Aaaand I'm back up in my reading game! Closed out July with a total of 12 books read, and some of them were pretty dang good! I'm also crushing my Goodreads goal... I'm 28 ahead of schedule and 1 away from completing the 70 I intially set for a goal (according to the site, but I'm actually at goal because Darin Bradley's book isn't on goodreads yet so it can't count it!). Boom!!!
Soooo.... what did I read, you ask? Let's take a look:
It Came From The Swamp, edited by Joey R Poole
I saw that Malarky Books had put a call out for some help in getting funds for the press and had dropped the prices of their books to encourage sales. I don't need much of a nudge to buy small press, so I snagged this ebook.
It Came From the Swamp is an anthology of stories involving cryptids and local folklore and honestly, who doesn't love getting lost in some creature-feature fiction every now and then?
Whether or not you're a believer in Bigfoot and the Florida Skunkape, or the lesser known Boo Hag and Mishipeshu, these stories will pull you in and wow you. There are shark teethed mermaids hiding beneath boat docks and scarecrows who come after those who poision their land and jackalopes that harness tremendous powers.
While not typically a fan of collected stories from a variety of writers, which tend to have an uneven feel for me, I had high hopes for this one. And it definitely exceeded my expectations. Why aren't more of you guys reading this one?!
A fascinating collection of the wild and weird that's not afraid to point a finger at the real monsters - humankind!
Ling Hun by Ai Jiang
Death is such a terrifying and fascinating thing. It's inevitable... from the moment we take our first breath, every subsequent breath brings us one step closer to it. No one really knows what happens when we die but everyone has a feeling, a theory, an expectation, a hope - do we cease to exist? Does our spirit go on to a better place? Do we hang around and haunt the places and people we loved most in life?
In Linghun, author Ai Jiang explores the idea that it is we, the living, who keep the dead alive and tethered to this world through our inability to let them go. She has created a small neighborhood called HOME, a hot spot for specter activity. Those in mourning can bid to purchase a house there, and welcome their deceased with open arms.
Wenqi's family move into a house there that used to belong to their cousin. Wenqi's mother immediately unpacks the photos and belongings of her dead brother, eager to summon him back into their lives while strangers who've moved to the town but cannot afford a home there yet, referred to as lingerers, begin to camp on their lawn. One such lingerer is a boy around Wenqi's age named Liam, whose family has also suffered a loss. Across the street lives an elderly woman known as Mrs. who lost her husband a long time ago and has been unsuccessful calling him back to her.
The book moves between these three characters, whose lives soon become intertwined in ways they hadn't initially imagined. Haunting, hopeful, and painfully atmospheric, Linghun is not only a story about longing and depair and how we carry our grief. It is also a story that questions just who is doing the haunting here?
This book was hand selected for me by my bookish pal @drewsof as part of a curated 'blind box' of books he recently sent my way. And boy does he know my tastes!
Welcome to Black Wells, a small town with some pretty dark stuff swirling beneath its surface. Enter Lauren, who moves there after a bad breakup, with the hopes of starting over somwhere fresh at the recommendation of her BFFs. But one visit to a local bar bathroom changes everything when she becomes the vicitim of a violent supernatural haunting.
Unable to shake the spirits that have attached to her, she ends up connecting with William Daniels, an excommunicated exorcist who, after witnessing one of her 'episodes' is just as determined as she is to understand what is happening to her and together, they plan to take action to make it stop.
Trauma and demon possession for the win!
Not sure I would have ever picked this one up on my own, as it had flown under my radar when it released last year. But I'm so glad I read it because I really enjoyed it.
And, oh no! I see that it's going to be a loosely connected book series set in the the town of Black Wells with the second installment, All the Prospect Around Us, already out in the world.
Damn it you guys... another series for me to keep track of, lol!!
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
Does the world really need another post-pandy novel? Well, if Claire Fuller is writing it, then the answer is yes!
It's a bit of a slow-to-start novel involving a deadly virus dubbed "dropsy". Those who catch it suffer from severe organ swelling, their eyes push out of their sockets and, fun times, the newest varient also impacts the brain and causes memory loss so you get to stumble around confused and disoriented while you die.
Neffy signed up to participate in a paid trial in which she'll be infected with the original strain and issued a test vaccine to see if it works. The book opens with her getting checked in and settled the day before they stick her. There's nine volunteers total (or maybe it's eight?). And when Neffy finally pulls through the worst of it days later, the vaccine apparently doing what it was designed to do, she discovers it's all too late. The hospital staff abandoned them. Only four of the other volunteers are left, the shit having hit the fan before the virus was administered to them. Neffy is informed that they are not to draw attention to themselves or the building, that they are already rationing the food, and that they hope but are not hopeful that the army will come rescue them once the trial period has ended.
The book shifts from pandemic fiction to isolation fiction. They are in shock. They believe most of the world is dead. They are afraid to leave, and Neffy feels pressured to be the one who will ultimately have to head out and scavange for the group.
As Neffy gets to know her fellow lock-ins, she discovers one of them is the inventor of a machine that allows you to "revisit" your memories in a virtual-reality trance kind of way. This quickly becomes a creative way for Fuller to delve into Neffy's backstory - why she's so eager to volunteer to do unsafe things to her body and why she's writing journal style letters to "Dearest H"... another nifty way for us to learn about our protagonist.
You won't understand the title until much, much later in the book, when some other pretty big reveals come speeding at us. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I didn't spot some of it sooner.
Bloodmetal by Darin Bradley
I've been a big @dammitdarin fan for years... first cracking my teeth on his dystopian novel Chimpanzee (which you should totally read if you haven't yet).
Bloodmetal, forthcoming later this year, is a whole other animal! 'Part western and part victoriana, it spans dusty frontiers and marble ballrooms, slinging swords, corsets, and gun barrels in a new modern fantasy. You haven't seen cowboys and wizards like this before...'
My husband would get a kick out this because it's based on a D&D campaign Darin led when he was a teenager.
There is war brewing between two influential families, and individual factions have splintered off into groups who are either in support of or are trying to stop the development of a powerful new drug varient that's destined to change the world and shift the balance of power...
Within all this chaos, we pair up with some people who have willingly, and for others... not so willingly, gone through a body modification that involves having wire filaments and a transducer inserted into thier head, giving them the power to talk telepathically, confuse and trick thier enemies' brains, and even stop moving bullets in mid-air...
If weird western fantasy fiction mashups are your thing... get Bloodmetal on your to-buy list pronto.
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
I listened to this one on audio and was immediately sucked in. It's atomspheric, haunting, and unsettling... and I really dug it.
It's the dark creepy tale of a married couple, Juliette and Richard, who are grieving the recent loss of their five year old son after having moved out to Starve Acre. The house, which gets its name from the field beyond the backyard, had belonged to Richard's father, who had passed not too long ago after suffering a bout of madness. As Richard fingers through a box of old books in the basement, he comes across one that details a rather gruesome hanging of three young boys from a great old oak that used to grow in the middle of the field. To help him process the loss of his son, Richard takes to excavating the field, and locates not only the roots of that old tree, but the bones of a long dead hare.
As the story rocks backward and forward in time, we learn that their son Ewan believed he could see the old oak from time to time while playing in the field. Juliette and Richard also began to notice frightening changes in him, violent tendencies that involved him inflicting harm on animals and other children.
As the parental terror and concern for Ewan's mental well-being builds in the past, Richard and his wife also face strange terrors in the present - remember those hare bones? Welp, Richard brought them into the house to study them and noticed almost immediately that they began to reconnect themselves with fresh cartilage, and muscle, and veins. Meanwhile, Juliette swears she can feel Ewan still, and invites a small group of occultists over to try to make contact with him.
Nothing good comes from any of this and let me tell you... the final scene, and that last line... oh. my. god. This book goes from creepy to absolutely cray-cray! I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a wild rabbit the same again.
Nope. I'm ruined.
I am kicking myself in the ass for waiting so long to read this one! I had downloaded it as an ebook a gazillon years ago but never managed to start it. Then I saw it for super cheap at a local book warehouse a while back and snagged it in hardcover, thinking that would entice me to pick it up faster, since it would be staring me in the face everytime I chose my next read. But there was always another book that grabbed my attention more, and so it waited and waited and waaaaited for me, like the woman-thing that bided her time in Travis' cabinet, whispering to me from time to time, reminding me it was there.
This book is fire. I fell in love with the prose immediately. It's got that slow, haunting, gritty thing going on where you just want to savor every sentence. Davidson takes the vampire trope and bashes it against the camper walls until it becomes a bloody, pulpy suggestion of the thing we knew, making it something all his own. It's a fabulous western lit / monster horror / thriller cross over that sounds like it shouldn't work but holy hell does it ever! And it has one of the most empathetic "bad guys" I've ever read.
If this isn't my top read of 2023 when all is said and done, I'd be surprised. I loved it that much!
The Quiet Tenant by Clemence Michallon
This was amazing on audio! Perfect pacing and narration, the writing and the short chapters lent itself so well to this format.. so glad I experienced it this way.
Aidan Thomas is a serial killer who also happens to be a beloved neighbor and father. After his wife's death, Aidan and his teenaged daughter Cecilia are forced to move, and he has a decision to make. Does he kill the woman he's secretly held hostage in his shed for the past five years, or bring her with them?
The woman in the shed, who he has forced to call herself Rachel, will need to behave. She'll need to lie to his daughter, pretend she's renting a room. She cannot scream, she cannot disobey, she cannot try to run. She will be locked in her room, handcuffed to the radiator and will only be let out when he allows her - for showers, for food, for nothing else. There are cameras everywhere. If she tries anything... he will know, and he won't be happy.
Rachel and Cecilia start to build a tentative bond over meals, and they eventually convince Aidan to let them watch movies together on the couch. Rachel's rewarded for how well she's been behaving, and gets more and more time out of her room...
Meanwhile, Aidan begins to get close to Emily, a bartender at a restaurant he frequents, who quickly falls head over heels for him. Heck, let's be real here. She's borderline obsessed. Everyone in town knows he moved into the Judge's rental, and one day she decides to drive by it, just to get a peek. Only she can't stop at a peek, so she gets out and knocks on the door...
The book is told entirely from the perspective of these three women - Rachel, Emily, and Cecilia (with little vignettes from the women he's murdered too, sprinkled here and there throughout the novel) - and the book really gets going as these three storylines come crashing together.
I was sucked in from the very start, actually enjoying the whole getting up and going to work thing because I was listening to this during my commute and couldn't wait to see how it ended!
Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki
Edan Lepucki is back, this time with a chunky novel about the gifts we're cursed with, family trauma and motherhood, and the power of memories.
In it, we first meet Ursa, a woman who has discovered that she can slip through the membrane of time and experience moments of her life again, like a movie playing out right in front of her. She befriends Karin, an excessively rich woman who learns of her gift, and offers Ursa an opportunity to stay at her mansion, hidden in the woods of Santa Cruz, provided she use her ability to help others who are troubled and seeking solace from the world. Women begin flocking to the property, enthralled with Ursa and addicted to the side effects that occur when wielding her 'power'. But the more Ursa thrusts herself into her memories, the more she pushes everyone, including her own young son Ray, away from her.
From here, the book is broken out into multiple parts, each section jumping further and further into the future of this multigenerational family... where we learn that a now college-aged Ray and Cherry, one of the other children growing up on the cult-like compound who was abandoned there by her mother at a very young age, ran away when Cherry learns she's pregnant with his child. Soon, their daughter Opal, who is barely old enough to walk, begins to have strange episodes with incredibly creepy side effects that eventually scare Cherry so badly that she takes off one day without a trace. Hmmm.. like mother, like daughter, right? Then, fast foward a bit, and we're getting to know Opal as a teenager as she begins to question her past and attempts to harness this thing she calls "tunneling" to learn more about the mother who left her.
Time's Mouth is an intricately layered, and at times painstakingly slow, story of how we never really know our pasts and of how much we must rely on others for our own history. Imagine how addictive it might be to revisit those moments that shaped us, made us who we are, and to spend time again with those we've lost?
The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun
Korean psychological horror for the win-ish?!
Aw man. This book is fucked up. It opens up with our man waking up from a coma in the hospital. He was in a bad car accident and learns that his wife didn't make it and he's completely paralyzed. And to make matter worse, he realizes the only family he has left is his mother in law, with whom he has a strained relationship, and now that her only child is dead and he's being released to home care, he's all the family she has left too.
This book plays with your emotions. Witchy MIL? check. Completely helpless bedridden dude who's now reliant on this witchy MIL for his survival? check. Weird uncomfortable situations that make you want to turn your head or reach into the book to make them stop? check. The isolation and the mistreatment and the cringe behavior is on point. Yet the deeper into this short novel we go, the more we start to understand. And the more we understand, the less we want to root for our guy, but if we don't, who will, and really though... should anyone?
Black Bark by Brian Evenson
I recently saw that Brian Evenson had a few copies of this one on hand that he was willing to sign and ship out and, I mean, how could I say no to that?! You could say I'm a bit of an Evenson fangirl, but again, if you've read his work, how could you not be?
Black bark is an incredibly dark collection - clocking in at just under 150 pages - that showcases some of Evenson's creepiest stories. Pitch black tunnels that house dripping, whispering creatures. A strange cabin that beckons to a lost and injured man may be the last threshold he crosses. Due to a series of unfortunate events, a young boy is forced to live with his estranged grandmother, who is anything but the kindly old woman he was hoping for. And two men are sent out on a one-way mission to follow a fence line to determine where the contagion began...
His writing gets under your skin. It itches. It twitches. It burrows in deep and never leaves you. It's the movement in the corner of your vision. The noise you hear downstairs just as you're about to drop off to sleep. The slight disturbance in the air that tickles the hairs on the back of your neck.
Which of Brian's books have you read? Do you have a favorite?
Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg
Goodreads tells me I added this book to my shelves back in 2014. At some point after that, I purchased a copy and here it sat, all this time, waiting to be picked up and read. And why did I finally pick it up now, you ask? Well, because this weekend, as I was reading Hye-Young Pyun's The Hole, I decided I would do a little reading experiment. I would choose my next read based off of the authors who blurbed Pyun's book, and I would continue to choose my next read in this fashion until I get to a book that I don't like. Laura van den Berg happened to be one of the authors who blurbed Pyun's book. Since I already owned Find Me, I figured this was the best place to start. And what a place to start it was!
I really enjoyed this book and wish I had it read it much sooner. I love that it's set in the middle of a pandemic and that it was written before any knowledge of Covid and the impact it would have on our country.
The novel is broken out into two parts - Book One follows our protagonist as she spends her days killing time in the hospital during the height of the pandemic. People who are infected develop silver scale-like blisters on their bodies and slowly begin to lose their memories, who they are, where they are from, what food is, what breathing is. The death rate is through the roof. But Joy appears to be immune and she may be part of the cure. So she's brought to a special hospital in Kansas where they are studying and testing those who have not shown signs of the virus in the hopes of helping others survive as well.
Joy continues to retain her memories as some of the patients around her fall ill and die, and as a result begins to dive deeper into herself and her pre-pandemic traumas. Then, on the heels of a news annoucement that the death toll appears to be slowing down, Joy convinces one of the hospital staff to give her the code to the outer door and she devises a plan to head to Florida to locate her estranged mother. Book Two leaves the hospital in its rearview as Joy begins the road trip of a lifetime across a country that has been ravaged by the pandemic.
The book is unbound by time, in that weird spongy way that isolation and boredom can have on you, and the prose is incredibly lovely in a gut-punchy, ridiculously quote-worthy way. If I was a fan of book darts or marginalia, I would have marked up soooo many pages!
So where do I go from here? On to the back cover of of Find Me course! Edan Lepuki blurbed this book, but I just read her forthcoming novel Time's Mouth last week, so I decided I'd go with Dan Chaon instead. Strangely enough, I've never read him before, but I have a copy of Await Your Reply that's also been sitting here for years... so onward we go in the #bookblurbreadingexperiment...
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