Lying awake at 1 AM—one of those nights where sleep just refuses to cooperate—scrolling through my library for something short enough to finish before dawn. Four hours. A romance about a robot searching for her dead husband's soul. That opening line riffing on Austen. I hit play expecting camp.
I did not get camp.
Shirley Jackson Walked So This Author Could Break Your Heart
Look, I cover horror. That's my thing. But horror and grief are siblings, and this book understands that in a way that caught me completely off guard. Nell isn't just a robot—she's Human-5014, which tells you everything about how this world categorizes the synthetic beings that inherited humanity's ruins. She's a librarian (obviously I was already invested), and she's been searching for twenty revolutions for whoever received her husband's soul when he died.
Twenty. Revolutions.
The premise sounds like it could tip into melodrama at any moment, but Holloway keeps it grounded in this quiet, aching specificity. Nell doesn't want her husband back—she knows that's impossible. She just wants to meet the person carrying a piece of him. To know that something of him still exists in the world. That's not romance as we usually define it. That's grief wearing love's clothes. White Witch, Black Curse does something similar—using supernatural elements to explore loss in ways that feel more honest than most straight literary fiction.
Bakken's Broadcast Background Actually Works Here
Theresa Bakken comes from broadcast journalism—Emmy-winning, apparently—and you can hear it in how she approaches the material. There's a steadiness to her delivery that could easily feel detached, but instead it mirrors Nell's synthetic nature. She's not performing emotion; she's channeling something more controlled, more measured. The empathy comes through in the pauses, in the slight catches that feel almost accidental.
At four hours, this is a single-sitting listen, and Bakken paces it like she knows that. No rushed sections, no dragging middle. The intimacy of a solo narrator works here because Nell's perspective is so singular, so focused on this one impossible hope.
What This Isn't (And Why That Matters)
If you're coming to this expecting a traditional romance arc—meet-cute, conflict, resolution, happily ever after—you'll be confused. This is closer to literary sci-fi wearing romance's skin. The "futuristic love story" descriptor is accurate but incomplete. It's a meditation on what survives us. On whether love is located in the soul, the body, the memory, or somewhere we haven't named yet.
I kept thinking about Her, actually. That same quiet devastation. That same question of whether connection requires biological equivalence. Holloway doesn't answer definitively, which is the right choice. The uncertainty is the point.
Who Should Download This (And Who Should Scroll Past)
If you scare easily, this won't be your problem—there's nothing horror-adjacent here. But if you're looking for escapist romance, for something light and affirming, this might leave you feeling hollowed out. In a good way? But still. Skip this one if you need your love stories to end with certainty.
This is for readers who loved the existential ache of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. For people who think about what makes a person a person. For anyone who's ever lost someone and found themselves looking for traces of them in strangers.
My podcast listeners who enjoy the more philosophical horror episodes—the ones about identity and consciousness and what survives death—they're going to love this. It's not horror, but it lives in the same emotional neighborhood.
Shirley (My Cat) Was Unimpressed. I Was Wrecked.
By 3 AM, I was staring at my ceiling with that specific feeling you get when a book has rearranged something inside you. Shirley was asleep on my chest, completely indifferent to my emotional state. Cats are like that.
Four hours. That's all it takes to ask whether love can survive the death of everything that made it possible. Whether searching for someone's soul in another body is devotion or delusion. Whether a robot can grieve more authentically than the humans who created her.
Science fiction romance that actually respects both genres. The runtime is tight, the premise is wild, and the execution is surprisingly restrained. Holloway wrote a love story about absence, and Bakken narrates it like she understands that sometimes the quietest performances hit the hardest.
I didn't expect to be recommending a robot romance on a horror podcast. But here we are. The best grief stories always sneak up on you.
