Well the holidays are good for slowing a girl's reading down, LOL. In December I managed to read 8 books, but one of those was for publicity purposes so I won't count it here. I also DNFd one pretty early in, so I won't count that one either... but I'll include it in the wrap up below just in case you were curious what it was and why I chucked it.
Also, I tried to read wintery books in December, to try to fully immerse myself in the colder, snowy weather and I did pretty OK with that, as you'll see below. I might try to build in some monthly theme reading in 2025. It might help me continue to work through my ever growing, never ending backlog!
How did your December reading pan out? Did you meet or exceed any of the goals you set for yourself?!
These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant
Another snowy book pick to match the colder weather settling in outside.
A perfectly paced novel set in a wintery landscape that only serves to enhance the tension in this slow burning story of self inflicted isolation and survivalism.
A father and his young daughter live in a cabin in the middle of the woods with no electricity and no contact with the outside world. Well, with the exception of Jake, a close friend who owns the cabin he's squatting at, and a nosey distant neighbor who appears to be watching his every move.
For his daughter Finch, this is the only life she's ever known. She's adapted well to life in the middle of nowhere. Cooper, on the other hand, lives every day in fear of the things he's done that brought him here eight years ago, hiding from his past, feeling like he's just one knock on the front door away from being separated from his little girl again.
I really enjoyed this one. It's not a pulse pounding thriller, though there are definitely thrillerish elements to it. It's a deceptively quiet, beautifully written story of the lengths a father will go to in order to protect his daughter, the struggle of accepting the horrible things you've done, and of not losing sight of the person you are despite the steps you had to take to get where you are.
If you liked Elmet by Fiona Mozley and What Mother Won't Tell Me by Ivar Leon Menger, you'll find elements of those here.
Extinction by Bradley Somer
I forget who I saw reading and recommending this but I thought it sounded decent and picked up on PangoBooks. Loving the cover but didn't care too much for the story.
Set in a near future, humans have finally damaged the Earth to the point that they have begun settling elsewhere in outer space. Flights off the planet are expensive and not everyone is prepared to leave just yet. Our protag Ben, a ranger and conservationist, has dedicated his time to protecting the last living grizzly bear from poachers. One night, Ben hears voices the valley and things suddenly turn all cat and mouse with guns ablazin' as they each attempt to get to the bear first...
Eh. I wish it would have spent a little more time on the whole 'end of the earth' piece of the storyline. I mean, why bring in science fiction elements if you don't intend to draw on them? But it appears Somer's was interested in writing a gazillion bad shoot-out scenes, poorly placed and confusing flashbacks that just appeared in the middle of a scene without warning, and horribly underdeveloped characters.
I should have DNFd it, but the ever hopeful reader in me was hanging on in the hopes that it would get better. It didn't.
An eco-thriller that comes up short on both the eco and the thriller.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
This was one of my most anticipated reads for 2024 (even though it doesn't come out till March 2025). I tried so hard to land an advanced copy. And maybe that should have been a sign? Because holy hell, once I had it my hands, it took me forEVer to finish it! I think it's partially because I was reading it on my kindle app and not in actual print format, but also because the damn thing is just so frick'n meaty and chewy.
The writing is much heavier than I'm used to from SGJ and the story seemed to take ages to fully unfold. Even after you got the gist of where it was headed, it felt like it just kept rehashing the same things over and over again. It's like ok, honestly, I get it, I promise. Let's move on already. And then when you get to the last section, all of a sudden the damned thing just moved at warp speed. So the pacing felt all thrown off. Like, it literally took me two weeks to read the first 80% and then the final 20% of the book was over in the blink of an eye.
In true SGJ fashion, there is so much death. Gory, horrific, necessary death. There are monsters, in every sense of the word. It's a book within a book within a book and its pages drip with bloody, generational, Indigenous history. It's a revenge story with an empathetic bad guy. And when it finally ends, you don't feel as though that's the end of things, you know?
So don't get me wrong. I one hundred percent appreciate the book for what it is and how he's breathing new life into this genre. SGJ is a masterclass in revamping classic horror tropes. But good loooord my legs are tired from slogging through it all!!
You Can't Take it With You by Marcus Hawke
I bought this on kindle for cheap after letting #bookstagram influence me once again. Yes, I know. The last time I let bookstagram convince me to buy a book, it was baaaad, and I said I wasn't going to fall for it again. And yet... here we are.
Book #FOMO is such a thing you guys.
Ok, so here we have a ninety year old millionaire named Monty who is just done with laying around waiting to die, and so he injects himself with a mysterious, liquid filled needle he bought at auction for a ridiculous amount of money. He rises out of his grave shortly afterwards to discover it's Christmas Eve and he's a hungry vampire, and so he goes on an all night blood slurping binge in NYC.
A Christmas Carol this ain't.
This one was strange for me. The writing was ... missing something. Even though the first half of the book dove into Monty's past as he reflected on his life before taking the plunge, it felt like we never really got beneath the surface of things which stunted my ability to connect with him. Likewise, when he turned, his desires and the animalistic urge to feed felt flat, more hollow and functional than anything. So if you're looking for something deeper... this isn't it.
But it was fun if you're reading it for what it is and are just looking for some lightweight seasonal horror to pass the time. And it'll scratch your gore itch for sure.
It explores the fear of death, asking the age old question - if you could, would you make the choice to live forever? But then again, life after death is still a form of death, isn't it?
Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey
This book found me while I was browsing the shelves at a bookstore. I had read her previous novel Pew and enjoyed it but wasn't necessarily looking for more from her. From the first few pages, I knew Lacey had sunk her claws into me. I fell in love with the writing. If I was a different kind of reader I would have marked up so much of this book - all of it hits in such a powerful way. I mean look...
"Occasionally being destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience."
"Some people make us feel more human and some people make us feel less human."
"What matter is that sometimes sense is made between two people and I don't know if it's random or there's any kind of order to it, what combinations of people work the best and why and how do we find these people and how do we keep these people around and I don't know if it's chaos or not chaos but it feels like chaos to me so I suppose it is."
"To love someone is to know that one day you'll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means that you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or freak accident or flesh eating bacteria."
It's a story about depression and directionless, about feeling stuck in time, about not being honest with yourself, and about trying to escape the one thing you simply can't get away from... yourself.
5 stars all the way. Geesh, this thing!
The Unmothers by Leslie J Anderson
I've seen mixed reviews on this one and I can see why. Though it's a bit slow, I found it to be completely engaging, and couldn't fault it for riding the whole small town with strange secrets angle right up until the very end.
Here we meet Marshall, a journalist who's stuck in a funky state of grief over the recent loss of both her husband and their unborn baby. She's sent to a small town out in the middle of nowhere to report on a horse who allegedly gave birth to a human boy. She knows her boss is handing her this joke of an assignment so she can get her head back in the game, but once she arrives, she begins to realize there is a whole lot more to things that they initially thought.
Part investigative mystery, part folk horror, The Unmothers packs a solid punch. Horse lovers, men haters, and fans of sacrifices, weird rituals, and freaky things that follow you in the woods, will find lots to sink their teeth into here.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
A girl gets a job at one of the city's oldest cinema houses. It's a gross job - sweeping up the screen room, unclogging toilets, wiping down seats covered in all manner of fluids (of the soda, beer, and bodily kinds). It also takes her a while to break through the staff's cold shoulders and make her way into their inner circle, but when she does, she happily finds herself mixed up in all sorts of movie theater mayhem. And then, just as she's really starting to settle in, the cinema owner dies, new owners move in, and the staff death toll just keeps on climbing.
Please do not mistake this for horror. While there is some blood, this is just a story about a bored twenty-something year old plain jane working a crap job with other unmotivated aimless co-workers who are all trying to pass the time and make a buck without busting their humps too much in a place that doesn't seem to give two shits about them or their physical or mental wellbeing.
Drugs, sex, suicide, and exploding popcorn machines propel the otherwise slower paced storyline forward. Same sad girl fiction, just in a different setting. One that tugs at your nostalgic senses, depending on how much time you spent low key hanging out in movie theaters, or hell, at each others houses watching movie after movie, perhaps maybe even washing down some suspicious pills with a warm expired beer, in your younger years (wink wink).
And the book I DNF'd, which was a review copy I requested because it sounded pretty interesting but alas... it wasn't... I called it quits 11% of the way through.
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