A group of insomniacs meeting in a cemetery every night, a mysterious open grave, dead rats, weird experiments, and an entire mystery unfolding over the course of one October night? Graveyard Shift had basically everything it needed to be my kind of book. And I did enjoy it. My biggest problem is that right when I started getting really invested, it felt like the book was already wrapping up.

Five people who work different night shifts have fallen into a routine of meeting in the local cemetery for their late-night smoke breaks. They aren't exactly friends, but there's something about being awake while the rest of the world sleeps that has brought them together.

Then one night, they discover a freshly dug grave where there shouldn't be one.

Obviously, they investigate.

The atmosphere was easily my favorite part. An old cemetery in the middle of the night, a derelict church, people wandering around while the rest of town is asleep, and increasingly strange things happening around them? YES. There’s this cozy-but-creepy October feeling throughout the whole thing that I really liked.

I also liked the group itself. They're all a little weird, all have their own reasons for being awake at ridiculous hours, and their dynamic made me want to know more about them. That's also part of why the length frustrated me so much. I felt like I was just starting to understand these characters when suddenly we were already solving the mystery.

And the mystery itself had potential. Dead rats, strange spores, suspicious research, and questions about what exactly is happening at the university gave the story somewhere genuinely creepy to go.

I just wanted it to go further.

Everything happens so quickly that some of the reveals didn't have enough time to become as unsettling as they could have been. I wanted more time with the characters, more investigation, more horror, and honestly just more opportunity for everything to get progressively weirder.

By the time it ended, my reaction was basically: wait... that's it?

I still had fun with it. It's atmospheric, easy to fly through, and has a premise I really enjoyed. I just think this is one of those rare novellas where I walked away wishing the author had written an entire novel instead.