Tag: horror

#REVIEW: The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, by Christina Henry

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My Aardvark book box subscription scores again; the books from this service have consistently surprised me with their quality, especially the horror novels, which have produced some of my favorite books of the year– books that I’d never have come across were it not for the club.

I need to get something out of the way first, though. This is a haunted house book. It’s a pretty damn effective haunted house book. You can really stop reading here if you want! You probably already know if you like good haunted house books, and if you are that guy, go grab this.

That said: the verb that keeps getting used throughout this book about what the house does to people is eats. The house eats people. The main character is Jessie Campanelli, fourteen years old at the start of the book (and living in a neighborhood near where I lived in Chicago, and in high school in 1994, which was the year I graduated, so this book hits home in a few places) and sick at home in bed, when she dares her annoying little brother to get a couple of his friends and go spend half an hour in the creepy old house down the road.

One of his friends loses an arm. Paulie is never seen again. The house ate him. And it’s immensely creepy and atmospheric in the book, but God help me, every time I saw a reference to the house eating someone, I was reminded of this:

(Forgive me, please, Christina Henry; your book is way way better than Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, which Oswalt gets the name of wrong every time he mentions it, but I couldn’t get past the eating.)

Jessie, who is an adult with an elementary-aged child by the end of the book, spends her life living in the house she grew up in, and Paulie’s death reverberates throughout the book, leaving scars that eventually rob her of her entire family and bring her one of her own. The book does a great job of capturing the kind of working-class, multi-generational families that Chicago’s neighborhoods are known for, and the relationships, bad or good, between Jessie and the rest of the characters in the book are a definite highlight. Jessie herself is kind of a mess, but she’s earned it, and her determination to better herself and keep her son safe is kind of inspiring.

I read this book in about four hours, a hundred pages before bed and the rest this morning before I was able to do anything else. It’s hard to put down, and the pacing is masterful. It’s creepy as hell throughout, and if anything I could have gone for another fifty pages or so to beef up the ending a bit. The book doesn’t quite fumble the finish, but the ending does feel a little bit rushed, which is my only real complaint.

I missed spooky season with this one– I should have read it in October– but you should check it out anyway.

(Okay, one thing: to be completely clear, there are gonna be some dying and/or threatened children in this book? Paulie isn’t the only one. If that’s not your bag, avoid. Consider this your trigger warning.)

Let’s double-check

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Raise your hand if any of your students got expelled yesterday for trying to sell a gun to another one of your students and his brother, who also got expelled.

No? Just me? Just checking.

Ooh, I’ve got another one! Raise your hand if, while discussing the gun seller, you discovered that part of the reason he’s the way he is that his dad shot his mom in the head and then killed himself right in front of him when he was six years old.

Just me again?

Okay.

#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.

Monthly Reads: June 2025

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Storygraph tells me this is 11,505 pages. That’s not completely accurate as there are a handful of DNFs in there, so let’s say 10,500. Either way, can you tell I did nothing but read in June?

Book of the Month is gonna be The Faithful Executioner, by Joel F. Harrington.

#REVIEW: SINNERS (2025)

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I don’t remember the last time I wrote a movie review. It’s been a while, I can tell you that.(*) The thing about me reviewing movies– and if you’ve been around, you’ve seen me say this before– is that I have to guard against my own enthusiasm a lot of the time. There are plenty of times when I’ve written a movie review quickly after watching the movie and in retrospect it’s been more positive than maybe it would have been if I’d waited a few days.

Last night, after watching Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, I commented to my wife (and posted on BlueSky, I believe) that I’d have been more positive about it had I never seen From Dusk Till Dawn. And since FDtD is easily the movie’s most obvious point of comparison, let’s go straight at this: the two movies are similar enough that you could tell me Sinners was deliberately meant as a remake and I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That might feel like a slam; it’s not, as From Dusk Till Dawn is a great movie. But that’s where I was; I enjoyed Sinners quite a bit but I felt like in large part I’d seen it before.

I’m sitting here right now, fifteen or so hours later and having slept on it, wishing I’d bought the thing instead of renting it, because I want to watch it again.

Sinners is that rarest of things: a movie that’s growing on me. I think I’m just going to assume that everything Ryan Coogler makes for the rest of his life is going to be gold; Michael B. Jordan is amazing playing two of the three leads in twins Smoke and Stack,(**) and the entire supporting cast ranges from solid to outstanding– I haven’t seen Delroy Lindo in anything recently, and I could watch that man read the phone book. I’m not familiar with Wunmi Mosaku, but her Annie is tremendous, and Hailee Steinfeld disappears into her role thoroughly enough that it took a good 2/3 of the movie before I realized who she was.

(A quick word about that: apparently there are people mad about Steinfeld being cast as this character, who says at one point that her “daddy’s daddy was half Black,” which makes her an eighth Black. The fact that Americans have a word for someone who is 1/8 Black is part and parcel of how fucked up this country is, and light-skinned Black people moving away and quietly passing into the white community has been a real thing for going on two centuries in this country. Steinfeld herself is literally an eighth Black. She is the exact race of the character she portrays. Pick up a book, Goddammit.)

Anyway, I always forget to talk about the plot so let’s do that: it’s 1930-something, somewhere in Mississippi, and Jordan’s Smoke and Stack have returned to their hometown after leaving years ago, loaded with cash and guns and planning on opening a juke joint. The first half of the movie is getting ready to open, pulling everyone else into their orbit, including the actual main character, Miles Caton’s Sammie, himself an extraordinarily talented blues musician. Sammie is Smoke and Stack’s younger cousin. They open up the joint to a successful first night, and then everything goes directly to Hell in more or less exactly the same way it did in From Dusk Till Dawn, and if you haven’t seen FDtD and don’t know the twist (although they haven’t done much to hide it) I’m not going to go any further than that.

Other stuff: everyone’s praised the music, for good reason, although Buddy Guy’s 88-year-old voice coming out of Sammie’s mouth is a little odd. Guy actually shows up in person in a stinger at the end of the movie, so don’t turn it off when the credits roll, although you probably won’t be in enough of a hurry to turn it off that you’ll miss it. The movie is almost a musical but not quite. There are numbers, but they make more sense in context than, say, Alexander Hamilton randomly bursting into song.

(Okay, yeah, it’s a musical, but it’s not the type of musical that people who don’t like musicals should avoid. Just fuckin’ trust me, please, plus blues musicals are amazing, as it turns out.)

So, yeah. Two thumbs up. Check it out. But it’s only five bucks more to buy it from Amazon Prime than to rent it, so buy it; you’ll want to watch it again.

(*) It was over a year ago, and ludicrously enough, it was Abigail, which I also compared to From Dusk Till Dawn.

(**) I would not have called myself an MBJ hater, but I’ve never quite gotten the hype about the guy? I mean, he’s good, but he’s got the reputation of the second coming of Denzel Washington or something, and I haven’t seen that from him yet. Okay, y’all. I get it now. Plus, not for nothin, he’s insanely sexy in this movie. Do what you want with that information.

There are two days of school left and I am kind of tired so here are some very short book reviews

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Good!

Also good!

Really good.

Really really good!

Only twenty pages in, but showing some serious promise.

(And the hardback cover is infinitely superior to the paperback one, which lacks the mid-title, which is a crime.)

Monthly Reads: March 2025

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There are actually quite a few good choices for Book of the Month in here. The Reformatory? Oathbound? The Unworthy? Martyr!? The Bones Beneath My Skin? All are great choices, but I have to go with Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Review coming in the very near future. Lots of great books this month, though.

#REVIEW: The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due

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I feel like I haven’t treated Tananarive Due with enough respect.

The Reformatory is the third of her books that I’ve read. I did not know that until just now! I remember reading her book My Soul To Keep way back in 2016, and at the time I really liked it, but for some reason every time I think of it now I feel like it wasn’t something I enjoyed. And I just discovered that I read her debut novel, The Between, in 2020.

When I tell you that I don’t remember anything about that book, I need you to understand that not only do I not remember any details about the story, I did not even remember the book existed. That cover looks unfamiliar. I cannot picture where my copy of it is in my house, and I surely read a print copy. I don’t know what the spine looks like. If you had asked me ten minutes ago what the name of Tananarive Due’s debut novel was, I would not have been able to tell you. My recall of books from years ago is not always great, I admit that, mostly because I read 100+ books a year. But forgetting a book existed or that I ever read it at all is not a thing that I do.

And that after my weird about-face on My Soul to Keep? I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Anyway, The Reformatory is really good, and if six months from now I find that I’ve turned on it too, I’m gonna need someone to come get me.

The Reformatory is the story of Robert Stephens Jr., a 12-year-old boy who is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for a supposed six-month sentence after kicking the son of a wealthy white man in the knee. The book is set in 1950 in Florida, thick in the middle of Jim Crow, and the Gracetown “school” is a segregated, haunted nightmare, run by a grotesque abomination of a man. It is widely understood that Robert won’t be getting out in six months, as the warden is renowned for finding excuses to hold on to any boy sent to him until their 21st birthday regardless of their original sentence. Beatings and torture are commonplace and the inmates prisoners “students” are encouraged to turn on each other at any opportunity.

The book bounces back and forth between Robert’s story and his sister, who Robert was defending when he kicked the other boy. She is trying her best to get him released, which is easier said than done in any number of ways. Their father has fled to Chicago after his attempts at unionization upset the Klan, and it’s fairly clear that part of the reason Robert is being treated as poorly as he is is because the authorities can’t get at his father.

The book would be scary enough without the haints, is what I’m saying, and the presence of a large number of ghosts at Gracetown becomes almost a distraction from all of the more grounded evil taking place there. Of course, a number of them are ghosts of children who were murdered or otherwise died while incarcerated there, and, well, a whole bunch of them bear quite a serious grudge against the warden.

I won’t go into much more detail, because (as usual for books I enjoyed) you deserve to experience the twists and turns on your own, but this really is a hell of a book, and I’ve not heard a lot of people talking about it. Give it a read.