As the end of the year creeps closer, the time seems to just fly by, doesn't it? I didn't read as many books as last month, but I am clocking in at a respectable 12 total (with one of those being for publicity purposes which one appear here).
There were some absolute bangers this month and I want to tell you all about them!!!
Too Old For This by Samantha Downing
Retirement's a killer.
An elderly, retired serial killer forced to start killing again when someone digs into the past she tried so hard to escape? Yes please—with bloody claw hammers on top.
This book was a riot. Nothing hits better than a feisty old lady who refuses to be found out. Lottie Jones is hilariously relatable, and you can’t help but root for her every step of the way.
It’s the best kind of brain candy—fun, fast, and twisted. I devoured it. If all thrillers were written like this, I’d be hooked on the genre.
A rare case of a big buzz book that actually lives up to the hype. This was so much fun. All the stars!
"you become aware of the darkness, and then suddenly it's everywhere"
"my face was here. Soon it will no longer exist. I'm losing speed, I wander in air, I turn to water, this great percentage of me is water, my face that once again will be water"
This book hurt my heart, the fucker.
I wouldn’t have picked it up if I hadn’t seen it promoted through NetGalley as a #freedownload. The cover caught my eye, the title intrigued me, and the description made it a #nobrainer. Algonquin published it a few years ago, and somehow it never hit my radar. I’m genuinely sad to think I might’ve missed it entirely. So now I’m begging you to read it.
It’s a heart-wrenching, beautiful story about a ferryman who wakes up knowing today will be his last. Resigned to that fact, he boards his boat and begins his usual route, joined by his dog Luna, who passed away over twenty years ago. Together, they begin collecting the ghosts of passengers he once ferried to and from the village, and they keep him company as he heads toward his final destination: reuniting with his wife.
Omg. It’s just so friggen gorgeous. There were moments where I had to do everything in my power not to bawl like a little baby. Like when Luna asked if he ever got another dog after her, and told him she wouldn’t have been mad... that she knows she was supposed to look after him but it was too hard to do that when she was dead... I’m still struggling to hold it back, writing this. This thing killed me. I’m dead. I died.
If you love the way Per Petterson, Cynan Jones, or Leif Enger write, you have to pick this one up. Just... make sure you’ve got tissues nearby.
The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley
This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. I even went out and bought it in hardcover. I was that certain I was going to love it.
It’s an atmospheric slow burn about two zookeepers who become best friends while working at the last zoo on earth, doing what they can to keep their animals from going extinct in a strange, post-climate ravaged world where entire ecosystems have collapsed.
We've got the naive goody-two-shoes employee who befriends the new recruit, an unrepentant rule-breaker with a hidden agenda; the tension between the ethical treatment vs the exploitation of animals; and an isolated setting where the lines between hope and desperation blur.
It's moody and sleepy and quiet, while also pressing its weight down upon you. Stirring and entrancing, with an ending that caught me off guard. And yet... I didn't fully love it. I don't know what it's missing exactly, I just know that it's missing something...
Yeehaw Junction by Kayli Scholz
"We're all gonna die someday. May as well not think too hard about it."
"Take no shit, punch hard. Live like you're going to die because you gotta work for what little you can get, even in places that didn't have you on the map."
Oof. This book is messed up—in the best possible way. It’s bleak, it’s rancid, it’s unapologetically depraved, and I devoured every page.
Narrated by Skeet, a teenage boy who casually announces he’s a school shooter in training, the story unfolds in the scorched backroads of Yeehaw Junction, Florida in 1999. Under the threat of Y2k, Skeet drifts through town stirring up chaos everywhere he goes, living in a ramshackle home with Trudy, her mentally disabled sister Cricket, and three kids—one biologically hers, the others, like Skeet, absorbed into her orbit through circumstance or neglect.
They’re the living embodiment of white trash and wear the label like armor. Things spiral quickly after a local girl vanishes from a rest stop, snatched in broad daylight from beneath her mother’s nose. While the town mobilizes in a frantic search, Skeet and his feral foster crew set up shop roadside—hawking poisoned dirt in mason jars and bootlegged Hope 4 Heather t-shirts. To stave off boredom, they capitalize on an opportunity to torment a man and his very pregnant wife when the couple crosses their path. and things only get darker from there.
Scholz weaves in found-footage elements with eerie finesse—peppering the narrative with snippets of news articles, police transcripts, interviews, and YouTube clips that deepen the dread and blur the line between fiction and documentary. It’s a storytelling style that feels voyeuristic, invasive, and brilliantly immersive.
The Morgue Keeper by Ruyan Meng
This book is strange in the most unsettling, quietly devastating way. It lulls you with its restraint, then blindsides you with violence so horrific, so humiliating, it feels like a gut punch.
Set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it follows Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper tasked with cleaning the bodies of the dead before they’re claimed or cremated. He’s seen countless corpses, but it’s #19—a grotesquely mutilated woman—that rattles him to his core and compels him to find out more about her. This quiet, unassuming man is soon pulled into a nightmare I wish didn’t exist, yet can’t pretend isn’t real: the brutal punishments inflicted on alleged counter-revolutionaries.
As bleak as it is, the novel pulses with threads of hope and perseverance. And if it doesn’t stir something in you, if it doesn’t leave a mark, however faint, are you even alive?
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Holy hell, this book.
I don’t know who first posted this on Bookstagram, but if it wasn't for them, I might’ve missed one of the most gutting, eerie reads I’ve ever picked up.
Yolanda and Verla wake up drugged, kidnapped, and dumped into a compound with other women—all stripped of their belongings, their dignity, and any sense of safety. What unfolds is brutal, ambiguous, and terrifyingly plausible.
If you loved I Who Have Never Known Men or The Handmaid’s Tale, this one will wreck you in the best way. Charlotte Wood hands you dread, confusion, and the slow burn of resistance. Her refusal to explain everything is the point. You’re meant to feel disoriented, furious, and complicit. It’s not about answers. It’s about survival, silence, and the slow, animal instinct to fight back.
It’s not a story. It’s a reckoning.
Will you understand everything? No.
Will you feel everything? Absolutely.
All the stars. And then some.
Other Evolutions by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
I downloaded this expecting speculative sci-fi, but instead I found myself reading a slow-burning family drama steeped in grief, trauma, and cultural tension.
The speculative element doesn't exist until the final section. At the book's core, it's about a mixed-race family navigating identity and assimilation, while also dealing with the aftermath of tragedy - surviving the kind of accident that leaves you physically and emotionally scarred, struggling under the weight of being the one who lived, and the pain of not being able to undo what was done.
If you’re here for Pet Sematary vibes or Frankensteinian horror, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re drawn to emotionally complex stories about survival, shame, and the places that grief takes you, this one might speak to you.
For me? Just not my cup of weird. Although, can we just gawk at that cover for a moment? Absolutely gorge!
You Weren't Meant To Be Human by Andrew Joseph White
Hello, you beautiful, strange, disturbing thing.
You, my lovely, are absolutely gunning for my favorite book of the year, aren’t you?
This one’s another internet darling I hesitated to pick up—me and big buzz books don’t always get along. But here’s a shining example of how wrong that assumption can be.
Set in a dystopian future overrun by hordes of worms and flies—festering in forgotten corners—the hive has turned humans into something like slaves. In exchange for feeding them rotting corpses, the bugs offer protection, loyalty, and the promise of self-actualization. As long as you obey.
Enter Crane: a mute autistic trans man who finally feels seen, valued, and whole in this grotesque new world. He’s in what he considers the perfect relationship—his boyfriend Levi treats him with brutal, degrading affection, the kind Crane craves after years of intrusive thoughts and fantasies of self-harm. It’s twisted, it’s tender, it’s his teenage dream made flesh.
But the fantasy shatters when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands he carry the child to term.
This is a book you might feel ashamed for loving. Dirty, even. It grieves and rages and spits in the face of social norms, dragging us into a dark, uncompromising space inhabited by the world’s most marginalized. It festers. It burrows. It scratches places in your brain you didn’t even know had begun to itch.
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Gosh, how I love a good, quiet story and Seascraper absolutely rose to the occasion.
For fans of Leif Enger, Frode Grytten, Cynan Jones, and Per Petterson, you’re in for something special. And if you loved Seascraper but haven’t yet read these authors, get them on your TBR immediately.
This is the story of a young man living a simple, salt-stung life—shrimping with his horse and cart, just like his grandfather did. He lives at home, supports his single mother, quietly pines for his best friend’s sister, and buries his dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter deep beneath the weight of practicality. Dreams don’t pay the bills, after all, and who has time to waste on that?! But everything shifts when a film director spots him working on the beach and hires him to scout locations for an upcoming movie.
Gloomy, moody, atmospheric, unassuming, and subtly folkloric—this is a slow-burn, character-driven novel that pulls you gently along through the mist. It straddles the line between duty and desire, longing and resignation, with a tenderness that lingers long after the last page.
It’s the kind of story that hums in the background long after you’ve finished reading... like a song you didn’t know you’d memorized.
The Violence by Delilah S Dawson (Audio)
Ok so you ever had an experience where the first book you read from an author makes you want to devour everything they’ve written… and the next one makes you reconsider?
I snagged the audiobook on Chirp when it went on sale, and thank the literary gods I didn’t pay full price.
I loved Bloom, so I dove into this one expecting awesomeness because hello... pandemic survival, rage-fueled outbreaks, people tearing each other apart. Bloody, gory, dark? Yes please.
What I got instead was popcorn horror wearing a pink tutu and tiara, twirling through trauma with jazz hands. The story centers on an abused wife and her two daughters navigating the early days of the outbreak. She provokes her husband into violence, calls the cops, and uses the pandemic’s chaos to escape. Cue family separation, individual character arcs, and a totally-not-a-spoiler reunion that’s about as surprising as a Hallmark Christmas movie.
There were moments that worked: a few genuinely unsettling descriptions, and some tender scenes. But they were buried beneath a syrupy layer of “mother knows best” melodrama.
It got me through a week of commuting, so there’s that.
The Island by Kerri King
Seriously, how did this one wash ashore unnoticed? It’s got saltwater in its veins and sorrow in its bones. It's mermaid-core meets emotional devastation, and no one’s talking about it. One rating and zero reviews on goodreads. I feel compelled to change that!
For fans of Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse, Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, Jane Rawson's From the Wreck, and Frode Grytten’s The Ferryman and His Wife, this novel is a salt-soaked elegy for the lost and the longing. It drips with grief over fractured relationships, churns your guts with the dread of searching for someone who might never be found, and aches like a heart trying to stitch itself back together with seaweed and memory.
The prose is tidal—gentle one moment, crashing the next. The island setting isn’t just backdrop; it’s a character, a mood, a trap. And the mermaid lore? It’s not glittery escapism. It’s haunting and half-submerged.
If you’ve ever loved someone who vanished—emotionally, physically, or both—this book will feel like a lighthouse flickering in fog. This one’s calling you. Loudly. Beautifully.
Go on. You can't ignore the pull any longer.
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