Tag: horror reviews

#REVIEW: The Caretaker, by Marcus Kliewer

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This is one of those books that you finish, put down, and then mutter “Fuuuuuck…” under your breath.

Marcus Kliewer has, I believe, written two books. I read his debut, We Used to Live Here, and reviewed it here. My review was a little on the mixed side; WUtLH features a really unreliable narrator, a literary trick I generally don’t get along with very well, and its genre is mindfuck. One thing that I’m noticing as I’m rereading the review, though, is that I finished the book in one sitting.

I also finished The Caretaker in one sitting, and I did not have “read an entire book cover to cover” on my to-do list for today. Now, granted, this isn’t a terribly long book, coming in under 300 pages and with a largish font on top of that, but I genuinely did not put it down once while I was reading it. This means that Marcus Kliewer has written two books, I have read them both, and I didn’t put either of them down while I was reading them.

That’s … really impressive.

The Caretaker is also a mindfuck, although not as intensely so as WUtLH. The main character, Macy Mullins, is a twenty-something and a bit of a fuck-up, with a doozy of an anxiety issue on top of that. She’s the parental figure for her younger sister Jenna, a seventeen-year-old with a penchant for casual shoplifting. Macy is broke and jobless, and the sisters are about to be evicted from their apartment when Macy happens to spot a want ad for a temporary caretaker position. She interviews and discovers that she’s being offered nine thousand dollars, a life-changing amount of money, for the simple task of three days of house-sitting. The house is old and isolated, buried deep in the wilderness off the coast of Oregon, but despite her sister’s reservations she jumps at it.

Oh, and there are some minor things you need to do while you’re house-sitting. No big deal. The former owner had some, uh, quirks, and maybe some OCD, and maybe a lot of OCD, and his wife promised him that as long as she lived in the house she’d keep up his little rituals that he thought literally kept the world safe. A promise is a promise, though, right? Here’s the list. Again, no big deal. Simple stuff.

You might not be surprised to learn that things don’t go well. Otherwise this isn’t that much of a book, right? Macy babysits the house and makes sure none of the lights turn on in the middle of the night. She makes a ton of money, buys a used car, and gets her and her sister back on track now that she can get to work. The end!

Nah.

Full disclosure: I got sucked directly into this book and it dragged me along at a breakneck pace until I was done with it, and it might be the kind of book I wake up tomorrow and find a dozen huge plot holes in. The three major book services I use for ratings– Amazon, Goodreads and Storygraph– all have it at under 4 stars, which isn’t alarming, necessarily, but it means the book isn’t exactly garnering universal acclaim. But oh, man, the ride it takes you on is great. It’s creepy as hell and the main character makes nothing but bad decisions from start to finish and if I could have found a way to cover my eyes and read the whole book through the cracks in my fingers I might have, except I haven’t found a way to turn pages or hold a book while I’m doing that. But I’m keeping a close eye on this Kliewer fellow from now on; I actually picked this one up from Aardvark without immediately realizing it was the We Used to Live Here guy. I will not be forgetting his name again.

Give it a read. Just make sure you have a few hours set aside before you do.

#REVIEW: Slewfoot, by Brom

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I picked up Brom’s novel Slewfoot more or less on a whim— I know him from his comic book work, but was unaware that he’d written any books until finding this one on a table at Barnes & Noble. That cover is haunting as hell (an apt description for most of his artwork, to be honest) and the book actually has an insert of several full-color paintings of the main characters, plus smaller pieces of artwork adorning each of the chapter headings, so I figured even if the writing itself wasn’t that good I would be getting some cool artwork out of the deal.

Well, I’ll be picking up more of his books, now that I know they exist. Slewfoot is not the most original book ever written— when I tell you the main character is a woman in Puritan Connecticut during the 1600s, combined with the cover and the subtitle “A tale of bewitchery,” you will no doubt be able to map out a lot of the broader beats of the story all by yourself with little effort, and you’ll mostly be correct. Is religious intolerance a theme? Yep. Is there a group of men whose goal is to fit main character Abitha into a box that she doesn’t want to be in? Yep. Will there eventually be a trial scene where she is accused of witchcraft, and the accompanying scenes of torture and interrogation? Yep.

(She doesn’t have goat legs, by the way. At first.)

Because, of course, the next question is going to be “Did Goody Good see her with the devil,” and the answer’s going to have to be sort of. Abitha’s husband dies early in the book and her shithead of a brother-in-law immediately starts to try to steal her farm out from underneath her so that he can pay off his debts, and, yeah, there’s something in the woods, but is it The Devil with capital letters? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. And Abitha has certain talents and skills learned from her mother, a cunning woman in her own right, and certainly not a Puritan— in fact, Abitha herself wasn’t born a Puritan, and in fact appears to have been more or less sold to her husband as the seventeenth-century version of a mail-order bride.

So she’s an outsider, too, in addition to all the other stuff, and, well, that’s not entirely a new idea either.

This book, in other words, isn’t necessarily good because of what it’s about, because as soon as you say Puritan you’re automatically conditioned in this country to expect a certain kind of story, and you’re going to get more or less what you’re expecting. Right up until the goat-legs thing, at least. And the bloody, bloody revenge. But there’s room for something to be reasonably predictable while still being a really good example of the thing that it is, and that’s what this is. Yeah, this is a book about a sort-of-but-not-really witch who is mostly just a woman with her own mind and her own opinions, in a world where all of those things are strongly frowned upon, and we’ve read that before. But I like genre books for a reason, and originality isn’t everything, and this is a really good seventeenth-century horror story, stuffed full of cool art as a bonus. It’s well worth checking out.

#REVIEW: The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen

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With about fifty pages left in Nicholas Pullen’s The Black Hunger, I showed my wife how much book was left and told her that there was no way the book had enough book left to end right.

I was wrong.

Real, real, real wrong.

Now, obviously I can’t spoil the book’s ending. I mean, I can; I’m not going to. But it makes the book kind of hard to talk about, because having read the ending, I now feel like it’s the only possible way that the book could have ended, and to be honest I feel kind of dumb for not having seen it coming. But God damn, Nicholas Pullen. My dude pulled an inside straight here, and I’m genuinely in awe of how this book is put together.

But before I get too far ahead of myself: The Black Hunger is a whole lot of things. It feels very neo-Lovecraftian despite not actually referencing any of the Lovecraft mythos; it’s somehow cosmic horror without quite being properly cosmic; it’s historical fiction, referencing real people and real events, right up until the point where it isn’t. There is, at one point, a story within a story within a story. It’s gory and supernatural and Gothic and super gay. I was already thoroughly enjoying myself even before finishing the book, and the last ten pages or so are a masterclass. It starts off at Oxford and wends its way through India, Tibet, Russia and China before it’s finished. Pullen even throws in an 1870s British paranormal spy agency and the Dalai Lama just for the sheer hell of it. The main character is an academic and a minor British lord who ends up in the civil service in the back-end of India just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In a move that really shouldn’t have worked and somehow did, the middle third or so of the book is a lengthy letter involving an entirely different set of characters that also itself includes a lengthy digression for another letter.

This, uh, appears to have alienated some people, from looking at the reviews, and the rest are mad that there is Gay. Do not trust Goodreads on this one, is what I’m saying.

Between this and The Poet Empress, I’ve definitely got some excellent early frontrunners for the end of the year.

#REVIEW: Trad Wife, by Saratoga Schaefer

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I’ve been suffering through a little bit of a book drought lately— of the seven books I’ve read in March, I’ve only ranked two of them above three stars, and if you’ve paid any attention to my Goodreads or Storygraph accounts (Follow me! I want friends!) you know that I tend to rate generously, as I don’t often buy books I don’t expect to like.

My wife was a little startled to see that I’d picked up Trad Wife, though, which probably doesn’t look like something I’d usually read, especially if you don’t happen to notice that clawed hand on the cover. I own this because of my Aardvark book box subscription; it’s pretty easy to get me to take a risk on a hardcover if it’s only $10, and the club in general has had a pretty good record for horror novels for me.

Because, yeah, this is a horror novel. It’s Rosemary’s Baby crossed with Nightbitch for the TikTok/Instagram generation, which was not a thing I ever expected to type. Main character Camille Deming is an aspiring Instagram influencer and “trad wife” person, meaning she stays at home and cooks and cleans and constantly posts pictures and videos of her perfect house and her perfect lifestyle. The problem is that she doesn’t have a baby, and she feels like her social media is never really going to take off (I feel you, sister) unless she manages to get herself knocked up. The problem is it keeps not happening, and her husband seems to be losing interest in her.

So obviously she’s gonna fuck the first demon who invades her dreams to promise her a child. I mean, really, who wouldn’t? And if the baby doesn’t turn out … quite like she expected, well. Do it for the ‘gram. Or something. I feel like young people at least used to say that.

I actually posted a review of this to GR/SG, and it read, in full, “Absolutely deranged. I loved it.”

A few hours later, this is probably going to be one of those books that declines a bit in my esteem with the passage of time, but its strength is that it’s a fast, propulsive read (only 300 pages) that you will probably finish far too quickly to think about it too much. Once you sit down and think about it— and, to be clear, this is something that I don’t recommend— it’s gonna develop a couple of holes here and there, and a couple of things about the setting are going to feel like they were contrived specifically so that the plot would work. Camille and her husband have just moved to a new home in a new town, for example, away from family and friends. Camille has no one other than her husband and an infuriatingly persistent and nosy neighbor who she’d rather do without, and she kind of has to be isolated for the plot to work— if she even had one good girlfriend the book would not have been able to unfold the way it did.

The book doesn’t actually really address her lack of friends; I assume it’s because she’s decided to dedicate herself solely to her husband; you’re gonna have to roll with it if you want to have a good time. Similarly, if her husband was even vaguely interested in being a good husband or a good father— either! it doesn’t have to be both!— a whole lot would have gone very differently. You will be annoyed by things like this if things like this generally annoy you. Do you want to like your main characters? You may not like Camille very much. I’m not certain you’re supposed to; I’m not sure the author likes her very much. But Trad Wife succeeds at being a creepy page-turner for the few hours you’ll spend with it, and sometimes that’s enough. I needed something I could dive into and enjoy, and it filled that role nicely.

#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.)

#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.

#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.

#REVIEW: The Eyes Are The Best Part, by Monika Kim

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I called this “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up” in my Goodreads review, and … really, isn’t that enough?

I am tempted to say it is, because it has been a long day, and I am tired, and I don’t have a ton of stamina at how the hell is it almost 8:00 already to write a complete review, so I’ll just say this: Monika Kim’s debut about a college-aged Korean-American girl named Ji-Won is equal parts horrifying and rage-inducing, which is an interesting combination. Ji-Won’s father leaves her mother at the very beginning of the book after an extramarital affair, leaving Ji-Won’s mother an emotional wreck and upending their family entirely. Ji-Won has to take on trying to keep her family stable while negotiating her first semester at college, and when her mom takes up with a white guy who is pretty clearly a narcissistic, womanizing scam artist and she catches the attention of a second white guy who is horrible for a whole different set of reasons, keeping her family stable starts to take a backseat to keeping herself stable.

Because she’s growing obsessed with eyes– eating them, specifically– and the more her mother’s beau pulls the wool over her eyes, the easier simply murdering him to get him out of their lives becomes to consider. And we’re off to the races, as Ji-Won both grows (descends?) into becoming a budding serial killer and definitely descends into some pretty interesting types of what I think is technically referred to as The Crazy. She has bad dreams and occasional hallucinations and for a minute at the end there you think the book is going to take the easy way out and then it doesn’t, and … yeah, I’m sticking with “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up,” here. Not for everybody, either, in case that’s not perfectly obvious, but I loved it.

A quick word on the white guys, as I feel like I just opened the book up to a certain set of accusations: the book is not anti-white so much as it is anti-a couple of specific kinds of white guys, and in particular it takes aim at Asian fetishization, which, at least as far as I’m familiar with it, pretty much is a white guy thing. The college guy is unbearable in a few other kinda white-specific ways too, but at least at first he pales(*) in comparison to the mother’s new boyfriend, who is immediately and clearly awful to everyone except her. Anyway, if you’re the type to get het up when you think white people are being criticized you’ve probably bailed on my blog years ago, so I doubt this will be a real problem for anyone who might take my recommendation seriously anyway. If not? We can take it, I promise.

One way or another, there’s a great build-up here, a brief moment where you might be worried that the end is about to get away from the author, and then she nails the landing anyway. I really liked this one, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for future work from Monika Kim in the future. (I also picked up a second copy from Illumicrate, because … my god, that cover!)

(*) I swear I didn’t do that on purpose, and I’m sorry, but not sorry enough to remove it.