If you saw my Preview of #AScareADay Reading Challenge 2024 post last month, you’ll know I spent my October reading 31 scary stories and poems curated by Dr. Sam Hirst of Romancing the Gothic. This was my third year participating in this spooky season reading challenge, and I loved it more than ever! Every year, I discover new-to-me authors, both contemporary and from centuries past, that I’m excited to explore further. These challenges are also a great reminder of how much I love short stories and poetry—forms I don’t devote quite as much attention to as novels. Plus, this year we explored a format I’ve never really read before: short webcomics. You can find the stories for this year’s reading challenge here, and check out the #AScareADay hashtag on Twitter and Bluesky to see the great discussions we’ve been having all month. Read on to see what I thought of the specific stories from this year’s challenge and stick around to the end of this post to hear about my recent guest appearance on a podcast! Continue reading #AScareADay 2024 Reading Challenge Reflections
Review of The Spite House—An Emotional Haunting
Need a good haunted house book for Halloween that will genuinely send shivers down your spine? Johnny Compton’s debut horror novel, The Spite House, which came out last year, features a desperate dad who moves with his two daughters into a strangely built house haunted by a handful of ghosts and generations of spite. Continue reading Review of The Spite House—An Emotional Haunting
Review of The Marrow Thieves—Indigenous Dystopia
Would an apocalyptic future cause history to repeat itself? Cherie Dimaline explores this question in terms of the persecution of Canada’s indigenous peoples in her YA dystopia novel The Marrow Thieves, which came out back in 2017. Continue reading Review of The Marrow Thieves—Indigenous Dystopia
Preview of #AScareADay Reading Challenge 2024
Why celebrate just one day of Halloween when you can read a spooky story for each day of October? For the third year in a row, Dr. Sam Hirst, founder of Romancing the Gothic, has put together a reading challenge that features thirty-one poems and short stories from across history and Gothic subgenres to get us into the Halloween spirit. The challenge started in 2022 using the hashtag #AGhostADay and focusing on tales of revenants and spirits of the dead. Last year, Sam expanded the focus to include all different areas of the weird and macabre and changed the hashtag to #AScareADay. You can read my recap of last year’s challenge here. This year, #AScareADay is back and I’m more excited than ever! You can see the full reading list, complete with links for where to find each story or poem, on the Romancing the Gothic website and join the discussion using the hashtag #AScareADay on Twitter or Bluesky. (I will try to post on both platforms as I finish each story.) Continue reading Preview of #AScareADay Reading Challenge 2024
Review of Lady Macbeth—A Grimdark Reimagining
“Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?” Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most memorable female characters, but what is it that motivates this murderess in the Scottish Play? Ava Reid uses this Shakespearean drama as loose inspiration for her gritty medieval fantasy tale Lady Macbeth, which came out last month. Continue reading Review of Lady Macbeth—A Grimdark Reimagining
Review of Mortimer and the Witches—Niche New York History
New York largely stayed out of the witch trial hysteria that plagued much of New England in the seventeenth century. But nearly two centuries later, New York City was engaged in a different kind of witch hunt: cracking down on the working-class women who earned their bread as fortune tellers on the Lower East Side. This movement was led in large part by the journalists who entertained their readers by seeking out these women’s services only to write mocking, derisive articles about their experience in the papers. In Mortimer and the Witches, a new nonfiction book that came out earlier this year, historian and NYC tour guide Marie Carter interweaves the biography of one such journalist with a study of the fortune tellers whose livelihoods he so reviled. Continue reading Review of Mortimer and the Witches—Niche New York History
Review of I Was a Teenage Slasher
Have you ever wondered what goes through a slasher’s mind as he goes on his bloody rampage? If you’ve read any of Stephen Graham Jones’s other novels (such as My Heart is a Chainsaw or The Only Good Indians), you’ll notice that Jones is fascinated by classic slasher films and their tropes and often uses these topics as a lens through which to explore deeper issues. In his latest horror novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher, which came out last month, he returns to this topic once again but from a new perspective: that of a reluctant killer. Continue reading Review of I Was a Teenage Slasher
Review of The Familiar—Fantasy and the Spanish Inquisition
Ladino magic goes up against the Spanish Inquisition in Leigh Bardugo’s brilliant historical fantasy novel The Familiar, which came out in April. I’m always eager to find more Jewish representation in fantasy and gothic/horror fiction, and ever since reading Rose Lerner’s The Wife in the Attic, I’ve been particularly interested in the plight of conversos in Inquisition-controlled Spain or Portugal—a subject I’ve rarely seen tackled in these genres. The Familiar proves that this slice of history makes a compelling backdrop for Gothic stories. Continue reading Review of The Familiar—Fantasy and the Spanish Inquisition
Review of The House of Silence—E. Nesbit’s Ghost Stories
I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I love a good ghost story. Lately, I have especially been enjoying discovering the works of many of the talented female authors who flourished during the golden age of ghost stories but have since gone largely unrecognized. Which is why I was devastated to learn that the small publisher who introduced me to many of these authors will be shutting their doors: Handheld Press, the small UK house who brought us Women’s Weird volumes I and II, The Outcast and the Rite, From the Abyss, The Unknown, Strange Relics, and so much more have announced that they are done publishing as of this summer. But they made sure to go out with a bang. One of their last titles was The House of Silence: Ghost Stories 1887–1920 by E. Nesbit, with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson, which came out in May. Nesbit’s stories were among my favorites that I first encountered in Women’s Weird and in my sporadic reading since, so I was thrilled when Handheld announced they’d be doing an entire collection of her ghost stories. And I was not disappointed! Continue reading Review of The House of Silence—E. Nesbit’s Ghost Stories
Fresh Takes on Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the kind of writer who provokes mixed emotions. On the one hand, he has become the face of the cosmic horror subgenre and his influence on modern horror in general is undeniable. When you sit down to actually read his stories, however, you’ll find that they tend to be permeated by his rampant bigotry—extreme even for his own time—and many of his plots fall into repetitive, predictable patterns. Even his best stories (I particularly enjoyed The Shadow over Innsmouth and “The Thing on the Doorstep”) have at their core an intense xenophobia and complete disregard for women. But whether you’re a hardcore Lovecraft fan or uninterested in ever reading anything from the man himself, you can enjoy the many new stories coming out from authors who play in Lovecraft’s sandbox while critiquing some of his views and adding new perspectives into his worlds. Here are just a few examples of books that put a fun, new twist on Lovecraft’s immortal mythos: Continue reading Fresh Takes on Lovecraft