Disclaimer: I did some beta-ing for some drafts of this book and I am the author's friend, but I parted with my coin like an ordinary book simp for this work, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
I've been waiting for this book for years and it did not disappoint. I'm very happy with the changes the author made because the original was so bleak, and even though I loved how dark it was, I think changing the scope of the narrative to focus on the healing instead of the trauma of a character was a good move. It feels less exploitative and more affirming of the heroine's agency and intrinsic value as a human being.
You cannot really read this as a standalone or discuss this book without spoilers, but the series is soooo good, so I will do my best to give a brief summary without revealing too much. Leila, the heroine, and her friend, Dawn, were kidnapped by vampires who wanted to have sex with them and then kill them, basically. They escaped and now Dawn is a vampire and Leila is a human but still messed up. In DEAD LOVE, she starts to make steps to recovering her sexual and personal agency by getting back into her art and dating a human bartender named Dax. But, of course, this is a 100+ page book and not a 10+ page book because that plan doesn't end up working out so hot.
I liked this book a lot. The writing was great and Leila was a wonderfully complex and flawed character. My only qualm is that the resolution and ending were a bit rushed. I kind of expected a detailed discussion between Dax and Leila about what happened and I don't think there really was one (unless I missed it). I also felt like the douche vampire hunters got off too easy. (And was Megan ever found? Who took her??) But the ending was perfect and builds the promise out for more and I'm so excited to read more books in this world.
YIKES. This book is the posterchild for how illustrated covers can trick people into thinking they're getting a quirky little rom-com, only to end up with something very not that. And one of the top shelves for this book on Goodreads is "romance"? You sick, lying fucks.*
*JK ily, but seriously, definitely NOT a romance**
**In my not-so-humble opinion
Kitty is a social media influencer with family problems up the wazoo. Socialite mother dabbling in the literal blood money (her father was a slaughterhouse magnate). Daddy issues from her cold and aloof father teaching her that the cast of Charlotte's Web makes for good eatin'? No wonder she's a vegan with a major hang-up about men.
Unfortunately that hang-up soon turns deadly when she accidentally kills a man who's harassing her on her way home. Faster than you can say "look what you made me do," she starts not-so-accidentally killing other men who are guilty of everything from ghosting to rape. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and Kitty is planning on serving them up on #sponsored cutlery, with a pinch of vigilante justice.
This reminds me of a much, much darker Katherine St. John work, as KSJ also writes a lot of beach read thrillers. But this one also has a heavy dash of Caroline Kepnes's YOU. Some people have compared it to Dexter and I can see that, but YOU is a better comparison because Kitty has such a dark and wicked sense of humor, seeped in satire and a rather sangfroid despair at the futility of humans to do anything but disappoint her on a deeply personal level. For most of this book, I was thinking this would be a four- or five-star read. But then the ending happened and I thought, hmm, I don't like that.
HOW TO KILL MEN AND GET AWAY WITH IT is an aggressively decent read, but it's heavy on the gore and I don't really think the cover prepares you for that. There's a lot of rather graphic torture and murder scenes, including some of animals. The tonal shifts were rather jarring, although I do think this would translate well to the screen. I kept envisioning it as one of those quirky streaming murder shows, like My Life Is Murder or Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries. I think it would translate well to screen. It was just a little too much for me and I felt like the ending was a little silly.
Overall, though, I did have a lot of fun reading this. It's a great summery read for the morbidly inclined and I'm excited to check out the author's follow-up.
NATURAL BEAUTY is a weird fucking book. It definitely feels like a debut, but not necessarily in a bad way. Sometimes debut books are brave experiments, where the author takes a risk and tells the story the way they envisioned it, even if it takes you to dark and twisted places. This is a timely, almost darkly satirical piece about women's bodily autonomy, the sadism of the beauty industry, and the very real danger of unregulated beauty and pseudo-medical supplements.
The unnamed protagonist used to be a piano prodigy until a terrible tragedy made her lose her heart in playing. She's working a minimum wage job at a restaurant when she's scouted by a beautiful woman who recognizes her from her piano playing days, who works at a business called Holistik. She offers the FMC a job.
Right away, Holistik feels a little... off. All of their medical treatments and products have bizarre ingredients and they are adamant that employees try the supplements and products-- as many as possible. Including the experimental ones, although they won't force you to do that. Probably. Probably, right?
Half of this book is very slow and more unsettling than horrifying. The last half is a rollercoaster of body horror and gore. I'm a wuss, and several scenes had me turning away and going, "Oh my god, EW." You'll definitely want to check the triggers on this one if animal cruelty and SA are triggers for you. Ultimately, I thought that this was more interesting than good. V.J. Chambers has a similar Stepford Wives-by-way-of-the-beauty-industry book that I enjoyed a little more called PERFECT. This book felt like that, if it were written in one of Mona Awad's surreal fever dreams.
Okay, so let me start off this review by saying that I am the BIGGEST horror wuss, so if you're an aficionado take this review with a grain of salt. (Maybe the whole jar, actually.) I like gothic tales and ghost stories but I don't like graphic violence or books where the pets or the love interests die, so as you can imagine, reading horror is usually an especially fraught experience for me. I love the aesthetics, I just hate the misery-- and I get super, super anxious while reading.
T. Kingfisher understands the desperate need among the anxious for vibes and aesthetics but no Super Bad Things in horror. Between this book and WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, I ended up both charmed, amused, and scared out of my pants, but both had satisfying endings that were bittersweet (bonus in this one: the dog doesn't die). I think people reading this expecting, I dunno, Stephen King, might be mad, but man, what an amazing story. Apparently it's a sort of expansion/homage to Arthur Machen's "The White People." I've never read that story but I'm sure the author did a great job (God bless the public domain).
This story is about a woman named Mouse who is tasked with cleaning out her grandmother's house when she dies. But her grandmother was a hoarder-- and her step-grandfather was apparently harboring some pretty insane delusions about people he calls "the twisted ones." Mouse finds a journal in his bedroom detailing some of his ramblings, with references to a manuscript and something he calls The Green Book. The more she reads, the weirder it gets. But then Mouse starts to see things in the wood: creatures that shouldn't exist and places that should be there. And then she starts to wonder if maybe her step-grandfather wasn't really delusional after all.
I don't want to say anything else because some people are out there giving way too many spoilers in their reviews and less is definitely more, but I LOVED this book. I loved Bongo the Hound. I loved the people Mouse encounters who help her on her journey: Enid the Goth barista, Foxy the hippie, and Tomas and Skip, people living at the commune (one of them is bipolar and the rep is so casual). I loved how creative and creepy this world that the author built felt. I've seen people calling it folk horror and after thinking about this, apparently that's the kind of horror I like. Cozy horror with vibes. If you enjoyed this experience, books with similar themes are YOU LET ME IN, THE CHINA GARDEN, and THE STRANGER. I loved all of these books so apparently creepy rocks and creepy trees are my thing. Go figure. Either way, T. Kingfisher is the only person out there who I trust to scare me properly and politely.
The only reason this isn't getting a full five stars is because I wanted to find out what was really going on with the grandmother and get more closure with the book. I feel like a lot of things were left to the reader's imagination or whatever, and sometimes that feels like cheating. I'm not mad, though.
Have you ever read a book and thought to yourself, "That was good, but let's never do this again?" That was me with THE HELLBOUND HEART. When I bought the book, I actually had no idea that it was the inspiration for Hellraiser, or, indeed, that Clive Barker had been involved with the production. I knew Barker from his more whimsical offerings: ABARAT and THE THIEF OF ALWAYS. Still horrifying, yes, but in the far more palatable mode of Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman.
Oh my God, this was so not that.
THE HELLBOUND HEART is beautifully written, just like Barker's fantasy, and it has the same cruel streak of dry, ironic humor, but the similarities end there. This is a gruesome, grisly book populated by twisted, unlikable characters. Frank, our first main character, is a morally bankrupt man who has grown weary of what life has to offer him. He has heard that there are imaginable pleasures to be found if one unlocks the puzzles of Lemarchand's box and uses it to summon the interdimensional hedonists: the cenobites. So he unlocks the box and the cenobites come... and Frank has, shall we say, regrets.
While Frank is having his... regrets... we cut to the second main character, Julia. Julia is married to Frank's brother, Rory, and she also has regrets. Namely that she could never get over the impassioned affair she had with Frank before her wedding (they did it on her veil, ffs). They have just moved to the house that the brother's used to share before Frank went missing and Rory thinks it's going to be a new step in their relationship and Julia does too, but she's thinking backwards and Rory is thinking rocking chairs on the porch. Watching this go down is main character number three, Kirsty, Julia and Rory's sort-of friend. She is attracted to Rory and resentful of Julia, and when things start going down, she begins to suspect that Julia is having an affair. Ha, she wishes it was just an affair, because Kirsty is about to have some regrets, too. No character in this book shall go without suffering. I mean, pleasure. Because-- as irony would have it-- the cenobites think the two affairs are virtually one and the same.
Now, I am not a horror fan, but after 30+ years of reading and 10+ years of book-blogging, I know a master craftsman when I see one. This is a good story. I mean, obviously. Imagine writing a short story and then having ti become a booming horror franchise right up there with Nightmare on Elm St. and Friday the 13th. My man is living the dream. The writing is both spare and evocative, and rather than falling into the trap that plagues so many horror writers (especially the splatterpunk ones), Barker never overdescribes. He knows when to leave things to the readers' imaginations-- which is both better and worse for the reader. Now, did I like it? That's a tough question, and while thinking on the rating scale, I'd have to say that it was good, but just a little too awful for me to say that I truly enjoyed it. All the characters are not very nice people, and the story is carried out with this casual sense of inevitability and apathy that just makes what's happening, paradoxically, that much more immediate and horrific.
So yes, HELLBOUND HEART was a compelling, propelling read that had me finishing it-- on a worknight-- in just a couple hours. But now I can't sleep and I'm creeped out and I really don't think I'll ever be revisiting this nightmare of a book again (or watching the movie, because yikes, pins).
SWEETPEA is one of many female serial killer books that's come out recently but of the ones I've read so far, it's my favorite. Picture HOW TO KILL MEN AND GET AWAY WITH IT or AMERICAN PSYCHO, except narrated by a grown-up Georgia Nicholson-turned-card-carrying-psychopath who works as a newspaper assistant editor and hates her job only slightly less than she hates everyone else.
As you can imagine, this book is pretty violent. Rhiannon thinks of herself as a vigilante because at first her victims are rapists and abusers. She has rules for masking in public, which she refers to as The Act, but it's pretty clear she has little regard for human life. Every chapter opens with a list of people she'd like to murder, alongside a list of their "crimes." And it's interesting that, to someone like Rhiannon, bagging your groceries wrong warrants the same punishment as child abuse.
I would also caution readers who don't like intentionally unlikable characters not to read this book. In true fashion with someone who has no empathy, Rhiannon is very superficial and makes very cruel fat-shaming, bigoted, and ablelist remarks, including a few minor slurs (like the R-word). I think it fits the character, but not everyone may agree.
This would have been a five in the beginning, but I think the book was too long and the last 20% of the book got weird. The fortune-telling and the talking fetus were just a bit much, you know? It felt a little like the author was in a rush to wrap things up, and so the ending felt a little choppy. I still really liked this book though and I think I saw the author saying on Instagram that it might become a TV series, and that makes me happy because the pacing of this would be perfect for a TV series.
Wow, if this isn't made into a Netflix miniseries soon, somebody's sleeping at their desk. This had everything I love in fiction-- a strong and flawed female protagonist, a dark storyline, breakneck pacing, and even a little romance. I'm keeping AN UNTAMED STATE on my Kindle forever as a reminder of what good writing looks like, because whoa. My feelings have been put into a blender and thoroughly shaken.
AN UNTAMED STATE is about the daughter of one of Haiti's wealthiest businessmen. She is a lawyer and a success in her own right, married to a white man who is the son of farmers. Once, she helped take care of his mother while she was recovering from cancer. His mother was an ignorant and proud woman, but her brush with death and her love of her son made her love Mireille too. Now, she and her new baby and her husband are in Haiti, and she is slowly getting her husband to love the country she has been taught to love.
And then she gets kidnapped.
And her father refuses to pay the price the men who have taken her are asking.
The story is told in two parts: during and after. One is a traditional thriller story of survival and bravery. The other is a story of healing and recovery. Mireille and her husband, Michael, are the narrators. I don't want to say too much more because of spoilers, but the things that Mireille endures at the hands of her captors is brutal. It reminded me a lot of the dark erotica, BREAK HER. Through torture, Mireille learns a lot about her own ability to survive and endure. She is reduced to an untamed state, which could also refer to Haiti itself: a place of beauty that, in her privilege, she has always glimpsed through rose-tinted glasses, unable to see the poverty and the desperation that can make mortal men so cruelly desperate.
This book has triggers for virtually everything but it is so deftly handled and such a starkly brilliant portrayal of humanity at its best and worst that nothing felt sensational. I love Gay's nonfiction and felt only lukewarm about her fictional short story collection that I read, but this book was absolutely masterful. I seriously can't even find the words to explain how much I loved this and why, but I know it's probably going to end up being one of my favorite books of the year. It's that good.
What if the literal concept of bigotry became self-conscious?
TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS is probably the darkest, most disturbing book I've read in a while. It's actually probably a good thing I read it now, when I'm actually feeling pretty good, because I could see this being a two or a one-star read if I were in the wrong state of mind to read it. It is a bleak, depressing, disturbing book, filled with hateful imagery and symbolism. It is a book that takes the idea of the power of anger becoming a transcending force that permeates the physical forces of reality like a cancer or a rot, bringing with it supernatural powers that can haunt a place like a ghost. It is like The Grudge, but fueled by whole generations of fascism, discrimination, and hate.
***WARNING: OFFENSIVE DESCRIPTIONS AND SPOILERS TO FOLLOW***
There are three narrators in this book: Ila, Alice, and the House. Ila seems to be coded as a closeted transman who self-identifies with female pronouns and is an active TERF. She is also a predator, participating in the same behaviors that she uses to condemn and deligitimize trans people and their existence, despite also being marginalized herself (Jewish/Middle Eastern and, ofc, queer-coded). Alice is a transwoman who cam girls, emasculating men for money. She lives in an apartment that is haunted and believes that tendrils of The House of seeped into her very existence, hungering for her even now. She also suffers from serious gender dysphoria, and cam girling is her way of projecting this dysphoria onto a masochistic audience that craves humiliation and emasculation for sexual gratification.
And then there's The House, steeped in history. The House where three girls entered but only two left. The House has seen terrible things and reveled in them. It's almost a fairytale-like figure, except when all the paint and panels have been stripped away, you'll find visceral gore and horror. Here, haunting almost seems to represent the process of radicalization. People who come to the House might seem innocent, but they have the seeds of fascism burning inside them already: the House, with its strange powers, makes them grow. And even if they manage to escape, those seeds will still blossom.
I felt so much anxiety reading this book. It really does have TWs for literally everything, including things like antisemitism, graphic transphobia with violent language, and eugenics. Despite all that, it's a compelling story. It reminded me a lot of the countercultural, transgressive horror of the 90s, penned by authors such as Tannith Lee, Poppy Z. Brite, and Kathe Koja. In fact, I think if you enjoyed those authors, you'll probably enjoy this book. It shares a lot of the same themes as those books. I'm not sure I'd read this again and I'd be careful who I recommended it to, but the concept of imperfect and viciously flawed queer people populating a horror novel like this made me think of what chels_ebooks said in their review of GAYWYCK, "the first gay gothic novel," about how GAYWYCK's characters weren't meant to be aspirational: instead the book aimed to just titillate gay readers with the same salacious thrills and chills as the "straight" gothic novels, just gay. I feel like in some ways, TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS does that for genderqueer individuals, too. It's messed up shock horror with queer characters who do messed up things in very messed up situations.
Is anyone actually surprised I enjoyed this book? Probably not. I have a reputation on here for curating some of the best/worst vintage books out there. I have a pretty high bar for not getting squicked out by books, but FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC really tested me because, well, if you know you know. It's gross as fuck. And SO UNCOMFORTABLE.
I was late to the V.C. Andrews game. My mother didn't keep books like this in the house, so I missed out on being traumatized by The Flame and the Flower and Flowers in the Attic at thirteen or fourteen-years-old like some of my peers. The first V.C. Andrews book I read was actually written by her ghostwriter, and if you're asking, "Well, what's the difference?" think about New Coke versus Coca-Cola Classic. One kinda sorta follows the formula, but it's clearly Pepsi in a red can, and nobody wants that. V.C. Andrews-written-as-Andrew-Neiderman has bubbles and is brown and comes in a can, but it's missing that je ne sais quoi that makes it a Classic.
The first time I read Flowers, I was in my twenties. And I liked it then, too. Sort of? I think you need to know going in that this is basically a bodice-ripper with preteens/teenagers as the characters. Child abuse is a predominant theme. Who can forget the story of the cute little nuclear family that's disrupted when the father is grotesquely burned beyond recognition in a car accident? With no one else to pay the bills (women working? Ha, this is the FIFTIES), the mother writes pleading letters to her parents, begging them for money. Which is something that many college students and college graduates still do to this day. The only difference? Your parents probably didn't disinherit you for your incest marriage and whip you for your sins. That's right, it turns out mother and father were actually niece and uncle. WHOOPS.
I'm not tagging that as a spoiler because you find it out pretty early on. But some major spoilers are coming, so hold on to your hats and get your pearl clutchers ready, because shit is about to get real.
Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory (who are they? the Cardashians???) are all locked up in an attic until the mother can convince the grandfather to love her again and put her back in this will. He's on death's door, she assures them, so it shouldn't take long. In the meantime, they're at the mercy of the abusive grandmother, who seems strangely preoccupied with what kinds of sins they might get up to in the attic space she's locked them in. At first, things are basically Diet Suck. They aren't happy but they still think their mother loves them and guilt propels her to make their stay as comfortable as possible. This is what is known as the honeymoon period and don't worry, it won't last long.
It doesn't take long for things to get gross. Cathy and Chris end up wrist deep in shit and piss, cleaning up soiled sheets and backed-up toilets. When the grandmother catches Cathy studying herself naked in a mirror while Chris watches (and yes, they're both still underage at this point), Cathy gets whipped and then the grandmother drugs her and paints her hair with tar, forcing her brother to cut off all her hair for their vanity (after starving them). They get starved again at some point and Chris actually cuts his wrist and forces them to drink his blood for nourishment. Cathy gets raped by her brother after he thinks she's fantasizing about someone else, and then he's like, "Didn't mean to rape you, sorry," and she's like, "I could have stopped you if I wanted to, and also I asked for it by wearing slutty clothes." Also, pretty sure that since their parents are already related, that makes this incest-plus. Somebody gets poisoned by arsenic. There are an uncomfortable amount of passages describing young kids wearing lingerie or underwear (the youngest kid, I guess, likes to show off her fancy panties, which she also shits multiple times, forcing her older sister to wash them-- ew, ew, ew). Oh, and Cathy goes out to the roof, determined to throw herself off of it, but backs down at the last second. Yay.
Basically, anything that's there to be triggered by is in this book. I can say with certainty that there is no way something like this could get written today. Someone would 100% take the author by the hand and say, "Maybe don't do that." As they should, because there are some things that should just be hinted at in a puberty book and not used as fodder for the world's best worst soap opera, you know? The only way you can get through this book is by saying, "Oh, it was the seventies. Of COURSE it was the seventies. That was the decade that came out with Love's Baby Soft, anything written by Bertrice Small, and Brooke Shields's Calvin Klein jeans ad (okay, technically that was 1980, but that's still basically the seventies and also she was FIFTEEN, wtf).
The best parts of the book are the intense psychology of the characters. Cathy is a sympathetic and believable gothic heroine, which is drilled into us by the books she reads (Wuthering Heights, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre). Through her eyes, we witness the disintegration of her belief that the world is just and loving and good, first with the death of her father, then with their inability to sway the grandmother's affections through obedience, and finally, in the gradual crumbling of their mother's morality and compassion; she has been corrupted by the house and in the end, she has become as cold and callous as the grandmother. The transformation-- and the lesson-- is a brutal one.
So yeah, hopefully this arms you with what you need before going in-- if you decide to read this book at all (and if you don't, I seriously don't blame you). I for one am excited to read the sequel, which follows Cathy's life as an older teen/adult, once she manages to escape the house and get her revenge. YAAASS.
I treated myself to a copy of THE FAMILIAR DARK after reading and loving ROANOKE GIRLS by this author. She just has such talent when it comes to creating a true Southern Gothic, where secrets are buried as deep as bones, and the children bear the sins of their forefathers. It's so rare to find an author who can create that sort of depth of atmosphere and characterization, and I knew when I finished ROANOKE GIRLS that this was an author I wanted to watch.
THE FAMILIAR DARK is a little bit different than ROANOKE. ROANOKE was a coming of age story, but FAMILIAR DARK is more of a traditional gritty murder story. When Eve finds out her twelve-year-old daughter has been murdered, it takes her to the sort of feral mindset that she's tried to distance herself from since escaping from her mother's abusive home. She swore she would be the person her daughter deserved rather than the person she feared she might be because of her mother, and ironically, it's her mother who might end up becoming her solace when all other ends yield stone walls.
I saw other reviews saying the twist was predictable. Maybe I'm a dummy, then, because I didn't see it coming. I'm not sure I liked it but at least I could sort of understand it. Part of the fun reading this book is Eve, who is allowed to be desperate, flawed, and raw. I liked how her grief manifested as anger, and she didn't bother mourning the "correct" way. I liked how there were feminist themes in this book, and how the author showed-- with subtlety-- how hard it is to implement change in places that don't want to be changed, and how a woman's strength might manifest differently, and maybe even in a warped way, when she isn't allowed to be powerful on her own terms. It felt like a very powerful message.
This is a sad book and the ending is, at best, just bittersweet (and maybe not even that). But I can't really give it less than five stars because of how much it made me feel, and how fascinated I was with the characters and the setting. Thank GOD Amy Engel has a new book coming out soon (I've been waiting!) because I've been putting off reading her YA duology just so I can have something else of hers to look forward to. Ms. Engel truly is a talent and I recommend her to anyone looking to scratch that Gillian Flynn itch.
FREAK is the sequel to CREEP, and yes, you have to read the first book first. It takes place after the events of the last book with the characters trying to recover from their trauma. Sheila is struggling to remain stable in her career as her involvement in the murder trial becomes increasingly public, and Jerry is suffering from serious PTSD after getting attacked by a killer. He recovered, but has a grotesque scar to show for it and his marriage is on the verge of failing.
Meanwhile, Abby Maddox is in jail and not happy about it. And other people aren't happy about it, too. Dead bodies are showing up, demanding that she be freed. There are creepy fansites devoted to her crimes and beauty. The news calls her Angel Face, because the news is gross, and society doesn't really think women can be soulless killers-- especially not if they have pretty faces. Everything basically seems like a total hot mess that's going to drag all people involved down like they're standing in a sinkhole full of shit.
And that's this book in a nutshell.
At first I was pretty into this book. I initially wasn't super happy that the focus shifted to Jerry because I don't really like police procedurals, but I thought that his trauma and insights were really interesting and he grew on me as a character. But I never liked him as much as I did Sheila. Sheila was problematic as all get out, but I felt like her situation was way more relatable and I liked the dichotomy of her teaching psychology while also suffering from a serious psychological condition herself. That was kind of going on with Jerry, too, but I felt like he was way more one-note as a character.
***ONE MILD POTENTIAL SPOILER TO FOLLOW***
FREAK is a lot more violent than CREEP. The ending especially left me feeling a little wince-y. My least favorite genres of horror are splatterpunk and torture porn and I kind of felt like this verged on being in that genre. There was also a twist at the end that I didn't like. It feels a little cheap, making your villains LGBT+ as a shock, you know? That was pretty common in the 70s and 80s, and it's disappointing to see it now. I'm not saying that no villains should be queer or queer-coded, but when the only queer character in a book is the villain, that's not a good look.
One totally valid criticism about both dark romance and erotic horror is that they tend to be heteronormative, and finding a sapphic variant of either can be a chore. Therefore, I was super excited to find out that THE WICKED AND THE WILLING is a sapphic work of erotic vampire horror set in Singapore during the roaring twenties.
Our cast of characters are Gean Choo, a young and desperate girl who needs employment to pay off her father's debts; Mrs. Edevane, a British colonialist reaping the benefits of her beauty and privilege while feasting upon the locals; and Po Lam, Mrs. Edevane's gender queer estate manager, who she bought as a slave when she was a child. There are other players but these are the three main ones, who revolve around each other's orbits like toxic little doomed stars.
I really appreciated how vampirism was an allegory for colonialism (and I confirmed this with the author-- it IS canon). Mrs. Edevane literally consumes the locals, and she is blind to their plight or their culture, exotifying her Asian lovers, indulging in casual racism when it suits her, and devouring the people whenever it suits her. She is a destructive force, using a foreign country as her refuge and playground. But, as a woman, she is also a victim to a man who hunts her footsteps. Which shows how someone can be an oppressor but still a victim of infrastructural prejudice, even within a colonial structure. The complexity and nuances were brilliantly done.
This is a very violent book-- sexually, emotionally, and physically-- and I had a hard time reading some of the graphic rapes and torture scenes. It starts out so slow and unsettlingly, but by the end of the book, it's a blood bath. None of the characters are particularly likable and I don't think they're supposed to be, although I loved Po Lam's character and I really empathized with Gean Choo's desperation as the motivator for so many of her actions. Even some of the almost humorous scenes, like Gean Choo fleeing a nest of East Asian folkloric monsters when her period comes during a party, are couched in dread and horror. This is like intellectual grindhouse, which I feel is probably the vibe the author was going for, and I think extreme horror fans will probably like it, especially if they have been hungering for queer and diverse entries in the canon that aren't Eric Larocca.
Interestingly, this story has a "choose your own ending" ending. There are three endings: two are in this book and apparently there's a third ending you can get by signing up for their mailing list. I'm not sure how I feel about this-- I read both endings and I think the author made both work, and suit the characters, but it also felt like a lack of commitment to the story. THE WICKED AND THE WILLING has a very strong beginning and I loved the portrayal of vampires and the gays-behaving-badly themes of the work, as well as the anti-colonialist narrative, but the ending petered out a bit and became far too violent for my own personal tastes, and even though I appreciated the uniqueness of this ending, I didn't really like it. I did ultimately like the book, though, and would definitely read more from this author.
Richie Tankersley Cusick was one of those Point Horror authors from the YA horror boom of the 80s and 90s. I've been gradually working my way through her whole backlist and her YA titles hold up surprisingly well, but the real gems in her collection are her two adult titles, BLOOD ROOTS and SCARECROW.
The titles and covers are very similar to her YA books, even more so in the rebrand, where it seems like the new publisher is trying to keep all her work in the same theme. However, BLOOD ROOTS and SCARECROW contain some very dark themes that would not be appropriate for really young kids. Like, at all. BLOOD ROOTS is like an old skool V.C. Andrews book set in the South, and SCARECROW is kind of like a disturbing cross between Midsommar and Wickerman, with a dash of messed up family drama.
Less is definitely more going in but basically, Pamela Westbook is newly widowed and lost her child in the same car accident that killed her husband. While driving to St. Louis from California, she gets lost in the Ozarks and then she has a car accident of her own. When she wakes up, her memory is super patchy and she's at the house of this super weird family, the Whittakers.
There's Seth, the gruff patriarch who knows more than what he's willing to reveal. There's Rachel, the godly and silently suffering wife with dark secrets. There's Franny, Rachel's much younger sister who's practically going crazy with the need to sow her wild oats (we won't talk about her relationship to scarecrows). There's Micah, Seth and Rachel's oldest son who comes and goes and is missing a hand. And then there's Girlie, the youngest child, who allegedly has some kind of "Gift."
Their house is super rustic. They house an outhouse with magazine toilet paper and grow and sow everything they eat and drink. It's claustrophobic and quaint... except for the scarecrows. Every year, they set up five scarecrows, and at the end of the season, they burn them. But this year, Franny's decided to hold hers back. And when the scarecrows don't burn, things go WRONG.
(I should totally write blurbs.)
I really liked this book a lot. It was weird and got kind of depressing, but as with BLOOD ROOTS, it had really solid atmosphere and kind of played out like one of those old 70s occult horror movies. I also really liked Pamela as a character. She was damaged and obviously super creeped out, and I think the author did a really good job showing how so much of the horror was in her own paranoia and fears of the unknown as she's literally trapped in the middle of the woods with the creepy family.
Who asked for the Deliverance/American Psycho mashup? Not me, but boy am I going to read that anyway. BROTHER is honestly one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. I normally hate horror novels but the kind that suckers me into traumatizing myself every time is the intimate, character portrait sort of horror novel, which is how I ended up being scarred for life by books like Misery. Once I get invested, I can't put the book down, no matter how much I want to.
Less is definitely more when it comes to BROTHER, but it definitely has TWs for basically everything under the sun. This is one of those books that not only shows people at their worst, but also kind of how they got that way. The two stars of this book are Michael, a not-so-ordinary teenage boy who hates his family (for a good reason). And Ray/Rebel, Michael's adoptive brother who is filled with a driving need for vengeance, poisoned by a hate that will literally stop at nothing.
The claustrophobic setting, high emotional stakes, and you-could-cut-it-with-a-knife level tension made this a gripping book, a real white-knuckler for sure, but I will also never read this again because it's so dark and so depressing. It's the sort of book that just kind of leaves you feeling dead inside. Brilliant story, brilliant writing, and daring author. I'll read more from her but it won't be this.
When I was in college, I used to read a TON of manga, and this series was one of my favorites (until they introduced that weird manic pixie dreamgirl character and the whole series started to fall apart, that is). The Death Note series is one of the darker manga I have read, and it's kind of sad that all of the attempts to bring it to the big screen have failed, because it's got so many disturbing and sensational twists that I think it would do really well if they got the right team on the project.
Light Yagami is a brilliant high school student and star test-taker. Ryuk is a shinigami, or a "death god," or is bored AF living in the shinigami realm doing nothing but gambling or napping. All hell breaks loose when he casually drops his Death Note into the human realm and Light picks it up. Suddenly, Light has power over human life and human death, and he thinks he's going to create his own personal eugenics paradise by killing off all the bad guys, psychos, and murderers.
I feel like this manga tackles a lot of really tough philosophical questions about good and evil. The cat and dog relationship between Light and L is also really fascinating. Both people are brilliant and think they are working on the side of good, but they're also super manipulative and willing to do pretty terrible things in the greater name of justice. A lot of manga doesn't hold up, but this series really does. It was fun to revisit one of my old favorites and still feel myself getting shocked by the twists.
WHEN THE RECKONING COMES is so good, I'm honestly surprised that it doesn't have way more reviews. It's kind of like a cross between Octavia Butler's Kindred and Stephen King's Rose Red, in that it's a haunted house story, but also a scathing criticism on the cruelty of slavery, and the way that future generations pave over the past, reimagining it as a picturesque idyll instead of what it really was.
Mira grew up with childhood friends, Jesse and Celine, but then they grew apart and she moves away. When Celine gets married, she phones up Mira and asks her to come to her wedding, which is being held at a recently restored plantation house. Mira is obviously like, what the heck, Celine, are you crazy, and initially refuses, but a phone call from Jesse changes her mind. Jesse, her childhood crush, who grew distant from her as well after one night in a haunted house went so, so wrong... So she decides to go to make things right.
Parts of this book are incredibly disturbing. I have a pretty high bar for disturbing content. This book flung from that bar and did somersaults over it. At the dark core of the Woodsman House is a gruesome history of some of the worst crimes against humanity, which are gradually revealed in pretty horrifying ways. I'm not particularly superstitious but some of my favorite ghost stories revolve around the idea that places of extreme anger or tragedy or pain can become psychic vectors, where all of that bleak emotion seeks into the walls and the floors and turns the house into a place of living, breathing hate and vengeance. I feel like WHEN THE RECKONING COMES buys into that sort of haunted house story, and man, is the payoff good.
My only qualm is that I would have liked more romance between Jesse and Mira, since I really shipped them as a couple, and I felt like the "present" portions of the book weren't quite as compelling as the scenes about their childhood and the historical passages, apart from the scene when Mira comes to the plantation and sees the Disney take on plantation life. It's physically sickening and I thought the author did such a good job with how understated it was, letting it all speak for itself.
This is a horror story, a ghost story, a coming of age story, and a lesson on the importance of social justice, all wrapped up in a bleak and oddly compelling parcel. I'd recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for it, which unfortunately won't be everyone. Read at your own risk.
Okay, so here's the thing. I'm very picky about horror. I want mind horror, and I don't want my favorite characters or any cute animals to die. It took me ages as a reader to realize that I actually like the horror genre, in principle; I just don't want to be traumatized while reading. As you can imagine, this has led to both slim pickins and a lot of broken hearts on my end. Sorry for being real.
Catriona Ward is an author who kind of toes the line for me in terms of what I will and won't read. I think she can have a fabulous way with words, case in point SUNDIAL, which was creepy AF and lured me right in with its whispers of culty shenanigans and fucked up family dynamics. Parts of that book were 5-star worthy but I ended up giving it a three because it got weird on me in the final act.
HOUSE ON NEEDLESS, on the other hand, just feels... campy. Campy and mean and bloody. Any book that opens and lingers on a gratuitous bird death scene is probably not going to be a "nice" horror book. I always try to read to at least 15% before reviewing but sometimes, a book asserts itself so well that you really get a sense of whether a book is going to be for you or not right from the beginning. The only character I liked was the cat, although having the cat narrate in a book like this adds a preciousness that is really quite at odds with the dark and disturbing content.
I will not be finishing this book, but I do recommend SUNDIAL if you have the stomach for it. I think I also own her other book, RAWBLOOD, because that sounded amazing (albeit terrifying).
I bought BEYOND THE RUBY VEIL on impulse a couple months ago when it went on sale, not realizing it was dystopian or sapphic. I'm a simple woman-- show me a fantasy novel with a gorgeous cover, and I willingly part with my cash like a sucker. I decided to make this one of my Pride Month picks and color me shocked when, despite rather mixed and unenthusiastic feedback from some of my friends, this ended up rocketing up my favorites list when I finished it in a day.
The plot of it sounds super cheesy. It's one of those water wars-type books, where the premise revolves around scarcity of resources. The heroine, Emanuela, lives in a pseudo-Renaissance Italy setting called Occhia, where water is obtained by a blood sorceress called the watercrea who takes people away when they get these mysterious lesions called "omens" and then drains them dry of blood.
On the day of Emanuela's wedding to her closeted best friend, she gets a lesion and is taken away by the watercrea. But Emanuela, who is a ruthless sociopath who will stop at nothing to get what she wants, is not about to let some old woman determine when she will die. She kills the watercrea, thus putting an end to her city's dwindling water source. And they aren't happy about it.
I don't want to say too much about this book, but it ended up going in a direction I wasn't expecting, and towards the end it gets very, very dark. Like, why-did-I-read-this-while-eating dark. In some ways, this reminded a bit of Kerri Maniscalco's KINGDOM OF THE WICKED crossed with Claire Eliza Bartlett's THE WINTER DUKE, but it's much darker than either of those two books, and the heroine is way more ruthless. Also, those books were a little more focused on the romance, and while there is gay yearning in BEYOND THE RUBY VEIL, and two potential LGBT+ relationships are kind of set up here, nothing is set in stone by the end of the book. So in that way, it's kind of more like Crystal Smith's BLOODLEAF, a YA book that took some serious risks with world-building and consequences.
I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel. I want to learn more about the cities and the mysterious aerial veil that shrouds the city and I want to see who Emanuela is going to torment next (probably everyone).
GOOD ME, BAD ME is so good. It's one of those books where even though it's a tiny bit predictable, you keep reading because the plotting is so tight and the characters are really well done. Milly is a fifteen-year-old girl who is living with a foster family while she awaits her mother's trial, where she is a key witness. Her mother is a serial killer known as the Peter Pan Killer who murdered young boys of the shelter she worked at. Milly was also a victim of her abuse and one day she decided she couldn't take any more and risked it all to escape.
Her new foster family is no walk in the park, though. Her foster dad, Mike, is her therapist (conflict of interest, much?) and seems a bit too involved in her mental health. Her foster mother, Saskia, is a hot mess. And her foster sister, Phoebe, hates her on sight and immediately launches a bullying campaign against her at their exclusive private school that results in all kinds of abuse, physical and sexual.
GOOD ME, BAD ME is one of the most disturbing books I've read in a while. Because of the young narrator I think older teens might like this book but it is a book for adults. I've read a lot of twisted, messed-up things and this book was a lot, even for me. It has triggers for basically everything and even though the author withholds graphic details, it is still a LOT. That said, I think it was incredibly well done. The psychology of Milly and her mother, her internal war between nature versus nuture and her obvious trauma at what was done to her-- it's all brilliant.
I also thought the school scenes were really good too. Milly's desperation to fit in and to be liked mirror her mother's cold charm, but there's something more needy about Milly. It's heartbreaking and scary at the same time and I white-knuckled my way to the end of the book, needing to find out what happened.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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dark-and-twisted
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