We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an amazing, unsettling book. It is a tale told by a fanciful and unreliable but fascinating narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood, or Merricat, as her older sister Constance calls her. Merricat and Constance and their Uncle Julian and Merricat’s cat Jonas live in Blackwood House, on top of the hill overlooking a small and small-minded village. The author Shirley Jackson was a master of the macabre and creepy. Her short story “The Lottery” continues to haunt schoolchildren every year, […]
Intellectually interesting, not so much enjoyable for me.
Well, I think I’ve put this review off long enough, and it will be a short one, since our fantastic discussion last month covered a LOT of ground. The Devourers is certainly an original take on werewolves, I’ll give it that, but this book was just not for me. I get intellectually what it was going for, and in parts I was engaged, but overall, I just didn’t care. At the beginning of the book, I actively disliked it. As many have said in their […]
Things That Go Bump in the Night
Devolution Z – The Horror Magazine edited by Julia McAdams (2017) – I don’t read much horror, but this anthology included some excellent writing so I picked up my wooden stake, lit a few candles, and snuggled in to read some gore and listen for things that go bump in the night. The Breed: Last Watch – A dying werewolf is surrounded by his friends and family and flashing back to when the Nazi’s captured and experimented on him and his kind before being rescued by […]
Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance
In spite of this having been on a number of “best of 2016” lists, I walked into this book completely blind, and was fully shocked, disturbed, and yet driven by it. It’s a really tough read, not just psychologically, but because it’s brutally graphic in a way that doesn’t exactly require a warning, but is unusual for a Western reader used to a vaseline’d lens covering sex and violence. I really loved this, and it continues to haunt me a little bit. I can’t imagine […]
a dash of frightening, a dollop of blood-curdling and a spritz of spine-chilling.
“A blind teenager receives a corneal donation and begins to see and feel memories from their previous owner, a homicide detective, his father. As Joshua navigates a world of sight he gets glimpses of what these eyes might have witnessed in their previous life. What was his dad up to?” Paul Cleave is an author with the ability to write a thriller where the characters are totally and utterly believable – Joshua reminds me so much of a kid who lives at the end of […]
Truth Time: Victor Frankenstein is a Dick
Hollywood can’t get Frankenstein right. We all grew up thinking that the Frankenstein monster was this green, groaning thing was stupid and aimlessly looking for people to murder. The reason why Hollywood can’t get it right is because while people do die in the book, it’s not a traditional horror novel. Instead, it’s a quiet study of what makes us human and what happens when our basic needs aren’t met. It’s a gentle argument that we are shaped into the people we are rather than born […]
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