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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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 #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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