Strange Houses by Uketsu
Strange Houses was the first book I read this year, back in January, and it has taken me entirely too long to just sit down and jot down my thoughts about it. Part of it is because I was very disappointed with how promising the premise was and how it fully deflated by the time I got to the end, so much so that now six months later, I’m honestly struggling to remember how it ended. The other reason why it took so long is […]
Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. I was sitting here thinking about how I should rate this, and I just really, really enjoyed myself, so I’m rounding this 4.5 star book up to five. Perhaps it is because there are two cats in here and one of them is a black one, and perhaps it is because of the ending, but regardless, I’m doing it, and I have no regrets. I liked the first […]
The Helm of Midnight by Marina J. Lostetter
After the dangerous relic of a serial killer is stolen in a daring heist, Krona and her fellow Regulators must uncover the greater conspiracy at play and recover the mask to keep the murders starting up again from beyond the grave. Not only is this book is an intriguing mix of fantasy, suspense thriller, and horror, but it is also stuffed chock-ful of unique world-building and follows three separate POVs, each with their own storyline. It definitely is a lot, but the author does a […]
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: A Novel by Stephen Graham Jones
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a wild and bloody novel, and I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stephen Graham Jones takes the vampire story into new territory – late 19th and early 20th century Montana, the Western frontier where whites are violently encroaching and native peoples find their communities and their environment subject to horrendous brutality and destruction. What better or more appropriate way to tell American History than through a horror story. The novel begins in contemporary Wyoming where 42-year-old Communications and Journalism […]
Murder Road by Simone St. James
When newlyweds April and Eddie pick up a mortally wounded hitchhiker on a deserted road, the last thing they expect is to be suspected of the crime. But to prove their innocence they will have to solve a decades-old mystery. The book’s blurb leans a bit heavier on the mystery-thriller aspect than the horror-paranormal, so I’m glad that other readers’ reviews emphasized the latter, or else I might have been disappointed expecting a straightforward cold case mystery. There’s an eerie feeling which hangs over the […]
Cardiff, By the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates presents four uneasy novellas of suspense, all of which are centered around a woman in peril, often from the male forces in her life. Cardiff, by the Sea – 3.5 stars Clare, an academic who was adopted as a toddler, returns to her unknown past when she unexpectedly inherits a house from her birth grandmother, but what she learns about her birth family leaves her unmoored. I loved the prose in this novella (as I did in all of them), as well […]
