Bram Stoker may have been the first to perfect the literary vampire, but he was certainly not the first to creep people out with a good monster. Carmilla was here first (by over 20 years), and she is perfectly frightening herself. After a carriage crashes near their remote forest estate, our narrator Laura and her father agree to take in a young woman as their guest while her mother travels on and promises to return for her. Not too surprisingly, young girls in the nearby village […]
Over there, inside the Smoke, pain was joy and anger peace. Violence was love.
The alternative world presented in Smoke is a fascinating idea, and a mix of ideas I was thrilled to be spending time with. In Vyleta’s altered Victorian England sinful thoughts and feelings are manifested as smoke that rises from your skin and leaves a unwashable soot behind. Breathing in the smoke of another can spread their feelings into you, and breed more and darker thoughts. The cleanest of people, who happen also to be the wealthiest, are seen as morally better people, and spend their lives learning […]
The Ghosts of Tragedies Past
I am not particularly partial to psychic-based mysteries, and I don’t know if I would have read this one had I known beforehand that it fell into that category, but I’m glad I went in blind, because I really got swept up in reading this one. Finley is a budding psychic and college student, who rather than listen, is trying to escape the voices and ghosts of people she sees and hears all around her. When Finley starts hearing a strange noise over and over again […]
THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO WAS KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED (except obviously not)
I kind of hated reading this . I understand its goals and it had some interesting and touching moments, but was overall a slog to get through. One of many stories of childhood in the 1950s, I don’t think it offered any new point of view on the era. It does have an interesting look into grief and children, specifically losing a parent, but doesn’t dive as deeply into the topic as I wish it would have. The Mutual Admiration Society is made up of young Theresa “Tess” […]
For the scientifically inclined cat lady.
I will jump at any chance to pretend like I know more about my cat and what he’s thinking than I really do. So this one was high on my to-read list, and I was particularly excited about the more scientific approach it promised to take towards cat behavior. That scientific approach is definitely the books biggest strong point. The hypotheses put forth for questions like why pet cats hunt when they have food at home, or why cats don’t without stressing them and ourselves are backed up […]
“…do something to a cadaver, it will do something back to you.”
I have yet to be disappointed by a recommendation from the NPR best books concierge, and Three Moments of an Explosion may be my favorite so far. A collection of sometimes sci-fi, sometimes fantasy, sometimes horror short stories, Three Moments starts with a base of a very realistic world, and adds in each of its stories an element of something beyond, something more magical or sinister. The stories in the collection typically start with or are based in a real object, or a regular person, that has become corrupted […]