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 #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 #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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Book #29 of 2023: Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (Carter & Lovecraft #1) The vibes of this fantasy noir, in which a private investigator learns that H. P. Lovecraft actually experienced some of the cosmic horrors he wrote about and gets caught up in a plot with the writer’s descendant, are top-notch. As …
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Book #28 of 2023: The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, in recognition of the fact that I’m not in the target audience for this middle-grade horror/fantasy novel, despite how I often enjoy that genre regardless, or how much I love author Joseph Fink’s unrelated Welcome to Night Vale podcast and books. …
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Book #26 of 2023: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks The modern ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre was already in full swing in 2006 when this book made its rather curious debut, with the associated tropes well-known enough to be mined for comedy in films like Shaun of the Dead …
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Book #20 of 2023: How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This is far from my favorite Grady Hendrix novel, but I do think it’s closer in quality to his typical output than to Horrorstör, the only title I’ve previously rated lower than four stars. A lot of this …
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Book #3 of 2023: The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay A horror novel with very little horror in it. This reads a bit like one of those Stephen King stories about an older man looking back on his haunted adolescence — Christine crossed with Revival, maybe? — which is a tone that I could theoretically …
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Book #197 of 2022: The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun A bitter little novella about a Korean man who’s bedridden and initially only able to communicate by blinking, having been severely disabled by the car accident that also killed his wife. Lacking any other family to take him in, he’s looked after by his mother-in-law, who …
Book #196 of 2022: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes A thrillingly creepy sci-fi horror novel in the same general vein as movies like Event Horizon, Alien, or Sunshine, where human/corporate greed may be the true enemy (for anyone who can survive the crazed assault of its previous victims). Out on the far vestiges of …
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