The Haunting of Hill House

 

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, 246 pages

Paranormal investigator and scholar Dr. Montague wants to investigate supernatural occurrences the old fashioned way, gathering people sensitive to psychic phenomena in an allegedly supernaturally active location for an extended period and taking a bunch of notes. Two young women respond to his invitation; carefree Theodora and sad, lonely Eleanor. Along with the rakish young heir of the house they plan to summer at Hill House, which has claimed more than one life in the past. From first sight the house seems wrong, and this wrongness quickly expands to strange, unexplainable, and terrifying events that may yet claim another life.

This 1959 novel is foundational to the horror genre, and it's truly astounding how far I can see its inspiration spread now that I have read it. The board game Betrayal at House on the Hill is obviously directly inspired, as is Hilltop House from the podcast The Magnus Archives (and I suspect that the Sanderson sisters from Hocus Pocus take their name from heir Luke Sanderson), but more broadly this is clearly the template that launched 100 "strangers exploring a haunted house" stories. Purely on its own merits, I have sort of mixed feelings on the book. There were a lot of elements I would have liked to see more explored, and a lot of hooks that felt like they were going to go somewhere and then never did. I do, however, find myself thinking about it for several days after I finished it, and having a lot of fun trying to pick apart what actually happened. Definitely interesting for a look at one of the pillars of the genre, but I don't know that it's as spooky or character driven as people say.

The Lesser Dead

 

The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman, 362 pages.

Joey Peacock is an adolescent vampire. He's been an adolescent vampire about 60 years. He's spent his decades like any young vampire might: picking up girls in the punk clubs, watching sitcoms in the homes of hypnotized families, keeping up on the latest fashions, and prowling the subway tunnels under NYC. But the city is dangerous in 1978, and the strange undead children prowling the subway are the first sign that it may be more dangerous than he ever expected. 

This was a really cool vampire novel. It was published in 2014, but I had to double check that because it captured precisely the eternally young and cool vampire that was so popular in the 80s, along with some prejudices that also felt very true to the period. It also has the type of ending that sent me reeling, which I will leave it to other readers to discover. I recommend picking up the audiobook, which is read by the author and does a great job capturing Joey's voice.  

Some Desperate Glory

 

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, 438 pages

Every aspect of life on Gaea station is dedicated to avenging the murder of the planet Earth, and Kyr, barely an adult, is one of its most passionate devotees. Then adult assignments come through, and Kyr finds herself unable to stay in her home, instead going out to find her brother with his brilliant but deviant friend and a captive alien. Out in the wider world, Kyr finds that the universe isn't as it was always described to her, and vengeance may be more complicated than she ever thought. 

This book blew me away. I'm still not sure if Kyr is a likable protagonist, but she's certainly a compelling one, and she served this story perfectly. This story is full of twists that make it interesting from an action perspective, and a complex examination of vengeance and reparations that makes it interesting on a thinkier level. I usually like my space operas on the silly side, but this is an ideal example of the more serious side of the genre. I can't wait to talk about this one with Orcs & Aliens tonight! 

The Half-God of Rainfall

 

The Half-God of Rainfall by Inua Ellams, 96 pages.

When Demi cries, the storms come; when he shoots a basketball, he does not miss. Demi's father is Zeus, and his mother an unwilling mortal Nigerian woman. Demi's great passion is basketball, and when the worshipful admiration of his fans begins to draw the ire of the gods, he and his mother Modupe flee to America. But even there they can't escape the pettiness of the gods, and so must choose to stand against them.

Ellams is a poet, and although this novella is written in prose, you can still definitely tell that is his background. I found the prose powerful, and thought this short book used every page very efficiently. 

The Death of Jane Lawrence

 

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling, 362 pages.

Jane marries Dr. Augustine Lawrence out of convenience, and if he has an odd condition or two that's no more than she had when she proposed the strange arrangement. Augustine says he must spend every night at his family's crumbling estate, and she must never sleep there. This arrangement is almost immediately broken, and Jane is quickly pulled into the strange and terrifying mysteries of Lindridge Hall, where she learns that her husband is not what he seems, and neither is the world.

This was a delightfully unsettling gothic novel. The synopsis listed Crimson Peak as one of its big inspirations, and there is a lot of that here, especially in atmosphere. However, Starling also engages very consciously with the genre, and plays on expectations about classic gothic novels to subvert them. I was very impressed by this book, even if the end lost me a little. I would still recommend it wholeheartedly, especially for fall. 

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

 

A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke, 400 pages.

As a child in Paris, Aubry Tourvel was struck with a strange illness. If she stays to long in one place she starts to bleed, then die. The only thing that holds her illness at bay is travel, so she begins to walk. Over the decades her wanderings take her from the greatest cities to the most remote locations. The only thing that is constant is that she can't stay, and she can't come back anyplace she has been before. Over the decades the world starts to change, as she passes from the 19th century to the 20th. Aubry sees countless wonders, but she sees most of them alone, as she longs to share her strange life with someone, and finally find a place to call home. 

I enjoyed this book a lot. It had a lot of really great set pieces, and Westerbeke did a good job building vibrant, interesting characters even if they were only part of the book briefly. The nested, non-linear stories did a really great job conveying the endlessness of Aubry's travels, as well as the vibrancy of her experiences. My biggest complaint was that the book couldn't seem to decide whether the "why" of Aubry's illness mattered, and I think I would have preferred it go entirely unexplained over the half measures taken towards the end (along with a totally unnecessary bootstrap paradox). Despite a couple of hiccups, I think this is really impressive for a debut novel, and did quite enjoy it. 

Brooms

 

Brooms by Jasmine Walls and Teo Duvall, 248 pages.

In a 1930s Mississippi slightly more magical than our own, illegal broom races fill the skies deep in the woods. These races are a vibrant gathering place for the people too marginalized for the national races, and an opportunity to win the money to change lives. Billie Mae is the leader of the Night Storms, and is determined to make enough money to get to one of the states where Black folks can legally practice magic. Sisters Mattie and Emma are trying to earn enough money to avoid getting sent to a residential school, a place where their cousin went and came back without her magic. Other members of the Night Storms have their own reasons to race, and as time runs out and the law draws closer, their desperation sends them to the most dangerous race of all. 

This was a really neat book! It draws on a lot of real history and extrapolates from there to make a world the feels real and believable. The art was expressive, and I think it did a good job helping to tell the story. A pretty cool historical fantasy graphic novel, definitely worth checking out. 

A Divided Duty

A Divided Duty by Seanan McGuire, 400 pages.

 

Toby Daye is finding a new normal in her makeshift family after her baby was born, a normal which may be upended as Rayseline Torquill original term of offense runs up and her mother tries desperately to pull her from October's home (where she has friends and a therapist) to her own domain. Raysel does in fact find herself kidnapped, and Toby has to return to the dark shadows of her past to get her back.

 

This is the 20th book in the October Daye series, and honestly it was mostly fine. I feel like it really needed another pass with the editors. Most of the book felt like rising action, and the payoff felt underwhelming, leaving the pacing sort of lackluster. It's not a terrible book, but if this was the quality of the earlier entries I probably never would have gotten into the series. 

I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell

 I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell by Mackenzie Reed, 352 pages. 

Brie has felt like a ghost of herself since her parents' deaths, living a sort of sad life as the receptionist for an insurance company, watching reality TV with her favorite coworker (and only friend), and nursing a small crush on her hot boss. But when she sees said boss performing an exorcism on a coworker after work hours, right before her friend and a rash of other women vanish, she forces her way into the rescue mission to hell. 

I'm afraid I wasn't impressed by this one. It's so aggressively by-the-numbers that it felt almost mass produced. Perhaps it's because I'm a little particular about my romance novels, but I found myself rolling my eyes pretty constantly, and some neat set pieces couldn't make up for a weak plot and prose that was very fine. Maybe read this if you want the most expected of romances, but honestly there are better things out there.

Cultish

 

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell, 310 pages

When he was a young man, Amanda Montell's father escaped from a cult. Growing up hearing his stories instilled in her an above average interest in cults, an interest she channeled into research on what makes a cult, where they draw their power, and what kinds of things unite them. What she found at the key to manufacturing the kind of intense communities and us-vs-them attitudes common in cults is language. She explores not only the kinds of huge and dangerous cults people think of when they hear the word (Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, Scientology, etc), but also the much more normalized organizations that use the exact same tricks of language (MLM schemes, "cult" fitness studies, Instagram spiritualists), giving a very clear picture of how exactly these linguistic traps work, and making it very obvious how easily anyone could fall into a cultish situation. 

I found this book insightful, thoroughly researched, and well-presented. I noted a few times when I was listening that some of the things she describes are also true of literally any close community, but Montell herself is also good at noticing such things and approaching them with nuance. The book is funny and consumable, while still treating serious tragedies with a sense of gravity and respect. I consider myself thoroughly impressed. 

 

Maus I

 

Maus: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, 159 pages.

I read Spiegelman's famous graphic novel for the first time recently, and despite hearing plenty about it still found myself described. The comic weaves together his father's experiences during the holocaust with their troubled relationship in the present day, in a way that make both feel eminently personal. Spiegelman doesn't shy away from anyone's flaws, nor does he shy away from the multitude of small, everyday horrors of the holocaust. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this modern classic, and will definitely pick up the second half of the story soon.

The Devil Three Times

 

The Devil Three Times by Ricky Fayne, 416 pages.

When the devil gets to feeling homesick, he asks his brother Jesus to put in a good word for him with their father. Jesus says he's willing to help him out if the devil will help him by putting his efforts to stopping the horror of slavery. So off the devil goes to a slave ship coming over from Africa, where he finds a woman stolen from her home with only the ghost of her dead sister to talk to. Through the generations the devil will go to her and her descendants in their time of need, long after slavery ends (although that does not save them from the racism of a former plantation town in West Tennessee), each generation with unique problems that often too unlike that of their forebears. 

Despite how that summery sounds, this book was a lot more historical fiction than magical realism. It is difficult to summarize, because there are so many characters in this book doing so many unrelated things, with most of the through-line being that they are all family, but I found the historical writing very solid throughout, and it kept me engaged. The synopsis mentions that this book draws on the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora; so I picked up the audiobook, and I think it made the experience of reading this even stronger. I definitely recommend it. 

Muñeca

 

 Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez, 176 pages.

When Natalia Fuentes hears about Violeta Miramontes strange illness, which left her totally paralyzed shortly after her marriage, she recognizes immediately that it is not a disease, but a curse. She gets herself hired as Violeta's caregiver, hoping to use her long abandoned witchcraft to break her curse and earn some much needed cash. But once Nat is in the house, she quickly learns that things are darker and more complicated than she had guessed, and her growing feelings for the trapped Violeta, rendered into a convenient doll, don't make anything easier. 

I was really impressed by this book. It was creepy and gothic, and it shines in the "metaphor made literal" that gothic literature is so good at. It handled nuance well, Violeta comes from very old Spanish colonial money and Nat is Latina, a dynamic which I haven't seen explored much, and which the setting in 1968 Oakland really highlights. This is Gómez's debut, and I'm really excited to see what else she writes!

Blood Over Bright Haven

 

Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang, 428 pages.

Sciona has never had the makings of a proper Tiranish lady, instead dedicating all of herself to becoming the first female mage admitted to the High Magistry. Unfortunately, all of her brilliance doesn't protect her from the slights and sexism of her colleagues, including being assigned a Kwen janitor instead of a proper assistant. But Thomil wasn't always a janitor, and his experiences with the world outside of Tiran combine with Sciona's once-in-a-generation talent have the potential to shake the very foundations of the city of Tiran, God's Bright Haven.

This was a great book, but I can't talk about most of the parts that hit me like a gut punch without lessening their impact. This is a fantastic and fantastical exploration of colonialism and exploitation that feels grounded and real enough to keep all of it's impact in a fantasy setting. Sciona is a great protagonist for the story, complicated and deeply flawed. I think this book is what I wanted Babel by R.F. Kuang to be. I can't wait to discuss this one with Orcs & Aliens next week!  

Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends

 

Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends by A.D. Sui, 312 pages.

Dr. Cassandra Barlowe is doing thankless, underfunded research on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a world that is rapidly spiraling towards climate apocalypse. Partially because she cares about plastic-eating fungi, and partially to get as far away as possible from Dr. Yana Gulsvig, the brilliant scientist of an ex she had an intense lifetime relationship with. Part of the reason her funding is so non-existent is because of Yana's own research on deleria, a drug that lets people look into other timelines to deal with their grief or search other timelines for the perfect solutions to Earth's problems. When Yana calls Cas right before the center of deleria research explodes with her inside, she is called back to Canada for a domestic terrorism investigation, and once she's there her own grief for Yana pulls her into a desperate, drug-fueled, investigation into why she died.

This book has one of the coolest concepts I've heard recently. The deleria is a great idea, and the framing device sounds great for a high-tension thriller. Unfortunately, the execution left something to be desired. I think this book needed at least a couple more of rounds of edits. There were a whole lot of details that didn't really make any sense (getting internationally arrested as a terrorist after a 1-minute phone call with someone you haven't spoken to in years, threatening to frame someone for a crime in a world where everyone is wearing recording devices in their eyes at all times, etc.) that added up to something that didn't feel very cohesive. Which makes this the most disappointing kind of book, because I can clearly see the bones of a great book underneath, but it is not what I'm reading. 

This book will be published on October 27th, 2026 

Engines of Reason

 

Engines of Reason by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 192 pages.

It has been 15 years Nyr and Lyn defeated the impossible demon and saved the world. The fairytale of the precocious princess and the reluctant wizard came to an end, and life got in the way, as rifts opened between people who were important to each other. But a new threat is emerging, a "sorcerer" with more power than he should have, and the only answers are in the secrets of the past.

Elder Race is one of my favorite novellas, and while I didn't think it particularly needed a sequel, I was still very excited when I saw it was getting one. Having now read it, I honestly still think it probably didn't need a sequel. I did enjoy this book, but I don't think it had the magic of the original, which would have been difficult to recapture. It did have some interesting things to say about identity within stories, and the end definitely feels like it might be setting up a longer series, which I'm sure I will continue to read. This book is great if you were invested in the characters of Elder Race, but not quite so exceptional if you were more interested in the structure. 

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart

 

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott, 259 pages.

This is a collection of contemporary fairy tales; not retellings, but fairy tales for the modern world. I found myself very confused in almost every story, but nevertheless found them very compelling. They are very comfortable in metaphorical and ambiguous spaces, a trait that is often shared in traditional fairy tales. "The Thread Boy" was probably my favorite of the collection, but I've also found myself thinking of "A Lily is a Lily" frequently since finishing the collection. Dark and puzzling, but also entrancing, this collection is hard to look away from and even harder to make sense of. 

 

 

ExtraOrdinary

 

ExtraOrdinary by V.E. Schwab and Enid Balám, 112 pages.

After a near-fatal bus crash, Charlotte Tills gains the ability to see people's deaths in their reflections. Her own reflection is haunted by a strange man, a man in a prison uniform named Eli Ever. Waiting for her fate is driving her crazy, as is seeing her family's deaths in every surface, so she decides to go hunting for him instead. 

 This comic falls between books one and two in Schwab's Villains series, and I'm afraid it just didn't work for me as well as Vicious. I liked what we saw of the new characters, but with so many in a very short book what we saw of them wasn't very much. I also didn't appreciate that we played a little loose with the events of the first book. I expect changes in a comic adaptation to make things shorter, but as there realistically wasn't a lot of point in rehashing the same scenes to start with, it felt like a weakness. There were a few cool concepts, but I wouldn't exactly call it a standout graphic novel.

 

Vicious

 

Vicious by V.E. Schwab, 402 pages.

Ten years ago Victor and Eli discovered the secret to superhuman abilities, running dark and dangerous experiments that changed them both forever. Now their college days are far behind them; Victor has broken out of prison and Eli has gone down a darker path, seeking to eliminate every super-powered person he can find. Victor's drive for revenge will set them on a collision course, and heroics aren't part of the agenda. 

This was a really interesting take on superpowers with a bit of a dark academia bent. I liked how the story moved back and forth between the past and the present, allowing for backstory and getting to the action in a timely way. This book is a lot of fun, and I plan to get to the sequel soon!

Poison for Breakfast

 

Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket, 158 pages.

After finishing his carefully prepared breakfast, author Lemony Snicket finds a note telling him that he had poison for breakfast. What follows is an oddly leisurely investigation into his breakfast ingredients in an attempt to get to the bottom of his own murder, thinking thoughts all the while. 

This is a truly baffling book, which Snicket would take as a compliment. It is a thoughtful little book that I think is truly all-ages, which is a rarity. The ending ties the whole thing together in a way that is unexpected, and I can't say more without giving everything away. Classic Snicket, it was nice to go back to his characteristic voice as an adult.