Book #28 of 2024: Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian The Weird Western vibes of this adventure novel are delightful, presenting a version of the post-Civil War midwest that’s populated with demons, ghouls, and similar entities, all treated matter-of-factly as threats that an unwary traveler might encounter like any other. I’m less sold on the plot, …
Tag Archives: horror
Book Review: Beholder by Ryan La Sala
Book #10 of 2024: Beholder by Ryan La Sala At first glance, it seems like this fantasy horror novel should have too much going on its plot to be remotely effective: an orphaned teen protagonist with the magical ability to see backwards in time through mirrors and other reflective surfaces, a Lovecraftian entity lurking inside …
Book Review: The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
Book #6 of 2024: The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White Another brutal story from author Andrew Joseph White, although just slightly less viscerally upsetting than his previous novel Hell Followed With Us. (The trans hero of this book is subjected to misgendering, institutionalization / conversion therapy, domestic abuse, and sexual assault dating …
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Book Review: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams
Book #4 of 2024: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King’s plague journal “The End of the Whole Mess” was the only entry I’d read before). …
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Book Review: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea
Book #129 of 2023: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea This debut novel and its heroine should have been right up my alley: an #ownvoices queer Black teen, striving to prove herself in the cutthroat and frequently racist world of French ballet, who makes a pact with …
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Book Review: Holly by Stephen King
Book #110 of 2023: Holly by Stephen King This is the sixth Stephen King story to feature private investigator Holly Gibney, following the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes; Finders Keepers; End of Watch), the novel The Outsider, and the novella If It Bleeds. The previous three entries all found that protagonist and her friends facing …
Book Review: Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Book #107 of 2023: Whalefall by Daniel Kraus I didn’t know that I particularly needed a YA version of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” but this novel was a delightful (if often viscerally unpleasant) read. Its genre flutters between wilderness survival and straight-up horror, telling the story of a teenage boy who winds up swallowed by …
Book Review: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Book #97 of 2023: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Three-out-of-five stars, which as usual is the hardest rating for me to articulate / justify in the space of a review. This horror title doesn’t make any major missteps, other than perhaps a bit of a drawn-out beginning. It’s a mid-90s period piece set in Mexico …
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Book Review: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
Book #93 of 2023: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher I only learned after finishing this 2019 horror novel that it’s a loose sequel to Arthur Machen’s 1904 story “The White People,” and I wonder if some of my frustrations might have been mitigated by that additional context. As is, this later work has a …
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Book Review: She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
Book #86 of 2023: She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran A creepy #ownvoices haunted house story that never quite clicks into gear, perhaps because the premise is just a bit too convoluted for my tastes. Our queer teenage protagonist, visiting her father in Vietnam while he fixes up an old manor home, is …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 