The nitty-gritty: Magical, funny and surprising, The Book Witch is a delightful, “can’t miss” story that embraces the joys of books and reading. “All stories are love stories if you love stories.” Book lovers rejoice! The Book Witch might be the best love letter to books and readers I’ve ever come across, and while I’ll […]
The nitty-gritty: A mind-bending, bloody mystery, Japanese Gothic blends time travel and folklore into an emotional and heartbreaking story. “Words carried easily through this house—it was a skeleton, and when you slid open enough doors, the whole world passed through it. There was no such thing as a secret in this house.” Japanese Gothic is […]
The nitty-gritty: Mind-bending and menacing, The Caretaker is weird psychological horror at its best. “If you are reading this, it means you have failed the first Rite.” The Caretaker is Marcus Kliewer’s second book, and it’s just as bizarre and unsettling as We Use To Live Here. This is another mind fuck of a story […]
The nitty-gritty: Shocking, gross and eye-opening, Nothing Tastes As Good is both hard-hitting and wildly entertaining. “We’re all hungry, aren’t we? You’ve made us all into monsters.” I read my first Luke Dumas book a few years ago and enjoyed it (The Paleontologist), but Nothing Tastes As Good is so much better in just about […]
The nitty-gritty: Insect horror and Gothic mystery combine in T. Kingfisher’s latest, a tense and disturbing horror story with the author’s trademark humor and quirky characters. T. Kingfisher never disappoints, and in her latest she returns to the horror genre, although she manages to inject plenty of humor into the story as well. If you […]
The nitty-gritty: Laura Purcell delivers another chilling haunted house tale in this atmospheric and terrifying ghost story. “Their procession had a sick, decayed sort of grandeur to it. This was what it was, Belinda thought, to be master of The Bridge. A throne of rotten fruit and ashes.” House of Splinters is a companion novel […]
The nitty-gritty: Detour takes standard sci-fi tropes and twists them into a unique and outrageously entertaining story, complete with well developed characters and surprising emotional moments. The premise of Detour starts out in familiar territory: a rich billionaire is trying to fund the first trip to Saturn’s moon Titan, in hopes of finding a viable […]
The nitty-gritty: A multilayered horror story set in a dangerous town, A Box Full of Darkness expertly mixes carefully drawn characters, emotional relationships and ghostly terrors. “This was Fell, the town of graves where they shouldn’t be and a missing girl’s shoes placed neatly outside her dorm room door. Fell, which had swallowed my little […]
The nitty-gritty: Storms—both literal and metaphorical—are center stage in Rachel Hawkins’ latest, a multi-layered thriller with well drawn characters and deeply buried secrets. “What I found was something deeper, stranger, and far more twisted than I ever could have guessed. St. Medard’s Bay wasn’t a town with one mystery—they were many, coiled around one another […]
The nitty-gritty: Full of crackling energy and an intriguing mystery, Another One Bites the Past is a solid science fiction debut. Another One Bites the Past is a short novella with big ideas, and I quite enjoyed Vladimir Provorov’s futuristic tale that melds music and memory. I rarely agree to read self published books, but […]