fiction – Page 2 – Darker Books

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.

The Glowing Hours: a Review

What’s the book? The Glowing Hours by Leila Siddiqui

How dark is it? Dark like a cloudy day. Also very trippy.

How good is it? 4/10 ghosts from the past

Be warned right now that spoilers abound. The last fifteen pages of this book changed how I thought of everything that came before so I can’t really review it fairly without explaining a lot of the plot. That said, here we go!

Mehrunissa Begum is the granddaughter of the Nawab of Lucknow. She’s basically a princess and she will not let us forget it. Mehrunissa Begum, Mehr for short, is also half British on her father’s side but when her British father left her mother he only took his son with him. Mehr and her mom were left in Lucknow with her uncle. They never saw him again.

Still, according to Mehr it was a wonderful life right up through her early adulthood, living in the zenana (the secluded women’s wing of her uncle’s estate) and waiting to be married off. There are a few hints that things weren’t as idyllic as Mehr remembers but we’re left to trust her story until the very end of the book. As far as we’re told, Mehr’s troubles began when her mother died and Mehr’s uncle insisted she deliver her brother’s inheritance in person, by hand. That meant a trip to England.

When she got off the ship in London, Mehr’s brother was not there to meet her. Instead, there was a lady from a ‘home for Indian women’ sent to take her in. The ‘home’ was a charity of sorts that took in Indian nursemaids out of work and found new jobs for them. After weeks and weeks with no word at all from her brother and no help from her uncle, Mehr has to train as a maid to earn money for the trip back to Lucknow. This work is beneath a princess like Mehr and she’s very very clear on that point, but she’s desperate to get home.

Who’s going to take in a maid with no experience and a huge superiority complex? Mary Shelley, that’s who. That’s right, Mehr goes to work for the famous writer of Frankenstein and her famous poet boyfriend/husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Only Mary hasn’t written Frankenstein yet–we’re about to watch Mehr accompany them on the famous summer trip that inspires that novel.

The first half of this book is taken up by Mehr judging the hell out of the Shelleys and their friends. Mehr herself is an insufferable snob (and a terrible maid) but the Shelleys are also pretty terrible. So is Mary’s sister Claire. Lord Byron is even worse. Byron’s personal doctor, John Polidori, is only barely less terrible than the rest. This is probably pretty historically accurate; all of their terribleness is heavily based on the actual lives of all these people. They were mostly very troubled, very into free love peppered with extreme relationship drama, and probably none too mentally healthy. This book puts it in the most unflattering light possible but it’s not a completely unfair take on these authors’ personal lives.

From the beginning, Mehr takes a shine to Mary Shelley. Mary is depicted as spineless and barely there for almost the entire novel, so it’s not clear at all why Mehr likes her. They’re not really friends and Mary’s not especially nice to her or interested in her. In fact, Mary’s barely interested in anything. There’s some implication that Mehr is sexually attracted to Mary, so maybe that’s all there is to it. Percy’s a jerk and Mary’s hot, so maybe Mehr wants to sweep her away from all this? Could be, but this possibility is just barely explored and doesn’t really go anywhere.

In the second half of the book all these terrible people (including Mehr) and a handful of not-so-terrible house staff are trapped in a weird nightmare full of ghosts and possibly vampires. They’re literally trapped in a villa by the lake, unable to leave, becoming sicker and more confused as time wears on. Mehr and Polidori both have their theories about the haunting but they both think each other’s theories are stupid. Mehr thinks she’s the only one not being haunted only to find out the secret room she’s been enjoying is actually chock full of ghosts. This part is weird and full of spooky images, only everyone is so terrible it’s hard to care what happens to them. The haunting also has very little buildup, going from “maybe it was just a nightmare” to “all ghosts all the time” nearly instantly so there’s no delicious suspense building or anything like that.

So far, the entire book is watching people be terrible, then watching them be terrible and also haunted. I was irritated the whole time. I don’t know what I expected from this book but this was a painful slog I hadn’t prepared myself for.

Then it got worse. Suddenly, in the last forty pages or so, the weird haunting became a weird mystery. We suddenly find that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron have kidnapped Mehr’s brother and hidden him in an unused room in the cellar. No, they didn’t kidnap him months ago when he was failing to reach out to Mehr. They kidnapped him a couple weeks ago in an elaborate plot to make him sign over his new inheritance. (Even though they’re not really sure what he’s inheriting or how much it’s worth.)

That’s right, the two greatest poets of the Romantic era are bumbling schemers out for a quick payday. Mehr figures this out and a stand off ensues, first with Lord Byron threatening to shoot either Mehr or her brother if he doesn’t get that money, then with Byron and Percy fighting over who deserves the stolen inheritance more. This plot twist was sudden and ridiculous and made me actively mad.

Then it got one shade more ridiculous. You might be wondering how a ridiculous kidnapping plot resulted in a horrific haunting. Turns out the answer is Mehr herself. When her mother died, she insisted Mehr deliver a taweez (kind of a talisman) directly to her absent British father. Of course, she couldn’t find him so she’s had it this whole time. Turns out the taweez is a curse, meant to torture Mehr’s dad with the memory of all that bad stuff he did but instead it’s been haunting everyone in the villa. Oopsy doopsy.

But it all has a happy ending! Turns out the inheritance Mehr thought was for her brother is actually for her. She’s rich now! She’s also not haunted because apparently once she figured out the taweez she could just . . . stop the hauntings. Easy peasy. Mehr is rich now, her brother is saved, Mary and her friends are once again free to write famous things and be awful. The book’s last fifteen pages wraps everything up in a simple little rush. It was like the whole dark novel turned into a Scooby Doo episode.

This was the most ridiculous thing I have read in a long time and suddenly, at the very end, I found it hilarious. Instead of trying to immerse myself in a moody gothic horror and failing, I stepped back and saw it all as a campy farce and I liked that much better! That’s why I’m spoiling the hell out of this book: I think I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I’d read it as humor from the beginning. It wasn’t quite enough to save the novel for me and I’m not at all sure the book is supposed to be funny, but reading it as a comedy bumped The Glowing Hours up at least two points on the ten point scale.

The Possession of Alba Diaz

What’s the book? The Possession of Alba Diaz by Isabel Cañas

How dark is it? Medium dark, like a mine entrance.

How good is it? 4/10 dark spirits

Mexico, 1765. Alba Diaz is rich and of marrying age. This is good, yes? No. This is more of a “marriage as business deal” time and place and Alba is terrified of ending up with some creepy old dude with a booming silver mine. So she makes a deal with her friend Carlos; he’s around her age, attractive, and has as little interest in marrying as Alba does. They agree to marry, forging their own business alliance before a much less pleasant one can be forced on either of them. So far, so good.

Then, two things happen. First, Alba meets Carlos’s magnetically sexy cousin Elias. Second, a plague hits. (The Matlazahuatl they describe was a real plague that swept through colonial Mexico several times in this era. It sounds terrifying.)

And here I must digress for a moment, because part of this story is told from Elias’s point of view. Elias grew up in Spain while his father worked here in Mexico at the family silver mine. While his father remarried a local and had another kid here in Mexico, Elias and his mother did not have a great time back in Spain. He’s pretty bitter about it. He has a checkered past, including a stint doing forced labor in a Spanish mine and some time in Constantinople studying alchemy and the occult. His alchemist buddies gave him a bunch of money and sent him to Spain to buy mercury for their experiments, and he does just that. But he also finds out his estranged father has died and Elias is more or less expected to take that mercury to Mexico and use his mad mercury skills to pay of his father’s debts. (They don’t explain it much, but mercury was key to refining the silver out of the ore they were mining.) He’s pretty pissed about the whole thing; the only silver lining (hah!) is the amazing gal he meets at a party cousin Carlos drags him to. The amazing gal is, of course, Alba.

Okay, back to the plague. Alba convinces her parents to move up to Carlos’s family silver mine until the plague burns itself out; they can ride out the plague safely up in the mountains while also finalizing the details of Alba’s impending marriage. The big downside is that sexy tempting Elias is coming, too, since he came to Mexico to work in that exact mine. Since he’s part of Carlos’s family, she can’t entirely avoid him. She also has to hang out with Carlos’s best friend, Bartolome, a soldier-turned-priest who wants to win Mexico for the Inquisition or something. Alba thinks he’s creepy but she’s also very religious so she feels guilty for thinking he’s creepy.

It’s here, up at the silver mine, that Alba becomes very clearly possessed by an evil entity. As her symptoms worsen, she doesn’t know who to turn to. Bartolome represents God and the church, so he’s an obvious choice, but Alba doesn’t quite trust him. Elias has some experience with the occult and Alba does trust him (turns out Elias is a pretty nice guy) but the book he’s using to help is, as far as they both can tell, evil. It’s a puzzle.

Things get worse and worse as Bartolome and Elias approach the problem from opposite angles. Eventually Bartolome involves the Inquisition and blames the whole possession on Elias’s sorcery. Things are not looking good for either Alba or Elias.

Alba is a sympathetic character, Elias is interesting, Bartolome makes a good villain, and the possessing entity itself is quite intriguing. I was excited to be along for the ride as the book got more violent and mysterious.

It chugged along and kept me interested right to thend, which is both bloody and dramatic. It’s also kind of a happy ending for Alba and Elias.

This is where the book lost me. Without giving away too many details, it felt like too much of a hand-wavey ‘deus ex machina’ situation to me. I love a good happy ending but this book set us up for a heartwrenching tragedy and just reversed it in the last few pages in a way that felt cheap. But right up until then, this was a fairly satisfying read.

La Llorona

This post first appeared on our Substack in September 2025.

Let’s talk about La Llorona, a collection of short stories by Chris Rodarte.

I picked this one up in a gift shop. We’d first moved to Santa Fe and were still doing tourist stuff. Gift shops are a surprisingly good place to find offerings by local historians and folklorists. My copy seems to be signed by the author, who grew up in Albuquerque, but I didn’t notice that at the time. In fact, at the time I laid it on a table and promptly got distracted by other books. I remember squashing a large bug with it and though I thoroughly wiped it off the cover still feels a bit psychically tainted with bug guts. I think this is why it took me two or three years to actually start reading La Llorona. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, that’s a dumb reason to put off reading this.

Chris Rodarte’s author page says he’s a teacher, which explains his writing style. It feels a lot like a “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” collection. Dark and spooky tales told in a simple easy style that’s accessible to just about anyone. A great collection for young readers looking for a scare, with the same potential to either scar a kid for life or ignite a lifelong fascination with the darker side of literature. It’s a quick read with a nice variety of Llorona tales, ranging from uncanny to terrifying to tragic.

Some of the stories are inspired by real events and stories told to the author personally, but they’re not raw ghost experiences. The raw stories are recreated and blended into tight little tales fitting into various common categories–hitchhiking ghost, graveyard haunting, spirit warning, cautionary tale–and all with La Llorona as a central figure.

To be honest, I’m not convinced all the specters are actually La Llorona; some of the connections seem pretty tenuous. I’m not even sure if I believe in ghosts, but La Llorona has a pretty specific backstory and connection to drowning so if she does exist, some of these stories fall pretty far outside her usual bailiwick. Still, even if these experiences aren’t all La Llorona’s doing, they’re chilling nonetheless.

One of my favorites is “The Stick Lady”, based on a friend’s experience. As kids, the woman and her friends were caught in an arroyo when a storm hit in the distance. They began to hear loud cracks, like branches breaking, and saw a terrifying old lady walking toward them ahead of the storm. They fled from the ditch just in time to escape the stick lady and a flash flood coming their way. This was a quick and believable story, made more eerie by being unsure whether the Stick Lady was warning them of the flood or bringing it to them.

Another great story is “Two Minutes to Midnight”, a made up story set in a real building in Santa Fe. The Public Employees Retirement Administration (PERA) building was put up in the 1960s, partially over the site of a historical graveyard. It seems the builders just paved over a lot of bodies, which means every time they try to add or renovate they find old bones. I’m not surprised that ghost sightings began pretty much from the moment the building opened. (Fun fact: this building is not that far from my house. Luckily we’ve never been haunted by its ghosts.)

In this story, two friends are allowed to ghost hunt by an uncle who cleans the building at night. The building is so haunted they have a hard time keeping night workers, so the building is deserted as the uncle leads them way down into the sub-basement and leaves them there. The kids’ annoyance at this prank turns to terror as La Llorona and an army of rats chase them through the building. The PERA building’s history makes this story more intense but it’s spooky and suspenseful even without knowing about the building.

Like most local ghost story collections, this isn’t high literature or destined for the best seller lists. It’s charming, though, an easy read, and an exciting perspective on New Mexican folklore and history. If you like little hints of truth and experience in your spooky tales or have a youngster looking for a good scare, this is a fun little book to pick up.

The Staircase in the Woods: a Review

What’s the book? The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

How dark is it? Not too gory but kind of existentially dark

How good is it? I give it 6/10 decaying fish

This book was pretty surreal. I saw it on a display and thought, “yeah, I remember pictures of woodland staircases going around the internet a while back. Makes sense they would inspire a horror story.” This book was, indeed, inspired by those pictures.

Mostly, this book is devoted to the kind of otherworldly house those stairs might lead to.

Way back in high school, Owen and his friends hiked out to a local camping spot to get wrecked in peace and anjoy the wonders of nature. On the way they discovered this random staircase that had never been there before. Just a staircase, all by itself, with no sign of a house around it. That was weird and terrifying, so they ignored the hell out of it and hiked on. But they were high schoolers so eventually drama happened and one of them decided to climb it. Matty, the most popular and well-adjusted of the friends, wanted everyone to climb the staircase with him but no one else was into it. They were all fighting with each other or too high to understand the request or dealing with their own shit. When everyone refused to join him, Matty climbed the ladder by himself and when he got to the top he just . . . vanished.

All his friends had to go home and just live with that confusion, as well as the suspicion of the whole town because there was no trace of Matty and no convincing explanation of his disappearance. Because the staircase vanished, too. The remaining friends, Owen, Lore (known as Lauren back in high school), Nick, and Hamish try to move on with their lives and . . . it doesn’t go that well. Owen and Nick are largely consumed by various mental health issues and Lore and Hamish, while outwardly successful, are emotionally far from okay. They spend decades like this, ignoring each other and nursing their various wounds, until Nick finds another staircase and convinces everyone to climb it. For Matty. This time they all vanish.

At the top of the stairs is a nightmare realm, literally. They’re trapped in a house where room after room is the scene of decay and tragedy; some rooms are the scenes of murders or suicides, some are the scenes of low points in the friends’ own lives. This dreamworld isn’t out to kill them, exactly, but it’s definitely trying to beat them down until they maybe kill themselves or each other in despair. It’s definitely trying to catch each one alone and vulnerable.

Most of the book takes place in this nightmare series of rooms, which makes it kind of a surreal book that runs on dream logic. While there’s plenty of gore and tragedy to be seen in the rooms, we’re really here for the emotional journey each character is taking as they attempt to rescue themselves and each other. We learn about each of the friends and the various pains they carry, both secret and not so secret. They’re all interesting and relatable enough that I was invested in their journey and whether they (and their friendships) survived this ordeal. It felt a little “after school special” in parts, trying too hard to teach me emotional lessons, but I do have a sappy side so I still enjoyed the book overall.

When I was little I was really weirded out by stories that ran on dream logic; Alice in Wonderland freaked me right out more than anything actually meant to scare me. I’m way more tough and grown up now but dream logic still sucks me in pretty well, disorienting me in a way that makes the horror scenes much more effective. The book starts to lose me near the end as the dream logic devolves into a backstory that doesn’t make a lot of sense but by then I really did care about the characters and whether they’d make it out alive (and of sound mind). I don’t know that I’m itching to read Wendig’s entire oeuvre but I didn’t hate this.

Who Killed Aunt Maggie

This review first appeared on our Substack in September of 2025.

Let’s talk about Who Killed Aunt Maggie by Medora Field. This is one of a handful of pulp novels I picked up in El Paso. I basically scanned the pulp table looking for female author names and murdery titles. I knew nothing about Medora Field and I didn’t know how hard this book is to find these days. Like a lot of pulp paperbacks, my copy started falling apart the second I opened it up, so I’m not surprised they’re becoming rare.

This book is casually racist. It was published in 1939 by a well off white lady from Georgia, so it’s no surprise. The only black characters in this mystery are servants, and they’re all portrayed as kind of dumb and childlike (and extremely devoted to the rich white family who employs them). Late in the book there’s a short speech about the moral inferiority of black people. Medora Field (married name Medora Field Perkerson) was an advice columnist and historian who wrote a book about Georgia’s historical buildings and was friends with Margaret “Gone with the Wind” Mitchell, who was also racist.

Honestly, it’s the unthinking casualness of the racist bits that gets to me. I read a lot of older novels so I’ve run across a lot of racist and sexist and colonialist content. As a modern white American lady, I have the luxury of taking a detached view of most of it. A surprising number of old novels actually examine and push back against the views of their time in ways that are interesting and hopeful, even when they fall far short of modern standards. Sometimes, though, there’s just zero thought and zero pushback and the old timey awfulness just sits there stinking up an otherwise decent story. (I suppose that’s sometimes true in contemporary fiction, too.)

It’s a shame because this is an otherwise decent story. Not great, but decent. The mystery takes place in a grand old plantation house Sally Ambler has inherited from her family. She’s offered to host an impromptu engagement party for her friends Claire and Bob. Bob’s old fling, Eve, is crashing the party and Sally’s Aunt Maggie has also been staying at the house to look through the library and do some family research. Maggie has also been nosily looking at all the recent renovations and making one last search for the secret room their ancestor was rumored to have built back before the Civil War.

As soon as she arrives to get the party ready, Sally feels something isn’t right. Who was that man she saw dashing away through the backyard? Where have the servants got off to, when they were supposed to be here dusting bedrooms and preparing dinner? She’s a bit spooked, but soon all the guests arrive and those thoughts are pushed out of her head. Until bedtime, that is, when she walks out of the kitchen to find Aunt Maggie crumpled at the bottom of the back stairs. At first Sally assumes Aunt Maggie fainted or somehow tripped down the stairs but it soon becomes clear that something far more sinister is afoot . . .

We spend a lot of time watching characters bumble about the house while learning about their various tense relationships and wondering who might have motive for such a crime. Sally and her husband try to call the police but the phone line has been cut. They try to get Andrew, the butler, to drive to the nearest town for help but all the cars’ tires have been punctured. A fierce storm comes up and the electricity goes out, which leads to a night of various suspects roaming about the house with candles, finding clues and having spooky moments. This isn’t the tightest of mysteries but there are fun and intriguing moments as the night progresses.

The next day they finally get the police and coroner out to investigate but at first this only leads to more confusion and questions. The coroner, by the way, is a blind lawyer. In these forensics-heavy days of medical examiners and crime scene investigators, it’s easy to forget that coroners with no medical expertise did and still do exist. This coroner’s expertise is in ferreting out motives and secrets by listening intently to the way people talk. He’s an interesting character, but he’s also the one who gives the racist speech, so that ruins things a bit.

After a lot of worrying and conjecture and confusion, Sally literally stumbles onto the mystery’s solution, which is a lot more tense and suspenseful than it sounds. The book’s finale was pretty exciting. Not sure it was worth the racism, but it was a good ending.

And there we have it. Who Killed Aunt Maggie was an interesting experience but I’m not itching to find Field’s second novel. It might interest you to know both of her books inspired movies in the 1940s; I haven’t seen either movie and the synopsis for the Who Killed Aunt Maggie film sounds not much like the book, but if you’re into old movies you might look them up. Tell me if they’re any good. Tell me if they’re also casually racist.