Wow, this month flew by and I barely read a thing. Nine books total, which is defintely lower than I've been averaging. But, we'd had a lot going on here at the Hettler Residence - more work around the house, more running around - but I've also not had a great time with some of the books I read this month either, so there was definitely some slogging through books when a DNF might have been better route...
So let's see which books were knock outs and which ones I should have chucked out the door, shall we?
This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer (Audiobook)
So Jenny is coming out with Crafting for Sinners, which I pre-ordered because it sounds ridiculously amazing, and in the meantime I thought I'd give this one a whirl. Especially because i found the audio super cheap on @chirpbooks.
And truth time - initially, when it released, I wasn't all that intrigued... a group of young adults walking into the woods to hike an uncharted cliff wall thingy... i didn't think it was going to be for me, and while I didn't totally love it, I will say this...
Come for the hike, stay for the haunting. Forever! Mwahahaaaa...
We moved my son from VA up to PA this weekend, and this audiobook was the perfect length to keep me company for a good chunk of the ride... coming in at just under five hours at 1.5x speed, which felt like the perfect pace for creeping dread and escalating doom.
This is a locked-room horror story, only the “room” is the woods. Think The Ruins (locked-room Mexican ruins horror) or White Line Fever (locked-room stretch of road)—except here, the trees are the walls, and the exit is a myth. No one’s getting out alive. And I promise, that’s not a spoiler! The book opens with a report of hikers found dead in the forest. The rest of the story unspools the who, the why, and the deeply unpleasant how.
Some die by each other’s hands. Some die by the forest’s. But make no mistake. All die badly.
The earth was hungry, the area haunted, and it took what it needed. And it’s not like they weren’t warned so you’ll find no sympathy here, folks. Nature doesn’t do mercy. What it does do? Rot, madness, and the slow realization that you were never meant to be the protagonist—you were just meat on the menu.
Next time, maybe listen to the locals.
By the Dark O' the Moon by K Stephens
Move over, mermaid fans! Make room for Selkie fiction.
Good lord, does K. Stephens know water! By the Dark O’ the Moon is a haunting tale of possession, patience, and the briny depths one will brave for love... of a child, of a family, of something ancient and wild. Prosy and lyrical, the novel expertly balances the mystery of Irish folklore against the backdrop of 1920s Prohibition and Maine’s struggling island lobstermen.
When a boat crashes on the rocks, Elray, a man forced into rumrunning to make ends meet, steals a selkie baby who’s washed ashore—her seal skin lying nearby. Aaelene rises from the sea in search of her bairn and is forced to live with Elray, posing as his wife, until she can reclaim her daughter’s skin and return to the water for good.
A deliciously slow-burning tale of maternal fury, folklore, and the saltwater price of stolen things. This isn’t a love story. It’s a reckoning.
What in the good god did I just read—and did I love it? Why yes... yes, I think I kind of fell in love. Once I got used to the writing, that is. And guuurrrl, Gransden really makes us work for it, doesn’t she?
Set in England and impressively narrated in single-syllable words the entire way through, this story follows Flo, a girl on a mission to find her brother after nearly everyone else has fled in an attempt to outrun an unexplained, encroaching mass of red. Along the way, she encounters a parade of strange, sickly, and eccentrically broken people who, while not exactly helpful, point her toward where they think her brother might have gone.
It’s a stark and charred world Flo walks through... barren, brutal, and full of apocalyptic horrors she cannot unsee and yet refuses to flinch from.
Gransden doesn’t hand you a map. She leaves you to figure it out on your own. And somehow, you do. This is a slow, surreal burn of a novella where mother-tongue minimalism meets end-times dread. And when it hits, it hits like a fever you don’t want to break.
Fans of The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman and The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell—where language bends, breaks, and rebuilds itself around fierce female protagonists—will absolutely devour this. If you love stories where women face impossible odds and the prose dares you to keep up, this one’s for you.
The Extremities! by Samantha Kimmey
Yeah. No. No thank you.
I wanted to DNF this one so many times. It's slow, repetitive, and just plain frustrating. But I kept convincing myself to push through, hoping it would get weirder, stranger, better. It didn’t. There was a little twist right at the end that was kind of cute, but not enough to justify the 260-page endurance test that came before it.
Kim, a young reporter at a small-town paper, is suddenly struck with sharp pains in her fingers, making it nearly impossible to do her job. Doctors are baffled. Her editor blames stress. Her boyfriend—an earth and mushroom kind of guy—prescribes a break for her and brews up some truly vile-sounding tinctures and soups. Her dad just wants her to come home and mooch off him for a while.
Then there’s the dictation software, gifted by her boyfriend’s friend Lee. It mangles everything Kim says. She spirals, worrying her coworker will steal her stories. Meanwhile, her boyfriend joins a group of emergency evacuationists preparing the town for a potential fire. And Kim? She’s stuck obsessing over her malfunctioning hands and glitchy software while the plot loops like a broken record.
It just keeps going. And going. And going.
This book is a slow crawl through finger pain, soup trauma, and dictation despair. If you’re looking for surreal horror, keep walking... this one’s stuck in neutral.
The Bells by Cai Emmons
Well… someone had to go first. I haven't seen any reviews for this one yet, even on goodreads.
The Bells follows Niall, a high school history teacher recently returned to society after years in a monastery. He’s adrift... stuck in a relationship he doesn’t know how to leave, avoiding conflict at every turn, and yet somehow attracting it like a magnet.
From childhood resentment toward his golden boy brother, to psychological torment in the monastery, to being gaslit by a student in his post-lunch history class, Niall is a man perpetually simmering. But instead of boiling over, he stews. He assumes the worst, rarely acts, and when he does—breaking up with his girlfriend, smashing his brother’s Lego setup—it’s followed by a long, mopey spiral of self-pity.
I’ll be honest... I struggled with this one. The pacing felt slow, the content felt repetitive, and I had to push myself to finish it in a single day because I knew I wouldn’t be motivated to pick it back up later.
However... there’s something to be said for a character study that leans into discomfort. Readers who appreciate introspective, quietly tormented protagonists and slow-burning domestic tension may find more to connect with here than I did.
This wasn’t the book for me—but it might be the right kind of melancholy for someone else.
Gothic by Philip Fracassi
From the twisted mind of Fracassi comes a tale of ink, insanity, and interior design gone demonic.
My first Fracassi was The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, and I fell instantly in love. It was the cheekiest, most fun, most original slasher I’d ever read, with the most badass elderly final girl to boot. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to devour more.
Gothic, rereleasing next month with Clash Books, is also cheeky and fun... but in a much darker, more insidious way. Darker than a slasher chasing retirees through a nursing home, you ask? Yes. Yes, I do say.
As with ASRHM, Fracassi takes a familiar horror trope and twists it into something uniquely his own. Gothic is what happens when you pair a washed up writer with a haunted desk. After receiving an ornate antique desk for his birthday, our protagonist is struck by feverish inspiration. He types in a daze, day and night, until the skin on his fingers splits and bleeds. When he finally stops, he’s staring at a completed manuscript... one he doesn’t remember writing a single word of.
Possessed, obsessed, and slipping from reality, our writer becomes putty in the desk’s demonic hands. Madness blooms. Evil reigns.
The vibe? Pure 80s horror novel nostalgia. A little hokey, but in the best way. This one screams summer horror movie hit, don'tcha think?!
The Midnight Knock by John Fram
Started with a bang, ended with a "Really, bruh?"
I was so ready to give The Midnight Knock a solid 4 or 5 stars. It had me hooked from the start... it's such a clever, stylish spin on the locked-room mystery, which, let’s be real, is having a serious moment this year.
The setup had me spiraling. Every few pages made me doubt what I thought I knew. The tension was unrelenting. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. But then we hit the final stretch… and it all kind of fell apart for me.
A group of seemingly random people all end up at the Brake Inn Motel. Once they've checked in, they quickly learn there is no checking out. Run by a pair of elusively creepy twins clearly hiding something, the guests' connection to each other slowly begins to bubble up to the surface and as darkness begins to descend, a scream announces a dead body, a murder that kickstarts the worst night of everyone's lives.
It was the ending that threw me, veering into the weird in a way that just didn't seem to fit. Not 'bold weird', not 'satisfying weird'... just whacky, like the story lost its footing and faceplanted into its own twist. I could practically feel the plot crumbling beneath me, like a sandcastle at high tide. What started as a tight, compelling mystery unraveled into something that felt rushed, chaotic, and strangely disconnected.
I can’t deny how much I enjoyed the ride... right up until the wheels came off, steering things headfirst into WTF territory.
Beings by Ilana Masad
Intimate, empathetic, and quietly empowering, Beings is a story that feels both timely and timeless.
I pre-ordered this one to support Ilana, who was a tireless champion of my clients back when she was the host of a kickass podcast. While the connection is a personal one, the premise of her book sealed the deal - a fictionalized account of the country’s first alien abductees? Yes, please. I was ridiculously curious to read it!
The book centers on The Archivist, a researcher fixated on a box of letters from the 1960s written by Phyllis Egerton, a queer sci-fi writer hopelessly in love with Rosa—a woman who’s since moved on, married, and built a life of her own. As The Archivist pores over Phyllis’s heartbreak and longing, they also begin crafting a fictionalized retelling of Betty and Barney Hill’s infamous encounter with a UFO. The Hills, a mixed-race couple living in a deeply segregated America, become the first people to claim alien abduction... and the nagging fear and fascination that follows is both surreal and deeply human.
The narrative starts slow and fragmented, drifting between timelines and perspectives - Barney and Betty grappling with trauma and notoriety, Phyllis navigating forbidden love and queer identity in a hostile era, and The Archivist confronting their own queer awakening and suppressed memories.
As the story unfolds, these threads begin to braid together - fact and fiction, longing and legacy - until they converge into something haunting, tender, and quietly radical.
Sure, it’s a slow burn. But it’s also a deeply layered meditation on obsession, erasure, and the stories we choose to preserve. I’m glad I picked it up!
All Hallows by Christopher Golden (Audiobook)
This one just didn’t work for me. I went in hoping for a chilling seasonal read, but instead found myself slogging through a plot that felt oddly preoccupied with the infidelities of its main characters. I struggled to see how those dynamics served the larger story—especially when the first half moved at a glacial pace... dragging us through the affairs of married neighbors like it was auditioning for a Lifetime drama.
Spoiler: When the interdimensional horror finally made its appearance, complete with spooky children and a Halloween entity racing to collect souls, the tonal whiplash left me more confused than creeped out so when the body counts eventually started to wrack up, I was too annoyed to care.
The narration was fine, but the prose didn’t do much to elevate the material. All in all, a disappointing pick for my fall lineup.
