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.

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.