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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab”
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 …
Book #107 of 2025: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on …
Book #106 of 2025: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim”
Book #82 of 2025: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones Unintentionally a great companion piece to the movie Sinners (2025), another historical vampire story centered on a marginalized racial group to come out in recent months. This one is less concerned with vampirism as a metaphor for whiteness as a predatory force, but …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more