Title: Upon a Silent Moon
Author: Liam James
My Rating: 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy, Literary Romance
Category: Novella
Published: September 19, 2026
Format: ebook
Date Started: September 26, 2026
Date finished: September 29, 2026
Summary:
Sean Cohan has no use for libraries. He’s an English teacher and a struggling writer, a father living in the wreckage of a life he was forced out of a year ago, getting by on drink and his pen whenever his seven-year-old daughter is away. The only reason he goes to the Spring Glen library is to return the books his daughter borrowed. On his way out, he sees Victoria through the window, pale, with skin white as snow, and he can’t look away. Captivated, Sean returns again and again, never suspecting there’s something stranger about his muse than he’s prepared for.
My Thoughts:
This is a story about fascination. Sean is taken with Victoria from the first glance, and James lets the reader feel every bit of that pull. Fantasy doesn’t come easily to Sean at first, but by the end he can hardly stop writing it, as though she unlocked a part of him he didn’t know was there. The prose is the real pleasure here: rich, lyrical, full of big, beautiful words that make even the quiet moments glow.
James also steps into his own story. The narrator speaks directly to us, dear reader, and that authorial intrusion gives the book the feel of a tale being told by the fire rather than simply read. It’s an old-fashioned touch, and it suits a story about a writer whose fiction is starting to become his life.
Don’t come into this expecting a thundering climax. Like James’s other work, which I’ve enjoyed before, the story moves subtly, and the tension stays under the surface. What it does well is the turn. Sean crosses from his ordinary, broken reality into something else almost in a snap, and the line between the fantasy he decides to write and the one he’s stepping into gets thinner with every page. My one stumble: in longer exchanges the dialogue tags drop away, and since the characters’ voices are close, I occasionally lost track of who was speaking.
Recommended for:
Readers who love lush, literary prose, quiet dark romance, and stories that slip from the everyday into the supernatural without warning. It’s a good fit for anyone who enjoys a narrator who talks to the reader, and for an evening’s read that lingers afterward.
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