Mouth, Puloma Ghosh (Astra House 978-1-66260-247-4, $26.00, 224pp, hc) June 2024.
Reading Puloma Ghosh’s debut collection, Mouth, brought me back to the pandemic and the months spent in lockdown. To be clear, not one of the eleven stories in the book takes place during or refers to COVID, but isolation and loneliness are so central to Ghosh’s work, her protagonist’s aching for intimacy, that my thoughts were cast ...Read More
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How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive, Craig DiLouie (Redhook 978-0-31656-931-6, $19.99, 400pp, ppb) June 2024.
Funny horror is hard to do right, but Craig DiLouie delivers plenty of it in How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive. At once a send up of the movie industry, a brutal horror novel where a lot of people die in horrible ways, and an exploration of art and ...Read More
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The Black Girl Survives in This One, Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, eds. (Flatiron 978-1-25032-199-2, $19.99, 368pp, hc) April 2024.
Horror is in a golden age in young adult fiction. Just a few years ago, you could count the number of YA horror novels released each year on one hand. Last year I tracked more than 30 YA books marketed as horror. This year just in January ...Read More
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Momma Durtt, Michael Shea (Hippocampus Press 978-1-61498-417-7, 310pp. $20.00, tp) July 2024. Cover by Tom Brown.
Michael Shea (1946 – 2014) is usually noted for his World Fantasy Award-winning fantasy novel Nifft the Lean, but he is almost as well-known among horror lovers for his Lovecraftian fiction. Among a multitude of short work in this latter category is a 2012 novelette: ‘‘Momma Durtt’’. It is a good allegorical ...Read More
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This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances, Eric LaRocca (Titan 978-1-80336-664-7, $22.99, 240pp, hc) April 2024.
Eric LaRocca has quickly established himself as one of strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction. This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is emotionally charged and full of the kind of strange body horror LaRocca is known for. A collection of four novellas that aren’t afraid to explore humanity, ...Read More
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Uncanny 5-6/24 The Deadlands Spring ’24
Seven new stories in issue 58 of the always-commendable Uncanny. “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine may or may not be your cup of tea. I slurped it up with glee, but its complex construction, multiple styles and points of view, and academic angle may turn some off. Part of the premise, as Martine writes, is “Historians are liars.” The ...Read More
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The Underhistory, Kaaron Warren (Viper 978-1-80081-202-4, £16.99, 383pp, hc) April 2024.
The publication of a new novel from Kaaron Warren is an event worthy of fanfare. She’s one of the rare few – Kirstyn McDermott is another – who can blend literary and horror fiction without undermining the strengths of either. It makes for a reading experience that’s both deep and textured, but also taut and brutal. The Underhistory ...Read More
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A Voice Calling, Christopher Barzak (Psychopomp 979-8-89116-001-9, $13.99, 108pp, tp) March 2024.
There has been no shortage of good haunted-house tales in the past year or so, with contributions from Elizabeth Hand, Alix E. Harrow, T. Kingfisher, and others. Christopher Barzak’s A Voice Calling (his first novella, he tells us in an afterword) might seem to be hopping on the bandwagon, but in fact it’s an expansion of a ...Read More
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Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, Robin Wasley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-665-91460-4, $19.99, hc, 400pp) February 2024. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.
The tourist town of Llewellyn, AKA Wellsie, is famous for the magic that used to be there. Just like Springfield is the town where Lincoln was born, and Roswell is where aliens might have landed, Wellsie is where something happened once. It’s a town on a fault ...Read More
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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-662-51391-6, $16.99, tp, 284pp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.
Cynthia Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters begins with a nightmare, then moves to a nuanced family history of sisters Jennie and Anna, who live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River that was owned first by their grandparents, then their parents, and now is theirs to treasure and maintain. In the second chapter, ...Read More
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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-66251-391-6, $16.99, 303pp, tp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.
Cynthia Pelayo has made a name for herself in horror by bringing to the table a mixture of horror, crime fiction, and folklore that always contains a dash of poetry and by telling stories that invariably take place in Chicago, a city that Pelayo always turns into a character in her work. ...Read More
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The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga 978-1-66801-166-9, $28.99, 464pp, hc) March 2024.
Jade Daniels – the uber-Final Girl – returns to the bloodily beleaguered town of Proofrock, Idaho, in The Angel of Indian Lake, the last installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s brilliant Indian Lake Trilogy. It’s October 2023, four years since the events of Don’t Fear the Reaper; eight years since we first met ...Read More
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Diavola, Jennifer Thorne (Nightfire 978-1-250-82612-1, $27.99, hc, 304pp) March 2024. Cover by Judy Jung.
In Jennifer Thorne’s hilarious, scary, brilliant, and all too easily identifiable novel, Diavola, advertising illustrator Anna is determined to be a good daughter, get along with everyone and do what it takes to make her family’s Italian vacation successful. Her parents have paid for two weeks in a villa near the tiny village of ...Read More
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Nightmare 2/24, 3/24, 4/24 The Deadlands Winter ’24 The Dark 1/24, 2/24, 3/24
Of the three originals in Nightmare #137, a flash piece satisfied me the most. Jessica Luke García notes in her introduction to “First Girl” that we “live in a Final Girl world” then proceeds to give the girl who dies first in any slasher movie her telling and sometimes risible due.
Two of the new ...Read More
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The Deadlands Winter ’24
The Winter 2024 issue of The Deadlands is full of lovely prose and quiet stories meditating on life and death. In the beautifully written “Threnody in Dark Wood” by Avra Margariti, a professional mourner who sings the dead through the Doorway receives a mysterious assignment to attend an empty funeral with a sealed coffin and soon realizes this is a job unlike any other. ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 1/1/24 – 3/17/24 Weird Horror Spring ’24 Uncanny 1-2/24, 3-4/24 Apex #142, #143
Lots to cover this month, so let’s concentrate on the cream of the crop.
The Sunday Morning Transport publishes new fiction almost every Sunday throughout the year. Each of the stories merits a read, but of the first eleven stories of 2024, six stood out for me.
The title of Mary Robinette Kowal ...Read More
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Small Town Horror, Ronald Malfi (Titan Books 978-1-80336-565-7, $27.99, 400pp, hc) June 2024.
It’s hard to find fresh, unique ghost stories. It’s probably even harder to find original narratives – horror, mystery, crime, whatever – in which someone is forced to go back to their hometown to face their past. In Small Town Horror, author Ronald Malfi manages to do both. At once a spooky tale about a ...Read More
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Changes in the Land, Matthew Cheney (Lethe Press 978-1-59021-526-5, $3.00, 90pp, eb) April 2024.
If you read my 2023 Year in Review essay published in the February edition of Locus, you’ll know my favourite collection was Matthew Cheney’s The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories. I’m not going to repeat what I said about the book other than to note that while the stories tended to be grim ...Read More
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Dead Girls Walking, Sami Ellis (Amulet Books 978-1-41976-676-3, $19.99, 368pp, hc) March 2024.
Serial killing runs in the family in Dead Girls Walking, Sami Ellis’s debut young adult horror novel. Several years ago, Thomas Baker was arrested, his reign of terror finally ended. He confessed to kidnapping, torturing, branding, and murdering more than a dozen people, burying their bodies on his sprawling farm. Temple grew up surrounded by ...Read More
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Table for One, Yun Ko-Eun (Columbia University Press 978-0-23119-202-6, $20.00, 280pp, hc) April 2024.
Yun Ko-eun (the pen name for Ko Eun-ju) will be unfamiliar to most English-language readers unless they’ve read her one translated novel, The Disaster Tourist. In South Korea, though, she’s the multiple award-winning author of several novels and short story collections and the host of the EBS Radio show Book Cafe. Thankfully, we now ...Read More
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Clever Creatures of the Night, Samantha Mabry (Algonquin 978-1-61620-897-4, $18.99, 240pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Kayla E.
Samantha Mabry’s Clever Creatures of the Night is a master class in atmosphere with a literary bent and a few surprising turns up its creepy sleeve. At once a murder mystery, a postapocalyptic narrative, and a story about friendship, this novel about a missing friend and some strange young people living ...Read More
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW 978-0-75641-885-4, $28.00, 320pp, hc.) April 2024.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In is award-winning short fiction writer John Wiswell’s debut novel. I went in expecting good things, and I wasn’t disappointed. The most straightforward shorthand I have to describe it is: ‘‘It’s as if T. Kingfisher wrote one of her fantasy romance novels from the point of view ...Read More
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The Invisible Hotel, Yeji Y. Ham (Zando 978-1-63893-137-9, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2024.
Early on in Yeji Y. Ham’s intense debut novel, The Invisible Hotel, our narrator, Yewon, describes her mother’s daily ritual of cleaning of their ancestor’s bones in the family’s bathtub.
My stomach began to thrash. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to smell it. Heat, breath, sweat, the odor that rose into the ...Read More
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The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris 978-1-8378-6046-3, $27.99, 432pp, hc) March 2023.
“Weird” is a word that’s been worn thin with use, even in regular conversation. I hesitate to apply it in a genre sense – whether old or New – for fear of misusing it, wading too deep into niche categorization, or merely adding more wear to the term. But there’s a sense in which its ...Read More
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The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings, Angela Slatter (Brain Jar Press 978-1-92247-961-7, $14.99, 186pp, tp) October 2023
Sometimes awards don’t mean much, but Angela Slatter’s accomplishments – a Shirley Jackson Award, a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, three Australian Shadows Awards, and eight Aurealis Awards – point to one thing very clearly: She’s a superb writer. She’s also a writer who is constantly pushing the envelope of ...Read More
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Nightmare 10/23, 11/23, 12/23 Heartlines Spec #3 The Deadlands 10/23, 11/23
In Nightmare #133, I found “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones to be notable. One of the most terrifying of modern horrors is the slaughter of school children by lone gunmen. Jones conjures a magical escape route for the innocents, but it is far from a safe haven. It’s a difficult theme to attempt, ...Read More
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The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1250881786, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024.
I’m pretty sure that tales of forests that are haunted (or enchanted or forbidden or cursed or simply hallucinogenic) predate haunted-house tales by several centuries – in fact, they probably predate houses – and they’ve long provided powerful templates for fantasy (William Morris, George MacDonald, Tolkien, Robert Holdstock), horror (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood) and even ...Read More
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Other Minds and Other Stories, Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio 978-1-9533-8735-6, $18.95. 202pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Eric Obenauf.
Other Minds and Other Stories, the new collection from Bennett Sims, is a must-read: a startling, insightful blend of horror and humor, thoughtful and unpredictable. Many of the stories here are about the psychologies of writing, and of reading, the very strangeness of trying to record thoughts or ...Read More
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The Woods All Black, Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom 978-1-250-79031-6, $19.99, 160pp, hc) March 2024.
Lee Mandelo focuses on the hazardous experiences of a trans man in 1929 rural Kentucky in The Woods All Black. Like Wasserstein, Mandelo opens with a classic narrative hook: a stranger arrives in a small town on a new assignment, and finds the townspeople chilly if not openly hostile, as though they are guarding some ...Read More
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Tender Beasts, Liselle Sambury (McElderry Books 978-1-665-90352-3, $19.99, 404pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Elena Masci.
I strongly advise you block out a weekend for reading Liselle Sambury’s Tender Beasts, because once you start down this multi-layered family drama, murder mystery, possible deal-with-a-demon cautionary tale, you are not going to be able to set it aside. At the center of the propulsive narrative are a lot (A LOT) of ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 10/24/23, 9/10/23, 9/3/23 Apex #140 The Dark 9/23, 10/23
I know I am repeating myself, but every story The Sunday Morning Transport publishes should be read. Of the nine original stories published from the end of August through October 22, I’ll mention only my absolute favorites. Nura – in ‘‘We Will Witness’’ by Martin Cahill – is a 30th-century Witness, sent back in time ...Read More
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The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-097-6, 320pp, $28.99, hc) Cover by Jaya Miceli. January 2024.
Aimee Pokwatka leans into the absurdist, and refuses explanations in her fiction. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Nothing (2022), has an artist with the ability to bring variants of her portrait subjects into this world; how this works is never explained. Rather, the focus is on relationships: between the artist’s own variants, between the artist and ...Read More
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