What I Read in September

 

Here's what I read in September. 11 books total. Of those, one was 5 stars, five were 4 stars, three were 3 stars, and two were 2 stars. Not the best month I've had but definitely not the worst.

Eight of the eleven were review copies, One was audio, Five were print. The longest book was 381 pages. The shortest was 106. A total of 2691 pages read.

Phantom Limb by Brian Evenson

I literally just finished Last Days, which I friggen adored, and wasted no time diving straight into the sequel the second I swiped that final page.

Phantom Limb picks up some time after Last Days leaves off, with our guy Kline facing jail time... but not for what he did to The Pauls or The Brotherhood. He assumes he's incognito, beliving he’s finally crawled out of that amputee‑cult horrorshow free and clear, but learns pretty fast that the promises made to him are already being broken. Inside those prison walls, the zealots are still hunting him, still convinced he’s theirs.

It’s just as grody, just as violent, and maybe even a little weirder than its predecessor, which is saying something. And while it didn’t hit quite as hard for me as Last Days did (sequels rarely do), it’s still a damn solid follow‑up and an absolute blast of a return to one of the coolest protagonists out there. Missing limb, missing toes, missing patience — Kline remains an all‑time fave!

I had a helluva time hanging out with him again.

Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler

Another highly anticipated release that did not disappoint. I’m honestly so glad I didn’t let my hatred of Grasshands turn me away from this one — I cannot believe these two books came from the same person.

The Ship of Death unfolds through non‑traditional storytelling: journal entries, after‑game reports, forum chats, and excerpts from the rulebooks for the mysterious board‑game/RPG hybrid Cory and his wife are playtesting. From what they can tell, it’s part large‑scale board game, part role‑playing campaign, and intriguing as hell. So intriguing, in fact, that Cory starts bringing pieces of it to work just to read and obsess over while his wife sets things up at home.

But then the weirdness starts. Strange things begin happening around (and to) them as they play. It doesn’t take long before the world inside the game starts bleeding into the real one. And when it does, the book shifts from fun and fanciful to totally unhinged and fucked up.

Something got out that desperately wants back in… and something inside does not want it to.

I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but The Ship of Death honestly blew me away. I didn’t want to put it down, and the only reason I didn’t finish it in one sitting was because I had to work the next day and needed at least a little sleep. All the stars. All I wanted it to be and more. And I probably owe some of my love for this book to my husband who is an avid board gamer, D&D campaigner, and the reason I understood most of the gameplay unfolding on the page.

Go. Get it. Read it. Tell me I’m wrong.

The Flayed Man by Chloe Lauter

Was I sad that I got declined for a NetGalley copy of this book? Yes, totally.
Did that stop me from trying to get my hands on it the second it released? Absolutely not.

And did it take forever because none of the bookstores near me were carrying it and I had to stalk PangoBooks until someone finally listed a used copy? It sure did. But once I got my grubby little hands on it, I couldn’t wait to dive in.

Was it everything I thought it would be? Strangely … no.

It's not like the other vampire books I’ve been reading. Though, that’s kinda been the trend. Every vampire book I’ve picked up this year has brought something new and unique to the table. And honestly, good on all these authors for giving the classic genre a little shakey‑shakey, oven‑bakey by cooking up fresh additions to the canon.

By the way, did anyone else think Lauter’s vampires had a little too much werewolf energy? If they didn’t feed regularly, their bodies would morph and shift, and not in the growing vampy teeth way. It felt a bit like the vampire‑lycan hybrids from those Kate Beckinsale movies, and once I thought that, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

Was I totally blown away? No. But don’t get me wrong when I say that. I really enjoyed the book and practically inhaled it in a single day. Ellis and her mother (who’s dealing with early‑onset Alzheimer’s) have a compelling dynamic. The concept of a flayed man who will come and take them away if they don't behave was intriguing as well, but even with that, the vampiric lore and its broader backstory felt a little underdeveloped. And full disclosure... I wasn’t the biggest fan of Ellis’s romantic obsession with Veer. I thought the whole relationship felt forced and cringey. Maybe because I found Veer herself to be really cringey. Give me less “should I kiss her or should she kiss me” and more gore and chaos any day.

But there’s so much here to love. Even with my quibbles, it’s a fast, weird, bloody ride, and I’m glad I finally got to read it.

If you liked Night's Edge, you'll very likely dig this.

Crone by Keith Rosson

Keith Rosson has definitely found his audience with Coffin Moon, and as a long‑time fan of his work, it’s refreshing to see him continue that high‑stakes weirdness with Crone. From vampires to witches, he’s out here capturing and singlehandedly wrecking readers’ hearts, book after book.

Crone leans hard into grief fiction. Eli’s disabled teenage daughter, Hannah, disappears one night, and his entire world collapses. He spirals into wire... a crystal drug slipped under the nailbed that dissolves reality into a dreamlike haze... gets kicked off the police force, goes on a violent tear trying to track down whoever took his kid, and ends up deeply indebted to local dealer Trying Dave Novak. Truly Olympic‑level bad luck.

Thirteen years later, with no leads and nothing left but guilt, Eli runs into Hannah’s childhood friend Avery — the last person who saw her step into that blue van. Avery’s return brings a rival drug crew, old wounds, and fresh danger. And when one of Novak’s sons turns up gruesomely dead in the woods, Novak turns to Eli to solve the murder.

Meanwhile, the dead are clawing their way out of graves. Sightings of a pale woman with grey hair and massive wings are increasing. Bodies are piling up. And Eli starts to realize that every strange, witchy, torn‑up thing happening around him might be tied to Hannah’s disappearance all those years ago.

It’s a story about shame, loss, and revenge. Crone is slow to start, but once it kicks into gear, nothing stands between these characters and the reckoning coming for them. I’ll be honest, Coffin Moon hit harder for me, but Crone shows Rosson is absolutely onto something with this new lane he’s carving out. Weird, bleak, supernatural, and emotionally raw, he’s building a canon worth paying attention to.

The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night by Joshua Chaplinsky

Oh man does this book really work your brain, especially if you're reading it in digital format. It's a haunted house (origin?) story that is told out of order across three main overlapping timelines. It starts off kind of chill as it sets everything up but whoa nelly when the weird stuff starts creeping in and everyone starts realizing that nothing is what it seems inside the Vogel House.

If you grew up in the 80's and 90's like I did, there really wasn't a whole heck of a lot of adult supervision and you were kind of left to your own devices when it came to keeping yourself occupied. On more than one occassion, my friends and I may have let ourselves in to new homes that were still mid-construction or homes and hotels that were decrepid and abandoned for a change of scenery. Never to vandalize or steal... just to hang. Reading this book brought those memories back full force and had me wondering, what if one of the places I snuck into decided not to allow us to sneak back out? What if I got stuck in there, in an endless fear-inducing loop of attempting to escape...

Joshua Chaplinsky's The Man in the Watch Still Visits Me at Night is what you would get if House of Leaves, Monster House, Backrooms, and Groundhogs Day all hooked up and had a freaky ass little baby. Unlike anything you've read before, but also so eerily familiar, and I'm not shamed to say that I enjoyed every second of it.

Strange New Moons Anthology

Man it's taken me a while to get to this one, and I'm not terribly ashamed to admit it would likely still be sitting in my TBR pile had my husband not wandered into my antilibrary, wanting to choose my next read for me, and randomly snatched it off one of the stacks.

This was a review copy that was sent to me back in 2024 (see how I'm telling on myself right now... see how far behind I get with arcs?). It's an anthology of wildly different werewolf stories - werewolves in space, a werewolf apocalypse, an alternate reality where once a month all females turn into 'bitches' and the men are trained to stay out of sight out of mind, kidnapped werewolves who are thrown into a concrete arena and made to fight to the death, you name it, it's in here.

For a 350 paged chunker, it reads fairly quickly. The stories are entertaining but not amazing. Fun but not fantastic. If you're looking for a quick, bloodsoaked read to get you closer to your end of year reading goal, you could do worse picking this one up.

The Unknown by Riley Sager

This was an ALC, and I nearly DNF’d it because of the narrator’s relentless talk‑whispering. She’d start a sentence at a normal volume and end it like she was confessing a secret in a church pew. I already have trouble hearing, so this audiobook had me feral.

The setup is solid but it took a while to pull me in. Five women shipped to a haunted island to “live” as the characters they’ll portray in a film, all of whom mysteriously disappeared a century ago. And wouldn’t you know it… history is determined to repeat itself.

The story spins its wheels for a while. Repetitive, slow, not quite gripping. But as we get closer to the end, we're hit with twist after twist and I was like, okay Riley, NOW we’re cooking, keep those coming.

When all was said and done?
Not horrible. Not great. A decent companion for a work commute.

But good lord, girl… please stop whisper‑speaking.

Rooted by Leopoldo Gout

Do all of Leopoldo’s books start painfully slow and then unleash all the chaos in the final act? Because at this point, Piñata and Rooted are making a very compelling case. It's good to lead with the weird... but not when it’s only in the prologue, which he seems to love to do.

And the prologue here is suuuuuch a tease. You rub your palms together thinking, okay, yaaaaas, this is gonna be good. And then the main timeline kicks in and you’re like… wait… is this the same book? When do we get back to the weird stuff? Soon? No? Oh, you’re going to make us wait a painfully long time, huh? Sigh.

In Rooted, we meet Aurora, returning home after many years away. She’s excited to see her mother again, and she’s coordinating the return of stolen ancient artifacts to her hometown museum. As with any homecoming story worth its weight, we know there’s a reason she left, even though the reason might not be clear yet... and now that she’s back, the memories and nightmares start rushing in, surfacing right as they unbox a creepy statue of Xipe Totec, The Flayed One, an old god who does not exactly bring comfort.

It’s another “that’s what you get for going home again” novel, this time filtered through Aztec mythology, Mexican folklore, a touch of body and eco horror, a generous scoop of mental instability, and a very… uhm… painful reconciliation? Or maybe it's more like a reckoning? Fuck it, it's kind of a bit of both.

When the ending finally brings the action, we remember the slow build up and the not‑quite‑horror vibe, so the book's imbalance kept this one from fully landing for me. Not bad enough to DNF, but not a book you'll see me raving about either. Which is shameful because hello, have you seen the cover? It's stunning.

The Sea Hides Its Dead by Megan Bontrager

Yeah... this was a no for me. I thought about DNFing it multiple times but I paid full price for it and wasn't allowing myself to just chuck it. But man I definitely should have. I had no idea it was going to be sooo long and painful and repetitive.

For those of you who haven't read it yet, it's basically a cosmic horror about a weird cave system that just suddenly appears out in the middle of the ocean one day. A professor of anthropology and his little side-piece research assistant immediately head out there with a small group of specialists to see what's what. Once they get there though, the front of the cave system collapses, locking them in, kickstarting a claustrophobic and torturous series of "tests" meant to appease the Leviathan that calls that place home.

I eyerolled. I sighed a lot. I counted the characters and realized Megan was going to keep us here for a while. Everytime I put it down, I was almost loathe to pick it back up.

And what's most disappointing... the first chapter contained two major no-fly-zone triggers for me - infidelity and an animal death. When the books goes all in right up front with both of those things, I mean... shame on me. I should have known better.

The writing was weird for me too and I had a hard time jiving with it. I don't know why, but I had a really hard time visualizing where they were and what was going on, even after going back and re-reading the descriptions. I felt like the author knew what she was writing but forgot that she needed to take the readers along and make it make sense for them.

I dunno. I see a lot of you loved it and I'm ok with being in the minority. It's a position I find myself in pretty frequently when reading the big five buzzy books...

Shrugs.

Glad it's behind me and that I can move on to the next.

The Eye of Goliath by Deigo Muzzio

First, thank you to Pushkin Press for their extreme patience with me. For whatever reason, the NetGalley PDF refused to transfer to my Kindle app, and I couldn’t get to it in the NetGalley app before it archived. After some failed troubleshooting, they kindly popped a print ARC in the mail and I’m so glad they did. This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and I’m happy to confirm it did not disappoint.

The Eye of Goliath unfolds in a sanatorium where David Bradley, a mute and mentally disturbed engineer, has been placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Pierce. Pierce, who considers himself miles ahead of his peers, favors hypnosis as a cure for mental afflictions rather than the trendy, torturous methods of electroshock therapy and terapanning.

Through conversations with Bradley’s guardian and by reading Bradley’s journal, Pierce learns that Bradley, a once normally functioning and rational man, was sent out to an abandoned lighthouse to assess its structural defects and report his findings back to the Northern Lighthouse Board... a straightforward assignment that quickly became anything but. Alone on the island, Bradley discovers the grave of the last lighthouse keeper, an accused murderer sent there as a compromise to his prison sentence. Soon after, Bradley begins hearing voices and distant music, complains of objects being moved from where he last left them, and feels watched by a black albatross that begins circling the lighthouse.

What follows is a dark, atmospheric descent into isolation, trauma, and the lingering psychic wounds of WWI. It’s gothic, yes, but also deeply nautical and internationally horroresque, steeped in salt, shadow, and the eventual lose of one’s grip on reality.

It’s a slim novel that reads quickly, but it lingers. The mood, the dread, the ache of not being understood — all of it stays with you long after you’ve closed the final page.

For fans of books like The Autodidacts by Thomas Kendall, The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex, The Tower of Love by Rachilde....

Going to Summertime by Kaaron Warren

I love Meerkat Press to the moon and back and genuinely enjoy almost everything they publish. But every once in a while, a book just doesn’t click for me and despite my high hopes, Going to Summertime fell flat.

The premise sounds absolutely fantastic. A salon owner and her three hairstylists sign up for a team‑building exercise. Instead of doing something fun like an escape room, they sign up for a game of breaking and entering into a cluster of abandoned homes in a strangely cut‑off cul‑de‑sac. Each participant signs a waiver, enters the development alone, is assigned a different house, and whoever emerges first with a unique token or treasure wins.

From what I can tell, the only real prize is a major mind fuck of an experience, because nothing in Summerland Place is what it seems. And once they return to their Red Mullet Salon lives, each woman finds herself unexpectedly haunted by what happened there.

On paper, it sounds pretty badass and by all rights, it should have been. But Kaaron’s style of storytelling is both weirdly simple and extremely complicated, and it didn’t work for me. The writing was distracting, the characters felt underdeveloped, and I spent most of the book confused rather than intrigued.

It clocks in at just under 100 pages, so it’s a quick read. And honestly… thank god for that.