Book #42 of 2026: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle Horror screenwriter Misha Byrne is having a hard time lately, even besides his upcoming twentieth reunion in the hometown where he hasn’t come out of the closet yet. Either someone is playing an elaborately cruel trick on him, or he’s experiencing a psychotic break, or …
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Book #41 of 2026: Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja Although I’ve generally enjoyed the short stories in this collection, I have to admit that I don’t quite get the point of it as a project. Lilja’s Library is a website dedicated to the writing of Stephen …
Book #17 of 2026: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling This horror-fantasy title has potential, but the novella format ultimately works against it by not offering enough room for adequate development of its ideas. An herbalist and shipping magnate in a blockaded city becomes aware of a strange new illness spreading through the population, rendering its …
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Book #9 of 2026: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance This novel has a neat beginning that it then proceeds to squander, becoming one of those stories where I can viscerally feel my rating for it dropping as I continue to read along. The initial premise involves a trio of queer and …
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Book #198 of 2025: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia An excellent horror novel that unfolds across three quasi-related timelines. Primarily we’re following a graduate student in 1998 as she pursues research on her thesis topic, which concerns a lesser-known (fictional) female contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft. She’s investigating a rumor that one of the author’s …
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Book #172 of 2025: You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White If you’ve read any of author Andrew Joseph White’s YA works, you know that they tend to be rich in both horror themes and #ownvoices details pulled from his own transgender experiences, often with those two elements structurally intertwined in order …
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Book #165 of 2025: King Sorrow by Joe Hill A beast of a novel that fully earns its epic scope, proving once and for all that author Joe Hill has escaped from his father Stephen King‘s shadow but will always be indebted to him for the shared family style (as well as a few charming …
Book #156 of 2025: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison I appreciate that this vampire title is less straightforward than author Rachel Harrison’s earlier werewolf novel Such Sharp Teeth, but as it turns out, unpredictability doesn’t necessarily translate to a stronger work. Although I didn’t know quite where the plot was going, its tale of two …
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Book #148 of 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire …
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Book #135 of 2025: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with one of the editors.] Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand is a massive post-apocalyptic classic — over 1100 pages in its revised …
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