A book review for Skin Thief: a short story collection that explores our sense of identity and belonging mixed with some delightful gothic themes.
Supernatural
REVIEW: This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer
SYNOPSIS Take only pictures. Leave only bones. This trip is going to be Dylan’s big break. Her geologist friend Clay has discovered an untouched cliff face in the Kentucky wilderness, and she is going to be the first person to climb it. Together with Clay, his research assistant Sylvia, and Dylan’s boyfriend Luke, Dylan is […]
Review: Swan Song by Robert R McCammon
Synopsis: Swan is a nine-year-old Kansas girl following her struggling mother from one trailer park to the next when she receives visions of doom—something far wider than the narrow scope of her own beleaguered life. In a blinding flash, nuclear bombs annihilate civilization, leaving only a few buried survivors to crawl onto a scorched landscape […]
Review: What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman
Synopsis: After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market. It’s there that she connects with old high school […]
Review: The Folly by Gemma Amor
Synopsis: Morgan always knew her father, Owen, never murdered her mother, and has spent the last six years campaigning for his release from prison. Finally he is set free, but they can no longer live in the house that was last decorated by her mother’s blood. Salvation comes in the form of a tall, dark […]
Review: Lies That Bind by April Yates and Rae Knowles
Synopsis: Lorelei Keyes and Adele Hughes are content, if not entirely happy, running a sham seance business in the English tourist town of Matlock Bath. Lorelei’s business savvy and Adele’s gift for mimicry provide for their needs, but the customers are not the only ones deceived. When a mysterious newcomer, Viola, uncovers a secret, the […]
Review: Cranberry Cove by Hailey Piper
Synopsis: Bram Stoker Award-winning author Hailey Piper joins Bad Hand Books with a supernatural crime novella. What’s been happening at Cranberry Cove? It’s unspeakable. It’s unspoken. Emberly Hale is about to take a dark journey inside the derelict hotel—and inside her own past—to find out the horrible truth. Review: Hailey Piper’s Cranberry Cove begins with […]
Review: Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Synopsis: One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While they are exploring the lighthouse, Maja disappears – either into thin air or under thin ice — leaving not even a footprint in […]
Review: The Fisherman by John Langan
Synopsis: In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared […]
Review: The Nightmare Man by J. H. Markert
Synopsis T. Kingfisher meets Cassandra Khaw in a chilling horror novel that illustrates the fine line between humanity and monstrosity. Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of Crooked Tree. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to […]
Review: The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
Synopsis It’s been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend Letha and her family from incrimination. Since then, her reputation, and the town, have changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to […]
Review: Uncanny Vows (Huntsmen #2) by Laura Anne Gilman
Gilman opens up this sequel in one of my absolute favorite ways across media, and that is by zooming in from a seemingly normal and sweeping outdoor scene, into an indoor one of absolute chaos and mayhem. And so it is that months after the events of book one, we find Rosemary and Aaron battling pesky imps wreaking havoc during a routine hunt. Not only is this kind of scene absolutely hilarious but the medias res allows you to hit the ground running back into the action you left off from book one.