Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
After a long day at work, university lecturer Stefan de Graaf returns to his home in the sleepy Dutch town of Beek, kisses his wife and sits down at the kitchen table. The wife tells him Grandma K has come to visit. They laugh and talk about their day. In a corner of the living room stands a silent woman, dressed in rags and chains, smelling of decay. Her eyes and mouth have been sewn shut. The wife has hung a dish towel over the […]
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman continues to outdo herself. After an entertaining (but pedestrian by recent standards) standalone in The Lady on the Lake, she again finds the form she had in Sunburn. I don’t know yet which is better but I know I liked them both a lot. While I guess it’s somewhat of a mystery, this book is a horror, with transparent shades of Stephen King’s Misery. And yet, Lippman is able to make it a work all of her own by taking the piggish perspective of Gerry, the writer, and […]
Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The book opens up from the perspective of a boy out on a party with a flighty, superficial and possibly spoiled socialite. I think this was intentional on the part of the author. A party girl is not what we expect to be a heroine of a story, much less a horror one. Noemi Taboada is a lovely heroine. Unusual in that she is smart and strong (as most heroines are) but also flighty, stubborn and a socialite who enjoys going to parties and flirting with […]
We Hear Voices by Evie Green
This book scared the crap out of me. It has the combined terrifying issues of children, murder, mysterious institutions, and other creepy shit. This horror story follows a boy named Billy who has an imaginary friend named Delfy. At first, Delfy seems like a harmless, developmentally approrpriate figment of a young boy’s imagination; but Delfy soon evolves into something malevolent. Something uncany about this book is that it takes place in the future, in a world where a pandemic has swept through the population. Meanwhile, […]
Later by Stephen King
I really had a good time with this one. I finished it over two months ago now, but unlike my experience with Eternals, I remember it vividly and fondly. I just have one tiny beef with it, and it’s a beef I’ve recently had with King before, but more on that later. Jamie Conklin is our narrator, a kid who can see dead people (King wisely acknowledges the Haley Joel Osment shaped elephant in the room). It’s a talent he (and his mom) have mostly […]
The Burning Girls by CJ Tudor
This book. Hmm. I think it would be easier to break this down into four parts: a thing I loved, I thing I liked, a thing I disliked and a thing I hated. A thing I loved… Being a mainline Protestant minister in the post-church western world, I think CJ Tudor captures the subtleties and nuances of what parish ministry is like. She herself is not religious but whoever advised her did an excellent job. I appreciated it. A thing I liked… I don’t read […]
