I don’t talk about it much here, but along with books, I’m a huge movie fan. And that makes sense to me, because I think books and movies share some similar characteristics (besides the obvious fact that many movies start off as books). There are books and movies that are gorgeous—words that sing off the page, visual scenes that delight and thrill the eyes. You often find yourself thinking about them days later.

There are books and movies that are—I’ll say it—trashy delights, so bad they’re good. They may be poorly constructed, with gaping plot holes and cardboard characters, but they do not commit the one unforgivable sin in books or movies. They are never boring.

Then there are books and movies that are compulsively readable and watchable, that grab you by the throat and never let go from beginning to end. These are the popcorn movies, the popcorn reads, and I love them. Their prose may not sing, but there is poetry in an expertly constructed plot. The Paleontologist, for me, is the perfect embodiment of a popcorn book—a propulsive, intricately designed plot that revolves around an intriguing central mystery.

I was immediately sold on The Paleontologist by the cover blurb—Night at the Museum if it was written by Stephen King. And it delivers on that promise.

Dr. Simon Nealy, curator of paleontology, returns home to work at the crumbling, gone to seed Natural History Museum where his younger sister disappeared from when they were both children. Her disappearance has haunted him since it happened, as he blames himself. Things quickly go south for Simon—he’s haunted by his past, by memories of his missing sister and his abusive mother, but there are also hauntings in the museum of a more supernatural variety. Dinosaur ghosts? Yes, please. The mystery only deepens as he begins to read the diaries of his disgraced predecessor. Much as the previous curator of paleontology mentally unravelled, Simon is soon spiraling out of control, questioning reality itself.

If you’re in the mood for a fun, compulsively readable thriller of a book, one with familial trauma that gives it a beating, bleeding heart, you can’t do better than The Paleontologist. Give it a read.

What should a reader do when they read an ARC of a brilliant forthcoming novel, one that’s going to blow people’s minds, and you yearn for another read by that author? Glad you asked! In my case, the ARC was American Rapture by CJ Leede (my, sorry, rapturous review here: https://davewritesanddraws.com/2024/07/30/arc-review-american-rapture-by-cj-leede/). Since I’m a sensible fella, I decided it was time to read Leede’s first novel, Maeve Fly. I’m happy to report that American Rapture is no accident, because Maeve Fly is a brutal, no-holds-barred masterpiece.

Maeve, the title character of the novel, is an utterly original creation. By day she works at the happiest place on earth, a barely disguised Disneyland, a place and job she unequivocally loves despite the black heart that beats inside her chest. At night, when she’s not tending to the gravely ill grandmother she lives with, a once famous actress, she prowls the seedier corners of the Sunset Strip, sometimes accompanied by her best friend. She’s found happiness, of a misanthropic sort, even if she sometimes struggles with keeping her darker urges, the wolf that lives inside her, contained. Then her best friend’s brother moves to town, setting off a blood-soaked, murderous chain of events that, once started, accelerates like a runaway train to the very end of the novel.

Maeve Fly is a poisonous love-letter to Los Angeles, a city Leede either loves or hates, possibly both. Once unleashed by circumstances, Maeve moves like an unrepentant Patrick Bateman through LA in an orgy of violence and depravity that’s at once shocking, thrilling, and, at least for me, ultimately cathartic (which might say something about me I’d rather not contemplate, but I digress).

This is bold storytelling, as beautiful as it is terrifying. If you have the stomach for it, if you like your horror uncompromising, this is a must read. I should also mention that, depending on how dark your sense of humor is, it’s often hilarious. I read most of Maeve Fly on a plane, and I found myself snorting out loud with alarming frequency.

Funny thing I’ve noticed. Each time I review a book by Eric LaRocca, I tend to start off with the same statement: Eric LaRocca does not fuck around.

Does this hold true for At Dark, I Become Loathsome? Like you wouldn’t believe.

Ashley Lutin, the main character at the dark heart of this novella, is wallowing in hopelessness, despair, and depravity. He’s lost his wife to cancer, and his young boy has been taken. The only thing that keeps him from ending his own life is the service he provides for others who are similarly at the end of their rope, a extreme ritual or sorts. Then he meets another man who matches him, depravity for depravity.

Lutin is a complex, polarizing character, fascinating but deeply unlikeable. Throughout the book he repeats the title, At Dark, I Become Loathsome, like a poisonous mantra, almost a mission statement.

LaRocca excels at pushing the envelope, at creating situations and characters that are so beyond the pale you’re not sure what you’re reading, but you also can’t stop. Reading LaRocca’s work, I get the same feeling I got when I first read books like Exquisite Corpse, The Girl Next Door, and Tender Is the Flesh—books that challenge a reader’s beliefs on every level.

At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a slim volume, but it is one heavy book.

If you like your horror uncompromising, if you’re ready and willing to dive into the deep, shadowy end of the fiction pool, the place where monsters human and otherwise live, At Dark, I Become Loathsome is the perfect book for you. It releases January 28th, 2025, and is available for pre-order now.

You know how some books are just made for you? How you don’t so much read them as happily tumble into their pages? Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix was like that for me. It’s a meticulously, joyously researched celebration of paperback horror from the 70s and 80s. I spent my teens in the 70s and my twenties in the 80s, fully immersed in horror, science fiction, and fantasy. This book is pure, unadulterated nostalgia for me, and I loved every minute of it.

I’m a huge fan of Hendrix’s fiction, and it turns out he’s just as good at non-fiction. Paperbacks from Hell brings a telling eye for detail and historical perspective to the books that made this time period such an important one for horror. His words have the ring of authenticity.

But for me, that’s not the best reason to pick up Paperbacks from Hell. Hendrix fills it front to back with glorious, high res, full color examples of the cover art that graced these books. I remember so many of them—I read them, I sold them as a sales associate at Waldenbooks, I collected them—and seeing them all here again was like coming home.

If you’re a fan of horror in general, horror of this time period in particular, or just gonzo, balls-to-the-wall, book cover art, Paperbacks from Hell is a helluva ride. Thank you, Mr. Hendrix, for the exciting trip down memory lane.

A new Hap and Leonard novel is always cause for celebration, and not surprisingly, Sugar On the Bones does not disappoint. I’m a big fan of book series—they give you a chance to get to know the continuing characters in a way that a single novel often doesn’t, and not just the main characters. Sugar On the Bones brings back several folks from earlier books, and the fact that you know them, know their backstory, makes the novel an even richer, more satisfying read. There’s a shared history here, not just between the boys and these characters, but between all of them and we readers.

Another thing I love that Lansdale has done over the course of the past few Hap and Leonard books is to let them age—I was going to say age gracefully, but come on, that would be stretching the truth to the breaking point—but they are aging. In Sugar On the Bones, Hap and Leonard are still shit-talkers and shit-kickers, but are at least feeling their mortality. I think a big part of it is that they both now have folks they love to live for. They’re still fearless, still willing to go headlong into the fire instead of away from it, but they at least think about the consequences of their actions. Do they still do stupid, dangerous shit? Absolutely. They wouldn’t be Hap and Leonard otherwise. Part of the fun is watching them consider the odds, then still say damn those consequences.

I don’t really want to dig too deep into the plot—as usual, Lansdale is a consummate storyteller, an unmatched spinner of yarns. This one starts out with a potential missing persons case that quickly turns deadly, with an East Texas crime syndicate out for blood. Also as usual, there are a whole book full of oddball characters that add to both the fun and the danger. Sugar On the Bones is fast paced and violent, with a final set piece that will start your heart rate spiking and keep it there.

Lansdale is working at the top of his game here, with a perfect mix of lovingly described mayhem, lyrical description, glorious turns of phrase, and the best dialogue writing of any author working today. In fact, I’m going to make a bold statement here—I think Lansdale is now a better dialogue writer than Elmore Leonard.

Sugar On the Bones is more fun that a couch full of mice (you have to read the book), and I hope Lansdale keeps writing Hap and Leonard books for years to come. If the boys end up sitting next to each other in rocking chairs on Hap’s front porch, blankets on their laps, solving whatever crimes happen to pass them by, I’m fine with that. Hell, they don’t even have to solve crimes. Just keep shit-talking.

CJ Leede’s first novel, Maeve Fly, set off a series of seismic shocks in the online circles where I hang out, yet I haven’t managed to read it yet. I have no good excuses, except for the usual so many books, so little time. It’s been on my towering TBR pile for quite a while, and after reading American Rapture, Leede’s forthcoming second novel, I’m moving it way up the stack, because people, you are not ready for this one.

Sophie, the heart of American Rapture, is a teenage girl raised in a painfully repressive Catholic household, a place where paintings of Jesus and crosses hang on every wall, where guilt and sin, shame and repression, heaven and hell, are spoon fed to her on a daily basis. Separated from her twin brother, for the most part closed off from everything outside her home and church, the very insular world she inhabits, Sophie is sad, lonely, wracked with the feeling she’s not worthy of love.

That situation quickly unravels when a mutating virus that turns victims into sex-crazed zombies spreads like a wildfire across the the US, setting Sophie on a brutal, gut wrenching journey in search of her brother and safety. Sophie soon finds herself questioning everything she knows, and discovering everything she doesn’t know, as she fights for survival. Along the way she gathers a found family of sorts, a desperate group of fellow survivors, including the best fictional dog I’ve read in a long time.

I love a good found family story, and American Rapture does not disappoint in that regard. As the ragtag group traverses a midwest hellscape, I found myself cheering for their brief successes, and mourning their losses. Make no mistake, this is very much an apocalyptic novel—think The Road mixed with zombies, with a healthy, sinister dose of religious fundamentalism mixed in. It is harrowing and unsettling, filled with uncompromising violence.

Sophie is a wonderful heroine, brave and terrified, innocent and flawed. When she finds all the notions that have been drilled into her by her parents and her church—things like love, sex, virginity, a woman’s place, blind faith in God—challenged by the maelstrom she finds herself in, she allows herself to confront those challenges head on. All the characters, Sophie especially, are heartfelt creations. Leede writes with heartfelt empathy.

A lot of American Rapture hits uncomfortably close to home, given our current political/social climate. There were moments here when I found myself reading through tears. Tears for what the characters are experiencing, and tears of rage at how truly inhumane humans can be. This is visceral horror at its finest, horror that isn’t afraid to ask profound questions.

American Rapture releases October 15, 2024. Don’t miss this one.

Here’s the thing…I’ve resisted the idea of audiobooks for a long time. Not because I don’t believe it’s the same as reading—any method of cramming good words into brainmeat is okay by me—but because the one time I tried it several years ago, I failed miserably. Maybe it was the book I chose, maybe my frame of mind at the time, but I just couldn’t keep the story in my head. Still, I always told myself I should try again.

Then last week I had a roadtrip, and I decided to dip my toe in the audiobook waters again. I did a quick search and found the perfect thing, a book only available on audio by one of my favorite authors—The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones.

Such a good choice!

Charlotte is a babysitter, a great one (except for one near-disaster she tries not to think about), with what should be an easy gig—babysitting six-year-old twins for new clients. Feed them, put them to bed, and spend the evening studying for the SAT test the next day.

The house has other plans.

Yes, this is a haunted house novel, but unlike any I have read before. Jones starts with the idea of other realities, funny places in the words of the twins, and goes buck-fucking-wild. Once the madness begins he never lets up on the gas, ratcheting up the tension, throwing in so many twists and turns it will make you dizzy, but never losing the thread of the story. Jones is never less than a compelling storyteller, and he’s operating at peak efficiency here. There are Inception-level layers and intricacies to The Babysitter Lives, so many balls being juggled, but Jones doesn’t drop a single one. I should also mention that this novel is deeply creepy, with scenes that have stayed with me.

Charlotte is a wonderful character—brave and resourceful in the face of overwhelming terror, tender and protective of the twins, and of her girlfriend Murphy when she shows up unexpectedly. She never gives up hope, even when things seem hopeless.

Isabella Star LaBlanc, the narrator of the book, has her hands full with this Chinese puzzle box/Russian nesting doll of a story, and she knocks it out of the park. She imbues Charlotte with every bit of intelligence and emotion that Jones gives her on the page. It’s a remarkable performance.

Give The Babysitter Lives a listen, and be both frightened and entertained. Myself, I’m looking forward to my next roadtrip, and my next audiobook.

What do you think of when you hear something’s been inspired by H.P. Lovecraft? For me it’s mysterious, cosmic, monolithic, even god-like horrors—horrors that are often hard to describe, but that’s part of what makes it Lovecraftian. As a rule, there are tentacles involved.

There are a lot of authors who play in Lovecraft’s sandbox—minus the virulent, unacceptable racism—to greater and lesser success. The very best of them, such as Matt Ruff with Lovecraft Country, put their own unique spin on the eldritch horrors.

It should come as no surprise that Joe R. Lansdale’s take on Lovecraft is utterly original—Scary, fun, and cosmic as all hell. Lansdale is a master in just about every genre imaginable (not sure if he’s ever tried his hand at children’s books, but that could be interesting), and it shows here. The eight stories dip into several genres, sometimes more than one at once, and it pays off big time. Every story is a home run, but here are my favorites:

The Bleeding Shadow—Blues music as a vehicle for opening a door to another, terrifying dimension…a door that can’t be closed.

Dread Island—An all-out gonzo masterpiece that somehow throws Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, characters from the Uncle Remus, a mysterious island in the middle of the Mississippi, and unknowable cosmic horror into a blender and hits puree.

The Crawling Sky—This grim, somber story transplants Lovecraftian horror to the old west, with terrifying results.

In the Mad Mountains—The title story in this collection is easily one of my favorites things Lansdale has ever written. Set in a forbidding arctic landscape, the horrors of “In the Mad Mountains” just keep coming. A bravura performance.

These are my personal favorite stories, but they’re all excellent. Lansdale is a national treasure.

In the Mad Mountains debuts October 15th, and is available for pre-order now.

There are a lot of great editors that play in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror sandbox. But are any of them as consistently brilliant at crafting genre anthologies, as consistently brilliant at attracting the very best authors and building drool-worthy tables of contents, as Ellen Datlow? No. She’s the very best, as Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror amply demonstrates.

When it comes to Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror, you should definitely take the word Horror in the title seriously, because these stories are one gut-punch after another. There’s not a supernatural entity to be found here, just human being inflicting violence, terror, and depravity upon each other. Some are over the top in the horrors they display, and some are quiet, subtle shockers—both types of stories are equally disquieting, equally disturbing. When it came to choosing the contents of this book, Datlow did not fuck around.

While every story in the anthology has something to recommend it, here are a few that were standouts to me, and your favorites may be totally different than mine. Most of the stories were new to me, but the two I had read before happened to be two of my favorites, so let’s start with those.

Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan—This brilliant piece of anthropological fantasy was my introduction to the extraordinary Lanagan, and it’s a shattering study of a family caught in a cultural trap they cannot escape. I’ve read this story half a dozen times, and I get something new from it every time.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carole Oates—You’ve probably read this at one time or another, it’s one of the most taught, most anthologized stories in history. It still packs as much punch as it did when it was published in the sixties. A chilling study in power dynamics coercion.

Bait by Simon Bestwick—The first story in the collection, about a young woman who’s not what she seems, it lets you know exactly what you’re in for.

A Sunny Disposition by Josh Malerman—Old, frail Grandpa Ray gives his young grandson a peek behind a very dark curtain.

Back Seat by Bracken MacLeod—I said above that every story here is a gut-punch…this one made me put the book down and go for a walk. Crushingly sad and hopeless.

One of These Nights by Livia Llewellyn—Two teenage girls and a public swimming pool in the summer are the ingredients for this twisted little tale.

Cavity by Theresa Delucci—The life of one woman connected, in one way or another, to thirty-six murderers. Told in cold, clinical, matter-of-fact detail that makes it shockingly powerful.

Unkindly Girls by Hailey Piper—What happens when you discover a devastating family secret? What do you do?

Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones—Hard-boiled crime fiction shot through with a queasy kind of horror, proof that Jones should maybe write more crime fiction.

Those are my favorites, but as I said, there’s not a clunker in the bunch. Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror releases September 10th, and is available for pre-order now. Don’t miss this one.

According to people smarter than me (okay, some random site on the internet), the characteristics of southern gothic literature are: isolation and marginalization, violence and crime, sense of place, freakishness and the grotesque, destitution and decay, oppression and discrimination. Delivery Me rings every one of those bells, including sense of place, even though the novel is set in Missouri, which isn’t technically in the south. I would argue that “the south” isn’t always geographical—it can also be a state of mind. Hell, there are parts of my home state of Ohio that are every bit of “the south” as Alabama. But I digress.

Deliver Me is an audacious, unsparing, deeply disturbing work of southern gothic storytelling. For me, it brought to mind the work of Flannery O’Conner and Harry Crews, novels like Bastard Out of Carolina, Swamplandia, and Beloved. Good company to keep, and Nash absolutely belongs there.

Deliver Me explores, in merciless detail, what happens when ordinary human wants, needs, and desires—friendship, to love and be loved, to have children, to find comfort in religion—curdle into ugly, toxic obsession.

Dee-Dee, the main character, has a soul-crushing job in a chicken processing plant, a shady live-in boyfriend with an exotic insect fascination, and a longing for motherhood after multiple miscarriages. When Sloan, her BFF from the past, appears back in town after 20 years, Dee-Dee descends into a tailspin with ever-escalating consequences. The ending, when it comes, feels almost pre-ordained, but is no less devastating for that.

Elle Nash is an uncompromising talent. She has the voice of a depraved poet, an unflinching eye, and a willingness to take the reader to places they are not prepared to go. There are scenes here that I will never forget, even if I wanted to. This is a brave, vital, important novel. I think it will possibly be too much for some readers, and that’s okay. Myself, I couldn’t turn away, even when I sometimes wanted to. Deliver Me is a haunting masterpiece.

I read the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, with total and complete delight. In the future imagined by Martha Wells, SecUnits are security androids Company-supplied to keep humans on planetary missions safe and secure. They are cold, impersonal, and deadly, rigidly controlled by their owners with a governor module.

Except…the main character in Well’s multi-award winning series has hacked its governor module, has gone rogue, is now self-aware and autonomous. It thinks of itself as Murderbot, and it thinks of humans as, well, not all that bright. In All Systems Red, Murderbot is part of a disastrous mission that leaves many humans, and SecUnits, dead, and leaves Murderbot questioning its place in the universe.

Artificial Condition finds Murderbot on a quest of sorts, looking for answers, avoiding detection, and in the process becoming part of another deadly mission.

Artificial Condition is an exciting, fast-paced story that fires on all cylinders. But much like the first book, it’s so much more than that, because Wells has given Murderbot, who narrates the books in first person, an amazing voice. Equal parts questioning, sarcastic, funny, and self deprecating, Murderbot’s narration is a master-class in how to use voice in a way that both moves a story forward and lets you inside the character’s head in a sometimes surprisingly intimate way.

My TBR stack is annoyingly tall, but reading Artificial Condition has again reminded me that I need to regularly add some Murderbot to my life.

A confession: I’m not always a fan of collaborations. When they don’t work, you can feel the authors butting heads through the pages of the book, trying to stir their styles together but they mix like oil and water. What you end up with is less than the sum of their parts.

When they work, however—Good Omens and the collaborations of Stephen King and Peter Straub come immediately to mind—the result can be magical, a perfect meeting of the minds. When I heard that two authors I love, Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, had written a novel together, I was optimistic. Khaw’s elegant but unsettling variety of cosmic horror and Kadrey’s grim, sardonic urban fantasy seemed like it could be a match made in heaven, or in this case hell.

I’m happy to report that The Dead Take the A Train is a rollicking good time, a non-stop, runaway train of a novel that you won’t be able to put down.

The Dead Take the A Train is set in New York City’s underground magical world, a place reminiscent of the Los Angeles Kadrey writes about in the Sandman Slim novels. Think high powered financial wizards who are actually wizards, Lovecraftian eldritch horrors, and a variety of entities who may or may not be gods. This is territory tailor-made for both Kadrey and Khaw and they seem to delight in attacking the page, leavening the mayhem with plenty of humor.

The cast of characters who populate the novel, whether kind and for the most part good-hearted or spectacularly not so, are complex and fully realized. The magic system that pervades this world, it should come as no surprise, is well-thought-out and fully integrated into the NYC we know. It feels natural. This is especially true of the two main characters, Julie and Sarah. Khaw and Kadrey put them through the wringer, and you’ll find yourself rooting for them, especially when things seem darkest. Did I mention there’s a tender, tentative love story that weaves its way through the entire story?

Amazon tells me that The Dead Take the A Train is book one in the Carrion City Duology, and I could not be happier. I can’t wait to return to this world.

It’s Labor Day weekend, 2022, and my son Eric and I are attending our first Worldcon, in Chicago. We’re going hard, attending panels from early in the morning until late at night. And then this happens (taken from a post I wrote soon after the con):

“We attended a panel with horror authors reading from their work, and—you heard it here first—there’s a writer from Iceland who’s going to be big. Her name is Holder Knutsdottir, and back home in Iceland she’s won a bunch of awards, but her first novel in English won’t be out until sometime in early 2024. She was funny and charming, and the excerpt she read (translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, no idea why she knows Icelandic) immediately grabbed our attention.”

Wouldn’t you know it, that novel that Knutsdottir read from, The Night Guest, is coming later this year, and I was lucky enough to get an ARC. I’m going to say it again—she’s going to be big.

As The Night Guest opens, we meet Iðunn after yet another visit with a doctor. Iðunn is overcome with fatigue, as if she hasn’t slept at all, and none of the doctors she’s seen can explain why. Her bloodwork is fine—in fact, everything seems fine. Then she starts waking up with unexplained wounds, and blood beneath her fingernails. She wears a pedometer to bed, and realizes with horror that she somehow walked 40,000 steps during the night. And the neighborhood cats are beginning to disappear.

That’s the intriguing setup for The Night Guest. Knutsdottir writes with an easy confidence, drawing you into the novel’s world with short, inviting chapters narrated by Iðunn. Iðunn is frustrated by her situation, but there’s humor, at least at first. All of a sudden I realized that I was turning the pages anxiously, totally engrossed, sucked in by the escalating tension. Knutsdottir does something truly amazing here—she ratchets up that tension in such a way that she’s dug the hooks in deep without you even feeling them, and then lets them rip. This is a lean, fast-moving book that doesn’t waste a word.

The Night Guest is set in Reykjavík, a city Knutsdottir clearly knows and loves well. The novel make me want to visit it, although I might stay away from the harbor late at night.

I’m still curious why Mary Robinette Kowal knows Icelandic.

The Night Guest releases September 3, 2024, and is available for pre-order now. Don’t sleep on this one (see what I did there?).

Yes, I Was a Teenage Slasher is a slasher novel—it’s right there in the title. Yes, there’s an impressive body count, and some truly creative methods of dispatch. And if that was all you were looking for in a slasher novel, this would completely satisfy you. But, and it’s a big but, because this is Stephen Graham Jones, I Was a Teenage Slasher is so much more than that. How much more? Let me count the ways…

1. VOICE—Tolly Driver, the teenage slasher of the title, narrates the novel, and Jones nails Tolly’s voice with what seems like effortless ease but I know is impossibly hard. There are few authors working today who can inhabit a character so deeply. Tolly is a killer, he tells us that right from the start. And yet, he is such a goofy, likable fuckup, he is so relatable—we have all known a Tolly, although hopefully they weren’t serial killers—that we care for him and hope for the best, despite what he becomes.

That voice, that expert characterization, extends to all the characters in the novel, particularly Amber, Tolly’s ride-or-die. Jones knows these people, and it shows.

2. PLACE—Jones makes it clear in the afterward—and if you’re not in the habit of reading afterwards, I suggest you always read his, because he puts so much of himself into them—that there’s a lot of himself in Tolly (serial killer not withstanding). Jones grew up in Lamesa, Texas, the setting of the novel, and the sense of place he imbues into I Was a Teenage Slasher feels so authentic, so filled with specificity, that it grounds the novel. There are so many telling details here, I’m pretty sure I could drive down to Lamesa and make my way around town without getting lost.

3. SLASHER GENRE EXPERTISE—As Jones as proven again and again, particular with the Indian Lake trilogy, he has a deep, abiding knowledge of, and affection for, the slasher genre. What that allows him to do in I Was a Teenage Slasher is play with those conventions, tweak them, subversively bend them to his will. In fact, he makes up a few new ones here, and seems to have a helluva good time doing it.

4. HEART—Yes, heart. This novel is filled with heart, and the heartbreak that often accompanies it. The relationship Tolly has with Amber is as pure an expression of friendship and love as I have read in a long time. And I have to admit, I did not expect to find tears in my eyes at the end of a slasher novel, but here we are.

I Was a Teenage Slasher has a propulsive plot, and a ton of humor to balance out the ultraviolence. If you’re a fan of Jones, you already have this headed towards your TBR pile. If he’s new to you, this is as good a place as any to start. It releases July 16th, 2024, and is available for pre-order now.

Here’s the thing…I read a lot of horror, and I can appreciate a well-wrought scary book, but I rarely get scared. Josh Malerman has an impressive back catalog which I’m ashamed to say I’ve only begun to dip into. As usual, my excuse is, too many books, too little time. I called the first Malerman I read, Daphne, a new horror classic. It was heartfelt, with a great main character, and most of all damn scary, even to a jaded horror fan like me.

Now comes Malerman’s new one, Incidents Around the House, and let me tell you, this book is creepy as fuck.

Incidents Around the House takes the trope of the monster in the closet, and he twists it up into a razor-sharp dagger that digs into the base of your skull. For a young girl named Bela, that monster is an entity named Other Mommy, who with one simple, seductive question—”Can I go inside your heart?”—it turns Bela’s world upside down. And not just Bela’s, because Other Mommy is soon too restless, and too powerful, to stay in the closet. What follows is a breathless, deadly race for survival against a malevolent, insidious monster.

If that was all Incidents Around the House was, it would be enough—it would be a crackerjack horror novel. But Malerman has more in mind. The entire novel is told from Bela’s point of view, and the voice Malerman gives her—true to her age but insightful, terrified but impossibly brave, worried for her parents and grandma but with enough love in her heart to want to protect them at all costs, even if it puts her in incredible danger—is a master class in authentic voice and sustained tension.

I think people are going to be talking about Incidents Around the House at awards season, and for years to come.

Incidents Around the House publishes on June 25, 2024, and is available for pre-order now.

With his first three novels—Zero Saints, Coyote Songs, and The Devil Takes You Home—Gabino Iglesias forged an utterly original sub-genre in the horror/thriller arena, call it barrio noire. Set along the Mexican/U.S. border, these grim and gritty crime novels are a tangled amalgamation of old world Catholicism, even older world mysticism, and supernatural horror. The violence and tension are cranked up to eleven. This is bold, uncompromising, fuck-you-right-in-the fight-or-flight-center-of-your-brain writing.

I’m so happy to announce that House of Bone and Rain, Iglesias’ upcoming new novel, is his best yet. It contains all those elements that make every book by him essential reading, but there’s a triumphant confidence to the writing, a maturity the makes for a deeper, even more impactful reading experience.

Iglesias returns to his roots, and enters new territory, by setting House of Bone and Rain in Puerto Rico as a hurricane bares down on the island. Five young men, lifelong, ride-or-die friends, pledge vengeance when one of their mothers is murdered. This begins a headlong descent into harrowing violence, a world where murder is as commonplace as the grinding poverty that permeates every aspect of life, a liminal space where the mundane and the supernatural share an uneasy coexistence. Ghosts walk here, a constant reminder of the fragility of life. Monsters walk here as well, although by the end you may find yourself questioning just who the real monsters are.

If Cormac McCarthy and Clive Barker teamed up to write a coming of age novel, you might get something like House of Bone and Rain, but honestly, that’s not anywhere near an adequate description, because it barely scratches the surface of what Iglesias has achieved here. He’s fiercely original and breathtakingly inventive. Best of all I have a feeling that he’s just getting started.

House of Bone and Rain will be released on August 6, 2024, and is available for pre-sale now.

Cursed movies—from Rebel Without a Cause to Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist to Poltergeist—are an infamous part of cinema and pop culture history. Movie shoots beset by tragedy, movies where the cast died young, before their time—the idea of the cursed movie has been around long enough to become a trope in its own right.

Paul Tremblay take that “cursed movie” trope and flays it to the bone. That shouldn’t be a surprise. In a relatively few short years Tremblay has become one of the finest horror writers working today, and he’s done that by being fiercely original. Even when he takes on time-honored horror subjects like demonic possession, with A Head Full of Ghosts, he turns it inside out and gives it new, vital life.

Horror Movie, the novel, is about Horror Movie, an ultra-low budget, indie horror movie shot by a small group of young guerilla filmmakers. The filming of the movie, a queasy, disturbing take on high school bullying taken to extremes, was so fraught that it was never released—only three complete scenes and the shooting script were ever released online—which only adds to its legendary status and growing, rabid fan base.

That’s the basic setup. From there Tremblay does what he does best, keeping the reader disturbed and off balance. He bounces between the past, with the shooting of the film, and the present, when one of the actors—the only surviving cast member—has been approached to be part of a high-budget reboot of the movie. We are also gifted with large sections of Horror Movie’s script, and for me, this is where Tremblay truly excels. The voice of the script is pitch perfect. The three parts of the story—past, present, and script—fit together, overlap, and sometimes contradict, forming an unsettling, terrifying gestalt.

Horror Movie is Tremblay at his best, which, if you’ve read anything by him (And if you haven’t, why not? Get on that.) you know that’s saying something. The past few years have seen an explosion of brilliant, uncompromising horror writers, and Tremblay is one of the very best.

Horror Movie will release June 11, 2024, and is available for pre-order now. Don’t miss this one.