New year, new reading goal set over at Goodreads, new reading challenge too!
I kicked the year off having read a total of 13 books - 2 for potential publicity purposes, which won't be listed here; 1 audiobook, 1 book from my tbr, and 9 review copies. Phew!
There were some really good ones and some kinda meh ones and if you're curious to see which was which, take a peek-see below:
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VW Schwab
I spotted this one at 2nd & Charles, and the only reason I grabbed the hardcover was because it was a signed copy. I’d been curious... it’s been all over my #bookstagram feed, hyped as a toxic sapphic vampire story, but good lord, this thing is a brick.
I cracked it open on New Year’s Eve right before the ball dropped and only just finished it last night. It’s a slow‑burn, centuries‑spanning “making of a villain” tale that follows three women whose lives eventually collide in a way that’s somewhat predictable but still thoroughly satisfying.
There’s love, lust, and sex, as you’d expect in any vampire novel, plus just enough gore to keep the horror girls fed (This was a fun line - “They came apart like Christmas paper”). Schwab did a nice job building out each character’s backstory… except for Alice. Her chapters were much shorter than the others and her history was squeezed into her current timeline as flashbacks and felt more clunky, compared to how Maria/Sabine and Lottie’s arcs unfolded.
One thing I loved - the vampires never actually refer to themselves as vampires. Instead, they refer to themselves as having been 'buried in the midnight soil', which gives the whole mythology this earthy, ancient texture. And one character’s childhood nickname ends up looping back into the title in a way really clever... a double entendre that lands beautifully once you get there.
This is my first, and probably my only, Schwab. Not because there’s anything wrong with the book — she’s a fantastic storyteller — but because her other work doesn’t really sound like my thing, and her novels tend to run a little long for my taste. I don’t mind committing to a chunky book, but a story told in 500 pages often could’ve been told in 300 and been just as impactful.
Regardless of length, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil delivers exactly what it promises: a lush, bloody, sapphic epic with teeth. So if you’re like me and a little late to the game, there’s no time like now to grab a copy. This one deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Interview with the Vampire as a modern must‑read of the genre.
The Butcher of Nazareth by David Scott Hay
Look out, bitches — this book is fire. I’m not kidding. It’s so friggen good I’m still vibrating. I devoured all 300 pages in a single day, blew off every Sunday responsibility I had, and even stayed up past my bedtime the night before going back to work after five glorious days off. And I have zero regrets.
If you’re not familiar with the biblical story of King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, take a minute and Google it. I’ll wait. (I had to do the same. Apparently my CCD teachers skipped that chapter.)
The short version: a paranoid king hears a prophecy about a child destined to overthrow him, so he orders the execution of every male infant two years old and under. An absolutely horrific historical event.
Enter David Scott Hay, who takes that nightmare and zooms in on one man caught in the middle of it — a grieving father, a master butcher, forced into the ranks of the Black Masks and compelled to participate in the very massacre that stole his own son. Many years later, he’s a man hollowed out by guilt and haunted by apocalyptic visions. Those visions point to a single surviving child, one who slipped through the slaughter. And now this butcher, this broken man, is tasked with finding the boy who got away… and killing him to prevent the end of the world.
What made this book so compulsively readable is how deeply Hay roots the story in this man’s torment. He’s not a villain. He’s a father trying to claw his way toward redemption through an impossible, soul‑splitting mission. The tension between duty, prophecy, grief, and the faintest flicker of hope is just... uuuugh... chef’s kiss.
This book didn’t just hook me. It dragged me by the throat. An absolute must‑read… as long as gory, alternate takes on biblical events don’t send you running for the hills. If you can handle the darkest corners of the Bible (and let’s be honest, that text gets grim), you’re going to have a blast with this one. I promise you.
Kayak by Kristal Stittle
Oh gosh, you guys. I really wanted to like this one. The premise had me hooked: a meteor crash-lands on Earth, scattering dust filled with alien seeds. As the wind carries this dust across continents, the seeds take root, and what grows from them is monstrous. These creatures are brutal, relentless, and hungry for human flesh.
Like any good alien invasion tale, there’s a weakness. Water. Once that’s discovered, humanity scrambles toward the nearest lakes, rivers, oceans — anything that might offer safety. In the chaos, Keith loses his parents at the beach, and the story follows his fight for survival as he searches for his friends and family out on the Canadian lakes, alone in his little kayak.
I was really excited to read this one. It should have been gripping. The setup was eerie and cinematic, and I was ready to be swept into the horror. But the execution just didn’t deliver. The pacing felt flat, the writing was somewhat stilted and never quite settled for me. If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed this was a debut. It reads like Stittle was trying too hard to channel what she imagined a sixteen-year-old boy might sound like, and the result felt forced and awkward.
I kept hoping it would find its rhythm, that that the tension would build, that Keith’s journey would pull me in. But instead, I found myself wanting to DNF more than once — and regretting that I didn’t. Cool concept, but kind of disappointing follow-through. Which is upsetting, because I really like what Tenebrous has been putting out lately!
Funeral Song by Carly Racklin
I requested a copy of this one because the premise hooked me and, yes, the cover is ridiculously pretty. A town where the dead are resurrected and just… rejoin the living like it’s no big deal? Sign me up.
“Praise All-Eternal Death who restores life to the dead.”
In Cairney, Death grants resurrection to its residents, a ritual the townsfolk treat as sacred. But Friede, the church pianist, has always viewed it as a curse. When she awakens in the catacombs coughing up mud and brackish water, her first thought is a horrified no… no, no, nooo. As her memories return, she realizes she has died and been dragged back against her will.
Soon after, she learns that Death’s relic has been stolen and the acolyte who guarded it has been murdered in a manner disturbingly similar to her own. With Allhallowsmas approaching and the resurrected at risk of fading away, Friede and her friend Bastian set out to recover the relic and restore order to a community obsessed with death, even as she longs for the rest she was denied.
The setup is fantastic. The vibes are moody. But the story never digs into the lore the way I hoped it would. Cairney is begging for deeper history, richer mythology, and more fully realized characters, but the narrative keeps things frustratingly shallow. Racklin had a killer concept, but instead of plunging into the depths, the book just treads water.
Pretty prose, great concept, underwhelming execution.
The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan
Add another one to your fungal fiction list, because The Midnight Muse is a welcome addition to the genre — eerie, immersive, and so easy to fall into.
This is my first Jo Kaplan novel and my god, I love the way she writes. Her storytelling has this wonderfully strange, magnetic energy that pulled me in from page one and never let go.
We start with two timelines that will ultimately come crashing together: one where our primary MC Harlow is hospitalized after a traumatic event that begins very mysteriously but quickly starts coming together, and another that takes place a little earlier, following her and the remaining members of the dark metal band Queen Carrion as they head into the woods a year after their lead vocalist Brynn vanished. They’re there to say goodbye… or in Harlow’s case, to make one last desperate attempt to find her.
The cabin they rent is every horror trope turned up to eleven — remote enough to feel wrong, without wi-fi (of course), and oh look, a trap door in the floor. Plus that prickling sensation that they are being watched.
Once they settle in, the weirdness starts simmering. They hear singing in the woods. There's a glimpse of a white deer that feels more omen than animal, mold creeping in the corners, cobwebs sagging from the chandelier, and when Rhys starts getting sick… that’s when the weird-o-meter snaps clean off.
Because the land itself is alive — crawling with an aggressive, hungry mycelium eager to burrow into their bodies and rot them from the inside out. It lures. It whispers. It waits for them to step outside so it can try to claim them. And now our fearsome friends find themselves fighting for their lives.
This book is creepy, cringey, atmospheric as hell, and absolutely drenched in dread. And the body horror? Oh wow. Think The Ruins but with sentient mushrooms.
I absolutely devoured this. It got under my skin in the best way. Kaplan didn’t just write fungal horror. She wrote a fever dream you can’t shake.
King Sorrow by Joe HIll
I sat on the fence with this audiobook for a long time before finally pulling the trigger. Honestly, the only reason I did was because I spotted it for cheap on Chirp and thought, why not? And then, just like that, it became my commuting companion for the last three weeks.
And… ugh, you guys. I just wasn’t a fan.
It actually starts out kind of cute. A college kid gets targeted by an older couple whose mother is in the same jail as his. They threaten to have their mom hurt his mom unless he steals rare, expensive books from the library where he works so they can sell them off and pay down some debt. Arthur goes along with it under duress, and his friends rally around him to figure out how to get these people off his back. In the process, they discover that one of the rare books is a journal belonging to a man who practiced dark magic and summoned a dragon. So naturally, they decide to summon the dragon too.
Enter King Sorrow, who appears, marks them, and makes a pact: he’ll protect them as long as they give him one soul on Easter. They agree… and quickly realize dragons are tricky little monsters. One soul turns into many, and suddenly they’re stuck feeding him for decades while scrambling for a way to break the pact or kill him outright so they can finally be free.
The whole thing was just too long and a little too unbelievable — yes, even for a story with a dragon. The characters were grating, especially King Sorrow. Every line he delivered was clearly meant to sound ominous and menacing, but instead it landed as goofy and corny.
And the strangest part? Every so often, right in the middle of the narration, the audiobook would shift into these odd little dramatized segments — actors, sound effects, the whole production — layered into the story without warning. It was jarring, and not in a fun experimental way.
This one just didn’t work for me. Please don't hate me.
Dig by JH Markert
Strange things are starting to happen on Crow Island — an isolated stretch of land known for its tupelo honey, its Geechee folklore, and Jericho, the unsettling giant of a child who went on a murder spree one Fourth of July eight years ago.
Amy Barnes, whose family owns the island, gets a late‑night call from Reverend Dodd telling her to contact his son Nathaniel and tell him to dig. Sensing something is horribly wrong, Amy rushes to Dodd’s house but she’s too late. He’s dead. His hand has been severed and coated in honey. His yard is torn up with frantic holes. And he’s been obsessively sketching red crows… which would be odd anywhere, but especially here, since Crow Island hasn’t seen a single crow in centuries.
Sheriff Lawrence quickly finds himself in over his head as more islanders develop the same compulsive urge to dig, frantically releasing clouds of dirt into the air and unearthing disturbingly large bones. And if those bones belong to who they fear they do, the island is about to face a reckoning unlike anything in its long, haunted history.
I really loved this book. I appreciated its slow burn and the way Markert gradually revealed the tangled relationship between the characters and the island, which feels like a character in its own right. The history of the bees, the quest to create truly pure tupelo honey, the honey house no one but the beekeeper can enter, the small earthquakes growing in frequency and intensity… it all builds with this steady, uncanny pressure. You may think you know where it’s headed, but trust me, you won’t guess everything.
It’s atmospheric, strange, and deeply rooted in place... the kind of Southern‑gothic‑adjacent horror that seeps under your skin. Crow Island has secrets, and watching them rise to the surface was an absolute treat.
Pedro the Vast by Simon Lopez Trujillo
I read this book cover to cover in my antilibrary while snowmageddon 2026 continues to whollop us. Even though it's the wrong time of year for fungus to live 'amongus', it was a great excuse to sit in one place and just read... guilt free.
Pedro the Vast follows three groups of people that are intimately connected to a forest worker who becomes infected by mushroom spores and survives, or appears to survive, because it's kind of hard to tell how much of Pedro is actually still in there... There's a religious group that basically kidnaps him once he awakens from his coma and treat him like a prophet, his son and daughter who are learning to deal with his absence, and a mycologist who is briefly called upon to consult on Pedro's case and its potential for additional contamination.
Trujillo’s writing has such softness to it, a musicality and a melancholy that feels distinctly, beautifully Spanish. The prose stays tender and attentive, lingering on small gestures, quiet moments, and the natural world with a reverence that makes the whole novel feel alive.
As the three storylines work together, the novel becomes less about the horror of Pedro’s infection and more about the ways life insists on continuing, reshaping itself, adapting, pushing forward. It’s quiet, contemplative eco‑fiction with a speculative shimmer, and it will have me thinking about the resilience of living things long after I move on from this book.
Crawlspace by Adam Christopher
Crawlspace. An interesting name for a cosmic horror novel… set in outer space… on a spaceship. And yet, it kinda works, because the ship’s crawlspace is exactly where all the real trouble starts.
I didn’t fall head over heels for this one, but Adam Christopher absolutely knows how to let the tension simmer and marinate his readers in atmospheric dread.
The story takes its sweet time getting going. We meet the crew of the XK72 (truly one of the least inspiring spacecraft names imaginable) as they prepare for a test flight of a hyperspace prototype called the SLIP drive — a machine meant to break the laws of physics and fling them across two light‑seconds in two microseconds. It’s a lot of setup... but hang in there.
While the descriptions of the different parts of spacecraft and the mechanical techy terms were a bit snoozey and hard to follow, the characters were pretty fun and easy to latch on to. You can tell something's going to go down pretty early on and when the weird and sabatogy stuff does start, everyone does that classic horror‑story thing where they shrug it off, rationalize it, or pretend it’s fine until it very much isn’t. And by the time they finally stop making excuses, well… it’s already too late.
The knocking that sounds like it's overhead, and then underfoot, and then in the walls. The shadowy movements in the corner of their eyes, catching the reflection of someone in the mirror or the window when you are alone in the room ... and now the missing crew members...
Crawlspace doesn’t reinvent cosmic horror, but it knows exactly how to make you sneak a peek over your shoulder before you turn out the lights and brings the darkness of the void uncomfortably close.
I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley
What do you get when an eccentric, aging artist hooks up with a woman slipping into the early stages of Alzheimer’s? You get I Am Agatha.
This is a tender, twisted little tale about love, loyalty, and moody‑ass bitches. Our narrator, Agatha, has recently relocated to New Mexico and fallen into a relationship with Alice, a widow whose mind is beginning to fray at the edges. Alice’s family owns the property Agatha rents, and as Alice’s dementia worsens, her son — who has never liked Agatha and considers her a corrupting influence — announces he’s selling the land out from under her. Cue Agatha’s quiet, simmering rage. She’s a classy butch, after all, and she’s not about to be pushed around.
Just as she’s trying to convince Alice to move in with her, Alice disappears. And Agatha, in all her stubborn, steel‑spined glory, starts covering for her when the questions begin.
It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s a little unsettling — the kind of story that keeps you leaning forward, wondering what this prickly old woman is going to do next. Agatha’s commentary is what really makes this book. She’s observant, wickedly petty, and fully aware that she’s the most interesting person in any room, even though she hates to draw any attention to herself.
If you love books narrated by unreliable, isolated older women... think Too Old For This, Elena Knows, or Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead... then buckle up, baby! Agatha’s in the driver’s seat, and she’s taking you on one hell of a ride.
Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer
Took a break from all of the review copies I've been reading lately and pulled this out of the TBR.
Never judge the decisions a person makes. That's what I had to keep reminding myself as I read this novelette yesterday.
If someone wants to live in the dark, ignore the obvious, and torture themselves with spiraling assumptions instead of facing the truth head‑on… fine. Good for them. Personally, I find that kind of willful avoidance maddening and enablist, but hey, to each their own. That's the bed you made. But also, I'd be lying if I said I never did that, sooo...
Killing Stella is beautifully written, but wow did it piss me off. The emotional choices, the passivity, the refusal to act — all of it pressed every one of my buttons. I spent half the book wanting to shake the narrator and the other half reminding myself to unclench my jaw.
And yet, despite how massively frustrating and triggering it was, it’s clever, tightly crafted, and incredibly readable. Just not sure it was worth the full paperback price for a story that's less than 90 pages long.
