WHEN WE WERE MAGIC is kind of like The Craft meets Lisa Frankenstein, but delightfully queer and strangely surreal. The book literally opens with the heroine, Alexis, accidentally murdering a guy during a hookup by making his dick explode with magic. Desperate, she calls in her squad of five friends to help her. They're all kinda sorta witches, and their original plan is to bring him back to life with magic. Instead, they separate his body into pieces, including his heart.
There's a little bit of The Telltale Heart with this book, too, as the pieces of the boy haunt each girl as they're forced to dispose of the body, while also reckoning with how his disappearance/murder impacts the community, their relationships, and their magic. I think the beginning was stronger than the middle and the end, which felt a little unsatisfying to me. Especially since I know Gailey can do better. I'm reading one of their adult novels right now, JUST LIKE HOME, and it positively drips atmosphere and character development.
One of my friends said that this would make a better movie than it would a book and I see what she means. It would be a good visually arresting artsy horror movie, like Lisa Frankenstein or Velvet Buzzsaw. Not bad, though.
LUCILLE is a pretty solid gothic novella. It's a Bluebeard telling with vampires and vampire hunters, set in France. The historical details were great and I thought the author managed to capture the Victorian "style" with her narrator, Lucille, who, even though she is often TSTL, is very young and sheltered, so I could sort of tell myself that her behavior made sense. After all, she doesn't have TikTok and fake news to make her skeptical and jaded before her time.
Bluebeard is probably one of my favorite fairytales of all time so I'm always a little picky when it comes to retellings. This is a good one, although the pacing felt off. Lucille decides she loves Jakob very quickly. So quickly that when she said she did, I was like, "What?!" The ending also felt super abrupt, especially the climax, which felt like it should have been drawn out a little more to give the reader time to both dread what was happening and process going on.
Based on the blurb, this is also being branded as a dark fantasy romance, but this doesn't really feel like a dark fantasy or a romance. It feels more erotic horror or gothic paranormal. I thought maybe you could argue that it was possibly an HFN since there is a sequel but then I realized that the sequel is about another couple, so there isn't going to be a whole lot more development between these two, since it ends on a note of tragedy and manipulation.
Overall, this was pretty solid and I do think that readers of gothic and horror fiction will enjoy it. Her follow-up novel, SONG OF THE DEMON COURT, was a lot better, so it was nice to see where she started and how much she improved-- especially when it comes to world-building details and character development.
DEEP AND DARK AND DANGEROUS is a fantastic middle grade gothic ghost story about a girl who goes to the lake for the summer, only to find out that her mother and her aunt are harboring a dark and terrible secret. It all starts when Ali finds a picture in one of her mother's old books of three girls: her mother, her aunt, and a mysterious girl whose face has mostly been torn away.
When she asks her mother about it, she shuts down. So she wants until her aunt comes to visit and her aunt acts just as strange. With the persistence only a kid can summon, she manages to convince her aunt to take her to the lake for the summer along with her small young cousin, Emma. And at first, it's beautiful and picturesque, but the lake creates its own foggy weather and all of the locals have warnings about how dark and deep it is. A body could get lost down there.
Maybe a body already has.
If you like the vibe of those old 70s gothics, you'll love Hahn's work. She basically writes the kid versions of them, and she does a great job. Some middle grade feels like you're being sat down and taught a lesson, but Hahn writes her kids in all of their bratty precocious glory, and I love that about her work. I honestly think the kids reading this will, too. Kids are a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. They know when they're being patronized.
This haunting, beautiful, creepy story is going to be living rent-free in my head for a while. Thank goodness I don't have any creepy lakes or creepy little girls in my backyard.
This was an impulse download because I kept seeing it being suggested to me every time I went on Amazon. On a whim, I downloaded THE CRUEL DARK and ended up completely obsessed. It's kind of like a threeway cross between Gothikana, Jane Eyre, and RoseRed, but set in the 1920s with a headstrong heroine who has come to a remote and supposedly haunted mansion named Willowfield to help a hot and standoffish professor with his research, only to realize that nothing about the house-- or the man-- is truly as it seems.
The lush writing and rich setting are good enough for those who read their gothics for the vibes, but the characterizations and SPICE are also top tier. Spice does nothing for me if there's no emotional element to it, so I was delighted that the chemistry between Callum and Millie basically set the pages on fire. They're so good together, and the dangerous edge to Callum's character makes it even better.
I was thinking this was going to be a four star read for a while because there were a few niggling things that weren't my fave, but then that TWIST flew out of nowhere and everything suddenly flew neatly into place, and I was like holy shitteth, there is no way that anything that made me gasp out loud like that is getting anything less than the full five stars. I don't make the rules. (JK, I do.)
If you're a fan of Keri Lake, you need to read this book.
This book made me miss the dystopian boom. I liked the creativeness of the story. It kind of reminds me of both HOLES and the Alex Rider series, but way grungier and creepier. Escape from Furnace is a series about a dystopian society where boys are slapped into a maximum security prison for even the smallest of crimes. But it seems like maybe there aren't enough criminals to fill quota because boys like our main character, Alex, are being framed.
If you like modern-day steampunk horror, like the Bioshock franchise, you'll love this. It definitely feels like a book that's marketed to teen boys first and foremost but I think that there's a lot in here that would appeal to adult readers of horror, too. I know it's the first book in the series but I had SO MANY QUESTIONS that weren't answered, and that was frustrating. Like, I know, I know, first in a series. But give me something! And it ends on a wicked cliffhanger, too. I can't imagine being a teen reading this in 2009 and being like where's the rest
THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES was recommended in this erotic horror thread I sometimes hang out in. The comparisons to Clive Barker both intrigued and terrified me because Barker is a fantastic author, but his stuff definitely pushes the limits of what I can handle. This book is a lot like the Hellraiser series, especially with the hedonistic sex addict heroine, Val, who fucks the way other people do hits of morphine; she needs greater and greater extremes to get the same highs, but it's never enough.
That's why she's searching for this place called The City. It's a place so terrifying that some people would rather blind themselves than see it-- unless you're a pervy weirdo, and then it's heaven on earth, where no sex act, no matter how depraved, is disallowed. Val goes all the way to the middle east with an intersex man who is also her lover, who holds the secret to The City over her head to toy with her.
But Val isn't the only one looking for The City. Breen, Val's ex lover and a serial killer-slash-sadist, is now looking for it, too.
I knew this book was going to be hardcore because it literally opens up with a graphic eye-gouging scene. It only goes downhill from there. I felt really uncomfortable reading this book and as with other readers, it made me feel a little physically ill. I found myself comparing it to THE HELLBOUND HEART, which was also about pleasure taken to wildly horrific extremes, but in that book, Barker left a lot of the horror to the reader's imagination. Here, Taylor feels the need to lay it all out, and the end result of that is that all of the body horror just gets stacked up on top of each other, until by the end of the book, you're asking yourself both what the point of it all was, and when it would end.
I skimmed to the end because I wanted to see if the characters made it out okay. None of them were particularly likable but with a book like this, it's kind of nice to know who-- if anyone-- makes it out alive. One of my favorite characters in the book got a pretty raw deal, so that was a bit of a bummer. Not sure I'd recommend this to anyone but readers of the extreme horror genre.
This was a buddy-read with my friend Corvina. WALK OF THE SPIRITS has been on my TBR for a while because Richie Tankersley Cusick is one of my favorite horror/thriller books of all time. Most of her books are YA but she has two adult titles. Her adult titles are among her best work, I think because she had to dial stuff way down for her YA publishers. Even so, her older stuff tends to be wilder than her newer books. WALK OF THE SPIRITS is so mild that it could probably be on the Disney channel.
There's a lot about this book I did like, though. Nobody does atmosphere like this author. I also thought the heroine was bland but fine (surprised by how many people were calling her obnoxious in the reviews; she's almost ridiculously inoffensive). Also, one of the other girls talks about how she's had casual sex and the heroine is super unjudgemental about it, which is a rarity for the 00s. I also liked the Louisiana ghost culture elements and the fact that one of the love interests was a hot, dangerous Cajun guy.
Where this book fell apart was that it foreshadowed creepy stuff but then it didn't pay off. I had an idea of how this book would end and when I wasn't even close, I was mad, because I liked my idea better. The ending was ridiculous. Apparently, there's a sequel, so some of the open-endedness made sense, but my issues with the main storyline remain.
I still love this author but I won't be recommending WALK OF THE SPIRITS to anyone.
If you're unfamiliar with the premise of THE CROW, it's the story of a young man named Eric who defies the laws of death itself for the sake of his vengeance, hunting down the criminals who murdered him, and then SA'd and murdered his fiancee as well. It's pretty horrifying, and very violent, and the story is incredibly dark and bleak.
Apparently the author's own fiancee was killed by a drunk driver when he was very young (eighteen, I think), and this graphic novel was an attempt to channel his feelings into a cathartic medium. You can really feel the raw anguish and hatred seeping through the pages, and at times, that can be very hard. The criminals are also horrible people who do horrible things, and we see them do some of them, which is also hard to read. Reading THE CROW gives you the idea that the world is a rather joyless and terrible place, where happiness is only fleeting, and evil basically runs rampantly unchecked.
It's hard not to fall in love with Eric, though. Even though he's pretentious and weird and violent, he's a 6'5" undead goth who is nice to cats and children and simps hard for his wife. So what if he wears bullets in his hair and carves a crown of thorns in his own chest? The only people who fall victim to his murder-sprees are Bad People Who Are Not Good(TM). He's better than most dark romance heroes.
I think the movie was better than the comic book, but the comic book isn't bad. If you're into gritty-looking art and very dark noir with goth overtones, you'll really enjoy THE CROW.
A HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE IN POPULAR CULTURE is a beautifully chaotic mess that deep-dives into the vampire mythos, tying it to actual science (rare diseases and processes of decomposition that "mimic" vampirism), goth culture, queer culture, and even actual historical figures who were slandered posthumously (most notably and infamously, Elizabeth Bathory). This is also an analysis of pop-cultural phenomena, starting from the gothic lit of the early Victorian era and ending with modern-day Dracula movies.
I thought this was wonderfully fun. The interviews with famous goths about their thoughts on vampires was quite entertaining-- she actually managed to track down and interview one of Bram Stoker's living relatives! Is it cohesive? No, but the wandering narrative is part of its charm. So many times while reading this, I found myself taking notes and thinking that Fenn seemed like the type of person that I would just love to be friends with. It was especially fun seeing vampires being discussed from the Gen-X goth lens, since vampires are goth in every sense of the word.
I'm a little surprised that she didn't bring up Fright Night (either of them) or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, though. I feel like Fright Night marries the horror and sex elements of the vampire quite nicely (well, in the original), and I think it's an even better vampire movie than Lost Boys. Likewise, Chelsea Quinn Yabro's St. Germain is a long-suffering, good-hearted vampire, who kind of feels like a direct response to the flamboyant deviancies of Lestat. They were contemporaries, too, and-- I imagine-- just as crucial in shaping vampires as mainstream, romantic figures. I definitely felt like there was a Dracula bias in this book, because it seemed like this author was curating vampires based on what she enjoyed, and while that's fine, people who are hoping for a more broad and impartial scope may be disappointed.
Overall, though, this was amazing. I'll definitely be keeping this for reference. :F
THE HUNGRY DEEP was such a pleasant surprise. It has the same vibes as a retro work of gothic horror, like something by Ira Levin, but the themes are more similar to the classic canon of gothic novel: rigid societal structures that breed harmful traditions, toxic masculinity, a bleak and accepting terror of the unknown, and female rage.
Told in multiple POVS, THE HUNGRY DEEP starts out like any other Rebecca or Jane Eyre retelling: a woman comes to a worn-down estate deep in the country with her new husband, only to find out that all of the people in town are wary of him and-- surprise-- he's been married before.The folksy twist is that the husband seems to think some kind of eldritch horrors lurk in the wood... and the townsfolk are either enabling him out of fear, in on it out of necessity, or something else far more horrifying. What really lurks in those chattering woods?
Obviously I liked this book a lot. I like atmospheric horror more than I like blood and guts, and it's really hard for me to read books that linger on suffering. THE HUNGRY DEEP has its share of gore, but I felt like it was tastefully done, and the other definitely spent more time building up her lore and the personalities of the narrators than she did trying to shock the reader.
On that note, I am very impressed about how each POV was so distinct. Tom, Eleanor, Rachel, Gus, etc. all felt very different. They had different motives and thought about what was going on in different ways. Rachel and Eleanor were particularly good characters because both of them are flawed but likable and neither of them are what they initially appear. I LOVE that-- especially in horror, which has a tendency to fridge women who are too unlikable or too sexual. This is a very feminist work, and could be taught in a comparative lit class alongside authors like Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson.
This is one of my favorite YA titles I've read this year. I actually don't really like horror that much, but apparently I do like horror as long as it's folk horror and the dog doesn't die. WHAT WE HARVEST is a gorgeous, lyrical novel about four magical founding farming families: one of them raises red horses and dogs, one ghost melons that glow in the dark, one glittering golden yams, and the last, a field of rainbow wheat that each has its own distinct flavor.
For years, they've been the toast of the farming community, world-renowned and celebrated, but Hollow's End holds a dark secret. A mysterious quicksilver blight has overtaken the crops and whatever it touches doesn't come back the same. Strange animals watch from the woods with glowing white eyes, tinged by rot. If Wren and her family can't figure out how to hold the blight at bay, their farm and their loved ones will all fall into corrupt and blackened ruin.
I loved this book so much. There were things about it that pushed my suspension of disbelief a little, but the story was so good that I didn't care. It has all the elements I love: magic-realism, dark family secrets, childhood friends to lovers, angst, sinister rituals, and high stakes danger. Some YA feels like it's pandering to the parents, rather than its teen readers, but this book was beautifully teen, whether it was the wistful longings for adulthood, or the mistakes we make while impetuously trying to be adults.
I can't wait to read more from this author. This was an INCREDIBLE debut.
I really tried to stick with this one because the writing style is very good. This is basically a gender-swapped AMERICAN PSYCHO, with a shallow and sociopathic sorority girl as the killer. One day, she decides that she just really wants to kill the guys in her life, and embarks upon a stabby, slashy spree.
One thing I didn't see anyone talking about is that the heroine has an ED, and calorie restriction and purging feature pretty heavily as themes in this book. I feel this is supposed to be juxtaposed against her feral appetite for killing and savagery, as well as the consumerist LA culture she lives in. If you're reading deeply into this book, I think you could say that Tiffany is a violent rebellion against the patriarchy and the societal standards that said patriarchy has imposed upon women.
I probably would have liked this more if I hadn't read so many other female serial killer-fronted books that took this concept and ran with it slightly better. Would recommend this to people who enjoyed books such as SWEETPEA, HOW TO KILL MEN AND GET AWAY WITH IT, and BOY PARTS.
I follow this author on Threads and quite like her posts. When I saw that she had a gothic erotic horror novella out about vampires, I knew I had to have it. I mean, just LOOK at that cover! THE DARK QUEEN'S APOTHECARY is set in medieval Eastern Europe. At first, it starts out feeling very much like an episode of Castlevania, with Andrei, an apothecary, being summoned to the queen to perform a task that defies the rules of life itself at the behest of a sinister Queen.
Viorica was such an interesting and dynamic character. She reminds me a lot of the heroines in Tanith Lee novels: she is a selfish creature of passion, flawed and a little sadistic, but very insecure and flawed, in a way that makes her fascinating rather than unlikable. Her sort of relationship with Andrei after he (SPOILER) becomes a vampire like her was really interesting to read. The way their roles warped and changed as they did was quite well done, and there are callbacks to numerous other gothic works in the storyline, whether it be Island of Doctor Moreau, Frankenstein, or the legend of Lizabet Bathory.
Fun read and quite dark but not overly so. Mind the TWs.
I've been watching The Other Black Girl on Hulu and it reminded me of how much I loved reading the book when I bought it, so I moseyed on over to the author's Goodreads page to see if she'd been working on anything new and found this Kindle Unlimited-eligible short story that she had apparently written. OMG!
HIS HAPPY PLACE is this weird and creepy little short story about a Black woman who is dating a Korean man. They've been dating for about four months and they're taking their relationship to the next level by going to a remote little cabin in his woods where he feels the most like himself, according to him. Because nothing says, "I love you, please don't kill me," like isolating yourself with a man.*
*Bad joke but you know, THE FEAR IS REAL.
Anyway, they get there and la la la, nature is beautiful but toilets w/ plumbing are iconic, and apart from the hatred of camping (same), the heroine, Ama, sort of gets into it. She and Nathan have some heart to hearts and he seems like he really wants to let her get to know the real him. Which is when things start getting REALLY FUCKING WEIRD.
Harris is so good at building tension and creating atmosphere. I noticed right away that this had the same vibes that I loved so much in THE OTHER BLACK GIRL. Also like THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, though... I didn't like the ending. Here, the author does something unusual and kind of risky: she starts the beginning of the book with the end of the book, so you already know what's going to happen as you're reading. Well, sort of. I figured if she was going to lead with an expose, she was going to take us somewhere shocking on the journey... but the whole thing just comes full circle with no closure.
I'm not going to give spoilers but if you read it, you'll see what I mean.
I will definitely be reading more from Zakiya Dalila Harris, but based on the two books of hers I've read, she seems to have a bit of a third act problem.
Rosemont is an idealistic little town that looks like it could have come out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and is famous for its "eternal roses." But when Kit goes there with her mother to visit the paternal grandmother her father never told her existed, a pall hangs over the town. Everyone stares at her, whispering her name. She hears a strange man's voice in the middle of the night. And what's this about a festival?
STARLINGS is a pretty solid YA gothic novel with some genuinely creepy scenes and an empowered bisexual heroine and, of course, the hawt and sinister villain. I honestly wasn't expecting this to be as sensual as it was, and there were some excellent body horror scenes and implied grotesqueness that made me squirm.
Points off because it got a little weird in the third act and there wasn't as much build-up with the love interests (who weren't really love interests) as I would have liked. But if you're into vibes and atmosphere, and love folk horror, this is your jam. I recommend this particularly to fans of Ann Fraistat's WHAT WE HARVEST.
THE HILLS OF ESTRELLA ROJA is a queer college-age YA graphic novel set in Texas, with supernatural elements. Marisol is forced to return to the mysterious town she hasn't been in since she was a child after the death of her grandmother. Kat, on the other hand, is a paranormal podcaster who receives a mysterious email urging her to go to the same town to investigate something called "devil lights" and various mysterious disappearances.
Estrella Roja, which means red star in Spanish, is creepy right off the bat. They don't get a lot of outsiders, so there's a lot of ominous staring and whispered conversations that the girls clearly aren't meant to hear. Kat ends up approaching Mari because they lock eyes at a diner and she seems the friendliest out of everyone. They end up hitting it off, as two queer girls in a weird situation. When they go to the library, they find old articles hinting at murder and occult phenomena. Mari finds creepy photographs and journals in her aunt's house. Basically, SHIT GETS REALLY WEIRD.
I don't want to spoil anything, but this was a pretty cute read. Even if you don't like horror, nothing too scary happens. (I'm not a fan of horror or gore-- I will be very quick to nope out if heads start rolling.) My ARC was not full-color, but I liked the art in the few sample pages I had. It's done in that minimal, indie style, which is common in imprints like First Second. I also liked that one of the girls was Latina and a lesbian, and the other girl was bisexual and had a non-binary best friend. The diversity felt super casual, and added to the story-- especially with regard to Latinx folklore. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of the '90s Scooby Doo movies, like Zombie Island and Witch's Curse.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
RTC is one of my favorite YA horror authors. She's a little bit up and down in terms of quality but for the most part, she writes exactly the sorts of stories that I went. The best ones have multiple hot guys, gothic elements, and some dramatic one-liners that wouldn't be out of place in a dark romance.
TRICK OR TREAT is set during Halloween. Martha's father has just remarried and they've moved to a big house out in the countryside and she has a hot and brooding stepbrother named Conor. But pretty soon, things get kind of weird. Apparently there was a murder in their house, and the girl who used to live there looked a lot like Martha.
As the book goes on, Martha starts receiving creepy phone calls and feels like she's being watched. Just like Elizabeth did before she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend... who was never found. Is it her stepbrother who has a secret passageway that leads into her room? The sexy young creative writing teacher with boundary issues? The golden boy? Or someone else?
This is one of the better RTC books I've read but the ending falls into a twist that I've seen this author do at least three times. Now I almost always see it coming and it kind of spoils the surprise. Also, I wish more had come from the stepbrother element. I thought that was kind of risque for a YA novel. If this had had a stronger ending and a better twist, I would have given it a five.
Whoa. This book was... something else. The first half of it was fantastic-- character development up to here, settings and atmosphere that had me feeling jealous, and the perfect blend of character-driven and story-driven elements propelling the book forward. The second half was... weird. Very, very, very weird. I was trying to think about what this book reminded me of and then it hit me: Stephen King's ROSE MADDER. The ending was like something out of a fever dream and I wasn't sure it worked. There was also some major insta-love between the two characters. They were both so broken, I wish there had been more time for them to build a rapport with each other on an emotional level before deciding they were in love after they did it once. I mean, really.
The story is very dark and I would advise anyone picking it up to go in with caution. It opens up with a violent murder-suicide scene and there are graphic depictions of self-harm. Towards the end, there's a lot of gore and emotional trauma. I didn't see many reviews warning people about this. The self-harm passage was particularly visceral and had me feeling a little light-headed (I think it occurs around 25% in the Kindle version).
Our two heroes are Zach and Trevor. Zach is a computer hacker and the son of abusive parents. Because of this he has major emotional intimacy problems and can't sleep with anyone he loves (or love anyone he sleeps with). Trevor, on the other hand, is the sole survivor of his father's murder rampage in their home. His father was an artist and an alcoholic before he just became an alcoholic (and then a murderer). Now Trevor himself is an artist and has become numb after a life spent in and out of foster homes. To anchor himself, he has returned to the scene of all of his traumas: the house in Missing Mile.
I think this book is worth reading because it is a work of LGBT+ horror, it is chock-full of '90s fringe culture references, and does a great job with atmosphere and setting. If the romance and the story had been just a little more fleshed-out this could have been an easy five-star read. I'm a little shocked that so many people were condemning this book for being too sexually graphic. Apart from being a little too descriptive about bodily fluid, this is more story than it is sex scene. I found the violence way more frequent and off-putting (funny how way fewer people are talking about that).
THE FALL starts out great but kind of ends up being a tangle of non-answers and lack of closure. Family madness ends up being a sort of Macguffin for this book and while I liked the vibes, I can see why so many people found the story-telling frustrating. The story is nicely written, though, and Madeline is a sympathetic heroine. I also thought the yo-yoing alternative timelines were pretty well-done. It ended up being a sort of interesting, beautiful mess. I still really liked it though but I wish it had been a little more solid.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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