Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog, page 2

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Publication Date: April 29, 2025 | Del Rey | 400 pages

In 1998, a group of high school friends enter the woods of Bucks County, PA to go camping... or, as teenagers are more apt to do, go "camping," which is to say they went into the woods to fuck and get fucked up. But in the midst of all their drugs and booze revelry, they stumble across the peculiar sight of a staircase in the woods. Just a staircase. There's no accompanying house, or the remains of a house that was, to indicate some perfectly normal reason for this staircase to be there. It's weird. So, of course, one of the teens climbs up the steps and... disappears. He didn't fall off the other side or pull some fancy sleight of hand to prank his friends and jump scare them in the woods. No, what he does is just completely vanish right off the face of the earth. Gone gone.

In the present day, the remaining friends, now long-since disconnected and grown apart, are reunited by a new tragedy coupled with the discovery of another strange staircase in the woods. This staircase is an opportunity for them to find out what happened to Matty, to find out if he's even still alive off in somewhere else, and maybe to save him, to put right what all fell apart so many years ago. And up they all go, up, up, and away, right on into hell.

The Staircase in the Woods is an unremittingly dark exploration of liminal spaces, fractured friendships, and the inner lives of this group of people that used to be friends but who have grown into almost-but-not quite strangers. In some ways, it's a haunted house story, but author Chuck Wendig does a marvelous job of inverting familiar tropes to give us something fresh, interesting, and next-level with its exploration of game mechanics and simulated reality philosophizing.

Mostly, though, it's a haunted people story. Theirs are stories about being lost, of being abandoned, of what it's like to be hollowed out and filled with darkness. The characters -- Nick, Owen, Lore (short for Lauren), and Hamish -- are all bleak figures with scarred childhoods, the better in which to mine for misery. There's deceit, depravity, suicidal ideation, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, child sex abuse, animal abuse, parental neglect, murder -- you name it, it's probably in here to some degree.

And that's not even getting into the pure, distilled scenes of nightmare fuel surrounding such heady topics. Did I mention this book is dark? The Staircase in the Woods may be the bleakest and darkest work Wendig has created thus far, skating up to the edges of, yet skirting around (but not necessarily away from), abject nihilism. That last bit could certainly go either way, sure, because throughout it all there's a certain measure of hope, but one can't help but wonder what happens when hope hits a wall, and how much a friendship, even one that's been reforged from its fractured remains, can truly withstand.

For me, it's those questions of endurance that made The Staircase in the Woods so damnably compelling. I found myself trapped by this book's gory hooks, but it was the human elements that truly captivated me, the relationship dynamics, their responses to each new piece of unraveling information, and their puzzling over what exactly was happening to them, whether or not they'd figure it out and how, and what then? I couldn't help but recall the tagline to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "Who will survive and what will be left of them?"

I couldn't help speculating, too, on other pieces of media that The Staircase in the Woods exists in conversation with. Wendig taps into a serious House of Leaves vibe, sans all the heavy extracurricular homework, not to mention Reddit creepypastas and The Backrooms, with overarching shades of Richard Matheson and Stephen King, the latter if only because every current-generation horror writer exists in the shadow of King, whose continuing work and legacy reaches oh so very far and wide that it becomes impossible not to touch in some way, shape, or form, even if only incidentally. The Staircase in the Woods is a shifty, shifting hodgepodge of inspirations that ultimately come together in unique, and uniquely infectious, ways, inside and out. It cuts and crawls its way into you, burrowing into your heart and mind, twisting and changing as it grows deeper inside you, and isn't that just the best kind of horror?

March(ing) into April: A Look Back

As March began to wind down, The Atlantic published their article about Meta’s massive, wide-scale book piracy ring used to train their generative-AI platform, Llama 3. Just in case you don’t know, Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and, under this umbrella, includes the social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. They stole the bulk of my published works to use in their bullshit AI training with the intent of feeding my writing into their little griftomatic plagarism machine to teach their generative computer software how to write like a human being. A quick Google search shows that Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is currently 201.4 BILLION dollars, making him the third-wealthiest human being on the entire planet Earth. And he’s out there fucking stealing ebooks. And let’s be clear about this right up front — it absolutely is criminal what Zuckerberg has done here. I am not throwing around words like “stealing” or calling this a “piracy ring” lightly. This is theft of intellectual property resulting in loss of income for me. As television writer and producer David Slack noted on BlueSky after news broke, “If your business model doesn’t work without stealing other people’s work and violating copyright law on a massive scale, then you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.”

Alex Resiner writes in his article, “Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.”

Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is, again, the third richest person in the world, stole my books. He authorized his minions at Meta to steal my books. And not just mine, either. They stole a lot of books, from a lot of authors, including works that haven’t even been published yet! Maris Kreizman at LitHub writes about Meta somehow having gotten its hands on digital advanced reader copies (otherwise known as galleys or ARCs) available only on legitimate sites like NetGalley or Edelweiss (both of which I use in my work as a book reviewer, FYI), summing it up with the most evergreen subheading ever with “One of the Richest Companies in the World is Stealing From the Rest of Us,” and closing with “the work of individual artists is being used and denigrated in order to benefit a class of people who don’t care about the art and fear no consequences.” When I began writing this piece, on March 20, my BlueSky and Facebook feeds were literally filled with other authors complaining about their works being stolen and the income lost as a result of one of the richest men in the world stealing our shit, and it hasn’t let up much in the days since. The works they stole from me personally range in price from 99c to $4.99 USD. This is, apparently, too rich for the blood of Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire. And not just a billionaire, but a billionaire more than 200 times over. Add on to that Meta’s valuation which, as Kreizman notes, “is currently $1.56 trillion, which seems like it would be more than enough to pay licensing fees.”

According to Garry Lu over at Boss Hunter, if you worked 24/7 non-stop without ever taking a break while earning $10,000 an hour, it would take 2,281 years to earn $200 billion, “Meaning to have his sort of wealth today, you’d have to start all the way back in 261 BC.” Another estimate shows that, spending $1 million per day, it would still take you 544 years to spend $200 billion. That’s how insanely wealthy Mark Zuckerberg is.

On Amazon, for each of my books that sells at $4.99, I get $3.49. I would need to sell roughly 57,142,857,142 copies of a single title to earn $200 billion. When you start looking at the number of how many copies the average book sells, let alone what your average indie sales are like (FYI not a single title of mine are even close to reaching that average), you begin to realize just how fucking laughable selling that many copies is. It’s never going to happen. Even Stephen King is only at 400 million copies sold across the entire breadth of his body of work (and Meta stole 200 of his works, by the way. You can look that up if you’re curious.). Selling 57 billion copies just ain’t ever going be a thing for me, especially when there’s only 8 billion on this planet. I’d be happy to be able to just earn a living from my writing alone, but even that possibility alone is ridiculously small and unlikely as an indie horror author, and even less so with all these dipshits stealing it instead of paying the already super-low price tag I put on my books.

But Mark Zuckerberg? That motherfucker has $200 billion lying around and he’s still stealing shit. This seems like a good time to remind you all that there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. They’re all wage thieves at the end of the day. Every fucking one of them. Mark, Elon, Bezos, Trump, the whole fucking lot of them didn’t get where they are by being honest, responsible businessmen. They got where they are because they fucked over everything and everybody in and out of their way in order to line their pockets. And then, after all that, after raking in money hand over fist and rigging the game so nobody else can ever have a shot, they then decided, you know what, let’s steal some books from these hard-working, little-paid authors, these indie motherfuckers who probably don’t even break even on their self-published works. Because we got ours, so fuck them. Fleece ‘em, rape ‘em, skin ‘em alive — that’s the philosophy of these ultra-wealthy cretins, their one and only guiding principle in life. Because that’s the one thing all these rich fucks have in common — they just take, take, take, take, take, and then once they’ve hoarded every goddamn thing they possibly can, they still manage to find something else to take, something so far beneath them, from people they’ve never heard of, who don’t make one iota of difference to them, from people so far beneath them they wouldn’t even know you’re pissing on them to tell them it’s raining because they’re so far down the piss doesn’t even hit them! It just fucking evaporates in the atmosphere, that’s how fucking far down authors like me are from Mark fucking Zuckerberg. One of the richest men on earth, stealing my fucking books, just because he can.

The one small thing about all this that gave me a chuckle was the fact that they apparently did not steal my anti-fascist, Fuck Trump splatterpunk horror book, Friday Night Massacre, to use in their training. Gee, I wonder why that might be?!

Naturally, there’s not much I can do about this in the end. He’s beyond fucking rich, while I’m roughly a missed paycheck away from becoming a hobo. The rich live in a different world from the rest of us. They exist in an entirely separate ecosystem from us. They live by completely different rules and are, in fact, above any such rules that would see any one of us condemned under the strictest penalties possible. They are, in short, the fullest and most perfect living example regarding the existence of two entirely different Americas. He stole my books, stole the money right out of pocket. The horses are out of the barn and the door is left standing wide open. All I can really do in response is to delete my Facebook and Messenger accounts, delete my Instagram account, and get rid of Threads, which I rarely used to begin with. There is absolutely no reason for me to use these products and platforms anymore. Why the fuck should I? I'm at a complete and total loss as to why I should stay on Meta platforms knowing they've pirated damn near everything I've written and published -- nearly every indie book I've put out there, along with several anthologies I've been included in. All stolen. Income lost. And that's not even getting into all the right-wing bullshit Zuckerberg has engaged in. Yes, I'm pissed off. You’re goddamn right I am. Why should I keep engaging with and using platforms that literally steal money right out of my pocket? To stay is to acquiesce, and that just reeks too much of battered person syndrome for my liking.

I’m fucking done. Leaving is all I can do, so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I can stop giving them my clicks. I can stop having their horseshit ads served to me, which is about all these sites were good for nowadays anyway, since their algorithms no longer show you the actual, real-live friends and family and assorted other people you follow, instead populating your feed with suggested accounts from brands and influencers that have paid to have themselves advertised to you. History suggests I won’t be missing out on very much. I left Twitter soon after Musk took over and turned it into a Nazi propaganda machine, and I sure as fuck haven’t missed that shit at fucking all. Facebook has been carving a similar trail, and the very few times I’ve logged into Threads show that to be a right-wing cesspool as well. All I can do now is deprive them of my information moving forward and hope that I will be included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action lawsuit filed against Meta for their copyright infringement. Zuckerberg may not be able to afford my ebooks and has to resort to petty theft to obtain them, but I can certainly damn well use some of that Meta money, so bring on the class action lawsuit, I say, and let’s make ‘em bleed.

Where’s my fucking money, Zuck?

TLDR:

Anyway, if you’re looking for me on social media, or are wondering where I’ve disappeared to, the only place you can find me nowadays is on BlueSky. This is the only social media platform I will be using and engaging with, until such time as they, too, prove themselves wholly unfit for my support as a user.

I know there’s really very little I can do to prevent my work from being pirated, by either the poor, the rich, or people who just want free shit, but there is something you can do. If you’ve ever read a pirated copy of my work, or if you have pirated my works for others to read, or have used a generative AI platform that has been trained on my stolen works, you can buy me a coffee and we’ll call it even.

And also:

FUCK AI   KINDLE UNLIMITED REMINDER!

Just a friendly reminder to Kindle Unlimited readers that all of my independently published works will be exiting Kindle Unlimited on April 16, so if you’re a KU reader you better hurry and get those borrows in quickly! Soon after this expiration date hits, all of my works will be going wide and will be available on all other ebook platforms, like Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and elsewhere, including right here on this site.

My own digital store will be opening up April 18 with everything I’ve published available for you to buy direct, giving you complete control over the EPUB edition of each book for storage and safekeeping on your personal devices. Bonus, if you buy direct from my store, you won’t ever have to worry about another billionaire taking my books off your ereaders. Peace of mind is a good thing!

Two of my books have already gone wide: Borne of the Deep (The Salem Hawley Series, Book 2) and The Horror Book Review Digest Volume 3. You can grab either one via your preferred marketplace right now, or wait until April 18 to buy them from my store.

On the review front, March was a slow month for me. My wife and I took a small vacation mid-month, which I took as an opportunity to do some pleasure reading free of review commitments and to get a bit more caught up with R. Scott Bakker’s The Aspect-Emporer series by way of the third volume, The Great Ordeal. I enjoyed it, but it also felt like a lot of prologue to the fourth and final book in this series. I hope to finally get this series wrapped up this year, after taking a decade-long break between the second and third book, but I feel like I say that a lot and am never quite able to follow through… but this time I mean it! Again!

I did manage to get two reviews posted over at FanFiAddict, which I encourage you to check out.

Rhino: The Rise of a Warrior: A Hell Divers Novel by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Inhsopitable by Ali Seay

I’m expecting April to be a bit more productive, reading-wise.

Currently reading: Zombie Bigfoot by Nicholas Sullivan

Currently watching: Rebel Moon (The Director’s Cut), Jack Ryan (Season 4) and various cooking competition shows

Currently playing: Star Wars: Outlaws (PS5)

That’s it for now. See you next month, gang!

February in Review

Image by Cullan Smith via unsplash

Time’s a funny thing, isn’t it? On one hand, I can’t believe how quickly February flew by, but on the other hand I can’t believe we’re only two months down into 2025.

That said, February was a pretty busy month. For starters, I joined the staff of reviewers over at FanFiAddict and already have a handful of new reviews under my belt over there. I’ll give a recap of all that shortly, down below.

The other big thing to happen were some behind-the-scene updates as I prepare to exit Kindle Unlimited next month. My entire bibliography will be leaving KU effective April 16. Some titles are making the exit a little bit sooner than others, as I decline renewal options to enroll them for another 90 days, but April 16 will be the absolute drop-dead cutoff for my stuff as it pertains to Kindle Unlimited. Everything will still be available for sale, but more importantly, everything will be for sale everywhere and, if all goes well, for borrowing digitally from your local library via OverDrive, CloudLibrary, and (eventually, fingers crossed!) Hoopla.

You’ll also be able to purchase the EPUB ebook files for my titles directly through my website, giving you complete ownership over the books you buy rather than any given retailer’s arbitrary licensing of my works. Come April 16, you’ll be able to find them all in the ebooks shop. Of course, all these books will available elsewhere, too, including the Amazon Kindle storefront, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and pretty much everywhere else you can think of.

A couple of titles have already escaped containment from KU, including my latest release, The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III. You may recall I ran into several snafus with Amazon in releasing this title back in January, which is what prompted my decision to finally go wide (or, more actually, return to going wide, as I had done before, a number of year’s ago). Well, I was able to work around whatever issues Amazon had with this release and, in doing so, got it listed everywhere else, too. I’m chalking that up as a win! You can now find The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III at a number of stores right now!

For those who may have been introduced to Salem Hawley back when The Resurrectionists was available wide, you can now find the second book, Borne of the Deep, at a number of other storefronts beyond Amazon. It’ll be available direct through my website April 16, but if you’re a Kobo or Nook reader, you can find it over there now. It should be appearing in the Apple Books storefront soon!

SALES

Before I exit Kindle Unlimited in April, I figure now’s a good time to have one last hurrah with Amazon’s scheduled promotions. Beginning Monday, March 3, all of my horror titles (minus Borne of the Deep) will be on sale for only 99c, along with my two science fiction titles, Convergence and Emergence, which make up the DRMR series duology. You’ll be able to find all my 99c titles beginning Monday morning on my Amazon Author Page. Just be sure to sort by Price: Low to High to get all the discounted titles.

NEW REVIEWS

February kicked off with two new book reviews here at the blog.

The Night Birds by Christopher Golden

Where the Bones Lie by Nick Kolakowski

And then things shifted into high gear as I began contributing to FanFi Addict, starting with a guest post reviewing Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods before joining on as a full-fledged staff writer immediately following.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Trog by Zachary Ashford

The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling

Phengaris by Anna Orridge

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

What’s been most surprising for me is that, with only two month’s into 2025, I’ve already read a handful of titles that will no doubt be some of the best releases of the year. Granted, some of these won’t be out for some time yet, and I actually read The Staircase in the Woods at the tail-end of 2024, but goddamn. I expect to be seeing this one, Chris Golden’s, Todd’s, and Stephen Graham Jones’s latest releases making a lot of Best Of lists later this year, along with Clay McLeod Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. This is shaping up to be a very, very, very strong year for the horror genre and we’re only just getting started! We’re eating good this year, Horror Fam! I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about all this as we prepare to close out 2025 (you know, presuming we make it that far and haven’t been dragged into nuclear conflict in World War III: The Search for Ukrainian Minerals so Donnie-boy can show Putin what a big, big boy he is! Fuck, it’s going to be a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long year).

See y’all next month, I hope!

Where the Bones Lie by Nick Kolakowski

Publication Date: March 11, 2025 | Datura Books | 400 pages

Nick Kolakowski really gets around, genre-wise. Although he has plenty of crime capers under his belt, with books like Payback is Forever and his Love & Bullets series, it’s his few - and excellent - horror novellas that I first became acquainted with his work, specifically Absolute Unit and, later, Beach Bodies. And let’s not forget his awesome Friday the 13th X Groundhog Day riff, appropriately titled “Goundhog Slay,” in the Monsters (Dark Tide Book 5) novella collection. Indeed, Kolakowski has found a pretty sweet spot as a crossover author in his own right, effortlessly hopping back and forth between crime and horror and mixing up the two on occasion (The Boise Long-Pig Hunting Club and its sequel, regrettably, remain unread in Mount TBR, along with Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, and I can only imagine what those books must entail based on their titles!).

With Where the Bones Lie, Kolakowski turns his attention to the old reliable of crime fiction, the private detective, albeit in a round-about way, which fits Nick’s style to a T. Dash Fuller is a former Hollywood fixer. Got a celebrity you need dried out before dying of an OD just before making the publicity rounds for a new flick or big-budget streaming series? Or maybe the celeb has already OD’d and the cause of death needs to be adjusted to something more palatable by way of favors made to the police and medical examiner? Or maybe it’s the body of a rando the celeb was hooking up with that has sadly expired and now needs to be hidden? Or, hell, maybe you just need some paparazzi kneecapped. Dash is your guy. Or was, anyway. Dash is reformed and failing at being a stand-up comedian because, funny enough, he’s not all that funny. This means, of course, he’s broke and making fast food door deliveries and Ubering folks around isn’t making ends meet. Enter his old boss, Manny, with one last job. One thing leads to another, yada yada yada, and pretty soon Dash find himself involved with Madeline Ironwood, who has hired him to find out who murdered her drug-running father, Ken. Ken’s skeleton, you see, has recently been discovered in a barrel that had been sunk in a lake, but climate changing being what it is, said lake is no more, wildfires are ravaging the landscape, and all kinds of secrets are finding their way back into the sun.

Kolakowski’s opening pages set the stage for an interesting dilemma — what happens when you’re really good at doing bad things? For Dash, it’s a personal crisis that results in stomach cramps best relieved by punishing amounts of alcohol and snark because he is, after all, a not-quite private eye of the hard-boiled tradition, and because healthy coping mechanisms make for poor drama. Both Dash and Madeline make light of the fact that finding out what happened to Ken is cheaper than therapy, but there’s an unmissable truth in such jokes. Both have long-standing, albeit wildly different, issues in need of resolution. For Dash these are brought to the forefront as Manny reenters his life and dredges up a past that Dash finds impossible to escape, and which has literally crippled him with guilt. During the course of his investigation into Ken’s disappearance he suffers a panic attack. His dreams are waking nightmares that make for fitful sleep. He sees a black-clad figure in a skull mask stalking him wherever he goes, a figure that may or may not actually be there.

Dash makes for an interesting character study. He’s impulsive and self-assured in his skills, but so riddled with doubt and guilt that he can’t keep doing all the things he’s so good at. His talents have made his existence a living hell. But it’s not until Madeline enters the picture that he finds a pathway into do-goodery. Former footnote of an actress Madeline makes for an equally intriguing foil, and it’s clear Kolakowski had a lot of fun writing these two. She’s a wildcat, and there’s a natural charm to the repartee between her and Dash. It’s refreshing, too, to see their relationship founded on mutual respect and professionalism, rather than the typical ‘will they or won’t they’ tropes often found in similar set-ups.

Where the Bones Lie subverts just enough of the usual expectations that it feels fresh and enjoyable, and Kolakowski puts a unique spin on the private dick character with his focus on mental health and finding balance in a truly off-kilter world. With shades of Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole novels by way of Jordan Harper’s outstanding Everybody Knows, Kolakowski delivers an intriguing PI page-turner that reminds us just how dark sunny California can get.

Odds and Ends

Image by Amador Loureiro via unsplash

Last month, I wrote about the difficulty I encountered with publishing The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III on Amazon. Fast forward to February, and hey, guess what? The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III is now available on Amazon. Wonders never cease. Anyway, you can buy a copy of that over there now, or you can continue to buy direct from me right here on this website. Bonus! If you buy direct from me, more of that money comes to me instead of lining the pockets of a billionaire who clearly does not have the best interests of American democracy at heart.

Speaking of buying direct from me… All of my books will be exiting Kindle Unlimited effective April 16. All of my books will be available for direct purchase through this website by Friday, April 18. I’ll also be working on going wide and expanding distribution of my ebooks to include a wider net of platforms, including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Hoopla, Overdrive, and everywhere else I can. Hopefully these ebooks will also make their way onto Bookshop.org via Draft2Digital, since they’ve recently expanded their platform to include the sale of ebooks.

In case you weren’t aware, print editions of my books are already available on Bookshop.org, along with Barnes & Noble, and can most likely even be special ordered by your local bookstore if you ask them nicely. I’ve also set up an affiliate account with Bookshop.org, and will be including a link to purchase books through them in my reviews whenever possible. Purchases made through the Bookshop.org links included on my site will earn me a minor commission that will help support this site and my future publishing endeavors.

I’ve added a Cool Links page to the site, which you can find up at the top menu. Right now, there’s just a handful of sites listed, places I visit regularly and/or authors or podcasts I want to show some support for, or just think are cool and would like to help spread the word.

On the review front, my first guest review for FanFiAddict went live today for Chuck Wendig’s The Staircase in the Woods. If you like the sounds of this one, you can preorder a copy right now. (Remember what I said about that Bookshop.org affiliate link?) I’ll share the review here in a week or two, most likely, but for now go give FanFiAddict all the clicks and check out the other great reviews and reviewers over there. My TBR has grown tremendously over the years thanks to these guys and gals, and they’ve become my go-to hub for scifi, fantasy, and horror recs, which is why they’re included in that Cool Links page up above.

That’s it for now!

The Night Birds by Christopher Golden

Publication Date: May 6, 2025 | St. Martin’s Press | 304 pages

Christopher Golden’s The Night Birds hit a few particular sweet spots for me. I’m a sucker for sea-based horror, so to have the setting be the hundred-year-old, rusting hulk of the Christabel, marooned off the coast of Galveston, TX, immediately make me perk up. To sweeten things even further, the Christabel isn’t just a marooned ship, but one that has become reclaimed by nature and turned into a floating forest as mangrove trees have taken root and grown through the ship’s decks. It’s a marvelous visual that I think the book’s cover has only partially managed to capture, as Golden’s writing makes it clear — or maybe it’s just my imagination — that the ship has become positively wooly with wild vegetation. Whatever the case, the Christabel makes for one hell of a striking locale. To top it all off, the story takes place during a seriously, wickedly violent tropical storm. Well, gang, I love me a good storm setting, too, and between the monsoon Golden conjures up here and the crashing waves breaking against the hull of the Christabel, I’m kind of surprised The Night Birds pages aren’t soaked all the way through and dripping everywhere.

The Galveston storm, however, isn’t the only thing wreaking havoc and bringing on a long night full of violence aboard the Christabel. One other aspect really drew me into The Night Birds, and that’s the subject of the horrors at play here. Witches. Witches galore. A whole nasty coven, with one single, solitary demand — the life of a newborn baby recently hidden away in the ship’s cabin.

Ruby and Mae have been on the run with this child, having only just fled a black magic-fueled assault that has led them to Charlie Book’s dock slip. Book is a researcher for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and the floating forest of the Christabel has become both the focus of his work and his de facto home. Ruby is his ex-lover, and when she turns up in desperate need for help, with a child that is not her own, he cannot possibly turn her away. They need shelter from the storm and a place where nobody would think to look for them, and Book knows just the right place to ride out the evening. But then the birds begin to circle overhead with predatory intent, and the witches that Ruby and Mae have been fleeing are much closer than expected.

The Night Birds is Christopher Golden at the absolute top of his game. I freaking loved this book, but even just saying that feels like I’m selling it short. The story is masterfully executed, its pacing both precise and exciting. Details are crisply delivered, and rather than ever feeling like a barrage of an infodump these moments serve the story perfectly and help to ratchet up the tension. In a way, it’s like watching an expert artisan watchmaker. Springs are deliberately, carefully coiled to deliver a high level of torque to turn the gears, while keeping everything perfectly balanced. One gears turns another, and another, to keep the hands moving. It looks simple and deliberate enough from the outside, but underneath, there’s so much machinery and moving parts, all so carefully crafted to make it all work. (I am, obviously, not a watchmaker, expert or otherwise, but hopefully this analogy works well enough to get my point across, imprecise though it may be. My apologies to watchmakers everywhere.)

Golden works hard, too, at building characters to care about. Book and Ruby’s relationship is underscored by tragedy and bitterness, and while they’re forced together into tight quarters under less than ideal circumstances, I found myself rooting for them. Even the secondary characters are nicely developed, and I found myself growing quickly attached to Otis, who runs the boatyard and wants nothing more than to be left alone to read his mystery novels and listen to the waves crashing against the docks. I get Otis. I understand Otis. But what really sold me was Golden’s exploration of witch lore and the utter monstrosities he has concocted here. Golden’s no stranger to witches, given his work with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Baltimore comics, not to mention co-editing the anthology Hex-Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery with Rachel Autumn Deering, but his take on witchy gals in The Night Birds casts this coven in a unique candlelight. These ladies are unapologetically vicious, and I dug the hell out of them for that.

Bottom line: The Night Birds is horror craftsmanship at its best, and one of my first no doubt about it, hands-down favorite reads of 2025 thus far. Golden’s latest is tense and exciting, full of wonderful little surprises along the way, and by the time the violent climax rolls around it becomes impossible to step away from.

January in Review

Whew. January 2025. That was a long year, huh? The last couple weeks, especially. And hey, how about that coup currently in progress, the pardoning of all the January 6 terrorists, Trump and Musk’s attacks on the FAA and the resultant plane crashes, Musk demanding access to the Treasury’s payment systems even though he’s not an elected official and Trump’s made-up appointments for him haven’t even been confirmed by the Senate and, as far as I know, don’t even really exist, the Los Angeles wildfires, the spread of bird flu and the destruction of public health agencies websites by the new administration, and and and and….

It’s safe to say January 2025 will certainly be one for the history books. You know, if they still make those things in another four years and, of course, presuming they’re even allowed to contain anything close to factual information lest they violate Trump’s demands for a bunch of made-up “patriotic” history.

But I digress. I really did not intend for this email to be a political screed, or more anti-Trump ranting. I do enough of that on social media. And besides, that’s what I wrote Friday Night Massacre for. And my novelette, Revolver, which is also collected in In the End, Nothing, with a whole bunch of other stories.

My main goal for 2025 was to try and keep my head down and lose myself in fiction as much as possible. Books, video games, movies — that’s how I want to spend this year, and the next four years at the very least. We all know what this prolonged second season of The Trump Show is going to look like, having already lived through a four-year-long sneak preview of it all once before. We know this sequel is going to longer, louder, brasher, meaner, crazier, and even more fascist, unhinged, insensitive, racist, sexist, and batshit insane than the previous nightmare, which was pretty goddamn awful in its own right. The safety rails have all been removed. There’s no seat belts and the brake lines have been cut, and everything is on fire (literally and figuratively). But, hey, that’s what so many of my fellow Americans wanted, I guess, so, yay, congrats, and good for them! Eggs are more expensive, Social Security and health care are in jeopardy, and a white supremacist Christofascist is leading the Department of Defense, but at least brown people are scared and being rounded up and on their way to a concentration camp at Gitmo. Enjoy! Way to go America! It’s like Germany, 1933 all over again.

Anyway. Yeah. Books. That’s my escape hatch, along with various other bits and pieces of non-reality based media to try and help keep me sane in an utterly insane country. Or at least from going any further insane as things rapidly spiral out of control. And maybe some writing, too. Hopefully I’ll have some news on a forthcoming and long-awaited book for you all soon. We’ll see.

In the meantime, how about some reviews?

My Avoid Reality 2025 project kicked off in high-gear, with January seeing seven (!) reviews for new and forthcoming releases hitting the blog. Here’s what you may have missed:

Needless to say, February will see more reviews coming your way. I intend to do these kind of mailers recapping review posts once a month. But by all means, be sure to check out the website regularly for updates. I might even start blogging if the mood strikes, but no promises there.

January 2025 also saw the release of the third, and I do believe final, entry in The Horror Book Review Digest series. If you’re unfamiliar with this series, each volume compiles a few years worth of my horror reviews into some pretty hefty volumes (thus defeating the purpose of a digest, but whatever… I liked the way it sounded).

Volumes I and II are currently available on Amazon. Volume III, however, is available exclusively on my website as a direct order EPUB-formatted ebook, mostly because Amazon refused to sell this entry and claim they are unable to confirm I’m the copyright holder of the reviews I have written. On the bright side, ordering direct from me means I get the full income and don’t have to split 30% of each sale with a billionaire.

If you’d like to support my work and this site, by all means, grab a copy at the link below!

Selling HBRDV3 direct means I have also reopened my webstore. Unfortunately, stock is pretty slim at the moment and is limited to this one digital ebook. But that’s gonna change soon! I do have some inventory to sort through and count, and once that’s done I’ll get the Store stock updated and will be able to sell signed physical copies of my work direct to you dear readers. Stay tuned!

The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III $4.99

“For the last few years, Michael Patrick Hicks has been my go-to for horror novel reviews.”

Tim Meyer, author of Kill Hill Carnage and The Switch House

In addition to crafting his own works of horror, Michael Patrick Hicks has been reviewing books for more than two decades and has written for such outlets as Audiobook Reviewer and Graphic Novel Reporter.

Now, he returns with The Horror Book Review Digest Volume III, his third collection of reviews covering some of the horror genre’s biggest releases and hidden gems from 2021-2024 from authors like Chuck Wendig, Nat Cassidy, V. Castro, Christopher Golden, Tananarive Due, TC Parker, Adam Cesare, Brian Keene, Stephen King, and many, many more.

This third volume of The Horror Book Review Digest features reviews of over 100 books that promise to give you chills and nightmares! Settle in, keep a light on, and find your next great read.

Readers will receive a secure link to the EPUB file lasting 24 hours after the first download. Add to cart

I’ve seen a few other authors post some vital information in the following format and always find it kind of fun. So, I figured I’d rip-off borrow shit my betters have done ahead of me.

Currently reading: The Divine Flesh by Drew Huff

Currently watching: Crime Scene Kitchen, Season 3

Currently playing: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5)

Currently listening: Nine Inch Nails on shuffle while working out

Spores by Michael McBride

Publication Date: January 28, 2025 | Preternatural Press | 280 pages

Michael McBride is an author I’ve found to be consistently reliable in producing hard science-based horror fiction. His work dovetails rather nicely with that of authors like Michael Crichton, James Rollins, and the writing duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (although both also have a hefty library of solo books, too), not to mention television series like The X-Files and Fringe. I suspect that if you’re a fan of any of these then you’re perfectly primed to dig into just about any one of McBride’s adventures. In fact, if you’re new to McBride, Spores is a terrific jumping-on point as it’s billed as the first in his new The Creature Files series.

McBride wastes no time getting down to business, opening the book with a widescreen cinematic-styled epic disaster that sees an earthquake rip open the tarmac of Denver International Airport. Seismologist Dayna Raines is called to duty by the USGS, along with a small group of chemical, structural, and biomedical engineers. What Raines, her team, and millions of others whose lives are unknowingly jeopardized don’t know is that beneath the airport is a decommissioned deep injection well the U.S. Army had used to dispose of biological and chemical weapons created during World War II. Over the intervening years, these hazardous chemicals have been eating away at the earth beneath Denver and it’s only a matter of time before a massive earthquake is triggered and wipes out the entire city.

Of course, that’s only just the start of it. Soon, their mission to launch a controlled demolition to backfill the subterranean cavity and prevent any further earthquakes is jeopardized by General Jack Randall, an ornery old man with hideous scars that betray a deadly secret from his past. Randall and his team essentially draft Raines and her team, merging their dual purposes of destroying the cavern… and whatever it is that lurks below. Something Randall has encountered before and tried — and failed — top stop once before.

McBride hits that wonderful sweet spot for me, building tension and unfolding the scope of his science-based horrors in slow-burn fashion, while also making the threats scarily plausible. Not to mention frighteningly timely. Hot on the heels of Spores release, Phys.org reported on a work published in the journal Fungal Systematics and Evolution about a newly discovered novel species of fungus found on spiders in multiple cave systems in Ireland that operates similarly to the infamous ‘zombie-ant’ fungus, Ophiocordyceps. I won’t proclaim McBride to be prognosticator just yet, although the origins of Spores goes back roughly twenty years according to his afterword. The man certainly knows his cutting-edge science, though, and has illustrated as much across a large spread of novels.

And Spores is positively brimming with science. McBride spends a lot of time exploring seismology, ground scanning, the use of drones, and, of course, fungus. Spores also acts as a warning reminder of the perils of mankind’s abuse of Mother Nature and the dangers of deep injection wells, drilling, and fracking, not to mention the perils of chemical weapons and biohazards. These latter topics are worrisome enough on their own, but once McBride starts looking at how nature continually responds and adapts to our worst inclinations, well, that’s when things get downright hair-raising. Once the scientists and their military escorts are dropped into the chemical and fungal soup waiting for them at the bottom of the earth, Spores becomes an energetic thrill-ride of freaky subterranean horror.

The best part is, McBride is only just getting started with these Creature Files, and his final chapters tease us with all kind of deadly possibilities of what’s to come. I’m scared of what weird biohorrors he’s cooking up in the lab for us, but also eager to read all about it, and hopefully soon!

Noro by William F. Gray

Publication Date: Feb. 21, 2025 | Cemetery Dance | 132 pages

Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography that “There is no such thing as a new idea. … We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” Meanwhile, film critic Gene Siskel once advised filmmakers not to take time out of their picture to remind audiences of other, better flicks they could be watching instead, such as when characters are shown watching a well-known scene from a piece of highly regarded cinema, or the camera knowingly lingers on a movie theater’s marquee. We shouldn’t be reminded that we could be watching The Shining when we’re stuck sitting through Drop Dead Fred.

These two axioms were at the forefront of my mind when reading William F. Gray’s Noro. Noro involves a meteor carrying an alien parasite crashing into the Wyoming woods in the middle of a savagely violent snowstorm. A young man named Con goes to investigate, but his German Shepard, Doc, gets away from him and ends up infected. Mayhem ensues, and Con’s neighbor Jonah, and his dog Noro, are caught up in the mix and struggling to survive. Noro — the book, not the dog — is a mishmash of familiar ideas and concepts, a kaleidoscope of influences that are ultimately better on their own than stitched together as they are here. Gray borrows from works like John Carpenter’s The Thing and the Alien flicks, along with Stephen King’s Cujo and Dreamcatcher, and tries to take various components from each of these to create a slick horror novella that never feels as fresh as any of its inspirations. Not even Dreamcatcher.

Somewhere along the way, Noro reminded me of a third axiom: familiarity breeds contempt. I’ve read so many similar scenes and set-pieces as Gray’s elsewhere plenty of times before, or seen them played out in movies and television, that having them all appear here in mandatory checklist fashion left me bored. It’s all so rote and dull. We have the requisite bit involving one human survivor getting infected and hiding it. The creature that was thought dead turns out to not be so dead after all and springs back to life. And, of course, as these types of horror stories often do, it ends with a cliffhanger indicating that not only has nothing been truly resolved, but the worst is just getting started.

To his credit, Gray spares little expense in doling out the violence, and Noro is consistently at its best when it’s at its bloodiest. Given that good doggo Doc is infected early on, it probably comes as little surprise that there is a plethora of both human and animal violence. Doc’s infection is gruesomely detailed as the alien parasite sets up residence inside the dog’s body and makes itself at home, and then proceeds to attack Con and Jonah both, chasing them through the woods intent on chomping the hell out of them both.

Readers sensitive to harm brought against animals may want to avoid Noro given the merciless violence inflicted upon Con’s canine companion, but for me that wasn’t even the worst of it. No, the true horror, and what ultimately drew my contempt into outright anger, was Noro’s editing, or rather the complete lack of it. When reviewing advance reader copies, reviewers aren’t supposed to get hung up on typos and textual errors. Most ARCs are even labeled as an “Uncorrected Proof” to warn potential reviewers that the book hasn’t yet gone through the rigorous process of editing and proofreading. However, most publishers do their best to present their advance readers with a book that is mostly polished and largely representative of what will soon be hitting bookstores. I can count on one hand the number of ARCs I’ve had to quit simply because they were so riddled with typos. That Noro comes out in less than a month and this recently-supplied ARC is so positively riddled with errors is absolutely mind-boggling to me. At only 132 pages, it’s beyond absurd that every few pages there are enough typos, and missing or repetitious words or phrases to make reading Noro a downright painful experience. It upset me, and I spent much of my time reading Noro in an active state of hostility toward the text. Even the table of contents on my electronic galley has a mistake, for fuck’s sake! Some examples: In one instance, we’re told that Doc’s one remaining eye remained locked on Con. In another, after Doc has tackled Con to the ground and is face to face with the man, Gray writes that “The snapping of Doc’s jaws sounded impossibly close…” This isn’t impossibly close, dear readers — IT IS CLOSE! Later, Jonah chides himself over a 20-year-old first aid kit and not having the foresight to buy a new one sooner, if not a long a time ago. If the issue is the kit being old to begin with, why would he want to have bought one an even longer time ago? Another time, Gray finds Doc’s wet, bloody, snow-covered fur to be of such importance that he proceeds to tell us about it for two sentences in a row in nearly the exact same way. In addition to a number of other goofs, like odd sentence constructs, inserting words that shouldn’t be there or forgetting to include words that would make a sentence sensible, and occasionally not knowing when to use “an” before a word beginning with a vowel, I found myself having to spend far too much of my time trying to make actual sense of what I was reading and trying to decipher what the author was attempting to say. I was often and repeatedly yanked out of the story by one glaring mistake after another. If I had received a printed copy of Noro in this condition, I would have thrown that damn thing across the room in a fit of anger a dozen times or more.

I can only hope that the version of Noro Cemetery Dance releases for sale has been significantly cleaned up and corrected, otherwise they should be embarrassed to sell this in its current condition. I would also advise potential readers looking to add this to their collection to verify that Noro has, indeed, been properly edited before purchasing. Reading this uncorrected ARC of Noro is like watching a new big-budget blockbuster, only one in which the director and editor forgot to remove all the bloopers and ruined takes before the premiere. I will admit that this sloppy mess severely clouded my opinion of Noro well before I even hit the half-way mark (I debated DNFing this book numerous times due to the total lack of editorial oversight, but stuck with it simply to kill time until the Tuesday release of another title I was highly anticipating), but given Gray’s slavish devotion to presenting familiar tropes in ways that have already been done to death it wouldn’t have been by much. This is a B-movie type of book given a D- presentation. On the bright side, I don’t expect I’ll ever have to read about glittens quite so frequently ever again.

Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman by Mallory O’Meara

Publication Date: Feb. 18, 2025 | Hanover Square Press | 384 pages

Imagine a film industry dominated by women. Directors, producers, screenwriters, and headlining stars — all women. This wasn’t just some Hollywood Barbie-like flight of fancy, but the reality of motion picture making as it was back in the silent film era of the 1910s and ‘20s. Back them, women were not just common place, but larger than life and in charge of damn near all of it. They were the heroes of the silver screen, leaping off horses and onto hijacked trains to punch out or shoot down the dastardly men robbing people blind, or celebrating bodily autonomy in dramas about abortion, sex, and women’s rights. These women were in front of and behind the camera, crafting stories for the predominately women audiences all across America to live vicariously through, in a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote and were mostly stuck in a life of housewifery.

The biggest star of the time was Helen Gibson, a former rodeo star who worked her way up from background actor to certified star — and Hollywood’s first stuntwoman. Ginger Rogers may have had to do everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in heels in the 1930s, but before that, Gibson was on film doing everything her male counterparts were doing onscreen without padding, wires, or safety harnesses. When she leapt off the back of a car — or out of an airplane — and onto a speeding train, or did a jump trick on a motorcycle over a flatbed car, she actually one hundred percent went for it, and oftentimes in a long dress that could get snagged on something and potentially kill her. She didn’t have the luxury of green screen and CGI, or even crash landing pads. There was only one shot at a stunt, because to mistime a leap wouldn’t just mean a ruined shot, but the loss of limb or life. Gibson was a bona fide action hero, a female Tom Cruise many decades before there was a Tom Cruise, performing one hair-raising stunt after another and constantly looking to raise the stakes with each outing as cars and airplanes were introduced and made staples of American life.

Gibson, and other women like her, ruled the box office for nearly two decades, and helped build Hollywood into the titan of industry it would become in The Golden Age…which was also the period in which control over film was wrestled away from women and turned into a massive boy’s only club. Mallory O’Meara explores these decades that paint the backdrop of Gibson’s life and career throughout Daughter of Daring, a wonderfully feminist exploration of Hollywood in its infancy and development of the studio system in the years following the First World War. O’Meara delivers a thoroughly researched accounting of women’s agency and it’s “women-made women” powerhouses in front of the camera and behind the scenes, as well as a terribly sobering examination of how the legacy of women in Hollywood was stolen out from under them by various cabals of jealous men and right-wing, white, Christian censorship boards looking to profit off everything these women built and completely strip them of their power and influence until they were mostly forgotten entirely.

O’Meara’s exploration of the growth and development of Hollywood as it became what we know it today is an intriguing, not to mention sobering, look at how things used to be, how far certain groups — namely women and minorities — have fallen, and how far we as a society have yet to go (and will likely have even that much further to go after a second ruinous term of the Trump administration and whatever his plans are for his recently announced three-man band of washed-up, racist, sexist misogynistic actors cum Hollywood Ambassadors confessing to Sean Hannity their longing to be spanked by daddy). Only a few days ago, the nominees for the 97th Academy Awards were announced with plenty of fanfare around Coralie Fargeat’s Best Director nod for the 2024 horror film, The Substance. That a horror film was able to garner five nominations from the notoriously stodgy and historically horror-averse Academy was something of a feat in and of itself, let alone a horror film helmed by a woman and centered around women. Demi Moore also earned a nomination for Best Actress, hot off the heels of her recent Golden Globes win. But Fargeat’s nomination is itself a pretty big deal, making her only the tenth woman in Oscar history to be recognized. To date, only three have actually won. Ten nominations and three wins. In 97 years. Ninety-seven years. Ninety-fucking-seven years!

The typical argument is that there’s so few women directors in Hollywood, and while true now, it’s also important to recognize that it wasn’t always like that! O’Meara does a fabulous job driving this point home throughout the course of Daughter of Daring, exploring and explaining how this atrocious inequity arose and became reinforced in the years following the suffrage movement. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to have gone from hundreds of silent films crafted by women to modern-day studios committing to, maybe, maybe, one women-lensed picture a year — maybe, you know, if they’re good, as a treat; to have gone from a period of such prestigious influence for women in the 1910s and ‘20s to the era of #MeToo a century later. One can’t help but look at the work of Helen Gibson, as recounted by O’Meara, and the women that helped make her career and shape Hollywood in its opening act, and think, sadly and wistfully, they really don’t make films like that anymore.