coma. How he sees himself has changed, and it affects his relationships. It’s a heart-wrenching look at how Henry must come to accept his new reality.
• Relationships with family and friends. Henry lives with his grandparents now, and his girlfriend Jade and best friend Toad still visit him frequently. He’s filled with resentment and craves the level of independence he once had. He also has suspicions that lead to cruel accusations. But as the novel progresses, Henry learns to reevaluate his relationships and how he fits within them.
• Grief, loss, and guilt. These are the driving emotions of the book. More than mortal fear or jump scares, these are the worries that haunt Henry.
• The prologue and excerpts of a story about the boy with holes in his body. The Whistler opens with a story in the 1970s, introducing the effects of the titular Whistler. Before each part within the book there are also pieces of a fable about a boy who lied and deceived to get what he wanted. Both of these added immensely to the story and provided much of the disturbing feeling.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

• It wasn’t very scary. This book was marketed as horror, but to me it read more like painful portrait of a young man whose life has changed irrevocably and grapples with loss and guilt. It’s a character study amidst turbulent times, but while it had its creepy moments, overall it wasn’t scary. The prologue was easily the most unsettling part of the novel.

Final Thoughts

The Whistler is an excellent story for those who enjoy an intimate character study when a man must come to terms with his new body and abilities. It’s haunting and full of secrets and grief, but it’s not too scary for those who aren’t big horror readers. I enjoyed this and look forward to reading Nick Medina’s other books.

Special thanks to the publicists at Penguin Random House, Berkley, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy The Whistler here – it’s available as a hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.

The Whistler by Nick Medina
Audience	Adult
Genre	Horror
Setting	Louisiana
Number of Pages	368
Format I Read	Ebook (NetGalley ARC)
Original Publication Date	September 16, 2025
Publisher	Berkley

Official Summary

A young man is haunted by a mythological specter bent on stealing everything he loves in this unsettling horror from the author of Indian Burial Ground and Sisters of the Lost Nation.

For fear of summoning evil spirits, Native superstition says you should never, ever whistle at night.

Henry Hotard was on the verge of fame, gaining a following and traction with his eerie ghost-hunting videos. Then his dreams came to a screeching halt. Now, he’s learning to navigate a new life in a wheelchair, back on the reservation where he grew up, relying on his grandparents’ care while he recovers.

And he’s being haunted.

His girlfriend, Jade, insists he just needs time to adjust to his new reality as a quadriplegic, that it’s his traumatized mind playing tricks on him, but Henry knows better. As the specter haunting him creeps closer each night, Henry battles to find a way to endure, to rid himself of the horror stalking him. Worried that this dread might plague him forever, he realizes the only way to exile his phantom is by confronting his troubled past and going back to the events that led to his injury.

It all started when he whistled at night….

Excerpt from The Whistler

His eyes snap open and all he knows is fear.

Whether the distress Henry feels manifested before he woke in response to a nightmare he can’t remember or if it only flooded his body the instant his eyelids went up isn’t clear, nor is it important for him to figure out. What is important is how he’ll escape. If he ever can.

His jaw flexes and a scream that would bring Pawpaw Mac and Mawmaw Tilly running from their room at the end of the hall wants to tear out, but it doesn’t. He can barely take a breath deep enough to feel like he’s not on the verge of suffocating. Somehow since going to bed, the blanket has moved up around his neck, like a snake constricting tighter by the second.

He tries to move his arms, but they’re buried beneath the blanket, a thousand pounds heavier than when he went to bed, pinning his arms to his sides. Even if he could move them, they’d do little good because his legs aren’t moving either and without them, he’s stuck, as if the mattress were made of quicksand, as if the sheet beneath him were one large piece of flypaper.

The figure standing at the foot of Henry’s bed, however, has no problem moving at all.

A canvas of black, it’s long, lean, and silent. It might not even have a mouth. Its arms dangle from shoulders that look sturdy and strong.

The figure takes a step closer to the bed. Its black fingertips graze the blanket covering Henry, only inches from his feet, which stick up like two pieces of wood. Kindling, maybe. If the figure were to set them ablaze, there’d be nothing Henry could do to put them out. He can’t kick. If he could, he would, but his legs feel impossibly heavy—pinned as if the hammer of a mousetrap has come down upon them, trapping him. The fear inside him swells, giving rise to panic that makes him want to cry. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling, the panic. He’s been overwhelmed a lot over the last year, by anxiety alarm, hopelessness, and dread.

He tries to swallow, but still he’s rendered silent, as if he and the shadow man have become reflections of each other. Except the figure can move. It takes another step closer, pressing its thighs against the foot of the bed.

Just breathe, Henry tells himself. Because he won’t last long if he doesn’t do that. But maybe that would be better, he thinks. To let himself asphyxiate before the shadow man can inflict a fate much worse. It’s not the first time he’s had thoughts like that. Sometimes he wishes he would have winked out before he got to know the meaning of hell on earth. He’s often wondered if the Reaper’s hand would be gentler than the impact of a fiery car crash or a freefall from the top of a tall building.

Henry breathes. He gasps. The blanket pulls tighter. They told him to close his eyes and count during moments like this, when the panic becomes so overwhelming that doom seems certain and inescapable. But he can’t close his eyes now. Not with the specter looming over him.

Excerpted from The Whistler by Nick Medina Copyright © 2025 by Nick Medina. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.