Bunny by Mona Awad
This one was recommended to me by a friend of mine and I’m glad I gave it a shot. While it’s not my normal thing, Mona Awad’s prose is crisp and she tells a good story. The whole thing is a horror/satire work on the nature of grad school work and the feeling of belonging or not belonging to a particular clique. I think the horror bits work better than the satire ones. When Awad shifts into situations of hyperrealism and dream states, she describes […]
Severance by Ling Ma
I love post-apocalyptic literature. Don’t know why, haven’t pulled at that thread, but it is my jaaam. My bread and butter. And other sandwich metaphors. So, I was predisposed to like this (cuz it’s my favorite genre) but also NOT like it, if it wasn’t well done. And it was so so well done. The day after I finished it, I bought it for someone else to read because I need them to read it so I can talk about it. I can’t stop thinking […]
Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky
Christopher and his single-mother are starting over in a town. Christopher must savE the worlD. He’ll need all thE helP he Can geT. FrOm hiS friendS. From his moM. And from his new imaginarY frienD. The Nice Man. Over 900 pages of this book were written like that: short, declarative sentences; fragments; strange, unnecessary capitalization; breaks in the sentence and paragraph. It’s all very Chbosky. At first, the style choices work. The breaks and short sentences create a tone and a mood that leave the […]
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Subtlety isn’t really what I’m looking for when it comes to books about possessed buildings trying to drive their occupants crazy. But that’s exactly what Shirley Jackson offers in the psychological horror classic The Haunting of Hill House. The book, which is the basis of a recent Netflix series, follows four strangers brought together by a strange, old mansion. Dr. John Montague has been looking for an opportunity to conduct serious research into unexplained phenomena for a long time. He hires young bohemian Theodora and […]
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
An absolutely fantastic follow up to Every Heart A Doorway, Down Among The Sticks and Bones gives us the back story to two of the most interesting characters from its predecessor, showing us how Jack and Jill found themselves at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children in an outing that is so brilliant I found myself devouring it within hours before turning around and reading it all over again. Jack and Jill weren’t always who we now know them to be. Born Jacqueline and Jillian […]
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
I love it when I come across fiction of the fantasy and science fiction variety that I can and want to devour ravenously. This happened in college when I discovered Octavia Butler and then read everything she’d ever written in a week and last year when a friend introduced me to N.K. Jemisin and spent several months reading two of her series. This only ever happens with fiction for me and I think I may be doing the same with Goss, albeit a bit slower […]
