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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Book #180 of 2022: Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix A whirlwind tour of decades of English-language horror publishing, spanning from Rosemary’s Baby in 1967 through the middle-grade era of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike in the mid-90s, and quite a lot in between. While …
Book #170 of 2022: Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison This title is too straightforward for too long, telling the story of a woman getting bit by a werewolf with little to distinguish it from any other iteration of that plot. It’s all competent, but somewhat unremarkable, and as I read along, I kept impatiently …
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Book #168 of 2022: Dracula by Bram Stoker First published in 1897, this gothic horror novel remains an influential classic. Its characters like Van Helsing and the bloodsucking Count himself are now household names, and so many of our cultural ideas about vampires that subsequent stories have either reiterated or consciously pushed back against can …
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