Book #56 of 2025: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito As the title suggests, this 2025 novel is a nineteenth-century riff on American Psycho, in which a deranged governess gleefully recounts her violent impulses and crimes, leading up to her slaughter of the entire household over Christmas. It’s darkly funny, depending on your taste for gratuitous …
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TV #14 of 2025: Farscape, season 4 This is the end of Farscape proper, though I still need to watch the sequel miniseries. Setting aside the shocking cliffhanger, which I’m sure would have been pretty frustrating if no continuation had ever come along, it’s another solid run that doesn’t quite live up to the series …
Book #55 of 2025: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix Another outstanding horror title from author Grady Hendrix, this one focusing on the real-life horrific institution of mid-twentieth-century homes for expectant teenage mothers. Parents would forcibly check their daughters into such places for the duration of their pregnancies, after which the girls were strong-armed …
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Book #54 of 2025: The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold The best part of this novel is the initial premise reflected in the title: after acid rain and other climate disasters have ravaged the planet and decimated the population, the teenage protagonist is the only person left working in her shop, which she …
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Book #53 of 2025: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson (Virgin New Adventures #3) This volume doesn’t quite deserve its reputation as a series low point — it’s far better than Lungbarrow, for instance — but it’s an early indication of the limitations of the concept here. Classic Doctor Who wasn’t exactly a consistently …
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Book #52 of 2025: A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones Some Diana Wynne Jones stories — both Archer’s Goon and the Chrestomanci series come to mind — I read and reread countless times as a child and found that they still carried that same magic when I returned to them later in …
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TV #13 of 2025: The Bear, season 2 I wasn’t as immediately impressed with this sophomore effort, since the switch from the characters managing a struggling restaurant to launching a fancy new one made everything feel somewhat tamer. There’s still a great deal of chaotic scrambling and neurotic vulgarity, but in this case it’s all …
Book #51 of 2025: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte This collection of interconnected stories offers some pretty sharp observations on modern internet culture, and it reminds me of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface in its sympathetic depictions of certain objectively horrible protagonists, whom we can at least understand no matter how much we presumably disapprove. Author Tony …
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Book #50 of 2025: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins I wasn’t a huge fan of author Suzanne Collins’s first prequel effort The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but this new title thankfully recaptures the old Hunger Games magic. It’s a challenging target for this sort of release to hit — similar enough to …
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Book #49 of 2025: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge Nearly but not quite the last of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic adaptations, as this volume — already smaller than the first two — for some reason …
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