“Seed”, Ania Ahlborn
Published May 28, 2011
In the vine-twisted swamps of Louisiana, the shadows have teeth.
Jack Winter has spent his entire life running from something no one else can see. His childhood is his darkest secret, but after a near fatal accident along a deserted road, the darkness he was sure he’d escaped rears its ugly head… and smiles.
But this time, he isn’t the only one who sees the soulless eyes of his past. This time, his six-year-old daughter Charlie leans into his ear and whispers: Daddy, I saw it too.
And then she begins to change.
Faced with reliving the nightmares of his childhood, Jack watches his daughter spiral into the shadows that had nearly consumed him twenty years before.
But Charlie isn’t the only one who’s changing.
Jack never outran the darkness. It’s been with him all along.
And it’s hungrier than ever.
“It was you, it was me, it was us, it was we.”
Seed is my first Ania Ahlborn experience, and oh boy does she deliver a unique kind of eerie horror. Like Intercepts, this was also a Kindle Unlimited discovery. It starts with something simple—a family on the road, a car accident, and a father who seems just a little too haunted by his past. From there, the tale spirals into full-on possession horror, but with a freshness that makes it stand out in a genre often weighed down by clichés. I can’t explain to you how intense the creep factor of this book is. Dread builds steadily, every chapter peeling back more of Jack Winter’s history and the sinister presence that has followed him since childhood.
What makes Seed so terrifying is its atmosphere. Ahlborn doesn’t rely on cheap scares—instead, she layers unease and dread until even the most ordinary scenes feel menacing. The family dynamic grounds the horror in something achingly human: the fear of passing on your worst parts, of failing the people you love, of seeing evil reflected back in your own child. By the time the supernatural fully takes hold, the story feels inevitable and unstoppable—and that inevitability is what makes it so devastating.
If you like your horror dark, relentless, and unwilling to hand you comfort, Seed delivers. It’s a possession story wrapped in a generational curse and the reality that evil festers in silence.
Content Warnings
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of content and trigger warnings.
animal death • child death • body horror • car accident
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