There are many things I’m looking forward to about 2021—mainly that the seemingly cursed year of 2020 is finally over! While I know that things won’t magically get better just because we’ve turned over a new calendar year, there’s just something refreshing about the feeling of a new start. And part of that new start means planning out a TBR list of new releases for this year! Here are some of the books I’m most excited for: Continue reading Books I’m Excited for in 2021
My 2020 Reading Challenge Recap
Well, it has certainly been a strange year! But if nothing else, 2020 has been a fairly good year of reading for me. As always, I participated in the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge, and this was the first time in many years that I easily met my numerical goal well in advance. The pandemic has changed my reading habits significantly, and many of my goals and priorities shifted from what I thought they would be at the beginning of the year. Let’s take a look back at my year in books!
Christmas Ghost Stories, Part 2
A couple years ago, I wrote about the tradition of the Christmas ghost story—which became an indispensable part of the festive season after Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. The heyday of the Christmas ghost story overlapped with the Golden Age of the ghost story more generally, and many celebrated spooky authors began incorporating Christmas into their haunting tales. Last time, I highlighted several stories by male authors, but women were equally if not more involved in the festive ghost story game. Check out the stories by women below for a seasonally appropriate scare!
Review of The Only Good Indians—Indigenous Horror
What happens when the hunters become the hunted? The Only Good Indians by renowned indigenous author Stephen Graham Jones was one of the most-talked about horror novels this year and came out back in July. I finally decided to check out for myself whether it lives up to the hype. Continue reading Review of The Only Good Indians—Indigenous Horror
Gideon the Ninth Review—Haunted Necromancers
A skull-faced girl in black slicing her way through an explosion of skeletons—I only needed to see the cover of this book to know that it would be exactly up my alley. Despite the fact that this debut novel was one of the most talked-about fantasy releases of 2019, it took me over a year to finally get my hands on a copy. I am, of course, talking about Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. But if you’re late to the bandwagon like I was, now is the perfect time to hop on—especially since the second book in the series, Harrow the Ninth, just came out this summer. Continue reading Gideon the Ninth Review—Haunted Necromancers
The Monster of Elendhaven Review
Even a monster can have a heart. Two monstrous men make an exquisite pair in Jennifer Giesbrecht’s dark fantasy debut The Monster of Elendhaven, which came out last year from Tor.com. Though I devoured this bite-sized novella in a single day, I have a feeling its lyrical prose and intricately constructed world will linger with me for some time to come. Continue reading The Monster of Elendhaven Review
The Year of the Witching Review
Witches lurk in the Darkwood … and they seem to be calling out to Immanuelle. A young woman struggling to be accepted by the Puritanical society she lives in discovers her true power in The Year of the Witching, a stunning debut fantasy novel by Alexis Henderson, which came out back in July. I know Halloween is well over, but it’s never too late in the year to pick up a good witchy book! Continue reading The Year of the Witching Review
Weird Fiction and the Gothic
One reason why the Gothic can be difficult to pin down as a genre is that over the years, it has spawned and overlapped with many different genres. I have touched briefly on the role that the Gothic played in the development of modern horror and explored in some depth how we can credit it as the foundation of the detective novel. Today, I want to explore one of the Gothic’s more nebulous offspring: weird fiction.
Review of Cursed Once More
How many curses can one woman handle? Clara Blackwood finds her happily-ever-after interrupted by yet another family curse in Cursed Once More by Amanda DeWees. I had reviewed the initial book in this duology, With This Curse, quite a few years ago and was very impressed with DeWees’s grasp of classic Gothic tropes. After hearing how much I loved the first book, the author was kind enough to send along the sequel. It had gotten buried in my TBR pile until now, but I was delighted to finally dive back into DeWees’s luscious Victorian Gothic world with Cursed Once More. Continue reading Review of Cursed Once More
Gothic Vocab: The Sublime
The “sublime” is a word you’ll hear tossed around a lot as you study Gothic literature, and even sometimes within the texts themselves. But what exactly does it mean? I’ll do my best to give a simple introduction to this rather complex term in this post, which will be the first in a series on important vocabulary words that will enhance your understanding of the Gothic.
