horror – Darker Books

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.

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 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.

Don’t Fear the Reaper

This review was first published on our Substack in September 2025. My sister Trex wrote it.

***This review contains spoilers for “My Heart is a Chainsaw” and its sequel “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Stephen Graham Jones proceed with caution***

Jennifer Daniels is back in town. It’s been four years since the summer of book one and Jennifer is coming home reluctantly. This book explores what the aftermath of a slasher could look like for survivors in the real world. How would the legal system respond to a person who had to kill or be killed? How would lawyers and prosecutors deal with a huge body count and a suspicious lack of hard evidence pointing at the identity of the killer? In the time between books, Jennifer Daniels is charged with and prosecuted for a number of crimes. Her heroism in opening the dam to stop the forest fire is reduced to destruction of government property. Surviving the massacre and then being shuffled through the judicial system leaves Jennifer disconnected from the version of herself that was Jade. She wants to be Jennifer now but being on parole means moving home to the house she inherited from her dead father.

Letha Mondragon has severe facial disfigurement from her run-in with Stacy Graves and has endured multiple reconstructive surgeries to try and reattach her jaw. She’s in constant pain and her jaw is wired shut. She has married Banner Tompkins and has a baby. She processes the trauma of everything that happened in book one by making herself as much an expert on slashers as Jade ever was.

Jennifer and Letha are just two examples among many in the book that believably portray characters surviving a huge collective trauma. Nobody miraculously bounced back or conveniently moved on. Everyone in town lives with their hackles permanently up. This plus a record breaking blizzard set the stage for a new outbreak of killings. Proofrock is cut off from the outside world with a notorious serial killer on the loose. Jade, Letha, and probationary deputy Banner Tompkins are trying to keep history from repeating itself while fighting to stay alive themselves.

This book is every bit as good as the first. It just is. In fact, I think I liked it a bit better. Jennifer’s reluctant journey back to Jade is heartbreaking and thrilling at the same time. We get to see a more mature and sober version of her leading a group of fellow Proofrockers who actually grasp the stakes this time around. Jones delivered a new set of slasher tropes interwoven with stunning surprises. His characters remained nuanced and interesting. Old characters got new layers and new characters were just as developed. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is a fantastic book and honestly the best thing you can do is to just go read it.

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.