The Lamb

 

The Lamb by Lucy Rose, 326 pages

First of all, do NOT read this book if you have a weak stomach, it is very graphic, you've been warned. 

This novel follows Margot and her Mama who live in a tucked away cottage in the woods, where they bring in "strays" to satisfy their hunger. As she grows older, Margot begins to question Mama's intentions and morals, especially when the "stray" Eden appears, who Mama takes a romantic interest in. 

This is a horror book, which I don't read many of, especially not cannibal books, but it was recommended to me. I don't regret reading it, because the writing was very interesting, and sad, from Margot's perspective and I was pretty captivated to whole time. However, some parts I had to skip due to the intense descriptions and gore of it all. I wish the ending had been more satisfying. Not sure who I would recommend this to, I guess if you really like horror you might like this! 

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.  

It Looks Like You in the Dark

It Looks Like You in the Dark by Mathilda Zeller, 288 pages

Chukchi is a tiny and remote Inupiat village in Alaska, and while there are some folks who leave, most of them either stay or return. The only time white men visit is when they're convinced that the nearby mine is full of rich minerals, whether it's gold, lead, or some of the rare earth materials that make up computer processors. And usually, when the greedy white men arrive, death soon follows, usually in the form of the legendary and always hungry kushtuka, a creature that disguises itself as someone you love to lure you to your death. That's certainly what happens in this book, in which a new herd of wealthy white men come into town and slowly win over everyone with their false charm and promises of better jobs at the mine. Everyone, that is, except Tapeesa, who is convinced they're up to no good. When Tapeesa's sister goes missing, she will do anything to get her back, even if it means seeking help from these outsiders, even though she's convinced they have something to do with the disappearance.

This debut novel pulls together so many types of horror -- supernatural and indigenous folklore, capitalism and the terror of being a young woman -- and they're woven together incredibly well, keeping the reader guessing as to what or who the villain actually is. And the remote location only adds to the creeping terror. An excellent book, and I can't wait to see what Zeller comes up with next.

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. 

These Walls Remember

These Walls Remember by Del Sandeen, 352 pages

When sisters Mickie and Delilah inherited their great aunt's house, they also received their relative's increasingly unhinged artwork from the asylum where she spent her final days. Among the drawings, a note: DO NOT GO INTO THE ATTIC. Yet as Mickie prepares to flip the house for quick sale, Delilah is drawn toward the locked attic door and soon finds herself ascending the stairs. Meanwhile, Mickie starts hearing about mysterious disappearances linked to the house, going back to it's origins in the late 1800s. Before long, there is something pulling at both sisters, begging them to stay at the house.

I'll be honest — I read this book about a month ago and completely forgot about it until I saw it on my list of books to blog about. It wasn't until I looked up the plot summary that bits started to come back to me. So while it was a creepy read while I was reading it, it obviously has no staying power, at least not for me. Which is a shame, because it did offer up a nice Southern gothic haunted house vibe with plenty of generational trauma thrown in. The walls may remember, but I certainly don't.

Japanese Gothic

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker, 352 pages

In one house, 150 years apart, two young adults are living through their own horror stories. In 1877, Sen is a young female samurai, hiding from the imperial forces when her father takes a monstrous turn, placing her between the danger of her father and the soldiers, either one of whom could kill her whole family. In 2026, Lee has retreated to the same house with no recollection of why or how he killed his roommate, but sure that his father's new home will provide sanctuary from investigators half a world away. When the two meet, they discover that they may be able to help each other, whether it's through searching the archives to find out how and when Sen's family died or helping Lee sort through his untrustworthy memory.

The idea of this book is really interesting, and I thought it played out well. It was definitely atmospheric and creepy at times, and there was true horror as the falsehoods were stripped away. I don't know that it's the best example of the horror genre, as the plot beats were a bit too predictable, but it was definitely an enjoyable read.

The Secret Dinner

The Secret Dinner by Raphael Montes, translated by Zoe Perry, 352 pages 

Four friends find themselves struggling to cover their rent in Copacabana, Rio, Brazil. They are young, broke and really don't want to go back to the rural countryside they fled. A solution presents itself. That solution? Secret "seagull" meat dinner parties. And by seagull, I don't mean seagull. Montes does an excellent job of capturing the protagonists’ desperation and their moral (and immoral) quandary as they try to make it in the big city. 

I enjoyed this book. Parts of it were certainly uncomfortable to visualize, but the characters were well done and I did like the final twist. I will say that I am very glad that I am a vegetarian and do not have to ever worry about being unknowingly fed "seagull" meat. 

Lucky Day

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle (2025) 228 pages

Vera just received her advanced degree in statistics and probability, and has gathered with her mother and her friends to celebrate at a restaurant when a low-probability event occurs. This may sound innocuous, but what occurred in Chicago, where they were, was a horrible series of disasters, which ended up killing and horribly injuring scads of people. Vera's mother and a good friend died. World-wide, almost 8 million people died on this one day.

Vera flees to her mother's home in Wisconsin and does very little besides lie on the couch for four years. One day a man knocks at her door, whom she ignores, but he walks in anyway, trying to get her, with her statistical knowledge, to help solve the problem with these low-probablity events, which are apparently ongoing, although not at the scale as that one day. The man, Special Agent Layne, indicates that a casino in Nevada, might be involved somehow. Vera is well aware of the casino's reputation and knew their stats.

What follows is their trip to Nevada to the casino and their quest to put an end to what is making these low-probability events continue. The story reminds me a bit of Grady Hendrix's works, quick and action packed, with a bit of mental chess going on.

Fabulous Bodies

Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle, 240 pages

Poppy Stringer is a star on the rise as an Instagram influencer. But to make sure she can make ends meet for herself and her daughter, Poppy moonlights as, well, "grave robber" is probably the best term for it. She steals bodies from morgues and funeral homes for whoever is willing to pony up the big bucks — she doesn't ask why they want them, just what/who they need and where to deliver the goods. But when Poppy's idol, gay rockstar Eddie Michaels, dies, she's hired to pick up and deliver his body for a fee that could allow her to drop the illegal job for good. Everything goes great until Eddie wakes back up, and then everything goes haywire.

I love the way Tingle is able to mix a truly horrifying story with humor and a bit of pointed commentary about society, and this book does it very well. I generally don't like zombie books, but when the main zombie is an undead singer who can't avoid a stage, well, that's a horse of a different color. I love all the things Tingle has to say about fame, infamy, beauty, and family while also seriously grossing me out. It's only March, and I can already tell that this is going to be one of my favorites of the year.

This book will be published July 7, 2026.

Wolf Worm

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher, 288 pages

Scientific illustrator Sonia has just taken a new job illustrating insects for the reclusive Dr. Halder, and even upon her arrival into town, she has misgivings. The locals talk of devils and "blood thieves" in the woods, while Halder is cold, short-tempered, and mysterious. Oh, and his wife disappeared with no trace, and nobody wants to talk about it.

This is a ridiculously gross and gothic horror novel, one that you definitely shouldn't read while eating (two words: screw worms). That said, it's also compelling and keeps the reader guessing. Really, my biggest issue with it is that **SPOILER ALERT** the ending seems to happy for a horror. Still, it was a good read.

Coffin Moon

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson, 320 pages

Vietnam vet Duane is back home after his tour of duty, and with the help of his in-laws, has managed to get sober (despite his job as a bartender), salvage his marriage, and become a foster parent to his niece, Julia. But one night at the bar, Duane runs afoul of local gang leader John Varley, and Varley decides the best way to get even is to massacre Duane's wife and in-laws in the goriest way possible. In their grief, Duane and Julia decide to get revenge on Varley, despite the fact that Varley is a vampire and nearly unkillable.

I loved this book, which felt like a throwback to the classic Stephen King novels of the 1970s, but without the coke-addled overlong books. This was tight, surprising, scary, and altogether fantastic. I highly recommend it for horror fans.

A Game in Yellow

A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper, 288 pages

Carmen and Blanca have been in a bit of a rut, sexually speaking, despite scraping the bottom of their vast barrel of kink-related twists. Blanca thinks she has the answer in a mysterious woman named Smoke, who introduces the couple to a play that is much more than it seems. Soon Carmen has been pulled under the play's influence, unable to tell what's real and what's not.

This is a very particular sort of erotic-meets-psychological horror, one that I'm sure has its fans. However, I am not one of them. This was a strange book, and while I did want to know where Carmen would end up, getting there was certainly a journey I don't want to take again. If anything about that first paragraph intrigues you, by all means, give this a read; otherwise, I have a boatload of other horror novels to recommend.

We Used to Live Here

 We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer (2024), 312 pages

I blindly went into this book thinking it was a typical mystery. I am not sure how it even got onto my "to-read" list, but imagine my surprise when things started getting creepier and creepier. Unsettling even - especially when walking my dogs alone at night. I don't typically read horror, but it snuck in and, honestly, I found it pretty entertaining. 

The story follows Eve and Charlie as they renovate a newly purchased dilapidated house. The home comes with a lot of eerie baggage that culminates in visitors that (as the title states) used to live there. It is twisty plot that does rely on psychological tropes, but, who cares, as it fun to be scared a bit. 

I do want to give a shout out to the audiobook narrator Jeremy Carlisle Parker - she was fantastic and I highly recommend listening to it. 

Unwieldy Creatures

 Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Brook Tsai (2022) 296 pages

"Unwieldy Creatures, a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein, follows the story of three beings who all navigate life from the margins." So starts the synopsis that caught my interest. I love the cultural influence Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has had, but it was a novel I didn't finish in high school. I made slow progress through this retelling. The style and method of three people telling us the story is very similar to how Shelley's novel is presented. Dr. Z's dangerous ambition takes up the most pages. Plum, the protege, commands considerably fewer pages. And Ash, the creature, only shares their voice briefly toward the end. Tsai includes some bilingualism with Mandarin characters in Plum's story, so I had to flip to the end of the chapters for translation footnotes. The author also lifts some sentences straight from the original Frankenstein novel. The story is set now, or in the near future, so the science is more up-to-date involving in vitro gestation. However, there are still plot holes that didn't totally make sense to me. I'm glad this version exists. The rejection faced by some queer people from their families is a theme that fits well in this "creature feature" framework. Themes of estranged parents and children still resonate in this context. Tsai writes like the Romantic writers of Mary Shelley's era, and this is the part I struggled with the most. There is a lack of energy moving the plot along in the later part of this book.

Patternist #3-4

Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler (1984) 241 pages

Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler (1976) 208 pages

I continued the series with audiobooks on Libby. I did not like this second half of the series as much as the first. Both have a tenuous connection to book 1 and 2 of the series. Clay was a character introduced in Mind of My Mind. I expected Clay's Ark to continue his story. That expectation was totally wrong. Instead we are in a near future dystopia when a father and his two daughters are kidnapped from their car and taken to a strange isolated colony of people living in the desert. The people appear to be diseased and, in fact, are contaminated with an alien organism that gives them telepathic abilities and strength that is vaguely similar to the powers of Doro's ancestors in the earlier part of the series. The organism is clearly extraterrestrial though and the people give birth to children that are physically described like cats or sphinxes. I'm reminded of the shift in zombie movies. There are early movies with zombies based on Haitian voodoo customs. Then Romero's 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead shifts most future zombie movies to giving a possible alien virus explanation. I'm not saying these books are about zombies. It just seems odd that a foundational shift happened in the middle of this series from something ancient to something alien. Butler's Clay's Ark approaches closest to the horror genre, which I don't read often. Patternmaster pushes further into the future with barely any un-powered humans left alive. The Patternist and Clay's Ark groups fight for resources and power. It is mainly about two sons of a distant old Patternmaster competing to rule. Butler, I think, is using speculative fiction to explore concepts connected to slave narratives, which is a noble pursuit. To "flip the script" and make readers consider the impact of slavery is worthwhile. However, again there wasn't enough connecting this book to the first two. In both books 3 and 4, I was not captivated by any characters. I struggled with the lack of intriguing character development too. I'd recommend just reading the first two books of the series unless your goal is to read Octavia E. Butler's complete works.

The Bewitching

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 368 pages

Grad student Minerva has always loved scary stories, most likely because her great grandmother Alba told her stories of witches all her life, and has made a little-known horror author, Beatrice Tremblay, the subject of her thesis. An international student from Mexico, Minerva has enrolled in the same university where Tremblay studied, and hopes to access the author's journals to include in her thesis. What Minerva discovers, however, is the story of a missing woman that inspired Tremblay's cult classic horror novel, a story that echoes in Minerva's present and in Alba's stories of long-ago Mexico. 

Told in three interweaving stories, this tale of three eras of women dealing with evil witches is spooky, atmospheric, and engaging. I felt a bit skeptical that the same types of witches would exist in New England and in Mexico, as I haven't heard of commonalities between the witchy folklore of both places in the past, though that's a fairly minor quibble with an otherwise excellent book.

King Sorrow

 King Sorrow by Joe Hill, 887 pages.

In 1989 Arthur Oakes' friends come together to go to extreme measures to get him out from under the thumb of drug dealer's who have threatened him into stealing rare books from the college library. Arthur and his friends, mostly too wealthy to have any respect for the impossible, use a journal bound in human skin to summon a dragon to take care of their problem. But as with all deals with dark and dangerous entities, there is a catch, and the six young people are tricked into sacrificing someone to the dragon every year, or else be eaten by the dragon themselves. Over decades they tell themselves they are only killing evil people, and that they are improving the world, but dragons aren't interested in good and the cost only gets heavier.

This was a compelling book, although I have to admit that by the last third or so it got exhausting watching bad things happen to bad people. We spend time in the head of each of the six involved in summoning this dragon, and several of them are frankly pretty terrible. I enjoyed this book, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was about 200 pages shorter. 

We Used to Live Here

 We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer, 312 pages.

Eve is a chronic people-pleaser, so when a family shows up politely asking to show their kids around the father's childhood home she reluctantly agrees, despite her misgivings. Everything starts pretty normal, except that the fifteen minute tour keeps getting longer, and the family doesn't seem in any hurry to leave. Soon little things seem to start changing, and Eve can't tell what is her anxiety and what is something much more sinister. The horrors keep multiplying, and Eve is increasingly unsure what she can trust. 

This book was an atmospheric master class. It was deeply unsettling even before there was anything concrete to be scarred of, which did a great job putting me in Eve's head. That being said, I do wish I understood better what was going on by the end of the book. Vaguely unsettling is very effective for building tension, but it's not a very satisfying payoff. This novel was clearly inspired by Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, and while I didn't find the archival-style material particularly effective in this case, I do still think fans of that book will enjoy this one, as well as fans of the podcast Rabbits. Even feeling slightly disappointed in the tail end, I did still find this a really cool universe-slipping horror novel, and genuinely scary. 

Mage and the Endless Unknown

 Mage and the Endless Unknown by S.J. Miller, 152 pages.

Mage wanders a strange land full of wonders, but also horrors. Little by little he loses more of himself, but also finds friends to help share the burden. Will he be able to accomplish what he was sent to do, or will the darkness swallow him whole?

This was a really effective wordless comic. I found the black and white illustrations very evocative, and they did a great job with both the magical landscapes and the horrors. As with any book with almost no explicit dialogue, there were definitely times I was a little confused about what was going on, but I did feel like I managed to follow almost everything. A very neat little book, I'm glad I read it.