As the Snow Gathers is what happens when Historical Folk Horror and Eco Horror come together to have a heartbreaking baby named Righteous Fury. It is such an incredibly lyrical and atmospheric read that even reading it in 30° degree heat you’d feel the cold of a snow covered, 1860s, isolated Canadian logging town, seep deep in your bones. The perfect winter read, it is a story that is both incredibly soft and tender, as it is unforgiving and painfully sharp as frozen wind on your face.
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Review: The Burn Line by Jonathan Sims
Whether you’re looking for some good contemporary criticism to feel a little vindicated/seen for living through these Interesting Times while trying to pretend like life is normal instead of the insanity we’re all going through. Or whether you’re looking for a claustrophobic, sweltering, anxiety filled train ride that will get under your skin and have you shrinking away from or avoiding street grates and dark alleys, The Burn Line is for you and it will arrive at each station this August 25th via Poisoned Pen Press.
Review: Don’t Look Close by Jaima Fixsen
It is a study in many things but also in the bittersweet acceptance that life always changes, if not soon, eventually, and what matters is our drive being strong enough to keep going and to relearn different ways of living with what it may bring us. Even if it’s completely different and new and hard. Don’t know about you dear reader, but I find that a message worth passing on.
Review: Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist
Home Sick is an interesting time to say the least, with Grist’s ability to render atmosphere doing a lot of the heavy lifting but not only. For, even though this is not your typical haunted house – the tagline of the book is after all “The house isn’t haunted. She is” – the claustrophobia is real. Except, instead of the physical walls of a building closing in on you, it is the metaphorical walls of the protagonist’s stream of consciousness-like narration that makes you feel short of breath.
Review: Reapers by Anthony Ryan
As the sharp and sassy man of culture that he is, Ryan presents the reader with the perfect allegory for our far too interesting times in the not so sneaky form of a “zombie” novel.
Review: Worry Box by Chris Panatier
Synopsis:The Martins need a new home for their growing family. For Alison, Nathan, daughter Dru, and foster child Lailah, it’s love at first sight when they see the house in Tumbling Hills. It even has a cozy attic, which is great for Lailah: she needs a quiet place to be alone when her intrusive thoughts […]
Review: The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan
Should I begin from the ambitious and chaotic theological sangria that Sullivan enriches his plot with in such a way that for all intents and purposes should not work and yet it somehow does gloriously?
Review: Weavingshaw (Weavingshaw #1) by Heba Al-Wasity
Al-Wasity regales us with a true slow-burn of old, the eventual lovers are most definitely enemies for a more than sufficient amount of time to meet the criteria and, most importantly, the yearning induced in the reader is sensational.
Review: How To Kill a Guy in Ten Dates by Shailee Thompson
How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates, is a very entertaining meta narrative, chock full of movie references and real-world commentary that click into one endlessly endearing, sassy, and bloody whole. It questions and teases well known tropes while also showing us how, in the heat of the moment, they may be more reasonable than we thought while watching from the comfort of our own homes.
Review: Daytide by Chris Panatier
Daytide by Chris Panatier is a thought provoking, turpentine induced, rapture of a novel that carries you into a dark world filled with hope against all odds, tender yet bittersweet full circle moments, and unexpected beauty in spite of the grotesque and macabre.
Review: The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling
The Graceview Patient is the polar opposite of a feel-good story.
It is confusing, delirious, claustrophobic, at times downright bleak, and frankly horrifying for so many reasons. Yes, I can almost guarantee that Starling’s raw and brilliant fever dream of a medical-horror novel will haunt you. Why? Because it is, to date, the cleverest and truest show of an unreliable narrator that I have read, while also presenting intelligent and nuanced studies into chronic illness, bodily autonomy, medical ethics, healthcare systems that seem to care more about profit margins than the lives they’re supposed to be saving, and disability. What happens when you cannot trust our own mind? Can things be too good to be true?
Eleni’s Top Reads of 2025
I couldn’t really pick a top five, nor a top ten this year. So you get the fun of a top 15! Like last year then, I’ll just be sharing all of their glorious covers and if I reviewed the book itself I’ll be linking the rambles in their titles so you can see if they are the books for you, at your leisure.
These are all books that kept me up till the very small hours of the night, some even made me see the first inklings of dawn and deprived me of even the little sleep I do get. But! I have no regrets whatsoever and neither would you, I believe, if you gave them a go!