"Memory is a difficult thing to navigate, especially traumatic memory. It splinters. You can cut yourself on the edges of it so easily."
We're only two"Memory is a difficult thing to navigate, especially traumatic memory. It splinters. You can cut yourself on the edges of it so easily."
We're only two weeks into January & I've already read a contender for top book of 2023.
Fucking hell.
Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is a haunted house story unlike any other.
Endless gratitude to the deadly awesome folks at Tor Nightfire for sending me a copy!
Tell Me I'm Worthless comes out tomorrow, January 17th!
"How do you want me to treat your body?"
Exploring the horrors of fascism & trauma, this most definitely will not be for everyone--which is rad & cool & totally fine because not everything is!
However, please do check for content warnings, as there are many ⚠️
Tell Me I'm Worthless is brutal & fearless; raw & powerful; haunting & poetic; visceral & weird as fuck, in the absolute best way.
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns comes out January 10th, 2023.
Now, while I loved this debut... I certainly won't cross the picket line & will be holding backBad Cree by Jessica Johns comes out January 10th, 2023.
Now, while I loved this debut... I certainly won't cross the picket line & will be holding back a full review until Harper Collins comes to an agreement with their striking union members. It's been since November 10th--far too long!
Please make sure to follow HCP Union to keep updated on everything going on & consider ordering something through their BookShop, which donates a portion of the proceeds towards the cost of living for the HC union members, who are all forgoing pay while on strike.
*Monster Misunderstood By Catherine McCarthy *Scrying Eyes By Laurel Hightower *Between The CFull review to come, but until then--
My Personal Favorites:
*Monster Misunderstood By Catherine McCarthy *Scrying Eyes By Laurel Hightower *Between The Crosses, Row On Row By Venezia Castro *I Swear I Didn’t Kill the Others By Kelsea Yu *The Protest By Jeremy Robert Johnson *Eggshell By Gemma Amor...more
"I felt upside down these days. My life had been so regular, boring really, until all of this.For sure a top favorite of the year!
Review to come!
EDIT:
"I felt upside down these days. My life had been so regular, boring really, until all of this. I liked boring. I'd had plenty of not-boring when I'd been young, and I'd left not-boring far behind me, mainly anyway."
White Horse by Erika T. Wurth is a book that captured my whole entire heart...
& one that I couldn't possibly find the words to express properly how or why.
I finished it in a blissful sobbing fervor mess...
"Grief is funny. It teaches you things about yourself you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. For me, I learned that numbness doesn’t equal not3.5 Stars~
"Grief is funny. It teaches you things about yourself you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. For me, I learned that numbness doesn’t equal nothingness; that emptiness isn’t the absence of pain."
HUZZAH FOR SOME FIBROMYALGIA REP (ESPECIALLY IN HORROR!)...more
"Above, the castle sighs and shifts. Creaks, cracks, sound and movement as if with the passage of vast dark coils. The thing from Dinah’s dream is dow"Above, the castle sighs and shifts. Creaks, cracks, sound and movement as if with the passage of vast dark coils. The thing from Dinah’s dream is down here, too. It crawls up through the trapdoor.
I turn and run for the air, the light. I take the stairs three at a time. I race through the afternoon, drawing the clean air deep into my lungs. I do not stop until I see the bent tree like a black spider against the sea, until I catch the scent of broken pear flesh rotting on the ground, until I throw my arms about Dinah and feel the surprise run all the way through her."
Thanks to the radical folks at Tor Nightfire for sending me a gorgeous finished copy of Little Eve by Catriona Ward!
This haunting, gothic, fever-dream of a book takes place in a gloomy castle off the coast of Scotland on a tiny, isolated island.
Atmospherically alternating between the past & present and multiple stirring narratives, Little Eve tells of a series of brutal murders & a cult that has "found children from the sea."
Little Eve is a dark tale of trauma, grief & healing, twisting family & sisterhood throughout its core.
CW: Child abuse, animal abuse, rape, death, sexual assault, miscarriage, murder, violence, war, starvation, drugs....more
"Wings and claws burst through the opening to seize me. I screamed, struggling as the creatures pulled at my hair and tore me from the passageway into"Wings and claws burst through the opening to seize me. I screamed, struggling as the creatures pulled at my hair and tore me from the passageway into the living room, where they finally released me. Lifting my head, I covered my mouth, and my eyes widened with horror at the sight—a feeding frenzy."
We Can Never Leave This Place is the first Eric LaRocca that I've read, and it most definitely will not be the last!
Massive thanks to the inimitable Mother Horror for her consistent efforts to promote horror & getting this into my hands!
We Can Never Leave This Place comes out June 24th!
LaRocca's dark odyssey is compulsively brutal, viscerally squicky & weird as fuck. IN THE BEST WAY!!
What a gruesome little delight this is!
HOWEVER--
Please look up the trigger warnings, if needed, because HOO BOY there are plenty in this graphic, emotional novella!...more
"A peaceful morning. Birdsong and insect buzz. The sun struck the fields with an energizing light. Everything was going back to normal. She 3.5 Stars~
"A peaceful morning. Birdsong and insect buzz. The sun struck the fields with an energizing light. Everything was going back to normal. She was alive and loved and on her way to school. A single moment breaks the world. A thousand moments heal the wound. Every step took her closer in time to healing."
Craig DiLouie is a brilliant writer, someone that doesn't stick to any one genre. This is my third book that I've read of his, each one incredibly different. Our War, a dystopian thriller; The Children of Red Peak, a psychological thriller with cosmic horror elements; and One of Us, a dark SFF/horror hybrid.
One of Us is a haunting, nightmarish, absolutely *brutal* book about an incurable sexually transmitted disease which causes physical malformations & in some cases, even death. The survivors become known as "The Plague Generation" & are sent away to live in a Home, where they begin to manifest powers. Think X-Men meets The House in the Cerulean Sea, but less hopeful!
If you're planning on reading this, be aware there are many content warnings, including: prejudice, rape, sexual assault, ableism, hateful language, torture, violence.
I'm usually into the darker things as you know, but there was a scene near the end of this that even I had to set the book aside for a moment because it was just too much.
"She rips the machete free, lets her neck take the full weight of the cord while she slices up at it with the blade. Finally she connects, but it's a "She rips the machete free, lets her neck take the full weight of the cord while she slices up at it with the blade. Finally she connects, but it's a cable, not a rope. She strips the vinyl coating off, taking it down to metal, and is nearly dead now, her lips blue , her nose bleeding, eyes shot red, but then she swings wildly one more time, just manages to nick the rope right above the hook her cable's on. The close-up of the rope twines out for long moments, finally snaps. Izzy crashes to the floor gasping, coughing, not able to breathe. And then a lit lantern crashes onto the floor beside her, its flames breathing out for anything it can find. Izzy, still dry-heaving, looks up for what's next.
It's Billie Jean."
Stephen Graham Jones is such a prolific writer & I've barely scratched the surface of his work, but I'm trying!
I devoured The Last Final Girl in two sittings! It was a fuck ton of fun for the spoopy month of October!
This has:
*Dark humor *Stabby, gory, brutal kills *Dialogue-heavy storytelling *Hella horror references (it's even written like a script/shot list) *A killer that wears a Michael Jackson mask...more
There was an opportunity here for a haunting, horrific look at addiction--
The mother/son relationship was beautiful & I was feeling the story at firstThere was an opportunity here for a haunting, horrific look at addiction--
The mother/son relationship was beautiful & I was feeling the story at first--
But it didn't fully come together for me. It's one of those books that felt like it was crammed with a ton of horror content, yet something was missing. Clarity? Oomph?
There is much potential, in the way that it would have almost been more successful in a shorter format OR needing *more* to the story, extending the length.
This is wicked hard to review & I'm struggling to make sense, so I'm going to leave it at that.
As always, YMMV!
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy!...more
Holly (The GrimDragon)
>
Books:
horror-mystery-thriller
(745)
Loading...
