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.

When people talk about the books and authors they love, they tend to mention the usual suspects—character, plot, language, world building, all-around storytelling skill—but there’s one thing they sometimes forget: FUN. John Scalzi is a master at all those other things. He’s a consummate storyteller who creates memorable characters and puts them through engaging plots, using equally engaging language. Anyone who’s read his Old Man’s War novels (and if you haven’t, why not?) knows Scalzi is an unparalleled world-builder. But on top of all that, Scalzi’s books are rip-roaring, rollicking, FUN AS FUCK!

Which brings me to Starter Villain, Scalzi’s newest, a novel that is so much fun it should be illegal.

Charlie, the hero of Starter Villain, is a down-on-his-luck schlub, a divorced substitute teacher with a cat, a house he owns with some siblings who want to sell it out from under him, and not much else. An then a long-lost uncle dies and leaves him his for-real supervillain business, with everything that entails, including a super-secret (well, it does show up on Google Maps) villain’s lair on an island with an active volcano.

What follows is an exciting, often laugh-out-loud, occasionally death-defying, cat and mouse game with the world’s most dangerous villains, where we find out that maybe Charlie isn’t such a schlub after all. Starter Villain has the intricate plot and body count you’d expect from a spy thriller, but then Scalzi sweetens the deal with intelligent, asshole dolphins, equally intelligent, talking spy cats (I did say it was a cat and mouse game), and a whole lot more. Let me say it loud enough that it reaches the cheap seats way in the back: This. Book. Is. So. Much. Fun!

I know I’m going to read lots of great books this year—in fact, I know my next four or five reads, and I’m beyond excited for them—but I don’t think I’ll read a novel more fun than Starter Villain.

I discovered Eric LaRocca last year with a one-two punch of The Trees Grew Because I Bled There are We Can Never Leave This Place. Here was a bold, uncompromising, utterly original voice in horror. Those adjectives absolutely apply to LaRocca’s forthcoming collection of four stories, This Skin Was Once Mine, and LaRocca himself adds a couple more in the author’s note that opens the book which also doubles as an essential trigger/content warning: claustrophobic and distressing. Make no mistake, LaRocca is not fucking around. These stories will dig their hooks into your brain meat and start to rip.

The four stories—This “Skin Was Once Mine”, “Seedling”, “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn”, and “Prickle”—push the envelope in terms of content. It’s not that they’re awash in gore, with body parts slapping wetly through the air, but they are psychically, emotionally scarring. LaRocca writes with a kind of brittle formality that makes the horror that much more disturbing. In each story, at the point where you say, “I know what’s going to happen next,” you will be absolutely wrong; and in each story, at the point where you say, “there’s no way LaRocca is going to go there,” you will be wrong as well.

And that’s really all I’m going to tell you as far as the stories themselves. One of the chief pleasures in reading This Skin Was Once Mine is discovering the horrors for yourself. I remember how I felt when I read Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse for the first time, that feeling that here was an author who was positively fearless. It’s not that their writing styes are similar—I don’t think they are—but much like Brite, LaRocca is beyond fearless. I can’t wait to see, and read, what they do next.

This Skin Was Once Mine will be released on April 2nd, and is available for pre-order now. If you’re a fan of extreme horror, of challenging books that may make you uncomfortable, then this is a must.

I’m pissed off at Mother Horror, and I’ll tell you why. Before reading 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, my TBR stack was…okay, not manageable, but, if I quit my job and stopped sleeping, I could probably read them all before my 65th birthday (I’m 63 right now). Now, with all the remarkable books Hartmann discusses, that dream is but a distant memory. I will never, ever, read all the books I want to read, and all these damn authors keep writing more books, every year, without regard for us poor readers. Life ain’t easy for a book junkie.

101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered is so much more than a simple list of books worth reading. Hartmann is a hardcore fan and aficionado of horror fiction, and this is a love letter to the genre. She concentrates on works published in the past 20 years or so, which makes sense, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re in something of a horror explosion. I know, I know, it’s never gone away, but in the past few years a ridiculous number of new horror writers have appeared, and man, they are fucking things up in the absolute best way.

Hartmann divides 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered into categories such as Haunted Houses, Demons and Possession, Slashers & Serial Killers, Eco-Horror, and more. And she offers small, perfect write-ups that describe each book without ever crossing into spoiler territory. There are also author spotlights and guest essays to spice things up.

Will your favorite horror book be included here? Maybe, maybe not. Many of mine were, but just as many were not, and that’s part of the fun. Hartmann has written an intensely personal book. These are her favorites, and she tells you why with intelligence and eloquence. I think I’m going to find a bunch of new favorites here, and you just might as well.

Whether you live and breath horror, or just dabble, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered is essential reading.

Reading this book, I found myself thinking of a conversation I recently had with a friend who told me that they find the novella length unsatisfying. They prefer a big, chonky novel. We had a good-natured disagreement, as I find myself more and more drawn to novellas—I find that in the write hands (see what I did there?), they can be just as rich, just as complex, as doorstoppers, without taking a month to read.

Case in point: Mislaid In Parts Half-Known, the ninth novella in Seanan McGuire’s Hugo and Nebula-winning Wayward Children series. Like all the books in the series that came before, Mislaid In Parts Half-Known is equal parts heartrending and hopeful, a meditation on friendship and family of the found variety, all of it wrapped up in an exciting, involving adventure.

Mislaid In Parts Half-Known picks up right where book eight, Lost In the Moment and Found, left off, featuring Antsy and several other characters—Sumi, Kade, Cora, Christopher, and more—we’ve come to know from the other books. Which brings me to an important point that McGuire recently addressed on the Twitters, namely that, when it comes to reading a book that’s part of the series, start with number one and work your way through. Starting with a middle book in the series (or, say book nine) does a disservice to both you as the reader, and the series itself. As mentioned, Lost In the Moment and Found features multiple characters from previous books. They have history together, shared traumas and triumphs, shared adventures. Without knowing all that, you wouldn’t get nearly as much out of the story.

As always with this remarkable series, McGuire’s world-building is intricate yet extravagant, with so much room for her considerable imagination to soar. She has built a framework that can hold a nearly infinite number of stories. Selfishly, I hope McGuire keeps writing them forever. Having said that, however, Lost In the Moment and Found feels like it’s building to something big and overarching. I’m just hoping it’s not the end.

I picked up Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones’ white trash coming-of-age werewolf novel, without knowing anything about it or him. I was immediately hooked. Jones has a writing style and voice that are utterly original—propulsive, chaotic, violent, equal parts mayhem and heart. When I read The Only Good Indians, I thought, damn, I’ll read anything this guy writes.

Then came My Heart Is a Chainsaw, the first novel in what would become The Indian Lake Trilogy, and the introduction of Jade Daniels, the trauma-damaged, slasher-obsessed, and ultimately final girl for the ages. When Don’t Fear the Reaper followed, I realized that Jones was doing something truly special, an epic yet intimate, ultra violent yet heartfelt love letter to slashers and final girls.

When The Angel of Indian Lake begins, Jade has returned to Proofrock, Idaho, after four years in prison. She’s different. Prison, and the events of the past, have taken their toll. Unfortunately, Proofrock, and the Lake Witch, aren’t quite done with her, and Jade finds herself once again pulled into a nightmare that threatens everyone she loves.

I mentioned above that Jones’ writing style was propulsive and chaotic. With The Angel of Indian Lake, he cranks it up to 11, delivering a non-stop, tension-filled tour de force. This novel reads like Jones wrote it with his ass on fire and he had to finish it before the flames reached his fingertips. The body count here is greater than the first two novels combined, the violence is downright operatic, and the story moves like an runaway freight train. The story is told mostly in first person, from Jade’s point of view, and her voice is pitch-perfect. She has taken so much physical and emotional damage, but her heart and humor have somehow survived.

I read the last hundred pages of The Angel of Indian Lake in one sitting, my heart rate spiking. The final chapter is some of the best writing Jones has ever done, a fitting culmination of everything that has led up to it, the perfect ending to one of my favorite trilogies ever. Jade Daniels is, and will always be, my final girl.

The Angel of Indian Lake will be released on March 26, 2024. It’s available for pre-order now, and it’s a must.

In his cover blurb, Stephen Graham Jones calls The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, “The Book of the Decade,” and I enthusiastically agree. I can’t remember the last time a novel hit me this viscerally. I finished it a couple of nights ago, and haven’t stopped thinking about it or talking about it to anyone who would listen. No matter how good you’ve heard it is (and the reviews have been universally superlative), The Reformatory is even better.

The novel is set in the Jim Crown south, in the fictional small town of Gracetown, Florida, in 1950. While defending his older sister, Gloria, 12 year old Robbie kicks the son of the largest white landowner in town, and because he’s black, he’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a place with an evil reputation. As Robbie struggles to survive the horrors of the reformatory, Gloria does her best to navigate an unjust system to get him released before it’s too late.

If my description sounds like The Reformatory is a straight-up historical novel, think again. This is very much a horror novel. The funny thing is, while ghosts (called haints in the book) play a large part in the story, the true horrors in the novel, the true evil that permeates virtually every page, is very much human. The white racists in power, from judges, to police, to small town thugs, to the human monsters who run the Gracetown School for Boys, they haunt this book more than any ghost.

Due, always a wonderful writer, has outdone herself. This is a riveting, heart-stopping novel. There are moments when she ratchets up the tension to an unimaginable degree. One scene in particular, when Gloria and another family member are stopped in their car by local law enforcement, reminded me the opening of Inglorious Basterds, in the level of anxiety and stress in causes the reader. I needed to go for a little walk after that.

The non-surprising, but no less sad, thing that makes The Reformatory truly gut-wrenching is that the reformatory is based on a real, infamous place—the Dozier School for Boys. In fact, the discovery that one of Due’s relatives died at Dozier was instrumental in this book eventually being written.

Don’t miss The Reformatory. It’s that good.

I’ll keep this short and sweet—Holly is a fast, fun, extremely enjoyable read. This is King operating in non-supernatural crime-writing mode, a la Billy Summers, and not surprisingly, he’s just as good playing in the crime sandbox.

Holly, as the name suggests, is a vehicle for Holly Gibney, one of King’s most satisfying characters. Holly has appeared as a character in the Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch) and in the novel The Outsider. Those four novels were all primarily crime with supernatural aspects, while Holly is straight up crime.

Holly Gibney has come a long ways since the trilogy. While she’s always been smart and honest, and brave in her own way, when Holly begins she’s a talented, dogged private investigator. What starts as a missing person case develops into something much more insidious. As usual, King takes the time to spin a satisfying story web, drawing the reader in.

Great characters, including several you’ll recognize from the trilogy besides Holly herself; an engrossing plot with plenty of twists and turns; and truly original big bads that will make you think twice the next time you think about being a good samaritan—Holly does not disappoint.

Over the past several years, Kelly Link has slowly (and maybe not so slowly) become one of the best short story writers alive. For the record, I didn’t say best fantasy/new weird/horror/slipstream/impossible-to-categorize (the sandbox Link plays in) writers alive. She’s one of the best, period. Her collections—Get In Trouble, Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, White Cat, Black Dog—are downright magical and hard to describe, and believe me, I’ve tried, because I tend to babble on to anyone who will listen about books I love. It’s a little bit like if Ellison, Lafferty, Borges, Barker, and the Brothers Grimm spent a drunken night together and through some infernal alchemy created Link, but that barely scratches the surface. She’s utterly original.

So, when I heard that Link had written her first novel, I was excited, but also a little worried. Not every brilliant short story writer is equally brilliant as a novelist.

I shouldn’t have worried.

If I tell you that The Book of Love concerns a group of young adults whose lives get turned upside down by two powerful magicians and an actual goddess, what do you picture? Castles, dark forests, dualing wizards in long cloaks? This is not that kind of book.

The Book of Love is set in the present, in Lovesend, a small New England town. At the beginning of the novel, three of the four main characters find themselves once again alive, after having been dead for nearly a year. Except, their families don’t seem to remember them being dead, and they have only dim memories of what happened themselves.

What follows is a novel drenched in magic, filled with wonders, written in a kinetic, high-flying style that had me smiling as I read, even rereading paragraphs for the pure enjoyment. At the end of the first chapter (and each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, alternating the MCs with others) I found myself wondering if Link could possibly keep it up for an entire novel. My friends, she so does, through all 640 pages.

All of Link’s trademarks—beautifully realized characters, laugh-out-loud humor, mysteries piled on mysteries, breathtaking moments of magic realism, and scenes of indescribable wonder that Link somehow manages to describe—are well-represented here. The plot is a thing of beauty, meandering, not afraid to pause and reflect, yet always moving with assurance toward the perfect conclusion.

The Book of Love is aptly named, as Link is concerned with love in all its many permutations, from romantic to familial to friendship, and she nails every aspect. Another thing. The young adult characters here—gay, straight, bi—often do what young adults do. This is a joyfully, playfully, and sometimes cathartically horny book.

Special shoutout to one of my favorite characters in the novel, a young girl named Carousel. You’re my hero.

The Book of Love will be released on February 13, 2024, and is available for pre-sale now. Don’t miss this one. In a year filled with great books, this just might be my favorite.

Full discloser: Although we’ve never met, I consider Amanda a friend of the internet variety. We are both part of a close group of writers involved in a couple of forthcoming anthologies. I’m honored that they let me play in their sandbox, and I’m honored to know Amanda at least a little.

Having said all that—this slim volume is a helluva book, a collection of short, often gut-wrenching poems that, according to the Author’s Note, “speak to the experience of being disabled, chronically ill, struggling with mental health issues, and neurodivergent.”

There’s a great deal of pain and sadness in these pages, but also tenacious resilience, hope, and righteous, fuck-you rage. These poems are brief, few more than a page long, but don’t mistake that brevity for a lack of something to say. Amanda has a laser focus and a merciless eye for detail, and if her work makes you uncomfortable, makes you question how you look at the world and the people around you, I think that’s a good thing. That’s how it effected me. The Inadequacy of Words opened my eyes and my heart, and I can’t ask for anything more from a book.

The Inadequacy of Words is available on Amazon here:

I’d been hearing what a remarkable writer Cynthia Pelayo is from folks whose opinion I implicitly trust, so when the opportunity arose to read an ARC of her newest, forthcoming novel, Forgotten Sisters, I jumped at the chance. I’m so glad I did.

Set in modern day Chicago, Forgotten Sisters expertly weaves together several story threads. The first is an exquisitely written meditation on grief, loss, and familial attachments concerning two sisters, Anna and Jennie. They live in the home they grew up in, the home of their grandmother and parents before them, a historic bungalow on the banks of the Chicago River. The house is a character in its own right, possibly haunted, and the sisters move through its rooms like ghosts themselves, consumed by tragedy, trapped within its walls. When Anna meets a young man, she receives a glimmer of hope that perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a life to be had away from her sister.

Otherwise, Anna’s only tie to the outside world is a podcast she hosts on the violent, tragic past that envelopes Chicago like a shroud. From the sordid, bloody history of the Chicago Stockyards, to the horrific catastrophe of the SS Eastland ship capsizing, Pelayo masterfully tells the story of a city steeped in death and disaster. Anna’s current fascination is with the alarming number of young, single men who are disappearing, only to wash up, drowned, in the many waterways the surround and course through the city. The family of Anna and Jennie has been intimately intertwined with those waterways, and the drowned men hit close to home.

Finally, Pelayo introduces us to two police detectives investigating those same drownings. With a storytelling style at once elegantly gothic, drenched in the supernatural, yet solidly grounded in historical accuracy, Pelayo weaves these threads together like a virtuoso, drawing the reader into her world. Forgotten Sisters is a gorgeously realized work of fiction.

Mark your calendars: Forgotten Sisters will be released on March 19, 2024, and is available for pre-order now.

This is not a drill…for fans of horror and supernatural fiction, Richard Kadrey’s newest book drops tomorrow, and it’s so much fun it should be illegal.

If you’re a fan of Kadrey’s Sandman Slim novels (and if you’re not, you should be—get reading), you know that he has a deft, thrilling hand with all things supernatural, and that’s clearly on display with The Pale House Devil. He has an equally deft hand with sardonic, sarcastic humor, and there’s plenty of that here as well. This is a slim novella that punches above its weight, throwing bloody chunks of creature feature, cosmic horror, and buddy humor against the fridge to see what sticks. Happily, every wet bit of it does.

Ford and Neuland are paranormal hitmen, dispatching the worst of the worst, and that would be enough of a hook to drag me in. But Kadrey doesn’t stop there. Ford is alive, and only kills the undead. Neuland is a member of the undead community, and only kills the living. Together they make the perfect kill team, and it’s immediately clear that they’ve been together a long time. They have an easy familiarity, a downright touching relationship. They care for each other in their rough, violent way. It’s as if Butch and Sundance were supernatural hitmen.

When a young woman named Tilda hires them for her asshole of a boss, they’re drawn into a harrowing confrontation with a monster that would have given H.P. Lovecraft nightmares. This is the kind of bloody, high stakes, over-the-top cosmic horror clash that Kadrey excels at. It’s gross and outrageous and, for me, a helluva good time.

Somewhere along the way, Ford and Neuland realize that the timid Tilda is actually a badass yearning to break free, and that maybe the duo is now a trio. In fact, I’m kinda hoping they’re the start of a new series, because I would very much like that.

The Pale House Devil debuts on October 10th. Jump in with both feet.

If you’ll indulge me for a hot minute, I’d like to talk about my history with short stories. I’ve been a reader of science fiction and fantasy since I picked up I, Robot and The Martian Chronicles from my Junior High library the first week of 7th grade. And while those were both novels (although I could argue that The Martian Chronicles is really a collection of interconnected short stories, but I digress), I quickly discovered that there was breathtaking variety in the many science fiction and fantasy short story anthologies available. I devoured them all—Damon Knight’s Orbit series, Terry Carr’s Universe series, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and all the many, many one-off anthologies (most of which seemed to be edited by Roger Elwood). And of course the many magazines, particularly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I discovered a multitude of writers in this way, writers I still love to this day.

What’s that got to do with the book I’m supposed to be writing about here? Hang on, I’m getting there. As I got older, I gravitated more to novels, with only occasional forays into short stories. But lately that’s been changing. Here’s my point:

It’s been a good year for short stories. After a quick look, I’ve read and reviewed five short story collections this year, all of them excellent. Here’s my second point, and I’m finally bringing it around to why you’re here:

It’s been a downright great year for Joe R. Lansdale fans. My first review of the year was Bleeding Shadows, a nicely chonky collection of his short stories that demonstrated his versatility and range. Then came The Donut Legion, Lansdale’s wildly entertaining novel of donuts, murder, and flying saucer cults. In August we were treated to Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale, another wonderful collection of short stories that concentrated on, well, crime stories.

And now, arriving November 1st, The Senior Girls Bayonet Team and Other Stories, another nicely chonky short story collection. If anything, this collection is even more varied and wide-ranging than Bleeding Shadows, with longer stories and flash fiction (although they weren’t called that back when Lansdale wrote them). One of the beautiful things about Lansdale, one of the things that makes him my favorite writer, is that he can’t be easily categorized. He jumps from crime fiction, to horror, to fantasy, to weird westerns, to truly oddball satire, too, in this collection, some downbeat, slice of life (dare I say) literary fiction.

You find all that and more here in The Senior Girls Bayonet Team and Other Stories—there’s truly something for everyone, and all of it pure catnip for Lansdale fans.

I’d like to call out just a couple of my favorites:
• THE HUNGRY SNOW—A long, dark-as-pitch weird western with a taste of the Donner Party.
• MONKEY’S UNCLE—Narrated by an intelligent monkey, and that’s all I’m telling you.
• ON THE MUDDY BANKS OF THE OLD SABINE—This one would have been right at home in Things Get Ugly.
• RED BILLIE—I love when Lansdale delves into coming-of-age stories, and this is one of his best.
• THE HOODOO MAN AND THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN—Another weird western, one Lansdale considers his best in that genre.

Bottom line—this is a must-read for Lansdale fans, and for fans of short stories in general. And the cherry on top, the book ends with Lansdale’s extensive, generous story notes, which I personally love.

The Senior Girls Bayonet Team and Other Stories is available for pre-order now. Don’t miss it.

I’m a fan of Daniel Kraus. I’ve read and enjoyed several of his books, and I saw him give a reading at the Chicago Worldcon, where he struck me as a quick-witted, funny, kind, and altogether excellent human being. All of this to say I was predisposed to like Whalefall, which I had heard raves about from folks whose opinion I trust. When I heard that it was a painstakingly researched, scientifically accurate novel about a teenage SCUBA diver being swallowed by a massive sperm whale, who must use all of his knowledge to attempt a daring, against-all-odds escape before the air in his tank runs out, that was more than enough to get me excited to read it. I mean, come on. Swallowed. By a whale.

None of that prepared me for just how exceptional Whalefall is.

Because the thing is, Kraus has written a compulsively readable, unbearably suspenseful novel, a race against time and nature that will wind your nerves tighter than piano wire. It’s clear he’s done considerable research, because the science feels sound and assured, but it’s also clear that Kraus isn’t showing off. The science is always in service to his story, not the other way around, moving it like an underwater (whale-sized) freight train from one heart-stopping moment to the next.

If that was all Kraus had achieved, this would have been one helluva yarn, a real stemwinder. Whalefall is so much more than that, however. Jay, the young man trapped inside the whale, had a strained-to-breaking, love-hate relationship with his father, and as he struggles to survive, Whalefall also travels back and forth through the years, dissecting that relationship, laying it bare with surgical precision. In the process, the novel gives a master class in characterization and family dynamics, and what is basically a thriller uncovers depths of heart and humanity that make it a richly rewarding reading experience.

A word about Kraus’ writing style—he puts on a bravura performance unlike anything I’ve read by him before, utilizing a dynamic, staccato rhythm, the words propelling the story forward with unrelenting force.

I’ve read some amazing novels this year, but this just might be my favorite so far. It’s that good.