Book Review: ‘Haiku for the Midnight Hour’

📘 Haiku for the Midnight Hour

By Dawn Pisturino
Publisher: Horse Mesa Press
Publication Year: 2024
Genre: Poetry (Haiku), Horror, Supernatural

In August 2024, poet and blogger Dawn Pisturino released Haiku for the Midnight Hour, her third collection of poetry—a book that reimagines the traditional Japanese haiku through a lens of shadow and unease.

Traditional haiku, with its compact structure of 17 syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, typically captures fleeting moments in nature, philosophical reflection, or seasonal shifts. Pisturino’s work subverts this expectation, recasting haiku as a vessel for horror, the supernatural, and the spectral corners of human experience.

“This collection of haiku challenges the traditional Japanese poetic art form. Experimenting with darker images and ideas, I have created non-traditional observations that address the other side of literature and life: monsters, ghosts, natural fears, supernatural forces, fearful gods and goddesses, and whatever constitutes the Otherworld. This book was written for people who like Halloween, scary stories, and being alone in the dark.”
— Dawn Pisturino

🩸 Selected Poems

Each poem is a vignette—precise, cinematic, and chilling. They evoke a ghostly hush, like echoes down an empty hallway or the creak of a house long forgotten.

Abandoned
cold spot catches me by surprise,
chills to the bone,
abandoned spirits

House
ramshackle old house —
ready to fall — hiding ghosts
lost on earthly plane

Ghost Child
gleeful child plays ball
in garden — old-fashioned clothes
remind us he’s dead

Dancers
women in long gowns
whirl in lovers’ arms at ball
fade away from view

Echoes
rapping on the door
echoes through the house, doorknob
slowly . . . slowly . . . turns . . .

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My Take

Though my literary instincts tend to favor prose, I occasionally tiptoe into poetry’s terrain—especially haiku, which offers its own kind of narrative economy. That said, horror-themed haiku was new to me, an unlit corridor I hadn’t explored.

Discovering Pisturino’s work via a WordPress review felt like pulling back a curtain on an old literary obsession. In the 1980s and ’90s, I was immersed in Stephen King’s ghost stories and eerie novellas. Haiku for the Midnight Hour stirred the same marrow-deep thrill. There’s a midnight chill in its cadence, a nostalgic echo of the tales that once kept me up late, heart thudding, eyes wide. These poems don’t just disturb—they remember. And in their remembrance, something flickers: a spirit, a feeling, a familiar fear.