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 …
Tag Archives: horror
Book Review: Road of Bones by Christopher Golden
Book #162 of 2022: Road of Bones by Christopher Golden [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] The atmosphere of this horror novel draws a reader in immediately, well before any hint of the supernatural appears. Set in the far north of Siberia, one of the coldest places on earth that’s nevertheless inhabited, it …
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Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Book #139 of 2022: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher This creepy little novella is a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher by way of Mexican Gothic or The Girl with All the Gifts — which is to say, it posits that a rare breed of mushroom colony at the …
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Book Review: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
Book #122 of 2022: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda A neat little character study of a modern “vegan” vampire — her own term, although she actually means that she drinks pigs’ blood to avoid feeding on humans — who despite her unique circumstances is as overwhelmed and directionless as any other 23-year-old unpaid intern. I …
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Book Review: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
Book #115 of 2022: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #2) 1976’s Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn’t nearly so good, but it still has …
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Book Review: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg
Book #114 of 2022: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg As usual for a genre anthology, some of these stories strike me as stronger than others, but they are collectively rather great, presenting a uniquely Jewish chorus of voices interpreting and exploring horror in that particular context. Here we find beings of …
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Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones
Book #111 of 2022: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones A strange little horror novella that’s not as unsettling as I feel like it’s aiming to be, yet not funny/campy enough to constitute a good parody. The high school protagonist makes a lot of bizarre intuitive leaps, and while I think the intent …
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Book Review: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
Book #92 of 2022: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas An underwhelming cross between Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House, in which a recently-married woman finds her new home literally haunted by the malevolent spirit of her husband’s first wife. (The publisher’s blurb compares it to Mexican Gothic too, but that similarity is basically limited …
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Book Review: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson
Book #84 of 2022: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson I’m very torn on this 2021 queer gothic horror novella, which reimagines Dracula’s brides by way of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, as decadent and melancholic immortals spending centuries tangling and untangling their codependent emotions as they ravage their way across Europe. The language …
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Book Review: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Book #73 of 2022: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files #1) This 2004 publication — which in my edition includes the novel The Atrocity Archive followed by a sequel novella “The Concrete Jungle” — introduces the Laundry, a secret British intelligence division dealing with magic and related otherworldly threats. It’s urban fantasy, …
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