Honest reviews of the next stars of spooky and speculative!
With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley.com for providing free e-advance review copies.
In The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave, woodworker Hannah is settled into a pretty good life. She has a wonderful, loving husband, and if her relationship with her teenaged step-daughter isn't the best, at least she's working on it. […]
Read MoreContent Warning: Suicide
Those of you who know me will know that, particularly because of my research interests, I love hauntings that aren't quite ghosts, remote rundown houses, dangerous relationships and found manuscripts […]
Read MoreIsn't it funny how sometimes themes converge? I've not even thought about the ethically dodgy, sensationalist psychology experiments of the 1970s since my quickly aborted foray into Psychology at AS level, nearly twenty years ago. […]
Read MoreI am a big fan of non-Victorian or Tudor historical fiction. It felt like, for a long time, these were the only kinds of historical fiction publishers were buying, and it's been great in the last couple of years to see more variety in the market. […]
Read MoreThe Savage Instinct by M.M. Deluca follows Clara Blackstone, a young Victorian woman who has recently been released from Bethlem Asylum into the 'care' of her husband. As Clara tries to re-adjust to life following the trauma she encountered in the asylum, she begins visiting Mary Ann Cotton, […]
Having already read (and loved) The Tenth Girl, Faring's first book which came out just a year before, the blurb for White Fox made me feel like this would be a very different kind of book. The Tenth Girl was a Patagonian gothic horror of the classic kind, but with a distinct and playful 21st century twist. […]
Read MoreA quick Google of the term 'fertility crisis' provides a simple explanation for why, since The Handmaid's Tale, dystopic fiction about women forced or coerced into pregnancy has been so popular. Skimming down the entries, I can see a news article on the topic for almost every year. […]
Read MoreOne way or another, Catriona Ward has been present for almost every big thing in my Professional Book Nerd career. The day I quit my job to become a full time editor, I went to an author event where she was speaking. She was the guest author at our first writing retreat, The Writing Haunt. […]
Read MoreI’ve been a fan of Matt Wesolowski since his first Six Stories book, Six Stories. And I’d honestly say there’s not a duff one. There are some I prefer more than others, but each instalment offers an interesting story/mystery wrapped up in an engaging writing form. […]
Read MoreI am aware that I recently wrote a review comparing the reviewed book quite closely with a well-established text. I don’t want to get a reputation for that being my schtick. But that being said … it’s hard to talk about The Last Thing to Burn without drawing comparisons with Emma Donoghue’s Room. […]
Read MoreLaura Purcell has carved out quite the niche for herself in the genre of neo-Victorian ‘are spooky things happening or is it all in the imagination’? It feels like almost any book I look at with interest on Amazon, comparisons are made to The Silent Companions or Bone China. […]
Read MoreIn academic circles, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is known as an important text. It’s a post-modern example of found document taken to the nth degree; it’s the haunted house on the next level; it’s a masterclass in unreliable narrator. From what I’ve observed, guys love it. […]
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