Here I Come by V.L. Banx: A Haunted Farm, a Masked Killer and One Long Halloween Night

A haunted farm, a county that quietly cheers for its killer, and a Halloween night nobody planned.

Here I Come is a standalone novella in the K!nktober: Reloaded series, and it comes out today, October 30. Shelley works the last night of the season at Hemlock Farm, where she plays a bloody patient in a mad doctor’s lab and sends strangers into a corn maze scared. Her boyfriend hates Halloween and has never seen any of it. Then a masked man walks into the barn, and she decides it must be him.

What worked

The two voices. Shelley talks herself into things in real time and changes her mind three paragraphs later, in the middle of being scared and very turned on. The killer is tired, burns his gloves and grumbles about the nickname the papers gave him. I laughed out loud more than once. Mara, Shelley’s best friend with the chainsaw that has no chain, gets the best lines, and I wanted more of her.

Where it stumbles

The sex takes up close to half the story and the vocabulary starts to repeat in the second stretch. The boyfriend barely appears, so the ultimatum feels lopsided. The question of whether the killer’s victims deserved it gets asked and dropped. It is an ARC with a few typos, and I assume the final copy fixes them.

It is a light, filthy, funny read for one sitting, and I’m giving it a three.

Read the full review of Here I Come, with every rating and the content warnings, here: suvienur.com/reviews/here-i-come.

Overall Rating: 3/5 · Writing Style: 3/5 · Characters: 3/5 · World-Building: 3/5 · Spice Rating: 5/5

Recommended for readers who like their dark romance playful, who grew up on slasher movies, and who want a one-sitting novella built around a masked killer. If you liked Haunting Adeline but wanted a funnier, lighter cousin, start here. Skip it if you need a deep emotional arc or a serious moral argument.

Bloodthorn · suvienur.com