Synopsis: At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, […]
Body Horror
Review: House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias
Synopsis In this “stunningly visceral” (New York Times Book Review) novel, a group of young men seek vengeance after one of their mothers is murdered in a Puerto Rican slum; STAND BY ME with a haunted, obsidian-dark heart. For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang […]
Review: All the Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper
Synopsis: What really happened to Cabrina Brite? Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries? […]
Review: All the Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper
Synopsis: What really happened to Cabrina Brite? Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries? […]
Review: Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
Synopsis: Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reawakening” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, […]
Review: Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson
Synopsis: Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn’t want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family’s big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she’s certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask […]
Review: The Devil By Name (Fever House #2) by Keith Rosson
Synopsis No one expected the apocalypse would be broadcast via phone call. But in this chilling sequel to Fever House, anyone who managed to survive that doomsday call has a harrowing answer to the question, “Where were you when the Message came through?” Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, […]
Review: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram
Synopsis: Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station. Determined to find a way […]
Review: Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson
While I have not read anything else by Dawson, I can certainly tell why she is so loved. Her writing is clean and quick, flowing expertly from the page with the economic yet evocative emphasis of a high-level storyteller.
Review: 8114 by Joshua Hull
Synopsis: 8114 is a terrifying horror novel investigating the mysterious death of a high school friend through an embattled podcast and hallucinatory hauntings at the abandoned house of his childhood. After returning to his hometown, Paul, the beleaguered host of a small-time podcast, discovers a longtime friend committed suicide in the dilapidated ruins of Paul’s […]
Review: Asunder by Kerstin Hall
Synopsis:We choose our own gods here.Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch entity—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a […]
Review: The Preserve by Patrick Lestewka
Synopsis: In the summer of 1967, seven men, members of an elite combat unit, embarked on a covert operation in the jungles of Vietnam. Two died. The survivors were forever changed. Twenty years later, the remaining unit members receive a letter from an anonymous benefactor, along with a check for $50,000 and a promise of […]