Hey Bookworm friends! This month has been so busy but it’s also #ReadIndieSFFMonth2026 and I don’t want the month to pass by without posting my review for the reading challenge. I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on That Which Follows You Home, which I read with an indie book club. It’s also offered for free on the author’s website in case anyone is interested!
Book Details
That Which Follows You Home
by Josiah D. Blizzard
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Threadbound
Publisher: Josiah Blizzard
Format Read: Ebook
Pub Date: Jan 1, 2026
Cover Artist: Tyler Lanter
Themes & Tropes
Portals │Monster Hunting│War│Power Corrupts│
Content Warnings:
Graphic Violence, Gore, Sexual Content, Drug Use, Death, Loss, Grief
Reading Challenge Prompts Fits
“Published Within The Last Year” and “Post a Review” for Read Indie SFF Month.
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Blurb
Click to Open
The Nine Hells have opened.
For centuries, Dún Lorne was a beacon of peace between realms, a place of academic achievement where weavers studied the art of manipulating the threads binding the world together. The mighty citadel sits upon a wellspring of great power. But power corrupts, and the traitorous King Casius has seized control of the citadel, opening a doorway between worlds, starting a war that changes the landscape of Verdalis for centuries. This became known as The Convergence.
If you want terrible monsters, blood-soaked battlefields, vivid thread magic, gut-wrenching loss, and moments of fierce tenderness, grab your copy now. Fans of high-stakes fantasy, portal fiction, and character-driven war stories will be hooked.
The citadel is crumbling.
Kings cross blades.
Monsters flood the earth.
And sometimes what follows you home is the monster within.
For fans of Ryan Cahill’s The Bound And The Broken, Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher, and authors like John Gwynne and Joe Abercrombie.
Review
A Dark Fantasy That Achieves So Much In Such A Tight Space!
That Which Follows You Home is a prequel novella that sets up how the world of Verdalis became what it is now. It spans just under 200 years of time and follows a cast of characters, with three different POVs it switches from. One of the most impressive aspects of this novella is that it throws you into the thick of battle from the get-go. We’re thrust into a political maelstrom between three armies the reader knows nothing about. And yet, as the carnage begins and each character struggles to survive and fulfill their specific role within the greater scheme of the battle, I quickly became invested in every single character’s fate. By the 25% mark, I was already feeling like I was brothers in arms with all of them and I thought it was a clever way to introduce us to the setting and peoples.
During the battle, portals suddenly open up and all kinds of monsters you can imagine (and even those you can’t) come bursting through which pushes the level of chaos entirely off the scales! Vampires. Wolf-Men. Banshees. Demons. Manticores. Cockatrices…you get the idea. A world that had zero monsters suddenly has all of them and now they have to deal with that. Not to mention that no-one even knows why the portals were opened in the first place.
‘He’d learned from Casius’s betrayal that some men were monsters underneath. And like the wildcats of the northern wastes, or the vipers in the silver sands, not all creatures are out to do evil.’
Once the dust settles, there is so much to do to rebuild but the trust between different factions has been broken. Especially once it becomes clear that not everything that came through the portals deserves to be hunted. In fact, my two favourite characters are not originally from this world and they’re just doing their best to start a life in a new, and very hostile, world. Renyart, a vampire who falls in love with a woman of this world and decides he no longer wants to hunt people for food, is delightful to follow (a favourite among the buddy readers for sure). His POV was equally adorable and devastating. My other fav was Hjalmar, a wolf-man who saves and befriends a man from this world and together they avoid the law, and hunt monsters.
Another really cool part of this story is the magic system based on elemental power threads that can be manipulated. There are also Spirit threads that can be used to communicate mentally. The vibes of this book are a very odd mix of inspirations that felt to me like a crossover between a grimdark Avatar the Last Airbender and The Witcher. Specifically because of the trope of the monster hunter who is hated by the very people they help, which by the way is one of my favourite tropes of all time. From the outside it might sound like there are too many ingredients in this book- soup but I swear, Blizzard made it feel cohesive—yet another feat accomplished by this novella!
“Seeing as time wasn’t linear, and was more like a circle all happening at once, they were moving from place to place and time to time.”
Despite the fact that I was fully invested in all the characters, it was clear that this novella’s focus was on breadth and not depth. Its attention is on the world-changing events rather than character moments and there are several huge time jumps where we catch up with our characters years later. There were two specific instances where I thought that I could read a whole book about what happened to these characters during this time gap. To be fair, That Which Follows You Home is not meant to be a saga but a brief history, even though my personal preferences would have loved more day-to-day moments with the fantastic characters Blizzard created. So that’s why I couldn’t give the book a full 5 stars. Regardless, I can’t wait to check out The Heart of Hornwood, book #1 in the Threadbound series, when it releases this July!
Let’s chat in the comments!
What’s a novella that impressed you? Do you enjoy reading prequels?
