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
Category: Horror
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 What Grows in the Dark—A Spooky Debut
What if you could turn your trauma into your hustle? It might not be the healthiest way of dealing, but Brigit does just that by creating a ghost hunting show centered on her connection to her dead sister in What Grows in the Dark, a debut horror novel by Jaq Evans that came out earlier this year. Continue reading Review of What Grows in the Dark—A Spooky Debut
Review of Vampires of El Norte—Monsters and Mexican History
Books like this convince me that the vampire genre will never be dead. You think you’ve seen everything that could possibly be written about vampires already, and then someone comes up with something completely new and unique. Isabel Cañas (who made a big splash with her Gothic debut The Hacienda, which I still need to read) does just this in her second novel Vampires of El Norte, which came out last year. The novel weaves both supernatural/horror elements and a romance that pulls at your heartstrings into a historical tale about the Mexican–American War. Continue reading Review of Vampires of El Norte—Monsters and Mexican History
Review of Your Shadow Half Remains—More Pandemic Horror
Humans are not meant to live in total isolation. Many of us had just a small taste of this during the shutdowns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Sunny Moraine takes social distancing to the extreme in their apocalyptic horror novella Your Shadow Half Remains, which came out last month. Continue reading Review of Your Shadow Half Remains—More Pandemic Horror
Review of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me
The world of professional ballet can be cut-throat—literally. Jamison Shea’s debut YA horror novel, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, takes an unflinching look at ambitious young women in a highly competitive field and the hellish lengths to which they will go to achieve their dreams. If you like morally gray female characters who embrace their dark sides, you definitely don’t want to miss this book, which came out last summer. Continue reading Review of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me
Review of Coffin Hill—Gothic Comics
“Wicked witch of Coffin Hill, buried in the woods and lives there still. Hide your face and close your eyes, if you see her you will die. Only the crows to hear you cry…” So goes the nursery rhyme at the heart of the Coffin Hill comics by Caitlin Kittredge, with art by Inaki Miranda and coloring by Eva de la Cruz. This comic series, published by Vertigo between 2013 and 2015, consists of twenty issues which have been collected in three trade volumes: Forest of the Night, Dark Endeavors, and Haunted Houses. With stunningly macabre artwork and a storyline that features black magic, bloody murders, and generational curses, this series is the perfect gateway into comics for any Gothic literature lovers. Continue reading Review of Coffin Hill—Gothic Comics
Review of Never Whistle at Night—Indiginous Horror
From “wendigos” to “Indian burial grounds,” the folklore and tragic history of North America’s indigenous populations has frequently been mined for inspiration and twisted to suit the purposes of horror authors writing outside of their own cultures. In recent years, however, we’ve seen a real rise in the number of indigenous voices within the horror scene telling their own stories. A new collection of short horror stories celebrates this surge of Native American writers: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. This anthology, which contains twenty-six stories plus a foreword by Stephen Graham Jones, came out just last week, in plenty of time for spooky season. Continue reading Review of Never Whistle at Night—Indiginous Horror
Review of Silver Nitrate—Cursed Films
Don’t play with magic you don’t understand. You’d think this would be common sense by now, but there’s always some skeptic willing to treat mystic rituals like a game—to their own detriment. Montserrat and Tristán learn this lesson the hard way in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest horror novel Silver Nitrate, which came out last month. Continue reading Review of Silver Nitrate—Cursed Films
Review of A House with Good Bones—Bugs, Blooms, and Boogeymen
Old houses always have buried secrets. An archeological entomologist is perhaps extra qualified to dig those up—and she’ll need to if she wants to get to the bottom of her mom’s strange behavior in A House with Good Bones, a delightful Southern Gothic by T. Kingfisher which came out back in March. In a fun coincidence, the audiobook for this one is narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal, author of the book I reviewed last week, The Spare Man. Continue reading Review of A House with Good Bones—Bugs, Blooms, and Boogeymen