Laurel Hightower joins the Capes and Tights Podcast for Episode 247 on October 15, 2025. To prepare for the conversation, we have compiled six books by Hightower you should read.
Hightower is the Bram Stoker-nominated author of The Long Low Whistle, Whispers In The Dark, Crossroads, Below, Every Woman Knows This, Silent Key, and The Day of the Door, and has more than a dozen short fiction stories in print.
Crossroads
When Chris’ son dies in a tragic car crash, her world is devastated. The walls of grief close in on Chris’ life until, one day, a small cut on her finger changes everything. A drop of blood falls from Chris’ hand onto her son’s roadside memorial, and, later that night, Chris thinks she sees his ghost outside her window. Only, is it really her son’s ghost, or is it something else – something evil? Soon Chris is playing a dangerous game with forces beyond her control in a bid to see her son, Trey, alive once again.
Below
While driving through the mountains of West Virginia during a late-night snowstorm, a recently divorced woman experiences bizarre electrical problems, leaving her with little choice but to place her trust with a charismatic truck driver. But when an unexplainable creature with haunting red eyes gets between them, she is forced to make one of the toughest decisions of her life. Will she abandon the stranger who kept her safe—or will she climb down below, where reality has shapeshifted into a living nightmare?
Whispers in the Dark
Rose McFarland is a trained killer–a Memphis S.W.A.T. sniper with a secret. Her team knows about the burn scars that lurk under her clothes, a legacy of the house fire that killed her father and brother sixteen years before. Her supervisors know that she spent two years in a rehabilitative facility, healing and learning to cope with the emotional trauma of the fire. But no one knows about the visions that drove her there, angry spirits that consumed her childhood, alienated her from her family and made her doubt her own sanity–the Whispers.
When Charlie Akers, a half-brother she never knew, ends up on the wrong side of Rose’s rifle, she unwittingly sets off a chain of events that puts her family in the middle of increasingly dangerous paranormal visitations. Charlie won’t stay dead, and soon ghosts from Rose’s past are creeping back into her life. People she’s killed in the line of duty, family she thought long buried, every one of them under the influence of Rose’s greatest fear, the Whispers themselves.
As the walls between our world and the world of the dead grow thin, Rose will have to face her old nightmares to stop the Whispers from breaking free. If she can’t, it won’t just be Memphis that falls to the dead–there will be no safe place left on earth for the living.
Silent Key
After the loss of her husband under mysterious circumstances, former Detective Cam Ambrose learns how little she truly knew him. Reeling with the grief of her loss and the realization that the man she loved was a stranger, she must learn how to keep her young daughter safe from a world of the supernatural she never knew existed. With the help of her best friend Dimi and reclusive neighbor Eric Morgan, she sets out to solve a decades-old mystery entangling the machinations of an obsessed killer, her husband’s mistress, and a series of deadly hauntings.
The Day of the Door
Once there were four Lasco siblings banded together against a world that failed to protect them. But on a hellish night that marked the end of their childhood, eldest brother Shawn died violently after being dragged behind closed doors. Though the official finding was accidental death, Nathan Lasco knows better, and has never forgiven their mother, Stella.
Now two decades later, Stella promises to finally reveal the truth of what happened on The Day of the Door. Accompanied by a paranormal investigative team, the Lasco family comes together one final time, but no one is prepared for the revelations waiting for them on the third floor.
Killer VHS: The Long Low Whistle
The sound of the whistle that split Patricia’s life in two still haunts her two decades later, its echoes leaving their indelible stamp on everything she does. The rift caused by her father’s unsolved death haunts her, pushing her to ever more dangerous attempts to put his memory to rest. Breaking into mausoleums in the dead of night isn’t how she pictured her life, but she’ll do almost anything to know what happened.
When a group of amateur cryptid hunters shows up in her small town, Trish doesn’t hesitate to take what might be her only chance to find answers, even if they’re searching in the last place she should be. A sealed, abandoned mine; tight underground passages filled with unseen creatures, and impenetrable darkness await the crew, but it’s the only path forward, and Trish won’t leave her father’s legacy buried, delving ever deeper into danger to where that whistle still moans.
