Tag: horror

Alchemized: a Very Long Review for a Very Long Book

I don’t usually do content warnings because I consider them implied in a blog about horror novels and murder mysteries, but this book deserves a content warning. SenLinYu’s Alchemized is awash in body horror, torture, creepy medical experiments on unwilling subjects, and a little bit of sexual assault. These are so integral to the book that I can’t even review it without talking about some of these subjects, so skip this review if you’re not up for this much darkness. 

My second warning is that SenLinYu is apparently famous for writing a Harry Potter fanfic where Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy get together and Alchemized is an expansion and reworking of that. Once I found that out (around 300 pages in, I think) I couldn’t unsee it. Hermione and Draco are definitely still visible in the main characters and that drew me out of the story at times, but the rest of the story is different enough that it didn’t bother me. If you feel a lot of feelings about the Harry Potter series or its author, it may affect your experience of this novel. 

That said, if you’re still here and game to try it, this is a pretty enthralling read. At over a thousand pages, it’s a brick of a book, but I’m glad the author resisted the temptation to break it up into a series. I loved being able to follow the long sweep of the story from beginning to end without interruption, and SenLinYu did a great job of keeping the story cohesive and moving forward even as it got bigger and more complex. 

Now, the details. 

Fantasy novelists love inventing new magical systems and societies, and this book is no exception. Alchemized is based on, unsurprisingly, alchemy. Historically, alchemy was a blend of art, science, and occult religion, and in Paladia it’s the same. In Paladia, though, a person’s alchemy ability depends on resonance, a sort of natural energetic affinity to various natural substances. If you have a resonance with iron or copper, for instance, you can learn to manipulate it and transmute it into other substances. If your resonance is especially strong, you might be able to affect quite a number of metals and natural elements, including human bodies and souls.

Paladia is the worlds’ main source of Lumithium, an element that amplifies resonance in humans and can enhance alchemical effects, and the key to scaling up alchemical processes to industrial levels. Paladia was founded and is still ruled by the Holdfast family; they’re both political and religious rulers, and they also run an elite alchemy school to train the best and brightest students with the strongest resonance, and to further the study of alchemy. The Holdfasts are in constant tension with various Guild families, mostly talented alchemists of various metals who perfected ways to industrialize the process and grow rich. 

When we enter the story, however, everything has gone horribly wrong and the whole country is now ruled by the horrifyingly immortal High Necromancer and his terrifyingly ruthless right hand man, Kaine Ferron. The Necromancer rules through a combination of cruelty to everyone and the promise of immortality to his faithful followers–only he has the alchemical secret to becoming Undying, and once you accept his “gift” you’re bound to the Necromancer forever. Everyone in this new reality is either miserably oppressed or trying desperately to impress the High Necromancer, mostly to avoid being miserably oppressed. Our hero, Helena, is the last living member of the Resistance. Newly discovered in a forgotten prison tank and missing a good chunk of her memories, it’s Ferron’s job to extract whatever secrets are hidden in that brain of hers. The Necromancer’s minions lock Helena’s wrists into manacles lined with “nullium” that deaden her natural resonance, then she’s packed up and sent to Ferron’s country estate for interrogation. Ferron one of those powerful alchemists who can manipulate all sorts of materials. He’s also a vivimancer, meaning he can manipulate people’s bodies and brains, so Helena’s interrogation less torture and questioning, more direct attempts to magically invade Helena’s brain and unlock the information the Necromancer wants.

The entire story is told through Helena’s eyes, first as she tries to figure out what the hell happened to her and what Ferron’s deal is, and later as her memories come rushing back and we see the war’s last year through her eyes. In part one, we see Helena fierce and almost pathologically self-sacrificing, still willing to do anything to protect a Resistance that no longer exists. She’s repelled by Kaine and his cold vicious ways, but also confused. As far as she can tell he’s a remorseless killer, always seething with barely suppressed rage and totally devoted to the High Necromancer’s every whim. But he’s also got some weird moral code; he seems almost protective of his prisoner’s welfare and he carefully holds himself apart from the casual sadism of his fellow Undying. He’s definitely a monster but not the kind of monster Helena expected. She also suspects he knows her, but whatever their history is, it’s clearly in the locked part of her brain.

The brain unlocking is proceeding pretty slowly when the Necromancer suddenly decides Helena should be part of a program to breed new baby necromancers. One of the few things Helena does remember from the war is being sterilized so she couldn’t pass on her own talent for vivimancy, so she’s pretty shocked to find herself part of a breeding program. One of the Necromancer’s creepy doctors have fixes for everything, it seems, and sure enough she’s “fixed” Helena’s fertility. Yikes.

Unlike the resistance, the Necromancer actually wants vivimancers to breed, and he decides Ferron would be the perfect match for this experiment. Ferron seems utterly horrified (but not totally surprised) by such an order but he has little choice but to make a baby with his prisoner. If he doesn’t do it, the Necromancer’s next choice will probably be worse and Ferron will completely lose control of Helena. This new project is awkward and horrible for them both, and Ferron’s handling of it furthers our suspicion that he’s got more going on than just blind devotion to his leader. 

As Helena’s pregnancy takes root, Helena’s stress levels spiral out of control and, ironically, all this stress loosens the locks on those hidden memories and causes them to come flooding back. Part two takes us back into these memories, and one of the first things we find is that Kaine Ferron was actually spying for the Resistance before they fell. That’s how he knows Helena. 

The war between the Resistance and the Undying had been going on for a few years before Ferron offered his help, claiming he wanted to avenge his mother’s death at the Necromancer’s hands. Exactly zero people believed this (even though it’s completely true) so he randomly asked for Helena to be his contact, implying some vague romantic obsession with her. This, the Resistance believed. A couple of Resistance leaders, Jan Crowther and Ilva Holdfast, essentially tell Helena to seduce him and encourage his obsession so Ferron will be pliable. 

Let’s just say none of this turns out the way any of them planned, and over the course of their alliance the two form a complicated relationship that eventually becomes a fierce love. They both become a bit obsessed with each other and we learn two important things. First, Kaine Ferron is much more a victim of torture and blackmail than anything else, which gives me great sympathy for him and the impossible choices he has to make. Second, the Resistance is a giant bag of dicks. Many of them are either intolerable snobs or self-righteous religious zealots, and almost none of them give the tiniest shit about Helena or what happens to her. She’s both a foreigner and a vivimancer so nearly everyone in the Resistance considers her vaguely distasteful and suspect, but all of them are happy to use her for healing their soldiers and seducing Ferron and literally anything else they need without giving her an ounce of sympathy or credit. Don’t get me wrong, the Undying are way worse than the Resistance, but the Resistance also sucks. They’re convinced with a literally religious fervor that they’re locked in an epic battle of good versus evil, and if only they have enough faith and optimism there’s no way they can lose. As the story progresses, even Helena begins to understand just how far their heads are up their self-righteous asses. It adds a lot of moral nuance to the story when you realize the only person to ever actually hurt the Necromancer is Kaine; even though he’s only doing it for personal vengeance, he’s the secret hero of the war.

Okay, no more spoilers. This review is long enough already. The romance between Draco and Hermione Kaine and Helena gets a little repetitive and overwrought at times; as the war drags on for months in a stalemate, so does their tortured path to love. Eventually the action picks up again, though, and the story does a pretty decent job of balancing their intensely personal drama with the epic events unfolding around them. Helena remains almost obnoxiously self-sacrificing, but also clever and brave and often pretty interesting. Kaine remains morally complex in a way that I really enjoyed–he becomes more and more a sympathetic character as he tirelessly works to bring down the High Necromancer without being suspected, but never entirely stops being a villain. I love complicated characters like that, and I thought Kaine was well done. 

This is a very long and very dark book that I devoured as fast as I could. It was tense and compelling, pulling me along nearly the whole time, and it balanced the intense relationship with some great world-building and political drama. I highly recommend it.

New reviews every Friday. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

This is My Body

Let’s talk about This is my Body by Lindsay King-Miller. More specifically, let’s talk about how much I loved it because man, this book got to me. It’s got a possessed kid who levitates and eats the local birds and squirrels, but that’s not what haunts me. What haunts me is how relatable all the religious guilt and family dysfunction is.

Books about generational trauma seem all the rage right now and most of them don’t really do it for me. The trauma is so big and abstract, it’s hard to really connect to it on a personal level. This book, though, is a look at that trauma up close. Ridiculous amounts of repressed guilt and anxiety. Imprenetrable emotional armor and narcissism. Everybody blaming everyone else for their pain and everybody being at least a little bit at fault. If you pull back far enough you can see the epically oppressive institutions pouring pain down through the generations, but on the daily human level it usually doesn’t feel sweeping. It feels like a big painful mess that no one quite knows how to deal with. 

So. Back to the possessed kid. Or actually, we should start with the possessed kid’s mom, Brigid. Brigid has so much Catholic guilt. Like, as much Catholic guilt as you can fit into one person. When she was little, she and her mom (her single mom who was never married to her dad) had to move in with Uncle Angus, a domineering priest who always kept the curtains closed and wouldn’t let her watch TV or read books that weren’t the Bible. This already sucked, but when Brigid fell in love in middle school, Angus got even worse. Mostly (entirely) because Brigid’s crush was her best friend, Alexandra. I’m pretty sure a straight crush would have still bothered Angus but this gay crush was soooooo much worse. Angus rained down the wrath of his god and Brigid’s mom was pretty much on his side. It was bad.

Eventually Brigid grew up, officially came out of the closet, opened an occult bookstore, and cut Angus and her mom completely out of her life. If only she could cut the secret guilt and shame out that easily. Still, she’s tried hard to keep all that from her daughter, Dylan. Dylan’s gonna grow up pampered and protected and connected to a mother who really sees and understands her. History will not repeat itself, dammit! (Honestly, this is what most of us strive for with our kids. Sad thing is, when we don’t repeat our parents’ mistakes we usually make new and different mistakes instead.)

And then Dylan gets possessed. At first we’re not sure that’s what’s happening. Dylan’s a middle schooler and they can act pretty weird, especially when they’re going through some stuff. Dylan’s fighting with her former best friend, Kai, and when she punches him and then later actually bites him she gets in big trouble with the school. Dylan doesn’t want to talk about it and Brigid is freaking out, wondering where she went wrong as a mother. And on top of all this drama, Brigid is trying to reconnect with that old school crush of hers, Alexandra, who’s even more awesome as an adult than she was in middle school. Connecting with Alexandra (Zandy for short) is good but the timing really sucks.

Especially when, right before their first date, Brigid discovers all the dead animals in Dylan’s closet. A few pages later we’ve all decided Dylan is definitely possessed. It’s bloody and there’s levitation involved. The only person Brigid knows who’s ever exorcised someone is her shitty Uncle Angus. In the absence of better ideas, she heads to his house in Denver to beg for his help. 

This turns out to be a terrible idea. He’s just as awful as she remembers, only now he’s being all fake nice to Dylan, who is totally falling for it because she’s so delighted to suddenly have a grandpa. Brigid never told her why she didn’t talk to her family. Then Zandy calls; she googled Angus and found out he was actually defrocked in the 1980s for running a cable access show where he “exorcised” people on screen. Was the exorcism Brigid witnessed fake? But she saw it with her own eyes!

And things get even worse when Brigid finds an old journal her mother made before her suicide. It’s full of clear evidence that her mother never forgave her for being gay, but also full of news clippings of people who committed heinous crimes after being on Angus’s exorcism show. 

It’s all just crazy and Brigid has no idea what to do now. If Angus can’t actually exorcise her daughter, who even can? She has to save her daughter somehow but Brigid almost feels possessed herself, filled with panic and shame and a growing desire to just smash Angus’s face in. 

I’m not gonna tell you how it all ends. I’ll just say it gets worse and weirder before it gets better. This is a quick read full of drama and horror and I loved following all the mysterious little threads weaving together as the book progressed.

What I loved most, though, was how real and complex all the relationships felt. Angus is a hateable villain but we also get glimpses of where it all comes from. Brigid’s mom is incredibly frustrating and grossly unfair to her daughter but we also get glimpses into her own personal torture. She feels all too familiar to those of us who grew up in conservative religious families. Brigid and Dylan are sympathetic and relatable, while also being flawed and human.

I didn’t grow up Catholic but my background is close enough that this book was all sorts of familiar. I grew up during the Satanic Panic, around people who tried to “pray the gay away” and wouldn’t watch R-rated movies because they’d “drive the spirit away.” This book captures the spiderweb of complex emotions and relationships that culture tends to weave around you, while also being an exciting horror novel. If you like possession stories (which I do) and/or carry residual religious guilt (which I do) go read this book. Go read it right now.

Embrace the darkness and read more books. As always, follow us here or on Substack.

Mary: an Awakening of Terror

Let’s talk about Mary: an Awakening of Terror, by Nat Cassidy. This book, about a middle-aged woman going through perimenopause, is written by a man. A straight cisgender man, even. Nat is aware this might be weird, and he talks about it before we even start the story (and again at the end). I can’t say that as a man he perfectly captures the experience of middle-aged women. He only partially captures the weirdness of menopause and the female midlife crisis (both of which I have some experience with). But it’s a good effort and I enjoyed this book a lot. Unless you love romance, you’re not gonna see middle-aged women featured much in books and movies. They’ll get supporting roles but the stories are rarely about them. This story, and I give it a lot of credit for this, is definitely about Mary and a slew of other women her age. It’s wholly centered and focused on their feelings and experiences and it works to represent them in real and individual ways.

So anyway, on to Mary’s story. In a weird twist of fate, I am almost exactly Mary’s age as I write this. I’m a few months younger (we’re both a few months shy of 50) but way farther than her in the menopause journey. Mary has just begun to feel the joy of hot flashes, poor sleep, brain fog, irregular periods, and irritability that herald the menopause years. All of this really sucks but it’s also very “normal” and Mary’s doctor is zero help. She’s afraid to tell him about her more unusual symptoms–vivid nightmares, fits of blind rage, and really specific hallucinations. Every time she looks at a woman too close to her age, she sees terrifying images of damage and decay. It happens when she looks in the mirror, too, so that’s fun. 

This is her daily background noise–lonely apartment, dead-end job, no friends, intense and frequent hot flashes, terrifying hallucinations. Still, it’s her life and she’s doing her best to live it on her own terms. Until her boss lets her go, which means she’ll probably lose her apartment. As Mary is trying to figure out how to get a new job and stay housed, her Aunt Nadine calls from Arizona, begging Mary to come take care of her. Nadine says she’s dying but she’s probably just lonely. Nadine kinda sucks to live with (she sucks a lot to live with) but . . . she’s family, and it’s not like Mary’s got anything else going on just now. 

So Mary goes home to Arizona to take care of Aunt Nadine for a while and maybe figure herself out. And the horror begins almost immediately. I’m about to give away one key plot point so spoilers ahead! You’ve been warned! Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know! Okay, here’s the spoiler: one of the main things Mary figures out is that in addition to being herself, a quiet bookish woman, she’s also inhabited by the soul of a local serial killer who used to target middle-aged women. This explains a lot about those face-melting hallucinations, as well as a few other things that started happening when she got back to town.

Okay, spoilers over. Without giving anything else away, it turns out Mary’s hometown has a dark history and is super haunted by terrifying ghosts with bloody clawlike fingers and bloodsoaked pillowcases over their heads. Crazy stuff starts to happen and Mary herself might be responsible for some of it. It’s all horrific and violent and confusing but it also does push Mary to find her own courage and power. Will she once again let life knock her down, surrender to the invisibility that takes so many aging women, or will she rise up and force the world to see her? 

This book is full of women struggling to be seen and valued. Some of them try to rebel, some try to be useful to those in power, some try to smile through it all and lean on other women, some are fiercely bitter and independent to the last. The story is relentless in this way; it’s entirely about women and it’s entirely about the ways the world totally fails to recognize and value them no matter what they do. This is a kind of depressing but vital aspect of the book because it makes you empathize with and root for pretty much every single female character even though some of them are actually pretty villainous. 

In spite of the dark themes of misogyny, this book is full of dark humor and exciting bloody horror scenes. Mary is personable and funny. Aunt Nadine is awful but also funny (and smart). A lot of the action is brutal and creative and satisfying in the way of classic ‘80’s slasher films. (Just for a taste of the humor, at one point Mary is literally saved from death by a hot flash.) I love it when horror stories can use a sense of campy fun to help us deal with dark and depressing issues, and this book does it well. It’s a fun book that horror fans will really enjoy even if you know zip zero about menopause and care not at all about middle-aged folks and their struggles. It will entertain you while giving you a bit of a new perspective. And if you know menopause intimately and know the struggles of middle-age, you’ll know exactly how Mary feels. 

Follow us here or on Substack. As always, embrace the darkness and read more books.

This Wretched Valley

This is a Trex book review for This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer.

I genuinely don’t remember where I saw this book first. I think it was in the free magazine from my public library. Anyway, it was on my to-read list for a while since I have a fondness for books where nature is trying to kill everyone. Fiction or non-fiction, I love a book where man’s hubris is checked utterly by nature. The book opens with the remains of four bodies and an abandoned Jeep being found on the side of the highway in rural Kentucky. From there we go back to who those four people used to be and how they ended up as a confusing set of remains.

Clay is a graduate student in geology at the University of Kentucky completing his dissertation using LIDAR technology to map rock formations. He finds what he believes to be an uncharted rock wall in Kentucky. With hopes to finish his dissertation and also turn this discovery into a career mapping climbing locations professionally, he plans a field excursion out to the wall. He brings in a fellow graduate student in his program, Sylvia, to help him research the location. Her research is in the relationship between native plants and geology. Clay also recruits his rock-climbing friend, Dylan, who recently received a sponsorship and is excited to be the first person to set climbing routes on this virgin rock wall. Dylan’s boyfriend, Luke, and his dog, Slade, come to belay for Dylan. On their way to the site, they stop at a diner for a last meal of sorts. The waitress tell them that the patch of forest they’re headed for is dangerous. People who go in don’t come out the same if at all. Obviously, they go anyway. From the get-go, things start to go wrong. Slade is scared and acting oddly, every plant Sylvia sees is poisonous, there is no sign of the huge rock formation they’re heading for, and the gps is misbehaving. Obviously, they push forward. 

Eventually, they reach the lip of a valley and see the giant rock. It’s everything Clay and Dylan hoped for. Slade has to be dragged into the valley. The rock has a magnetism to it, especially for Dylan. Drawn by the rock, Dylan wakes up before everyone else the next morning and starts to free climb. In her haste, she leaves the tent unzipped and Slade escapes. When Luke wakes, he’s beside himself. It’s unlike Slade to stray but he’s nowhere to be found. After an hour of looking, Dylan convinces Luke to quit. Now Luke is filled with resentment at her seemingly callous attitude toward their dog, ingratitude at the sacrifices he made to be there, and general disregard of his emotional state. Dylan is a woman possessed by this rock and her dreams of making it big as a climbing celebrity. Clay is somewhat inexplicably bumbling and brooding. Sylvia, at this point, seems to be the only person who is acting pretty normal and is doing responsible research and documentation. Slade remains missing. Dylan is mapping yet another climbing route and is high on the wall when disaster strikes. She falls and multiple of her clips fail. Dylan’s weight pulls Luke off the ground and the rope swings her like a pendulum into his body. Luke’s head smashes against the wall. She cuts them both down and it’s immediately apparent that Luke needs medical attention at a hospital. He is concussed and has seriously injured both an ankle and a wrist. This is when things really start to spiral for the group. 

From here, the book takes a slightly different course than I expected. From the first pages, it’s clear to the reader that the physical location is wrong or evil or…something. What was surprising was that in addition to the supernaturally evil locale, there are evil ghosts. So this is a place possessed. The ghost character and backgrounds for them are really interesting additions to the story. The interactions between our main characters and these ghosts are creepy and mind-bending. I wondered though if there were too many different eras of ghost. Clearly the idea is that the place is evil and hungry, corrupting and capturing the souls of those who dare enter. There is ultimately no explanation for why. I get it, it’s supposed to be like an eldritch evil that defies explanations of men but I still wanted more. Similarly, some ghosts were more evil and in charge than others but didn’t really have much more background. Why did the oldest ghost seem to date back to the civil war? That doesn’t seem long enough unless the civil war itself was a catalyst somehow. Another thing that bothered me some was how the ghosts and the land seemed to be sharing the corpses. It was an interesting idea that they were both feeding off the fear and death but the different mechanisms left something to be desired. Like why did Sylvia get turned into a skeleton but Clay was left largely intact? I appreciated the variety but felt there was just a tiny bit more explanation or exploration needed. Anyway, this is mostly me poking holes in an otherwise perfectly good and satisfying horror novel. There is plenty of gore, suspense, disgust, betrayal, and visceral sensory detail here to give you at least mild nightmares. 

What Stalks the Deep

What Stalks the Deep is the third in T. Kingfisher’s “sworn soldier” series featuring Alex Easton. I highly recommend all three and they do relate to each other, but each of Alex’s adventures is complete in itself, so you don’t absolutely have to read the first two to enjoy this one. All you need to know going in is that Alex has been invited to America to help a friend, Doctor Denton, who was instrumental in defeating the mysterious evil Alex encountered in the first book. The way the invitation is worded, Alex is pretty sure Denton has encountered some new mysterious evil and Alex is not one to abandon a friend or shy away from battle. So off to America it is!

If you haven’t read any of these, “sworn soldier” is pretty much its own gender identity in Alex’s home country of Gallacia. Alex was born female but took on this new identity and pronouns (ka and kan) when ka became a career soldier. In Europe, this is generally accepted as “one of those quirky Gallacian things” and people are curious but not alarmed about it. Fellow soldiers tend to recognize one of their own breed in Alex. Americans, of course, know jack-all about this tiny European country so mostly Alex just poses as a man instead of trying to explain Gallacian language and culture. None of this is vital to any of the stories, I just find the whole thing (and Alex’s wry comments on Gallacia) interesting and amusing. I also think it’s a cool way to present the unique life experience and bond soldiers often have. Gender aside, it is its own thing, you know?

The real meat of this story is that Denton’s cousin has disappeared while exploring an abandoned mine his family owns, and there’s reason to think strange things are afoot. Finding out requires exploring the mine itself, and in the process Alex has to constantly remind themself (kanself? Kaself? I don’t speak Gallacian) that ka is a badass soldier who is absolutely not claustrophobic or scared of being deep underground. Nope. Nosiree, Alex isn’t scared one little bit and ka’ll die before ka’ll say otherwise. I love Alex. 

As they explore the mine and nearby town, the friends do indeed find something mysterious and maybe evil. I don’t want to give anything away, but the “sworn soldier” series (and a lot of Kingfisher’s weird tales) generally lives in that muddy area between natural and supernatural and this book definitely lives in that area. Kingfisher takes a lot of inspiration from classic authors of weird tales, like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen, and this particular one draws inspiration from Lovecraft and his stories of ancient gods and buried mysteries. I enjoyed, as I usually do, the updated and creative spin she put on the classic theme. 

I haven’t reviewed a Kingfisher book for you yet so you couldn’t possibly know this, but I love her work. I can always count on her for engaging characters and solid storytelling, and though she leans more toward haunting and fairytales than gore, she’s great at creating a spooky atmosphere and has a real knack for creative and disturbing imagery. I haven’t read a book of hers yet that I didn’t enjoy, and I find Alex Easton’s adventures especially delightful. Plus the cover art is awesome. I listened to the first two books on audio* but someday I’ll have to go buy physical copies because the artwork is just that good. 

*I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks but I recommend these if you’re into that sort of thing. All the books are written in first person as if Alex is telling us the story, and Avi Roque does a great job conveying Alex’s sense of humor and soldierly stoicism while preserving ka’s unique identity. 

Until next time . . . as always, embrace the darkness and read more books.

Ring Shout Review

This is a Trex review for Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout.

Although nonfiction about the Klan is full of horror enough, this book takes the existence of the real Klan and layers on the supernatural. What if some klansmen were literal monsters? Inhuman creatures with supernatural strength disguised as humans? Ring Shout tells the story of Maryse Boudreaux and her two deadly compatriots as they hunt and grapple with white-hooded monsters in 1915 Macon. They are watched over and aided by Nana Jean whose magic called them to her to fight evil. She brews magical water by channeling the energy of spiritual “shouts” through herself. Maryse wields an otherworldly sword that was forged by slaver chiefs who channeled their regret and anguish into its’ smoky blade. She is the champion chosen by three spirit “aunties” who Nana Jean doesn’t trust and calls “haints.” There is a new and powerful entity in Macon who has pushed into Maryse’s dreams – Butcher Clyde. His plan is to use the film “The Birth of a Nation” to create a portal for an even more powerful and destructive entity than himself to enter the world. There are a lot of supernatural and frankly freaky as hell things in this book. The author does some truly terrifying things with mouths and teeth. The pacing and action feel more fantasy but the body-horror and supernatural entities make this a decidedly creepy (in the best possible way) book. 

As compelling and surprising as the supernatural elements are, just as rewarding were the historical and cultural details. Nana Jean is a Gullah woman and speaks in Gullah on the page. The history and significance of shouts is explained and revered as one of the key factors of the magic in the book. One of Maryse’s friends, Chef, was a Harlem Hellfighter in the war. Disguised as a man, she fought. Now she kills monsters with homemade bombs charged with Nana Jean’s blessed water. One setting of the book is a jook joint owned by Maryse’s love interest. It’s hard not to imagine a more formalized version of the jook from Sinners and this one also gets beset by monsters so I feel fine drawing that comparison and using the movie set in my imagination. On her journey to defeat Butcher Clyde and what hell he is trying to bring forth, Maryse seeks out The Night Doctors. They are terrifying beings based on the historical atrocities committed against enslaved peoples in the name of medicine. It’s not every day that a book teaches me so many things and does so while weaving it all together seamlessly.

Ring Shout is a skillfully written book. It’s entertaining and thought provoking at the same time. While transporting you to a different historical time and place, it also imagines a world where the oppressed have magical tools at their disposal to combat injustice. Not everyone, but some. But so does the enemy. In fact, one of the inciting incidents for everything going on in the book is the release of The Birth of a Nation. In actual history, that movie triggered a resurgence of the Klan. This is also so in the book but some of those human Klansmen also become monsters because of the racist, hateful power of the film. At the climax, Maryse must decide whether she wants to take that power for herself and avenge her people or reject Butcher Clyde’s proposal. Would the end justify the means? Would vengeance make anything better?

Ring Shout got national acclaim and it was well deserved. If you haven’t read it yet, change that. It’s short, action packed, compelling, and even though there were some spoilers in this review, the journey is more important than the destination with this one. Just because you know where it’s going doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy how it gets there. 

Song of the Sandman

I finally read the sequel to A God in the Shed. That first book by J-F Dubeau brought us a gruesome yet hypnotic unnamed god and a whole slew of secret societies trying to bend that god to their own purposes. The book ended in a confrontation that killed several people and didn’t resolve much. 

The second book, Song of the Sandman, picks the story up not long after that, following several different survivors and delving deeply into the lives of the Sandmen, the society/cult that now (just barely) has the god contained. 

Venus Mackenzie, the girl who actually kept the god in her shed in the first book, has been wandering Montreal looking for someone who can help her find it and try to kill it. As she does that, she has to contend with her guilt and pain over her part in this mess while knowing she’s still intimately connected to the god.

Daniel, whose father succumbed to the god’s lure in the first book, has gone to find his mother and brother. He’s really not sure how he feels about them, seeing as how they’re the backbone of the Sandmen and seem to think that if they just learn to control the god they can turn it into a benevolent deity who grants all their wishes. Meanwhile, they have the god locked up in the basement. They’ve trained a girl to sing such perfect lullabies that she can lull the god to sleep for days at a time. Of course, every time it wakes up it starts killing every cult member it can get its hands on, so it seems they’re a long way from their dream of transforming the god of death and hate into something less murdery. 

Oh, and the girl who sings? She’s a prisoner herself, kidnapped years ago and also kept in the basement pretty much any time she’s not singing. The Society of Sandmen seems pretty mean for people dedicated to bringing about a peaceful utopia. They don’t seem to know they’re the bad guys, but I’m pretty sure they’re the bad guys.

There are other threads to the story, equally intriguing and complicated, but I’ve given you a good taste of what you’re in store for. The book switches back and forth between characters, whose paths sometimes cross in surprising ways, as the books weaves toward a grand confrontation between several characters, the Sandmen, and the god everyone wants a piece of. As the second book in a series that will clearly continue, we reach the end with many unanswered questions, but the end is dramatic and satisfying, with a couple big twists that make us excited for the next chapter in this saga. 

In fact, this book’s grand finale felt more fully set up and more fully satisfying than the first book’s finale. In spite of its sprawling transitional vibe (the second book of a trilogy is always the trickiest) it was pretty enjoyable. I especially enjoyed reading about Alice, the girl with the power to sing the god to sleep. Her story arc and her psychology are especially interesting as she wrestles with understanding she’s merely a tool for the cult leader while also exploring her power over and kinship with this god, her fellow prisoner. This series seems to be getting better with each book and I’m excited to read the next one.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

White Horse

Today I present you White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. I got this at Op Cit in Santa Fe. Their website is sad and basic but in real life the store is a legit hoard of used books. Literal piles of books everywhere. I think I got this book in the crime section? Or mysteries? Their official horror section is tiny, as it is in most used book stores, so I browse other sections. This mystery promised “disturbing visions,” which sounded horror adjacent. The lady at the register said it was a great book. Then she paused and said “but it gets really dark. Are you okay with dark?” Yes, I’m okay with dark. 

Kari James lives in Denver but she grew up in Idaho Springs, a tiny mountain town west of Denver. A bunch of her family still lives up there, including her cousin/best friend, Debby. Debby is pretty white but is fascinated by the native ancestry of her cousin’s side of the family, so when she finds an old bracelet with native symbols on it, she brings it to Kari. It belonged to Kari’s mother, you see . . . 

Turns out the bracelet is cursed. Or blessed, maybe. It’s definitely connected to Kari’s ancestors and just having it around triggers powerful visions of Kari’s mother and sometimes other ancestors. Kari is not into this at all. Her mother disappeared when Kari was just two days old and Kari has always assumed she just couldn’t handle motherhood and ran off. After her mom ran off, her dad regularly drank himself into a stupor and eventually got into a car wreck that caused serious brain damage; Kari spent most of her young life helping nurse a father who could barely dress or feed himself and as far as Kari’s concerned, it’s all 100% her mom’s fault for bailing on them.

But these visions are showing something way more complicated than what Kari’s believed and whenever she goes to the real life locations her visions show, Kari finds another complicated piece of her mother’s history. While the visions are also terrifying, showing her mother bloody and screaming, being followed by a stinking monster with vicious claws, Kari makes time to follow them up, often with Debby at her side for moral support. 

A lot of this book is about Kari’s personal growth, her coming to terms with her own past mistakes, her own emotional blocks and unresolved issues, her sometimes selfish and dependent relationship with Debby. Kari is an interesting character and an unreliable narrator. Sometimes we can see her problems way before she sees them in herself, and this is sometimes frustrating and sometimes fascinating, while allowing us to connect with Kari on a deep level as she wrestles her demons.

It also turns out to be a murder mystery. Pretty early on, Kari realizes her mom probably didn’t just run off to party or whatever, but it’s not clear what actually happened to her. It turns out Kari’s mom was heavily involved with the American Indian Movement, which means the FBI might have been out to get her. But the movement also had some dangerous people on the inside, so maybe one of them did something to her. Then, on top of these suspicions, Kari realizes her own grandfather was not such a good guy. Both Kari’s visions and her brief encounters with the man make him a suspect, too. 

Both the visions and the real life mystery come together in dramatic fashion at the book’s climax. Kari’s final showdown is a blend of fantasy and reality as she faces both her mom’s killer and the demon of her visions at the same time. It might be a bit over the top with its technicolor dream sequences but it was also pretty gripping. 

This was a pretty serious look at the way generational trauma and larger political issues can play out on the messy individual level, especially for indigenous women. I think it does a good job and represents a point of view that is really pushing to be heard right now. I’m not sure when I’ll be posting this review but it turns out I’m writing it on Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day.* Seems like an especially good day to be thinking about a book like this. Though it might not be technically horror this book is definitely dark, and it’s a good one to read if you’re looking for alternate perspectives and dark books by indigenous authors. 

*Turns out it took me months to post this, as you can see. I write reviews as I read but I don’t post them in any particular order.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books.

Red Rabbit Review

My kid picked this book out for me. I was browsing the horror shelves, one of my favorite pastimes, and she asked “if I pick a book will you read it?” Yes, of course. Pick anything and I will totally read it. So she handed me Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I do not regret saying yes to a random horror novel. Red Rabbit was a delightful book. 

It reads very much like a fairy tale or folk tale, with lightly sketched characters guided by fate on an epic quest, but with a distinctly pioneer American flavor. We’re mostly following a posse of folk on a quest to kill a witch up in Kansas. There’s a pretty large reward for anyone who can take her out. Everyone in the posse has their own agenda, and only one old man, Tom Goggins, really cares about killing the witch. Because he is a self-taught witch hunter looking to make a name for himself. Best friends Moses Burke (Civil War army surgeon) and Ned Hemingway (well dressed cowboy) are just along for the ride, Rose Nettles has recently lost (killed?) her husband and can’t run their homestead alone, and Benito Cortez is running for his life after an ill-advised affair with a lawman’s wife. It seems fate has brought them together, along with the silent orphan they all just call Rabbit. 

While this posse is traveling north into Kansas, having some weird and dangerous adventures along the way, the witch they’re hunting is tracking them along with everyone else trying to get at her. Sadie Grace is her name and she doesn’t seem particularly evil but she sure does have magic powers. She’s not worried too much about who’s coming to kill her, not even this posse seemingly thrown together by fate. She can handle whatever’s coming at her. She’s not too thrilled about the two so-called U.S. marshalls headed her way, though. One of them seems pure evil and pretty powerful. Him, well, she’ll have to be prepared for his arrival. 

Despite its charming folk tale style, this book has a lot of dark and gory bits. That demonic U.S. “marshall” does some incredibly cruel and gruesome stuff, and our posse of heroes meets ghosts and cannibals and more on their journey. This book has an exciting blend of charm and horror, blending threads of American and Mexican folk magic with some old world European tropes my pioneer ancestors could have brought with them across the ocean. It was a fun read. 

It also looks like Moses Burke gets his own separate novel after this quest is done. There’s a free snippet of Rose of Jericho at the end, featuring him. I’ll have to pick it up next time I go book shopping. If it’s anything like Red Rabbit it will be a great story. 

As always, follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.

Cinderwich: a Review

I guess Cherie Priest is known for steampunk but I haven’t read any of those books. This is the second horror novel of hers I’ve read, though, and I enjoyed both of them quite a bit. (I’ve read Cinderwich and The Toll. I read The Toll before I started this blog but maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.) Priest is great at creating quirky and engaging characters and setting them in delightfully haunted spots in the swamps and hollers of the American south. Cinderwich is very gothic and also very southern gothic, which I like.

Cinderwich is a short one, almost a novella at around 160 pages, and the story it tells is pretty straightforward. Ellen Thrush is named after her aunt Ellen, who disappeared before she was even born. It’s kind of awkward being constantly compared (both favorably and not) to an aunt she never knew, so she usually goes by her middle name, Kate. 

Aunt Ellen’s disappearance was quite the mystery and no one was affected more than Ellen’s girlfriend at the time, Dr. Judith Kane. Decades after the disappearance, when Kate ended up in grad school where Judith worked, they bonded for a while over Ellen’s life and possible death. Judith would share memories and Kate got to know a different side of her namesake. Eventually Kate left grad school and the two drifted apart, but Judith never entirely quit trying to solve the mystery of Ellen’s disappearance. 

Years later, Judith invites Kate to visit Cinderwich, Tennessee, where for years someone has been writing “Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?” on walls and such. The name is right, the timing sort of fits, and Judith wants to follow this one last lead before giving up the search for good. Kate isn’t hoping for much but she agrees to meet in Cinderwich and help Judith investigate.

Ghostly things happen almost immediately, and they keep happening until the story’s dramatic ending. They meet probably most of the people left in this tiny ghost of a town, including three of the girls who originally found “Ellen” in the tree. The girls have since grown up into a kickass trio of very spooky, very gothy ladies who all seem to be kind of psychic. They and their house are awesome and Kate secretly wishes she could move in with them. So do I, frankly. They seem cool and they stock a wide variety of loose leaf tea at all times, it seems. It sounds lovely.

You might notice this story is chock full of women. It’s not a story about women exploring their womanhood, it’s not part of the town’s mystery or anything, but almost every single character is a woman of some kind. It’s just a cool ghost story centered around a bunch of women and their various lives and goals and perspectives. It gives the book a particular flavor I enjoyed.

This book isn’t gory at all, in spite of the dead body in the tree, and it’s not particularly frightening. It is, however, very spooky and magical and this town is haunted by mysterious (and sometimes malevolent) forces. I love a gothic tale with a really pervasive atmosphere and this delivers. The atmosphere is great and the mystery is satisfying, while Kate and Judith feel real and I’m rooting for them to solve Ellen’s mystery and get home safe. I highly recommend this as a quick cozy read. It’s a perfect ghost story for a long winter night.

As always, embrace the darkness with us here or on Substack.