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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Road of Bones by Christopher Golden”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson”
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, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross”
Book #72 of 2022: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of …
Continue reading “Book Review: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more