Stray by Ryu Kamio
Reading via an online reader copy is sometimes hard for me. But I persevere and just keep swimming, I mean reading. But with Stray there was the added issue of a big ol’ “watermark” in the middle of things. Nope, they did not want people copying the manga comic by Ryu Kamio and illustrator Nakamura Yuu. Plus, it is manga and therefore, the flow is off for my western eyes to start. With that said, a few days after starting, I finished this Yakuza meets […]
Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror by Ellen Datlow (editor)
In this anthology of psychological horror, we encounter killers, madmen, and twisted families in this presentation of the many shades of human depravity. My preferred subgenre of horror is psychological horror. Here there’s no ghosts or curses or demons – just the strange and terrifying excesses of human nature. The horror is enhanced by the fact that, bar the occasional tinge of the supernatural, everything that happened in this book could happen in real life. All of the stories included in this book were originally […]
The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence by Anita Anand
A Indian freedom fighter waited more than two decades to exact revenge for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre which was ordered by the British Raj – but the story is more complicated and less cinematic than it has been often depicted since. At the start of this book, the author notes that as the descendent of Indians, she had to set aside her natural aversion to the British Raj and admiration for Udham Singh to tell the story in as unbiased a way as she could. […]
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
CBR17 Bingo: Citizen – Though Cora is a citizen of the United States, her race – as well as the race of the many murdered Asian women in this book – makes everyone around them perceive them as foreigners to the point that they are stripped of the safety that their citizenships were supposed to have given them. Cora works as a crime scene cleaner during the COVID-19 pandemic – after witnessing her sister pushed in front of a train, the gore doesn’t bother her anymore. […]
Lucky by Marissa Stapley
If I had a nickel for every book I’ve read recently that also has Anya Taylor-Joy starring in an upcoming adaptation, I’d have two nickels which is not a lot but it’s still weird that it happened twice. Lucky Armstrong is having both the best and worst day of her life. She and her boyfriend Cary have pulled off a scam that will allow them to finally run off to live the life of luxury in the Caribbean that they’ve been working towards. Except Cary […]
Heatstroke (2020) by Hazel Barkworth
Heatstroke (2020) is clever–cleverer than its cover, certainly cleverer than its title. I remember that the review blurbs on the covers of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006) and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me (2012) signposted how terrifying teenaged girls can be–and this is certainly a thing, the way teenage girls are inscribed with contradictions of power and anxiety, and Heatstroke does deal with that–but I remember thinking, well, it’s actually the mother that is fairly fucking monstrous in Sharp Objects, and parental figures are pretty absent […]
