Synopsis: It’s the late ’90s, and you can find Jeremy Heldt at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa―a small town in the center of the state. The job is good enough for Jeremy, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try […]
Religious Horror
Review: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Synopsis A searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down. They’ll scare you straight to hell. Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold. Nestled high up in the mountains is […]
Review: Elder Epoch (Gunmetal Gods Series #3) by Zamil Akhtar
Synopsis The protector of the land is dead. A blood plague infests the soil and sea, eldritch angels vie for dominion over hearts and souls, and holy war boils between four gunpowder empires. The line between truth and falsehood, the righteous and the wicked, hope and annihilation is buried deep beneath blood-soaked sand. Review By […]
Review: Lowland Rider by Chet Williamson
Synopsis: Jesse Gordon, driven to a shocking murder by the killing of his wife and infant daughter, condemns himself to life underground in the New York City subway system. Abandoning the light of day, he finds an evil as old as time, and a redemption which must be bought by a price far greater than […]
Review: Boys in the Valley by Philip Fracassi
Synopsis St. Vincent’s Orphanage for Boys. Turn of the century, in a remote valley in Pennsylvania. Here, under the watchful eyes of several priests, thirty boys work, learn, and worship. Peter Barlow, orphaned as a child by a gruesome murder, has made a new life here. As he approaches adulthood, he has friends, a future… a family. Then, […]
Review: The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo
Synopsis Leslie Bruin is assigned to the backwoods township of Spar Creek by the Frontier Nursing Service, under its usual mandate: vaccinate the flock, birth babies, and weather the judgements of churchy locals who look at him and see a failed woman. Forged in the fires of the Western Front and reborn in the cafes […]
Review: Apparitions by Adam Pottle
Synopsis Violence was his first language. A nameless Deaf teen escapes his father’s basement after years of imprisonment. Bloody, alone, and without language, he stumbles through the Saskatchewan prairies and lands in a psychiatric facility, where he meets Felix, another Deaf teen. Felix—cunning and ambitious—teaches the nameless narrator Sign Language and begins to mold the abused […]
Navigating The Flanaverse: A Guide to Mike Flanagan on Netflix
As the dust settles on Mike Flanagan’s newest series The Fall of The House of Usher, so too does the dust settle on his time with Netflix. In December of last year Flanagan announced that he had signed a TV deal with Amazon Studios, and although I am sure there will be plenty of long […]
Review: Mister Magic by Kiersten White
Summary Thirty years after a tragic accident shut down production of the classic children’s program Mister Magic, the five surviving cast members have done their best to move on. But just as generations of cultishly devoted fans still cling to the lessons they learned from the show, the cast, known as the Circle of Friends, have spent […]
Review: Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison
Synopsis A cynical twentysomething must confront her unconventional family’s dark secrets in this fiery, irreverent horror novel from the author of Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle. Nobody has a “normal” family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly…something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious […]
Review: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Synopsis Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold. Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy. And they’ll scare you […]
Review: The Vein by Steph Nelson
Synopsis It’s 1989 and failed detective, Syl Dixon, has returned to her childhood home in Pate, Idaho, to sell the old place she grew up in, back before her Gran mysteriously disappeared. But when the shriveled corpse of a local man is discovered inside the old silver mine the town was built around, Syl is […]