I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: October 24, 2025] “Flicker”

It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….

After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.

As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.

This story starts out fairly calmly.  A woman, Kam, goes to see her brother who is an optometrist.  She admits that she made this appointment just to see him since she hasn’t for a while.  She tells him about a problem she’s been having but doesn’t think he’ll be able to do anything about it.  She says that her vision fades out for like half a second.  Things just go dark like a power surge.  He says he’ll look into it and tells her to say hi to he friends Wolf and Ami whom she’s having lumch with.

Lunch with them is always disappointing because they are seasonally vegetarian.  But she’s excited to see them and runs across the park to where they are sitting.

And then the lights went out.  All of them including the sun.  It was as if the power went out in the entire universe.  There was no breeze, no natural noise.  Just the sounds of people freaking out.  Twenty-one seconds later, everything turned back on and everyone could see the airplane sail out of the sky and crash into her brother’s office, totally destroying it and everyone in it.

For three months it was all anyone could talk about (understandably).  But Kam can’t get past it.  Her brother was killed and she wants to find some kind of answer.  She moves in with Wolf and Ami and sits in front of their TV all day.

One day Wolf came running in saying they had to get out of here right now.  It’s like the Purge out there–people are firing guns and setting things on fire.

And soon enough another darkness descends on the world.  Then they hear someone break into their apartment.

There’s a lot of supernatural in this story but the basics of it–people looting and breaking into houses is one of the scarier moments in any of these stories so far.

In the second half of the story, they flee to a cabin in  the woods only to learn that nowhere is safe.

The ending confused me though as I’m not exactly sure what happened.