The Night Is Not For You - Review
*I received a physical copy via Run For It and an audio copy from Hachette Audio. All reviews are my own.
The Night Is Not For You by Eman Quotah was the biggest waste of my time in 2026. I know we still have a few months left in this year, but there is no way I’m finding another book as disappointing as this one. I am currently in a Horror-Reading mood, and I picked up this title, which should have fit the bill. Same problem I had with A Cut of Salt by Denna Helm: the horror is definitely there, but the story is so much more than the folklore of a woman serial killer with hands of sharp blades and feet shaped like hoof prints. It’s also a coming-of-age story about a little girl who just wanted a pet donkey.
"A man's body is found viciously murdered behind a neighborhood's corner store, sending shockwaves through the tight-knit community in this small-town neighborhood. All the victim's family and bystanders want is to make sense of this brutal crime and move on with their lives.
But all seven-year-old Layla wants is a pet donkey. To her, a donkey is the epitome of freedom and being self-sufficient—to think for herself, go anywhere by herself and live an independent life.
As the killings continue, Layla's world unravels. Rumors start to fly of supposed hoofprints and a woman with hair like black silk. As the ambiguous messages in lipstick and sweet smell of perfume cause the finger of blame to point towards the women, Layla herself grows into a woman.
The kind of woman she has always dreamt of becoming—a woman with sharp instincts. A woman who cannot be tamed."
As usual, I chose to experience this title via audio. Ezra Saifie narrated it, and it took 9 hours and 13 minutes to complete. I have no notes for Saifie; I think she did a good job giving an atmospheric undertone that fits the subject matter. I need to do a quick search to see whether she narrated any of the many books on my TBR.
I had to scrap my original review because it was written in pure emotional frustration, rather than covering the story's content. I just knew I didn’t like it and I wanted to shout it out to the world. But I think I was more mad at myself for sticking it out, waiting for the plot to twist or at least for it to all make better sense. I should’ve DNFed, but we’re here now.
There is a serial killer on the loose in a small town that is hunting men down at night for possibly promiscuous reasons. Nobody really knows. But because all of the deaths were gruesome beyond imagination, and the telltale signs of lipstick prints and perfume scents were left behind, one can only assume it had to be revenge from a fed-up woman. Except, she always left hoofprints at the scene of the crime as well. This gave rise to fear of the “Vengeful Murderess”. Meanwhile, 7-year-old Layla doesn’t have a care in the world. All she wants is independence from her siblings, and she thinks she can get that by having a pet donkey.
The way the synopsis was written, you would think the Murderess and Layla had something in common. Spoiler alert: They do not. These timelines don't really connect on a surface level, and honestly, we could’ve gotten two completely different stories if the author had chosen to. Instead, Quotah decided to take a different approach to horror and gave us a flipped script of how society will protect men being hunted by a lone woman while still incorporating the feminist attributes of how women are stifled under the control of the patriarchy, due to the killings. It’s a doozy, and for a second I thought I was watching another M. Night Shyamalan film.
This book takes place during Layla’s childhood, and the random murders in the small town shape her reality and upbringing. Because the community is tight-knit, the people chose confinement and the removal of outside activities, thus making the children (and mainly Layla) feel suffocated. As Layla gets older, the Vengeful Murderess becomes a quiet obsession and shapes how she views life outside her community. All she ever wanted was to be free, but she feared what that freedom would entail. So she adopted the notion of the Murderess as freedom and embraced that energy to reclaim her independence from “the man.”
After finishing the book, I did some research to understand how this story idea came about. And I found out that the serial killer is based on an Arabic mythology called the Umm Al-Duwais. Umm Al-Duwais is one of the most feared female jinn in the Gulf of the Emirates. As in the book, Duwais is described as having long, beautiful black hair, a sweet perfume scent, cat-like eyes, and feet (or hands) like sickles or donkey hooves. Traditionally, she is a creature of the night who lures unfaithful, lustful, or wandering men to their deaths via seduction. Parents used the myth to keep children from wandering off and to enforce curfews on restless young men. Sounds familiar? The Jinn is basically the cousin of Aicha Kandicha from Soraya Bouazzaoui's story Aicha. Quotah noted in an interview with Arab News that "every culture has boogey men and women. Every culture has paranoia." She chose this folkloric figure to examine how a community processes trauma, grief, and collective panic after acts of violence. The myth acts as a mirror; rather than uniting the town, the mystery of the jinn fractures the community, turning neighbors into suspects.
Overall, I gave this book 2-stars. Reading TNINFY was like expecting candy, but you got fruit instead. Once I calmed down from my initial reaction and sat down to think about how the story was told, I still don’t like the book, but I do like the creativity in how Quotah told it. This definitely was a different direction from the usual horror I’ve come to know, and feminist horror was a first for me. I’m not sure how I feel about the sub-genre, but for now, it’s a no for me.
The Night Is Not For You is available now!
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