Spooky Jo

This Skin was Once Mine

What’s the book? This Skin was Once Mine by Eric LaRocca

How dark is it? entirely centered on disturbing abuse and body horror

How good is it? 3/10 open wounds

LaRocca gets compared to Clive Barker, it’s right there on the cover, and I can see why. Last century, when I was young, Stephen King and Dean Koontz were the giants of horror but I always preferred Barker’s sensibility. I loved his short stories and was a big fan of Hellraiser. LaRocca shares a certain love of eroticized body horror with Barker. LaRocca also seems to be building on Barker’s queer sensibility, bringing queerness more openly into their stories. But where Barker brought depth and nuance to, say, Pinhead and the cenobytes, making them compelling and even sympathetic in the midst of their worst excesses, LaRocca can’t seem to bring that same depth to their stories. It’s a shame; I’d love to see a true successor to Barker.

This is a collection of four stories, all built around various images or tableaux: an enormous pyre built of fine furniture, a woman meeting a warped and stunted reflection of herself, a father and son literally exploring their shared wounds, a gleaming shard of glass poking out of someone’s skin, an old man choking a baby with a small stone. These tableaux are exquisitely disturbing and often steeped in eroticized body horror. The images at the heart of these stories pull no punches and they’re brilliant in their bloody way.

Everything else about these stories is pretty bad, though. LaRocca seems to have no idea what kind of characters would end up in these awful scenarios or how they’d get to and from them, so everything surrounding each tableau is pretty thin and sometimes nonsensical.

Sometimes the badness is logistical issues that completely pull me out of a story: the story will shift locations with no transition, or a character who can barely walk will suddenly stab the hero and manage to drag her up several flights of stairs and down a ladder. Or a character claims that his stab wounds full of glass never get infected because he carefully removes the glass each night and reinserts it every morning. I’m no doctor but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t help anything. Also, that same story features a guy walking into the store for a knife to cook with and walking out with a gold-handled jewel-encrusted bit of ridiculousness and nobody ever thinks this is dumb. Have you ever seen a Top Chef whip out a jewel-encrusted knife? Damascus steel, yes, jewels you can’t clean chicken juice off of, no. Without including a bunch more spoilers, there are a lot of dubious and impossible moments for a book this short and many times it was bad enough to detract from the atmosphere if not outright ruin it.

Some of the badness is very thin flat characters. Even when we follow a character’s thoughts we don’t really get any insight into who they are as people beyond the one issue in the story. The best example is the protagonist of the third story, All the Parts of You that Won’t Easily Burn. We spend page after page in this guy’s head but all he ever does is obsess about how erotic it is to cut yourself and put glass in the wounds. There are slight hints that before his marriage he was interested in self-mutilation or some sort of pain play but we never find out why or why he stopped. In fact, in spite of living in his head with him we find out almost nothing about this guy even as he goes from “fine, I’ll try this one little thing” to some fullblown crazy murderous stuff over the course of a couple of days. This flatness is pretty much true of every character. There’s no real rhyme or reason to most of their actions because the characters don’t matter, only the central tableau LaRocca’s rushing to set up.

Maybe the thin characters and nonsensical details are supposed to add to the surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, but if that’s the case I’d like them even less developed. Go all in on the metaphor and allegory instead of dwelling on the characters and plotting at all. What we get here is the worst of both worlds–the characters aren’t relatable and storytelling is sketchy nonsense but the exquisite horror of the central images doesn’t quite hit that emotional center that a good symbol or metaphor does. None of it quite hits right.

LaRocca also, in their desire to be evocative and poetic with their language, makes odd and distracting word choices. People keep glaring when they’re not angry or simpering when nobody’s looking, or using phrases like “all too inherent” in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. It feels like they’re plugging in synonyms from a thesaurus with no idea whether they actually fit where they’re putting them. If I were really invested in the stories I would have overlooked this almost unconsciously; it bothered me because I was already having trouble immersing myself in the horror.

It was all so frustrating because this author does have a gift for evocative imagery and the body horror in this is gutsy and creative, but everything else about these stories is so shitty. This author has written several novels but I’m not sure I could force my way through them. I’ll probably just rummage through used books for Clive Barker’s old stuff.

American Afterlives: a Review

What’s the book? American Afterlives by Shannon Lee Dawdy

How dark is it? very light for a book about funerals

How good is it? 3/10 tasteful urns

This is the latest Morbidly Curious selection and I was relieved to find that it isn’t deeply depressing and Very Very Important. I’ve got a lot going on and I’m depressed enough without another socially important but tragic selection on my list. I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped but at least it wasn’t depressing. Not for me, anyway.

This author writes the way I talk when I’m drunk, wandering between subjects and time periods according to her own obscure internal logic. Dawdy tries to show us a little bit of everything–traditional funerals, modern alternatives, the history of practices like embalming and headstone decor–but in trying to show us everything she doesn’t explore anything very deeply. I was excited for this book and the superficial treatment left me disappointed.

The introduction, which took nearly a quarter of the book’s length, promised a lot. Way too much for the rest of this short book to deliver. Apparently this book is largely based on material originally destined for a documentary and at times this shows. Dawdy will spend several paragraphs talking about being wrapped in a shroud or describing an interview subject’s home and then skimp on the details of actual funeral preparations or the mechanics of embalming. At times it was charming and many of her subjects probably would be interesting on camera but I don’t want to read a book describing what the documentary would have been like. I want to read about my new and exciting death care options, preferably in detail, and instead I got a lot of breezy anecdotes about the colorful characters the industry attracts. The photographs included in the book had this odd feel, too, being mostly emotive stills from the film footage that were only sometimes interesting and informative.

If you’ve avoided thinking about your own funeral and want to be more comfortable with death and its trappings, this might be a nice introduction. You’ll find out a little about everything from green burial to composting to having your ashes turned into a brilliant fireworks display, with a little discussion about changing attitudes toward death. If you’ve ever followed ‘death positive’ content or you like the darker side of history, you might not find much new here. It didn’t occur to me that I’d gone past ‘Death 101’ but apparently I have. I wouldn’t consider myself extremely interested in funeral practices but I was familiar with most of the topics covered. I picked up a few nuggets here and there but the book was largely a retread for me.

Still, I’ve read worse books. This was a quick and easy read even if it did wander off on way too many tangents. The author’s philosophical ramblings about the American approach to death left me cold but again, if you’ve never thought about the subject it might be a soft introduction for you.

Immortal Dark: a Review

What’s the book? Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma

How dark is it? Really dark. Drenched in blood.

How good is it? 7/10 fangs

Kidan Adane hates vampires. In the year since her sister, June, was kidnapped Kidan has come to hate one vampire in particular. She hates Susenyos Sagad with the heat of ten thousand suns but to find out what happened to her sister, Kidan has to share a house with this monster.

In ancient times, a powerful sage made a magical pact that bound all vampires to only feed from eighty families. Kidan’s family is one of them. Since her sister disappeared Kidan is actually the potential heir to House Adane but if she becomes unable to inherit, Susenyos Sagad will inherit the family fortune and, quite literally, their house.

The Adanes are founding members of Uxlay University, which is more of a magically closed community than a regular university. In order to inherit her family’s legacy, she has to go live at Uxlay and pass a class certifying her as a vampire companion. When she accepts this challenge, her main plan is to force Susenyos to tell her where June is and then kill him. Inheritance be damned. Once Sagad is dead and her sister is avenged, Kidan can happily leave all this vampire nonsense behind.

The book kind of stalls here for about two hundred pages, with Kidan and Susenyos trying very hard to kill each other but also feeling deeply and strangely attracted to one another. There were hints of conspiracy and intrigue but they were largely unexplored as our two rivals focused on each other. I got bored and frustrated. It was painfully obvious that Susenyos did not kidnap June at all but Kidan couldn’t accept that and they just kept trying to kill each other anyway. I got really worried this would turn into some bullshit romantasy reeking of wasted potential. I like romance but I get bored fast when hotness and sexual chemistry are the only things the love interests have in common.

I also had some issues believing in this “university” where we only see Kidan take a couple of classes, the main one being a “philosophy” class with only one set of correct answers. At times it felt like cheap pandering to the Dark Academia crowd. (Don’t get me wrong, I love dark academia but I don’t love weak crap that sells just because of a label.) Kidan has to pass this class, the answers are set in stone and they’ve been that way for generations, her friends in the class have powerful families hoping they’ll pass, and no one just tells these kids the answers? Riiiiiight.

Still, I actually ended up liking this book quite a bit.

About halfway through the story started to really pick up steam. The intrigue really got going, Kidan and Susenyos created a weird alliance that actually became interesting, and there were some real surprises near the end that got me excited for the sequel. Kidan becomes more interesting and likeable as she wrestles with and somewhat embraces her fierce nature, her friends from “philosophy” class become more interesting and integral to the plot, and Susenyos turns out to have a cool backstory. Also, we finally start figuring out what actually happened to June. All of this was action-packed and got me invested in this world.

I’m glad the world building and plot picked up because I loved the aesthetic of this book from the very beginning, even while I hated Kidan and the stalled plot. The Ethiopian vampire thing totally worked for me. Taking the classic debauched decadence of your basic European vampire and steeping it in African history and mythology gives this vampire world a richness and sense of deep time I enjoyed. And of course a world of African vampires is full of beautiful braids and locs and afro puffs, silky mahogany skin and rich dark eyes. Girma does a great job creating a sumptuous and sexy world that, as the story finally gets going, is as dark and complex as any vampire lore I’ve read and features lovingly rendered African characters in a powerful story. If they ever make a streaming series out of this I would put it on my watchlist, for sure.

If you have a high tolerance for romantasy and ‘enemies to lovers’ tropes, you should definitely check this out. If your tolerance is lower, like mine, I think it’s still worth your time. Even in the draggy first half there’s some moral darkness and shocking behavior and the aesthetic is rich and luxurious. I like where the worldbuilding seems headed and I hope the sequels flesh that out in interesting ways. Uxlay University is made up of only a dozen of those eighty families bound to vampires and we get some tantalizing hints about what other families and groups of vampires might be up to. I hope the intrigue deepens.

The Fisherman: a Review

This review first appeared on our Substack in 2025 and now we’re reprinting it here for your enjoyment.

Let’s talk about The Fisherman by John Langan

This one’s gonna stick with me. This is more in the vein of weird fiction than typical horror, with the main characters encountering truly mythic forces and being scarred and sometimes warped by them. There is some blood and terror but it’s more the ponderous weight of nature and myth that have stayed with me. Most of the novel is told by old men, the kind that “once caught a fish as big as you!” It’s an unbelievable set of tales, surely exaggerated or maybe entirely made up, but these fish stories are told with such intensity and deadly earnest . . .

This is a slowish story, focused on atmosphere and emotion instead of action or gore. It spends a lot of time on the characters’ ordinary lives and that can be a touch slow. The book builds up to a dramatic climax but it’s more emotional and mythical than action-packed. If you’re looking for something fast and exciting or chock full of gore, this will bore you to tears. If you’re a more patient reader, one who will follow as the layers of the story build and can let the heavy waves roll over you, you’ll be rewarded with a powerful reading experience.

The Fisherman is narrated by Abe, an aging widower. Shortly after they married, Abe’s wife found out she had cancer. When she died tragically young, Abe fell apart as he mourned both the love of his life and the future they’d planned to build together. After months of drinking and unrelenting pain he took up fishing, almost on a whim. It gave him something to do, something to focus on, and eventually those quiet moments in nature gave him the sense that his wife’s spirit might be looking down on him. It wasn’t a dramatic change but in a very real way, fishing saved his life.

Years later, when his coworker Dan loses his wife and sons in a gruesome car accident, Abe invites him fishing. Abe wants to help this broken man but he’s not sure what else to offer but this quiet companionship and something to fill Dan’s hours. They become fishing buddies and it seems, for a while at least, to ease Dan’s grief. Then fishing season ends and Dan begins to fall apart again, hard. Dan’s family tries to keep him occupied, tries to give comfort, and Abe even invites him to dinner once or twice, but nothing seems to pull Dan out of his spiral.

Abe is surprised when once again, come fishing season, Dan wants to come with. Dan even suggests a new stream, Dutchman’s Creek, way up in the Catskills near the reservoir. Eager to help his friend, Abe agrees to check it out with him.

Here follows a story within the story, one that goes back to the building of the reservoir and beyond, involving black magic and mythical forces and the attempts of desperate men to bring back wives lost to the great beyond. Eventually we’re brought back to the present day to see Abe and Dan have their own brush with these same mythical forces, with harrowing consequences. There are moments of blood and horror in both stories, present and past, but more important is the heavy atmosphere created by the weight of grief and the immensity of the netherworld pressing against our own. The build up is slow but the payoff is worth the work to get there.

You’ve probably noticed already the deep river of grief that runs through the book, especially grief at the loss of a wife. Abe’s wife is dead, Dan’s wife is dead, several characters in the story within the story lose their wives to various tragedies. This is a story about men, a deeply male-centered and masculine story about love and grief. Especially as seen and lived through Abe’s eyes, it feels like a deep and compassionate look into the emotional lives of men. Pretty much every man in the story holds his emotions behind that traditional facade of stoic strength, and while it protects them and their families it also separates them and in the worst cases it blocks up all that grief and pain until it breaks the man trying to contain it. Looking so deeply into their inner lives made all these men feel real and relatable, even when some of them resorted to desperate and even horrific measures.

I’m acutely aware of the mountains of books written by, for, and about men and sometimes I wonder how many more we could possibly need. This one, though, I’m glad I read. I absolutely was thrilled by the deep cosmic horror and lovingly detailed monsters and madness; I absolutely was moved by the powerful emotions and difficult decisions faced by Abe and the other men in this story. It felt like an illuminating mix of traditional manly tales with a new, softer understanding of the hearts behind their stoic facades. This book, on many levels, felt like a glimpse of something vast and fascinating. It had a weight that will be with me for a long time to come.

We Used to Live Here

What’s the book? We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

How dark is it? Dark grey. Or is it sky blue? I could swear it was a different color last time I looked . . .

How good is it? 8/10 cryptic ciphers

This one was a nailbiter. I was fully invested from the beginning, excited even when the book made me learn Morse code and painstakingly type Norwegian phrases into Google translate. It singlehandedly restored my faith in the annoying device of interspersing minichapters of newsclips and police reports between stretches of narrative. Quite a feat for a story that spends so much time being aggressively normal.

Eve and her partner Charlie are fixing up a house, hoping to flip it. It’s more of a wreck than they’d first thought but it was a great deal and once they’re done it would make a great vacation home or rental property, surrounded by beautiful forest at the end of a winding little mountain lane.

It’s a Friday night and Eve is waiting for Charlie to get home with groceries and wine for a cozy night in when a family knocks on the door. Father, mother, three kids, all very clean cut and well dressed and sheepish as they ask for a look around. Thomas, the father, lived here as a kid and he’d really like to show his kids where he grew up. They’ll be fast, they promise.

As soon as they step through the door, everything slowly starts to get weird. The thing is, the weirdness is so fleeting at first, such tiny moments in an otherwise normal chain of events, it’s easy for Eve to think she’s just being paranoid. After all, she does have massive anxiety problems. She is prone to catastrophizing and getting caught in anxiety spirals. Charlie isn’t phased by any of it. It’s probably all just in Eve’s head. Sure, the basement is surprisingly full of mazelike corridors, but it’s an old house with a lot of DIY renovations. Sure, the attic is creepy, but what attic isn’t? Sure, Thomas had that weird moment out in the yard but he seems normal enough now . . .

By the time Eve decides it’s not just her, there’s definitely something creepy happening and even if she is just going crazy she wants this family gone and honestly, they should probably just abandon the house and get out of town altogether, it’s way too late. Eve’s neck deep in this twisted new reality and can’t seem to find a way out.

This book does have some gore at the end but most of the horror is of the mindbending altered reality type. The buildup is admirably slow and suspenseful and even as we get to the end, it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on and why, mostly because we’re tied to Eve’s perspective and she has very little chance to puzzle any of it out as she tries to claw her way back to her old life, her simple life before this family darkened her doorstep.

The minichapters are highly effective at enhancing the suspense and weirdness. Often, this kind of interleaving is made up of “documents” that bear directly on the mystery unfolding but in this book, they’re mostly snippets of other weird time slips and stories of other people waking up to find reality had changed around them. A kid explores a haunted house on a dare from friends and walks out to find that none of those friends exist anymore. An old house in the Pacific Northwest is inexplicably surrounded by plants native to other parts of the world. Someone looks for an off-brand monkey toy only to be told that toy and that company never existed, it’s just an internet hoax, but this exact monkey was Eve’s favorite toy as a child. Whaaaaat? These little snippets are our only clues to the big picture and they are maddeningly vague and incomplete. And occasionally in Morse code or Norwegian. I loved it.

To be fair, none of that larger mystery wraps up nicely at all. It’s got a very creepypasta dream logic vibe to it that can be maddeningly random for some people. I might be uniquely creeped out by well done dream logic–it’s one of the only things that genuinely freaks me out so this is the first book that’s spooked me in a long time.

If you like your horror straightforward and full of blood, this will be disappointing for you. If you’re in it for slow burns and deep character development this might also be disappointing for you. But if you like little puzzles that make you question reality, I highly recommend this one. It was a lot of fun.

The Atrocity Archives

This review was first published on our Substack in 2025. Now we’re reprinting it here. Enjoy . . .

Let’s talk about The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. My husband gave me this for Christmas, presumably because it looked interesting and possibly full of nameless horrors. He knows I like nameless horrors.

This book is actually a shortish novel followed by a longish short story. They’re both about the same guy, Bob Howard, who works for the “Laundry.” The Laundry is a super secret British security/spy operation dealing with supernatural and otherworldly threats. Bob is an IT guy/hacker looking to break into field work, hoping that will be more exciting than hex-proofing people’s computers and updating software. Once he gets his big break, Bob finds that field work is even more exciting and also more terrifying and tragic than he thought it would be.

The first story introduces Bob and some of his coworkers as they do some minor spying, attend meetings, and do some training, and then follows Bob as he gets mixed up in events far above his pay grade. The major incident involves some remnants of Nazi occult research that created some dangerous and unstable connections to other dimensions. Bob ends up having to actually enter one of these dimensions to help resolve the crisis. It’s pretty thrilling and actually quite creepy and sad in parts. (Unsurprisingly, the Nazi occult experiments in Bob’s universe were just as brutal and gruesome as their less occult experiments in the real world.)

The second story sees Bob working in a different department of the Laundry, with a different boss. But he also still works IT (there’s a real shortage of computer savvy at the Laundry) so his old bosses also make demands on his time and now nobody’s sure who pays him for what projects. Is this a promotion? Who knows? Between IT tasks, Bob’s new boss sends him to Milton Keynes to solve what everyone hopes is a minor problem. It turns out not to be a minor problem at all–someone has hacked into England’s extensive network of surveillance cameras and can now use them to burn basically anyone to a crisp. Bob, still fairly new to field work, suddenly has to find the hackers and stop them before he’s burned to a crisp himself. In spite of the dark themes here, this second story is actually a bit lighter and funnier than the first. Go figure.

This book plays heavily with H.P Lovecraft’s ideas of “strange geometries” opening gateways to other worlds filled with malignant monsters. In this universe, summoning demons and monsters has as much to do with math and physics as it does with magic or religion. I find Stross’s mixture of science fiction, horror, and spy novel thrills pretty exciting. It’s a clever combination and he does it well.

My copy of the book (and maybe all copies?) has a very long afterword that, in part, talks about the crossover between spy novels and horror. Lovecraft’s characters, in particular, were often scientists and explorers searching for clues about the eldritch horrors visiting us. Conversely, spy novels during the Cold War were set against the very real threat of nuclear apocalypse, giving them a background of Lovecraftian existential horror. It’s an interesting perspective and it suddenly makes me want more horror/spy thriller mashups.

In the very long afterword, Stross also mentions British spy novelist Len Deighton as an influence. I went out and bought a Deighton book (The Ipcress File, if you’re interested) and though I didn’t particularly enjoy it I totally see what he’s talking about. Deighton’s spies are written as very ordinary working stiffs, worried as much about how to stretch their very small (and often late) paychecks as they are about action and world events. They’re kind of the opposite of James Bond’s suave persona. In Stross’s book, Bob and his coworkers are written the same way. Bob has as much trouble with office politics as he does with secret Nazi files and death rays. It makes the characters relatable and fun even in the midst of epic horror-filled drama. On the down side, Stross also imitates Deighton in being a bit long winded at times and sometimes getting the mix wrong (for me, anyway) between workaday side business and cool action and monsters. Still, the creative blending of genres and moments of great horror and drama were worth it.

The Atrocity Archives is, of course, the first in a long series of Laundry books. This is often the case with both horror and spy thrillers, so I was expecting that. I liked this first one enough that I’m sure I’ll eventually pick up the next in the series, though both stories had strong solid endings so they’re fine as a stand-alone work. Still, if you’ve read the next story or two, do tell me how they are. I’d love to know.

White Trash Zombie Unchained: a Review

What’s the book? White Trash Zombie Unchained by Diana Rowland

How dark is it? bloody pink like fresh brains. More funny than dark.

How is it? 5/10 alligator teeth

I accidentally picked up the sixth book in the White Trash Zombie series without reading the first five. It was fine, everything was pretty well explained and I understood what was going on. In fact, things were so well explained that I might have been rolling my eyes if I had read the first five, groaning “I know this already, get to the new stuff!” It’s hard to say. But I liked this well enough that I might eventually read all the previous books; if I do, I’ll have a more solid opinion on the level of explanation these books involve.

Anyway, Angel is a zombie and also self-described white trash but by the time this book starts she’s starting to get her life together. She’s got a good job as a morgue tech, friends both zombie and human, and she’s taking a couple of classes at the community college. Seems like she’s currently balancing a human-style life with a job and school while also doing more secret work for the zombie tribe she belongs to. There’s a lot of back story to this secret work, but the book explains all the relevant bits when they come up.

This is one of those “zombies are just like humans except they’re indestructible and have weird eating habits” books, and the central problem in Unchained is a sudden outbreak of mindless shambling zombie-ism. In order to combat it, the zombie tribe brings in the brilliant but evil Doctor Kristi Charish. This does not go well for anyone. Secrets are revealed, betrayal happens, people die. But the zombie alligators, who are adorable and important to the plot, end up fine.

Unchained was a solid adventure with lots of humor, much in the style of iZombie or Santa Clarita Diet; I enjoy zombie romps and this was a nice working class Louisiana-flavored twist on the theme. It also made me miss the easy mass market vibes of my younger years, back when genre novels had no pressure to be important or literary. Don’t get me wrong, I love that genre fiction is getting respect and attention and it’s really spurred authors to deepen their characters and tackle some interesting themes. But sometimes it’s nice to just escape into a good story without it having to mean anything and I didn’t know how much I missed that until I picked up a book that did just that. Just fun characters, an exciting story, humor and just a touch of zombie gore. Yeah, it was good.

The Moonstone

This review first appeared on Substack back in 2025, before we started publishing over here. It was written by me. Enjoy.

Let’s talk about The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I got this from the Barnes & Noble classics shelves at some point (but you can also read it free from Project Gutenberg). I’d enjoyed The Woman in White, his most famous book (or the one that makes all the gothic literature lists) and decided to try another one.

I’ve got to be honest, The Moonstone is not that dark. On a scale from powder puff pink to the alarming maroon of dried blood, The Moonstone is at worst a lovely blush rose. It is, however, an early forerunner of the modern cozy mystery novel. It features a possibly cursed and definitely valuable diamond (the moonstone of the title), an English country estate, several good suspects, brandy spiked with opium, and the weary but keen-witted Sergeant Cuff. It’s an entertaining story even if there is only a single death involved.

The story starts in India, where the moonstone is stolen by Colonel Herncastle during the Siege of Seringapatam. (That was a real battle, by the way. Collins did some real research for this novel.) Herncastle steals the moonstone from the local temple, killing the people guarding it, and then he doesn’t really know what to do with it. He keeps it a secret for years, afraid the Indians will find it and steal it back, and upon his death he leaves the moonstone to his niece Rachel as a birthday present.

A family friend, Franklin Blake, offers to deliver it to Rachel at her home in the countryside. It turns out Herncastle is right about the Indians; three of them are hot on Franklin’s trail, looking to intercept the moonstone and take it home.

At this point, I was afraid the Indians would turn out to be the villains. This novel was written in 1868, so I started bracing for some racist colonialist nonsense to pour forth. I was surprised and delighted when that didn’t happen. I mean, we don’t get any serious anti-colonialism and it’s definitely not an informed or nuanced take on Indian culture. It’s still kinda racist. But the Indians are not the villains, and when they finally manage to steal the moonstone away from the real villain and take it home, this is presented as a just and happy ending. Good for Collins, being somewhat less imperialist than most. Polite Victorian hand clap for him.

Anyway, even though the story begins and ends in India the main mystery is focused on the guests and staff at Rachel’s birthday party. She wears the moonstone for her party, stores it for the night in a drawer in her sitting room, and wakes up to find it gone. Franklin, who by now is infatuated with Rachel and eager to give any help he can with this mystery, gets the renowned Sergeant Cuff to come out and investigate.

In a surprising twist, Cuff gets sent away before fully solving the mystery. To everyone’s surprise, Rachel is thoroughly uncooperative with the investigation and furious with Franklin for dragging it out. Cuff is making progress but keeps being blocked by Rachel, and eventually Rachel’s mother just pays him and sends him away, afraid of upsetting her daughter further. It’s her diamond; if she doesn’t want to find it her mom’s not going to force her.

I’ll stop short of telling you the entire plot. You can look it up on Wikipedia, anyway. Let’s just say there are several twists and turns before we get to the end and it turns out Cuff really did figure out the likely culprit before everyone else did.

The story is told through a series of witness statements and diary entries, gathered by Franklin Blake from various people involved. When Rachel had Cuff fired, she also broke up with Franklin and stopped speaking to him, but he’s still determined to solve the mystery for her. Most of the narrators, from the amusing Betteredge to the self-righteous religious nut Miss Clack to the sad and mysterious Ezra Jennings, have their own distinct voices and backstories. It was fun to read the story through their eyes and watch it unfold from different angles. I also enjoyed Cuff, who was great at solving mysteries but kind of disillusioned about human nature; he eventually retired to become an obsessive rose gardener, which feels to me like a very English thing to do.

Cozy mysteries have become a huge genre, and you can see many of their features developing here. It’s got a lot of twists and turns without being particularly scary and as I said at the top, only one person dies. The Moonstone reminds me why I read so many older novels. Many of them are quite good once you’re used to the older language and writing style, and it’s so interesting to see where our modern tropes and genres were born.

The Twisted Thing: a Review

What’s the book? The Twisted Thing by Mickey Spillane

How dark is it? Super dark purply-black like a black eye

How good is it? 7/10 gut punches

This is a Mike Hammer mystery. I had heard of Hammer and knew he was one of the classic hard-boiled detective characters. I pictured him vaguely as one of those tough talking film noir characters. Back in the day, Mike Hammer mysteries were wildly popular, maybe the most popular of hard-boiled detective stories. Which makes sense, because Hammer is the most over-the-top hard-boiled detective I’ve ever encountered. He’s completely ridiculous but also utterly awesome.

This book starts with Hammer beating up a crooked cop and only gets more violent from there. Hammer is huge and angry and kinda looking for excuses to pull out his gun. (Which he constantly calls his “rod” because he’s super hard-boiled and unbothered by metaphor.) He will punch a dude for the smallest of reasons, and this is treated as more heroic than psychotic. Hammer is also irresistible to the ladies and always lookin’ to get laid. He’s chock full of film noir slang and old school outlaw masculinity.

He’s almost an offensive caricature of a hard-boiled detective, and the whole book is full of vaguely offensive stereotypes and stock characters: the ex-con trying to make good, the former sex worker hiding her past from her employer, the murderous lesbian with masculine vibes, the boy genius who’s emotionally stunted, the cop on the take, the casino owner with mob ties . . . every character is so over the top it’s actually hard for me to be upset about it because none of it feels serious. If you think about this story for even one second it gets pretty silly.

But Mickey Spillane’s writing is so tight and gripping that I didn’t have one second to think about how ridiculous it all was. It was thoroughly fun to watch Hammer punching twits in the face, sneaking around in dumbwaiters, swimming through freezing water to find the bad guy’s escape route. This story is all plot all the time and I couldn’t help but enjoy it. I was way more excited by reading Hammer’s adventures than I was by any of the other hard-boiled classics I’ve read.

If you’re looking for something classy, I doubt Hammer’s what you’re looking for. Stick to P.D. James or Agatha Christie or, if you’re in a noir mood, maybe Raymond Chandler. If you want action and the hardest of hard-boiled insanity, this is the detective for you.

Madness: a Review

What’s the book? Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

How dark is it? Dark like a hospital without enough windows

How good is it? 8/10 emotionally, 5/10 as a history

This month’s Morbidly Curious Book Club selection was Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. It’s centered on the Crownsville hospital, built as a mental institution for Maryland’s black residents back in the days when the state was still segregated. It is an astounding coincidence that I spent part of my childhood in a town not far from this hospital and never knew it was there. Google maps tells me it’s a fifteen minute drive from the house I grew up in. I have clear memories of a few of the places talked about in this book. I haven’t lived in Maryland since last century but I have siblings in and around Baltimore. As I said, this is all just a big coincidence and I didn’t choose this book myself but knowing the area gave me an added layer of interest and an emotional connection I hadn’t expected. On top of that connection, I also spent several years doing housekeeping for a mental hospital when I was younger. Ever since then I’ve had a small personal interest in the history of mental health treatment and the thorny issues of institutionalization. Because of all that, I’m not sure I can be objective about this book. I found it fascinating and emotionally compelling, but how could I not?

This book is a history of the Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland, built in 1911 as the only mental health facility serving black people back when the state was still segregated. It’s a history of that hospital but it also uses Crownsville’s history as the starting point for a larger discussion about race and the mental health system in the U.S., focused on how it serves (and too often fails to serve) black Americans. It relies heavily on interviews with former patients and staff, oral history, and personal interactions the author’s family has had with the mental health system.

As a history, it’s not the best. Crownsville’s records are spotty for various reasons so putting together a thorough history is already a tall order, and Hylton hits a lot of major themes in the history of mental health care but she isn’t even trying to be thorough with that. She jumps around a bit between places and time periods, which made it hard to form an orderly timeline or historical picture as I read. Hylton also comes at this history without any special understanding of mental health so she sensibly avoids deep discussion about treatment philosophies and challenges, especially in the time before drug treatments became common. I find that kind of discussion fascinating and I felt the lack of it, but it’s fair that Hylton’s interest lies elsewhere.

Hylton’s interest centers more around broad historical and political trends and personal experiences. Most of the stories, especially as she talks about the sweep of history beyond Crownsville, are chosen more for theme and emotional resonance than historical completeness.

This book absolutely excels on the ‘theme and emotional resonance’ front, though. Hylton clearly wants to open our eyes to two facts: one, that the larger background of racial tension and discrimination can complicate and contribute to mental health struggles for individual black folks and two, that those struggles are made worse by the very good reasons those black folks have to distrust the mental health care system. By focusing deeply on personal stories of former patients of the Crownsville hospital and of many caring but under-resourced employees, Hylton really drives those facts home in a compelling way.

Now that I’ve highly recommended this specific book, I’d like to say a few words about my general book club experience so far. This is the third pick I’ve received from this book club and I’m beginning to worry that it’s actually the Very Important Issues book club that wants to justify its darkness by making sure each book I receive teaches me deep and important lessons. I don’t need my totally voluntary book club to apologize for liking morbid topics or make up for its darkness by acting very very virtuous. I enjoyed this book and I do think it’s very very virtuous and very very important, but I do hope this club sends the occasional book that’s just darkly historical and entertaining.