Cackle by Rachel Harrison
Been a slow drip of reading to start the month. So slow that I keep forgetting I actually finished this book a week ago and have been putting off this review. I liked it when I finished it and seven days later, I find myself appreciating it even more. I’ve now read through Rachel Harrison’s whole catalog, save her short story collection. Not a big fan of reading short story collections but I may need to get to hers because she’s a fun writer and […]
Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison
There was a lot going on in the week following my purchase of this book, one I grabbed with great anticipation. So I saved it for the last few days to really savor the experience. Rachel Harrison’s The Return was a sneaky good read; I felt like I was on her storytelling wavelength and that helped overcome the many negative reviews that, I think, missed the point of her book. And now she’s writing a book about returning home to a religious cult? Hell yeah, let’s […]
Ghosts of East Baltimore by David Simmons
While Horror Month 2023 has been a minor disappointment, it did encourage me to finish books I would have otherwise put off reading. That includes this little ditty, which I greatly enjoyed. I’ve worked and lived in Baltimore. I love the city so much. But it is a city of heartbreak. Violent crime, racial disparity, income inequality, a paucity of resources for young people, drug overdoses everywhere. It’s not the citizen’s fault, it’s the city’s for being so inept, the state of Maryland for being […]
Night Walker by Donald Hamilton
Months like this one make it tricky to continue my required monthly Hard Case Crime read. I usually skip February as HCC has done a poor job of publishing Black authors. And I’ve read all the female authors they’ve so far published (precious few). And now, reading only horror for these 31 days, I’ve read all their horror reads: the Stephen Kings and Sugar Rush. But unlike February and March, I didn’t think this month required a departure from it. So I grabbed this one […]
Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
This was the kind of book I was hoping to discover when giving Horror Month a shot. It’s not the best book I’ve read this year, nor even this month. But it’s the kind of thing I was hoping to read: quality psychological horror that is beyond the mainstream. Getting this rec from Max Read’s substack was a gift. It was a delight to pour through Tryon’s rich language as he slowly but surely developed the characters, parceling out horror bit-by-bit until the big reveals, […]
Reptile Memoirs by Silje Ulstein
Come Closer by Sara Gran
I meant to review every book of Horror Month separately but I happened to consecutively read these two and they both feature women going through…transformations. So I figured it made sense to talk about them both on one page. Reptile Memoirs**** This is billed as a horror mystery but aside from a woman’s weird psychosomatic fascination with a snake, there’s not much in the way of horror, if that even qualifies as horror. That’s okay though; this is an interesting enough mystery tale with shifting […]
