The Cellar Below The Cellar: Book Review
Well howdy, dearest reader!
It’s a new year and I am starting up the blog and will hopefully be more consistent! I can’t promise anything though, I can only try my best. I have been missing blogging though, it’s a very rleaxing type of writing. I’ll do an update post soon, but today I have a review of an upcoming book!
It’s not out yet so I am keeping this review spoiler-free!
The Author
Ivy Grimes is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and she currently lives in Virginia. She has an MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, Vastarien, hex, Maudlin House, ergot., Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection Glass Stories (Grimscribe Press) and The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion (Cemetery Gates). — Ivy Grimes’ website
You can find more information about Grimes on her website, or subscribe to her Substack.
The Book
A playfully dark folk horror inspired by the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and the mythology around Frau Perchta, set under the blazing sky of endless auroras.
When a wild solar storm wipes out all electronics and traps Jane at her grandmother's house in the woods, she is forced to start a new life off-grid as part of a small, isolated community.
However, there is something very strange about her new neighbors, and the longer she lives under the eerie glow of the auroras, the more she feels her grandmother may be hiding unsettling secrets.
To have any hope in her new world, Jane must find the courage to step into her power and claim her identity, but that would mean facing whatever hides in the cellar below the cellar—a place that seems to be waiting for her.
Full of delightfully weird surprises and off-kilter characters, this adult coming-of-age story explores themes of female empowerment, spirituality, identity, and community. For fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Otessa Moshfegh, and Leonora Carrington. — Apex Book Company website
Distributed through Independent Publishers Group and with a cover by Jack Hillside, The Cellar Below The Cellar by Ivy Grimes is a dark folk horror coming March 25th, 2026.
Weaving threads of grim fairy tales, the end of the world, and the survivors haunted by a aurora-laced sky — The Cellar Below The Cellar is almost like a coming of age tale of an adult reclaiming her heritage and her future.
The Review
Grimes’s prose is impactful and poetic, pulling you in as the world ends around the characters within. The novella follows the protagonist, Jane, who is living a normal life when — visiting her grandmother — an event happens and the world as she knows it ends.
What follows is a soft, gentle reckoning. What does it mean to confront death? To survive and need to continue surviving. When your worst worry the day before was finding a date, a partner, and now its finding food, dealing with a strangeness in the land, and the secrets left unconfronted? She contends with mourning the life she knew, grappling with new responsibilties, and the knowledge that something waits in the cellar beneath the cellar.
Jane’s grandmother, in all this, remains calm, mysterious, and at times — frustrating. She guides as much as allows Jane the space to flounder. Send her out to aid the strange neighbours as everyone bands together to survive.
Normally coming of age stories refer to kids, teens, but The Cellar Below The Cellar is a story about a modern woman caught in the limbo of the modern world and given the chance to come into her own with a world altering event. Jane is forced to grow up, take charge, pick up responsibility in a new reality where she must depend on others and allow others to depend on her.
Written like a vintage, delicate, and beautiful fairy tale, this novella is comforting and hopeful, even in its darkness.
And what lies in the cellar beneath the cellar? You’ll have to read it for yourself to find out.
Overall, I was really sucked into the story and loved being swathed in Grimes’s writing. To me, this was such a hopeful story — that life can change for the better no matter what. That anyone can have their “coming of age” and I love that.
I also really loved the fantastical fairy tale elements of the novella — from the cellar, to the dolls, to the demon jars, to the classic grandmother in the woods. This novella is definitely on my favourites list.
9/10
If this sounds like your next read, you can preorder The Cellar Below The Cellar here!
x PLM
