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 …
Tag Archives: horror
Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim
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, …
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Book Review: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
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 …
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Book Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
Book #77 of 2025: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell One of fantasy’s most truly distinctive protagonists anchors this delightful tale, achieving a tone that’s somewhere between Hell Followed With Us and Killing Eve. Our antiheroine narrator is an inhuman creature who begins her story by describing how she ate her …
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Book Review: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Book #58 of 2025: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir The main problem with this horror novel is that it’s simply far too short. The heroine’s escalating situation is relatively gripping, but the root cause is still pretty unexplained at the end and the conclusion is hugely underwhelming. While I’m sure there’s some cultural variation …
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Book Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
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 Review: Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling
Book #33 of 2025: Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling Dr. Tamsin Rivers is losing her mind. She’s not sleeping well, she’s exhibiting odd memory lapses, and she’s going long periods without remembering to eat or leave the house. She’s also studying a strange House of Leaves phenomenon where her basement seems to …
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Book Review: An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson
Book #27 of 2025: An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson The opening sequence to this horror-fantasy novel is appropriately chilling: our protagonist, standing between two mirrors in the bathroom, notices a distant figure in the receding reflections that isn’t behaving like the others. In fact, it’s slowly walking towards her, weaving through all the …
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Book Review: Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson
Book #177 of 2024: Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson This 1913 short story collection consists of six entries initially published in various British magazines a few years prior, all concerning the titular occult detective, Thomas Carnacki. His methods are somewhat like those of Sherlock Holmes, but his domain is the supernatural and especially …
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Book Review: Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes
Book #158 of 2024: Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes An atmospheric example of space horror, but sadly not as effective as author S. A. Barnes’s earlier novel Dead Silence (unconnected except for occupying the same narrow genre). The premise here is fine: a psychologist joins a small crew on a corporate excursion to a …
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