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 #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 #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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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 …
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Book #45 of 2022: My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1) On a basic plot level, this is the story of a half-Indian teen trying to convince everyone in her small town that they’re soon to be caught up in the events of a slasher-style massacre, identifying patterns …
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Book #6 of 2022: White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson This YA ghost story could have been a run-of-the-mill three-star read for me, but since the ending is so abrupt and unsatisfying, I think two stars feels more appropriate overall. I’ve had a really hard time getting inside the mindset of the protagonist, a teen …
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Book #346 of 2021: You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson This novel technically takes place in the dystopian setting of authors Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson’s “Within the Wires” podcast, but you don’t need to have listened to that first in order to enjoy it — all I’ve …
Book #329 of 2021: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw This horror novella came highly recommended, and I was further intrigued by the striking cover design and promise of Japanese folklore-inspired frights within. (The title is the literal translation of ohaguro bettari, the main variety of monster encountered here.) Unfortunately, I’ve found the book …
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Book #316 of 2021: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling For nearly half of this novel, it seems a competent yet somewhat unremarkable iteration of the standard Bluebeard-esque gothic plot — see Rebecca, Jane Eyre, etc. — of a young woman warned not to dig into her brooding new husband’s secret past or …
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Book #315 of 2021: The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward This horror thriller isn’t an absolute trainwreck, and it undeniably picks up near the end, but the whole thing is built around a series of twists that are painfully obvious from the start and tiresome in their dragged-out execution. Ostensibly the plot …
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