REVIEW: The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling
Last Updated on April 4, 2025
Grief is a powerful theme in horror. So is getting old and facing that consistent dresser the Grim Reaper. And your neighbours being a bit creepy? Classic. Two-time Bram Stoker award-nominated author Todd Keisling’s retirement-community-gone-weird tale The Sundowner’s Dance from Shortwave, out April 22, combines these all into one poignant, heartfelt yet also gloriously sinister and freaky melange that creeps its way into your heart before exploding into a surreal, cosmic haze and asks the big questions about life, death, and, as we shall see, introverts.
Our protagonist is Jerry Campbell, a grief-stricken elderly widower who, haunted by memories of his wife, buys a new home in a retirement community, Fairview Acres, for a fresh start. Although the neighbours seem nice enough, if a bit odd, there’s strange noises on his roof at night, a bleeding woman screaming about worms on his porch, and an overly friendly chairman of the community association who keeps inviting him to the endless and bizarrely energetic all-night parties. Oh and there’s a massive stone in the park that seems to be at the centre of everything.
The set up to The Sundowner’s Dance is impressive. The first quarter does a delicate balance of grief horror—I found Jerry’s struggles to deal with the memories of his wife particularly moving, made more complex by his battle to deal with his anxiety in her absence—with neighbours-acting-weird suspense. That tingling, deep unease of these suburban-paradise-gone-wrong tales makes these early sections strong.
What proceeds from that is a strange ride of cosmic, grisly discoveries about neighbours and increasing high stakes on a cosmic level. Keisling loves a nightmarish tableau, and there’s some grotesque images that might put you off spaghetti for a few centuries.
But for me the most satisfying part of The Sundowner’s Dance was the unerring thematic commitment to the explorations of grief and aging. There is a strong sense overhanging this tale of the strange no-man’s land the elderly enter when their life partner dies and they must face an entirely new world, and new choices, even as their health fails and their years dwindle. We see one of these choices—challenge the concept of death and aging itself—play out in this book, and you’ll no doubt be stunned to find out it’s not as rosy as the brochure promises.
But impressively, there’s another meaty theme here distinct from growing old that really resonated with my millennial bones. Jerry is an introvert, and finds the never-ending peer pressure of his neighbours as wearying as any introvert reading this would find it (I got empathetic anxiety at some of his neighbours’ prodding.) There is a sense here of a group of people thinking they know best for the freaky introvert without ever seeking to try and understand them, and those of us who have felt this peer pressure from extroverts their whole life to “join in” will find Jerry’s plights here just as thematically satisfying as the revelations on death.
That said, this is ultimately a book about facing aging, grief, and death the right way, and to this end Keisling packs a hell of an ending that pulls no punches while being undoubtedly beautiful. The finish is strong on this one.
Overall, for all its retirement community mystery and cosmic creepiness, The Sundowner’s Dance is an elegiac reflection about one man’s confrontation with the pain that most of us will face and the fate that all of us will endure. A heartfelt creepfest that packs a punch.
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