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 …
Tag Archives: horror
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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Book Review: My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron
Book #69 of 2023: My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron This YA novel reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with both Henry Jekyll and the narrator Gabriel Utterson cast as queer Black teens, whilst retaining the Victorian London setting of the gothic original. …
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Book Review: Pines by Blake Crouch
Book #64 of 2023: Pines by Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines #1) I picked up this 2012 novel on the strength of author Blake Crouch’s later sci-fi thrillers like Dark Matter and Recursion, but this earlier effort isn’t really in the same league. It’s long on vibes but short on story, and although I haven’t seen …
Book Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
Book #63 of 2023: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher A fun little horror novella about a woman whose mom’s house is being haunted by the malevolent spirit of the protagonist’s abusive grandmother. It’s a quick read overall, but I think it stays a bit too long in the initial stage of the …
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Book Review: Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers
Book #60 of 2023: Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers This is such a nifty idea for a short story collection, with every entry following different members of the same extended Cherokee family yet moving steadily forward in time, ultimately spanning from 1839 to 2039. (There are a few callbacks and recurring characters across …
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Book Review: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
Book #41 of 2023: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White Living in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by mutant abominations is tough. Especially if you’re Benji, a trans kid being held prisoner by the fundamentalist cult who originally unleashed the plague and have now injected him with an experimental strain to create their greatest …
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Book Review: A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor
Book #31 of 2023: A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor This is a pretty consistently solid collection of horror (or horror-adjacent) short stories, many revolving around some type of dystopian apocalypse and its aftermath. Oftentimes I find such ensembles to vary dramatically in quality across their contents, but here I think I’d give …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 