Synopsis:

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.

Review:

Tender is the Flesh hit English readers like hammer to the head when it arrived in 2020. The incredibly divisive story of a world turned to industrial cannibalism offers none of the prurient thrills one might expect from a “cannibal” novel, instead delivering a slow burn existentialist drama that builds to a devastating conclusion.

The Unworthy is built on more familiar ground.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world of climate collapse apparently exacerbated by AI tyranny, it’s a setting familiar from everything from The Road, MaddAddam, The Road Warrior, Station Eleven, and a hundred survival video games. At least, on the outside it’s familiar.

For the most part, the characters of The Unworthy are protected from any Mad Max goings on, as we’re tucked safely behind the protective walls of the convent of the Sacred Sisterhood. Sure, their food is mostly cricket flour and water, but there’s something like a stable society.

Well, maybe not so stable.

Life in the convent is essentially fascistic, a recurring theme for Bazterrica, with a rigid hierarchy that looks something like a religiously ordained class system that leads up to an unseen Him at the peak, a voice from behind a screen that may as well be God. But it’s God’s instrument, the Superior Sister who is the dangerous one, running the convent with an iron hand and a literal whip: Nurse Ratched in a wimple. Contrary to what one might initially think of when considering a convent, it does not appear to be a place that allows much interiority.

But our unnamed protagonist has, Winston Smith-like, secreted away some writing paper and ink (sometimes blood) with which to break free of the convent’s absolute rule. It’s here that we learn of the goings on in the convent, but also of her back story, emerging in fits and starts, as a child navigating the wreckage of a lost civilization.

This would be little more than a portrait if not for the fact that a stranger comes to town, or rather, a strange woman makes it over the convent wall. Luciá is magnetic, wolf-like, and powerful, attracting our narrator emotionally and sexually, but also exhibiting the qualities that could mark her out as one of the Enlightened, one of the upper caste within the covent.

As the two women navigate this dichotomy, they begin to uncover an even more unseemly side of the convent, introducing a rather slight mystery element to the mix. It’s not much of a mystery, of course, because the reader can spot a fascist religious cult from the first pages, yet the fragmented first person point of view makes our narrator’s awakening still poignant and powerful.

Plot-wise, The Unworthy doesn’t offer many surprises. There’s no gut-punch moment as at the conclusion of Tender is the Flesh, and part of that is by design. There’s a kind of dramatic irony in watching our narrator come to realize what is painfully obvious to the reader, but it’s also not quite enough. The relationships are so distanced by the journal style that it’s hard to take individual deaths and sacrifices as deeply meaningful. But, as in Tender is the Flesh, one of the most moving relationships is with an animal, underlining–along with the novel’s overt ecological concern–that it is the human connection to the natural world that might well be the trick of this thing called living.

There’s also a kind of telegraphed message that writing, art itself, is an essential human activity, but this gets rather buried beneath the petty (and not so petty) horrors of the convent.

All in all, The Unworthy makes for, well, a worthy entry in Bazterrica’s translated catalogue, though it doesn’t quite land with all the hoped for power, which is a bit of a disappointment consider our current historical moment, with its multi-pronged attacks of environmental collapse, AI slop, and the disintegration of civil liberties, could be well served by a book ready to hold up that particular mirror. The Unworthy‘s mirror might just be a bit too narrow to take that all in.

Synopsis:

Vera is a survivor of a global catastrophe known as the Low Probability Event, but she definitely isn’t thriving. Once a passionate professor of statistics, she no longer finds meaning in anything at all.

But when problematic government agent Layne knocks on her door, she’s the only one who can help him uncover the connection between deadly spates of absurdity and an improbably lucky casino. What’s happening in Vegas isn’t staying there, and the world is at risk of another disaster.

When it comes to Chuck Tingle, the only thing more terrifying than a serious horror novel is an absurd one…

Review:

In the post-war period, when Existentialism was the rage, all the great continental philosophers, it seemed, were also playwrights and novelists. There was something about this particular philosophy that lent itself to dramatization. Alienated protagonists wrestling with both the threat and allure of nihilism, attempting to construct meaningful selves in a universe that is patently absurd. This is the stuff of art as much as philosophy, and to a certain degree No Exit or The Plague have outlasted their authors’ more academic works, certainly in the popular imagination.

And then there’s Chuck Tingle.

In Tingle’s latest foray into the self-contained and endlessly self-referencing Tingle-Verse, we get absurdity aplenty. A book release celebration is interrupted by a worldwide “Low Probability Event,” a delightfully Orwellian name for what appears to be the very shattering of the laws of the universe. The events range from the Fortean (raining fish) to the hilariously grizzly (a chimp bashing people to death with a typewriter). Over the course of the event, millions die.

For Vera, the statistics professor protagonist of Lucky Day, this day brings about both the death of her mother and an end in her belief in, well… anything. For Vera, who has made a life out of studying the rational world of probability and statistics, the Low Probability Event is world-shattering. Vera sinks into a multi-year depression that is more than just grief. It’s nihilism.

“Nothing matters,” becomes her catchphrase, and the lure of the gun on her dining room table is omnipresent.

And just like that, we’re in the middle of an Existentialist novel: our protagonist attempting to build some sort of essence out of the absurdity of existence, warding off comforting bleakness of nihilism. She can either come to terms with this absurdity and grow into something authentic, or she can commit suicide, surrendering to nihilism.

Sounds pretty grim, but we’ve barely scratched the plot of Lucky Day.

Vera is pulled out of her funk by Agent Layne, an upbeat seize-the-day style agent in the newly formed (and patently fascistic) government agency formed in the wake of the Low Probability Event. Next thing you know, we’re in something like the most unhinged of X-Files episodes, as the two of them follow the source of the big event to a Las Vegas Casino.

Lucky Day is fun, smart, and utterly ridiculous, but it doesn’t carry with it the emotional heft of either Camp Damascus or Bury our Gays. This is at least in part due to Vera herself. We barely know her before the Low Probability Event, and afterward she mostly speaks in nihilistic aphorisms that reminded me more of A.J. Soprano’s brief fling with Nietzsche than a woman in the throws of genuine existential crisis. As Layne slowly draws her back toward the light, she’s mostly dealing with impossibly batshit events, and we never get to know her.

So, in the end, Lucky Day feels more like a dramatization of Existentialist philosophy than the organic journey of a human character. And it’s a shame, because there is plenty of meat on this novel, with lots of wild set-pieces, and Tingle usually brings so much heart to his characterization.

Despite these shortcomings, it’s a welcome addition to the Tingle-Verse, and a fun, inventive bit of sci-fi horror.

Synopsis:

Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reawakening” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.

Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.

But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart-–literally-–as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend watching particular channels, using certain apps, or visiting certain websites. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn–-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?

This ambitious, searing novel from “one of horror’s modern masters” holds a mirror to our divided nation, and will shake readers to the core.

Review:

I’ve loved everything I’ve read from Clay McLeod Chapman, and I’ve read quite a bit. His What Kind of Mother is right up there at the top of my list for the great horror novels of the twenty-first century, and it’s emblematic of all the things I love about his work: deep character work, literary style, palpable grief, and the kind of horror that creeps up on you and finally leaves you saying, “Hey, what the actual fuck?”

There’s plenty to admire in Chapman’s latest, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, but it doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to anything else in his oeuvre. Here, the horror is in-your-face, brutal almost to the point of comedy, the characters are (very intentionally) types, and much of the latter half is narrated by an imaginary Anderson Cooper.

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes focuses on the extended members of the Fairchild family, a “typical” suburban American family. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young daughter, while the rest of his family lives back in Virginia. As the story opens, Noah realizes something is wrong when his parents won’t answer the phone, and the next thing you know, he’s driving down to check on them. When he arrives, he finds his parents transformed into zombie-like near-catatonics, repeating television catch phrases, wallowing in their own filth, and finally turning violent.

What Noah doesn’t realize yet is that this is no isolated incident. Similar scenes are occurring all across the nation, transforming the U.S. into the site of an apocalyptic paranormal event. And soon we’re following Noah on a trek from Virginia to New York, trying to make it home amid the violence and orgies of a populace gone mad.

One thing that makes Wake Up and Open Your Eyes different is that it’s much less a horror novel (despite its horrific content) than a satire. What makes the satire hard to carry off is the fact that modern American life is already so ludicrous that it’s almost satire-proof. The Onion can’t write a headline that rivals the real-world events bombarding us every single day.

But Chapman gives it his all.

Over the course of the novel, Chapman takes shots at Fox News, ipad babies, incels, and the through-line from hippy wellness culture to fascism, refiguring them all as demonic influences, possession through our screens, a great spiritual attack on a world too secular–and too isolated from one another–to fight back.

In isolation, many of these topics have been tackled in horror literature (E.K. Sathue’s Youthjuice being a personal favorite), but Chapman’s aim is so broad that it leaves little room for nuance. They seem like easy targets, which seems like a weird thing to say while we live through the literal end of democracy due to the impact of just these social influences.

One problem might be that none of these influences are ever allowed to appear actually appealing. They are all cartoonishly vapid and evil from the get-go, even (or especially) the viral youtube video, “Baby Ghost.”

Chapman is sure to save some vitriol for those city-dwelling liberal elites (Fair and Balanced, after all), but it feels a bit like an afterthought in a book that is really a kind of primal scream at the abhorrent stupidity of this historical moment. And structurally, the book spends a bit too much time with Noah’s brother’s family, watching them plunge further and further into the demonic rabbit hole, while there might have been a much more satisfying road trip structure to guide us through the carnage.

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes shows Chapman stretching, flexing his muscles, aiming for something a little different, and even if it doesn’t always connect, it’s still a wild ride conducted by a writer of great skill, and it’s certainly worth the cost of the ticket.

Synopsis:

Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you’d rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

Review:

Stephen Graham Jones has quickly established himself as one of the major players in the horror world. His Indian Lake Trilogy is just about the final word on the slasher as a form, while also operating as a kind of meta-criticism cum fanboy love letter as well, all while delivering a character for the ages, and his upcoming Buffalo Hunter Hunter is poised to be the book of the year (see review here).

But as is often the case, the sudden explosion is not quite so sudden at all. Graham Jones had been putting out work for years before appearing to emerge fully formed with his breakout hit The Only Good Indians. And what’s better than discovering a favorite artist has a big back catalogue to explore?

And now Tor Nightfire is rereleasing Mapping the Interior, Graham Jones’s 2017 short novel, giving us all a chance to dig in.

Mapping the Interior beautifully captures the claustrophobic anxiety of adolescence, as Junior, a fifteen year old native kid, tries to come to terms with his father’s death, which happened when he was a small child. Dad is now a faint memory, but then, one night, he’s there, standing in the house, dressed in full Fancy Dance regalia. Here and gone again.

What starts as a fairly standard-seeming ghost story soon shifts into something much more troubling and complex. Junior’s brother, Dino is having trouble in school, and it appears he may be losing ever more cognitive function, and Junior believes there may be a connection between these two events. Junior is soon torn between concern for his brother and a deep-seated need to connect to his absent father.

Suffice it to say that things get very weird and very bloody, as Dad become more and more real and more and more malevolent.

As is his his M.O., Graham Jones makes up his own rules, creating a unique mythology for this particular brand of haunting that is viscerally unsettling, bearing some resemblance to the best of The X-Files monster-of-the-week creatures.

But the monsters aren’t really the focus in Mapping the Interior. Instead, it’s very much a coming-of-age story, with everything–the haunting, the violence, the totemic childhood items, even the house itself–taking on a kind of allegorical weight. This is a story about a boy on the brink of adulthood, searching for answers about his absent father, grappling with what feels like some capital F sense of Fate, figured here as a kind of compulsion to repeat generational cycles. Junior is testing out what adulthood means, specifically adult masculinity, and time after time, the answer seems to be violent and destructive.

It looks like Junior might have found a way out of this cycle, but Graham Jones is well adept at offering up hope only to punch us straight in the heart.

In the end, Mapping the Interior is beautiful and harrowing, a bloody bit of grief horror that is absolutely distinctive. A must-read for even casual fans of the author.

The new edition of Mapping the Interior is available April 29th, 2025.

Synopsis:

It’s the winter of 1975, and Duane Minor, back home in Portland, Oregon, after a tour in Vietnam, is struggling to quell his anger and keep his drinking in check, keep his young marriage intact, and keep the nightmares away. Things get even more complicated when his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, is sent across the country to live with Duane and his wife, Heidi, after a tragedy. But slowly, carefully, guided by Heidi’s love and patience, the three of them are building a family.

Then Minor crosses the wrong man: John Varley, a criminal with a bloody history and a trail of bodies behind him. Varley, who sleeps during the day beneath loose drifts of earth and grows teeth in the light of the moon. In an act of brutal retaliation, Varley kills Heidi, leaving Minor broken with guilt and Julia filled with rage. The two of them are left united by only one thing: the desire for vengeance.

Review:

Not knowing what to expect from a Keith Rosson vampire novel, I ended up getting exactly what I would expect from a Keith Rosson vampire novel. Much like his brilliant duology of Fever House and Devil by Name, Coffin Moon injects a brutal, gritty magic into an otherwise realistic world, allows all hell to break loose, and offers us real, human characters, all facing the worst days of their lives.

I loved every second of it.

When we meet Duane Minor, it’s 1975, and the Vietnam vet is back home, working at his in-laws’ bar, clean and sober, parenting Julia, his thirteen-year-old niece. There’s a lot of anger in Duane, and that’s led to some bad decisions on his part, but at this moment, things are about as good as they can get. He’s madly in love with his wife, and Julia (who shares some of Duane’s anger issues) is starting to open up, starting to act like a regular kid.

Obviously, there’s nowhere to go but downhill.

Minor tries to do the right thing, kicking some drug-dealing bikers out of the bar, but that puts him up against John Varley, a spooky kind of criminal with his own anger issues. Trouble is, when Varley gets angry, people tend to die.

In a brutal act of revenge, Varley kills Minor’s wife and in-laws, leaving him and Julia alone and bereft. Minor’s pretty sure he’s hit the nadir, rock-bottom, but Rosson has other ideas.

As the unlikely pair set out to hunt John Varley and enact their own revenge, it becomes clear that Varley is more than just a dangerous man. He’s a powerful vampire with a long history of violent massacres.

More bad decisions are made, and soon we’re on a supernatural revenge roadtrip across the nation’s northern edges: two broken people with only one idea to keep them moving forward.

As you might have inferred from the above, Coffin Moon‘s universe is an angry one, where hurt people hurt people, taking place in a long series of dingy motel rooms and even dingier bars. Rage, and its capacity to destroy what is beautiful, is a bright red thread strung through this tale, but as in Rosson’s earlier work, so is love. Family bonds, even when tenuous to begin with, are central. Varley, who in many ways plays Minor’s foil, is different in just this way. He doesn’t understand love, so he can’t understand loss. It might be this fact that makes him truly monstrous.

There’s a little Salem’s Lot in Coffin Moon, with a dash of Let the Right One In, but Rosson creates a unique take, and his nocturnal Portland is a haunted place filled with nightmare children, labyrinthine houses, dark magic, and a whole lot of people just trying to get by. And in the end, it’s the relationship between Minor and Julia that carries Coffin Moon to its inevitably bloody conclusion.

Review:

When I first discovered C.S. Humble’s The Massacre at Yellow Hill, I was giddy. That book mixes a gritty western mythos with vampires, secret societies, and cosmic horror, but more importantly, it does what I come to story for: it gave me new people to love.

Gilbert Ptolemy and his adopted son, Carson; Tabitha Miller and her family; these characters appear fully formed on the page, and they assert their reality with every action, every scrap of dialogue, every sacrifice.

It doesn’t hurt that Humble’s prose alternates between razor sharp observation and passages of lyrical beauty not often found in your average horror novel.

As I read on through the trilogy (A Red Winter in the West and The Light of Black Star), it became clear that there was much more at work there. Through this ever-expanding story, Humble wasn’t just spinning a great yarn. He was building worlds.

The 19th century of Humble’s books may sometimes resemble that historical era, but it is most certainly an alternative history with complex, competing occult organizations, all variety of supernatural entities, a highly regimented Gunfighters Guild, a young hero struggling with his troubling destiny, and a deep system of magic that ties all of these disparate parts together, leading up to a final battle.

I’d been hoodwinked. This wasn’t a horror-western series at all. I was reading an epic fantasy.

Ever since, I’ve been an evangelist for these books, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Hey, you want to have your heart ripped out? Have I got the books for you.

So, when I heard that Humble was releasing more books in the series, I was understandably excited, and when I learned that they were prequels, I was doubly excited. Why? Because in Humble’s world, there is no safety for anyone, especially those characters we love most. So these prequels offer us the opportunity to spend time with those we’ve loved and lost.

More importantly, they allow Humble to deepen his world building, slow down to investigate the mythology of The Peregrine Estate, the occult organization fighting for the fate of the world. We also get a deeper look at the mechanics and politics of the famed Gunfighters Guild. All of this while we see the pieces shifting slowly into place to bring us to the plot events of the original trilogy. It’s deeply imagined, fascinating stuff.

But none of that is what matters.

These books are pure character work.

The opening volume, To Carry a Body to its Resting Place, follows the early career of the lovable rogue, Ashley Sutliff. In the original trilogy, Sutliff is a kind of Han Solo figure, drawn into the occult drama against his will. He’d much rather be playing cards, though, naturally, under his brash exterior is a loyal heart.

To Carry a Body to its Resting Place rounds out Sutliff’s character to great effect, humanizing him to an almost unbearable degree.

Ashley is drawn home by the news of his father’s impending death, and while there he uncovers family secrets and eventually rides off on what will become his first action for the Peregrine Estate, but these latter details are almost incidental. The heart of this book is a meditation of fathers and sons, what is owed, and how we say goodbye that more to Larry McMurtry than any horror or fantasy writer. It’s an emotionally wrenching read that suddenly hurtles into action.

San Antonio Mission is a much more plot-driven entry, with my favorite character, Gilbert Ptolemy dispatched by the Peregrine Estate to recruit newly freed slaves to join the cause. Ptolemy, a former slave himself, is partnered with the wisecracking Sarah Lockhart and a member of the Gunfighter’s Guild because there’s no guarantee that the former owner of these people will allow them to leave, even in this post-Juneteenth era.

These suspicions turn out to be correct, but nothing could prepare our team for the depth of the horrors that await them at the mission.

San Antonio Mission focuses more on human horrors, while placing them quite explicitly within their historical contexts, allowing Humble to investigate the horrors of U.S. history itself, and its legacy of racist violence. It also offers a cathartic response to those who set themselves up as tyrants. Add in some romance and the delightful new gunslinger, Oliver Maine, and this second volume feels like a much more complete and self-contained entry into the saga.

The final book in the trilogy, The Baroness of the Eastern Seaboard, does a lot to segue into the original storyline, presenting some of the future Big Bads, while also allowing the reader to access the interior world of the Gunfighters Guild. As with the other volumes, these are mostly details. The center of The Baroness of the Eastern Seaboard is the relationship between Sven and Larry, devoted husbands who also happen to be inching perilously close to each other’s ranks within the Guild. Any day now, they will be forced to compete for rank, meaning one of them must die.

The couples’ attempt to petition the Guild for a way around this impossibility leads to quests for each of the lovers, both of them bloody and harrowing. The most explicitly romantic of the three books, Baroness is a love story wrapped in a Peckinpah movie’s violence and propulsive action.

As a reader, all I wanted to do was protect Sven and Larry, but the facts of Humble’s universe leave no one safe, and things get just about as bad as they can get while still leaving our heroes alive to appear later on in the saga.

All in all, The Peregrine Estate Trilogy is a varied and wondrous treasure trove of stories that situate themselves less as straight prequels than as elaborate midrash, glimpses between the scenes of the larger story, illustrating Humble’s knack for not only storytelling and lush prose, but his near magical penchant for character building. It is a necessary addition to what has become a vast saga. Here’s hoping there’s more to come.

The Peregrine Estate Trilogy will be available in September of 2025.

Synopsis:

A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.

As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

Review:

Hailey Piper can’t help herself: she’s gonna write her some cosmic horror. A weird western? Cosmic horror. A vampire novel? Just kidding. Also cosmic horror. Almost all of her work navigates that line along the thin and thinning edges of this world and what lies beyond, often plunging us through and downward, into dark places where the rules no longer apply.

And it’s always a wild ride.

In her upcoming novel, A Game in Yellow, Piper cuts to the chase and uses Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow as its central device. Chambers’ book came out in 1895, and its loosely connected stories revolve around a cursed play that drives its readers mad. It also introduces a supernatural entity (the eponymous villain), the mysterious land of Carcosa, as well as “the yellow sign.” Over the years, all of this has been synthesized and subsumed into the cosmic horror universe and folded into the Lovecraft Mythos, and its influences can be found everywhere, from role playing games to the first season of True Detective.

Perhaps it’s needless to say, but Piper is up to something a little different here.

In A Game in Yellow, Carmen is a woman sleepwalking through her workaday life. Her only respite is at home, engaging in ever-more-complex dominant/submissive sex play with her longterm partner, Blanca. There’s a lot done here with the seemingly counter-intuitive politics of Blanca’s submissiveness and the ways it allows her complete control over her otherwise spiraling life.

Trouble is, even that isn’t quite doing it anymore. Carmen and Blanca’s “play” (and yes, this is a deliberate double entendre) is getting more and more extreme, Carmen needing more and more danger to achieve her particular pleasures. It doesn’t help that she sees this as emblematic of the relationship’s failure in general. And she might not be wrong.

When Blanca introduces her to Smoke, it’s intended to be a way to take their play to that next level, theoretically healing what’s ailing in their relationship. Smoke is a mysterious figure who has a new toy: a portion of the cursed play, The King in Yellow. Smoke portions out small passages of the play to Carmen, walking her up to the edge of madness before pulling her back.

The trouble, of course, is that what this relationship really needs is an honest conversation (and maybe some therapy), and soon Carmen is jonesing for another glimpse into Carcosa, a kind of mirror world where her own history is mixed up in Chambers’ mythology, and soon, the promised madness is near at hand.

There are certainly erotic passages in The Game in Yellow, but I’m not sure they necessarily “work” in any prurient way. Piper instead walks the razor-thin line between Eros and Thanatos, mixing BDSM with possibly world-ending cosmic calamity, and there’s absolutely no promise that things will turn out well for anyone.

All of this is so wild and wildly compelling, that it would be easy to overlook the little glimpses of these characters’ back-stories, all of them buried under layers of traumatic scar tissue, and these passages are poignantly heart-rending.

In the end, A Game in Yellow, is a strange and particularly dark ride, but Piper’s storytelling chops guide us through the darkness holding out hope of redemption even as she snatches it away.

Synopsis:

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train.

Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater.

So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bite marks on her coffee table. Of course, ever since Delilah was killed in front of her, Cora can’t be sure what’s real and what’s in her head.

She pushes away all feelings and ignores the advice of her aunt to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. But she can’t ignore the dread in her stomach as she keeps finding bat carcasses at crime scenes, or the scary fact that all her recent cleanups have been the bodies of East Asian women.

As Cora will soon learn, you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.

Review:

After a couple of years in which submissions would announce in all caps, NO COVID STORIES, we seem to have finally reached the place where we’re willing to address what was arguably the most important and traumatic historical event of the twenty-first century and a clear precursor to the current rise of fascism in the US. That much of this work is now being done in the horror genre is highly appropriate.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng comes at this era from a unique angle, focusing on the wave of anti-Asian sentiment (and violence) that swept the nation in 2020.

Cora Zeng’s Chinese father has already fled home, deciding that America was not quite what it had promised, and her white mother is out of the picture, part of a cult upstate, leaving Cora adrift, trying to navigate the world of New York and her extended Chinese family. Her main anchor is her half sister, Delilah, but when Delilah is killed before Cora’s eyes in an apparent hate crime, Cora begins a devastating spiral.

Months later, Cora is a crime scene cleaner, mopping up the blood and viscera of various violent crimes in New York’s Chinatown, making almost-friends with her co-workers. And then the bats begin to appear.

Showing up at multiple crime scenes, the bats lead Cora and crew to believe that a serial killer is targeting Asian people. Soon after, Cora is visited by the ghost of her sister, and things get real weird as the little Scooby Gang attempts to solve the murders (which are apparently being covered up by the authorities), as well as deal with Cora’s haunting.

The book mixes Chinese traditional beliefs in with a modern thriller plot and adds in a fair share of psychological horror to boot, and the mix should be gangbusters. Instead, Bat Eater feels a little messy. Cora’s attempts to deal with the Hungry Ghosts is compelling and, well, haunting, but the serial killer plot feels rushed, and is riddled with plot holes, resolving in a way that if satisfying, is not quite believable.

Worse, underneath all of this is the question of Cora’s mental state. Mentions of past institutionalization and oblique references to mental illness call into question just how much of this is real at all. This brand of American Psycho-style unreliable narrator is having its day right now, but it doesn’t really do much for us here. At best, it’s one piece of Cora’s characterization, but at worst it’s an answer to the aforementioned plot holes, a kind of apology for the not-quite-believable resolution that implies that none of this was strictly real anyway.

Line by line, Baker is a strong writer, and for the most part, Cora’s head is an interesting, unique place to spend time, and the novel’s conceits are unique and should work well. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a little to be desired, and that, along with characters’ penchant for speaking in dramatic monologues, keeps Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng from quite landing.

Synopsis:

A haunted jukebox at an out-of-the-way dive bar not only lures patrons, but then doesn’t allow them to leave.

Review:

D7, the new novelette from Philip Fracassi, feels like a particularly menacing episode of Twilight Zone, as our generically yuppieish protagonists get lost on the backroads to find sanctuary in a roadside bar.

Inside, however, they find a strange scene: a room packed with silent, unwashed patrons who are distinctly unhappy to see the new arrivals. Attempting to retreat, they find the doors locked and begin to unravel the mystery of this haunting (and haunted) place.

D7 is a short, fast read, filled with Fracassi’s lean prose, but it also feels a bit slight. Boys in the Valley is a favorite for the way it tells a brutal story of religious horror and demonic possession with real heart and fully fleshed characters that we love and hate in equal measure.

And that’s what’s really missing here. I would have taken a tale of twice the length, if it had meant we had time to know something about our protagonists, had time to come to care about them in some real way. As it is, the characters are all rough sketches and types, there to deliver a mean little ghost story that builds to a sudden reveal.

Even the backstory is delivered in a rushed, paraphrased manner, whereas allowing this story to come out through dialogue would have offered a simple and effective way to built more distinct characters and a more solid sense of stakes.

I can’t fault anything found within D7, but I wish there was more. It’s a fun, spooky conceit that’s naturally cinematic in its delivery, but there’s just not quite enough there there to make the ride satisfying.

Synopsis:

Catherine Coldbridge is a complicated woman: a doctor, an occultist, and briefly, a widow. In 1879, her husband, Private Frank Humble, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, Catherine used her formidable skills to resurrect her husband. But after the reanimation, Frank lost his soul, becoming a vicious undead monster. Unable to face her failure or its murderous consequences, Catherine fled to grieve her failure.

Twenty-five years later, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels back to Texas with a pair of hired killers ready to destroy Frank. But Frank is no longer a monster; he is once again the kind man she knew. He has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show, and even taking on a mysterious young ward.

Now Catherine must face a series of moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved without considerable bloodshed.

Review:

In 2023’s The Legend of Charlie Fish, Josh Rountree created a version of the Wild West that was at once naturalistic and infused with magic. In that world, centered around the historic storm that leveled the island city of Galveston, there are hard men–outlaws and heroes alike–as well as witches, child gunslingers and psychics. There’s also a lovable gill-man with a penchant for chain-smoking cigarettes as he attempts to find his way back to the sea from which he came.

All told in Rountree’s stripped down but effortlessly elegant prose and peopled with instantly lovable characters, The Legend of Charlie Fish became an instant favorite, a book I recommend to anyone who will listen.

The Unkillable Frank Lightning returns us once again to this magic-infused version of turn of the century Texas, with a lengthy detour in the Montana territory, and I couldn’t be happier if I were returning to my own childhood home.

This time around we follow Catherine Coldbridge, a medical doctor cum mad scientist, who finds herself deep in the Montana territory, attached to a military fort set squarely in Indian territory. She’s there with her new husband, a soldier named Frank Humble. When Frank is killed by native forces, Catherine calls on her extensive occult training and, in a fit of desperate grief, brings him back.

This being a Frankenstein tale, you know what happens next.

The man who comes back is not the man she loves, but instead a mindless (soulless?) monster, who uses his superhuman strength to kill everything in his path. Catherine flees this horror she has created, abandoning the newly reborn monster to the wilderness.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and Catherine has retained the services of a pair of hired killers to finally correct her error. She’s tracked Frank Humble to Texas, where she hopes to kill him so that she might peacefully drink herself into her own grave, free of this great existential guilt.

Trouble is, just like Mary Shelley’s monster, Frank has grown into his humanity. He might not be the man she once loved, but he is no feral beast. In fact, he’s taken up with a Wild West Review, reenacting an Indian attack much like the one that killed him, and he’s made a family of his fellow performers (including one familiar character from The Legend of Charlie Fish).

Things get complicated, and there’s a lot of blood spilt, a lot of hearts broken, and more than one angry mob.

The Unkillable Frank Lightning has a good deal more plot than its predecessor, but like Charlie Fish, it’s really the supporting characters that carry the story. Rountree is a deft hand at sketching in a character with a few strokes and then lettting them steal the reader’s heart.

Catherine Coldbridge, however, is harder to love, and that’s mostly due to her allegiance to type. Like that other mad doctor, she’s rash, she’s overconfident, she’s more than a little fickle, and her capacity for both self-loathing and self-pity is nearly overwhelming. While it’s Catherine’s voice that carries us through this story, and her actions that propel it toward its exciting conclusion, there seems to be less at stake for her than for the many innocents (and not-so-innocent) people that she pulls into her orbit.

This isn’t a failing of the narrative, for–after all–no one reads Frankenstein and falls in love with the doctor. No, we want the monster, and on that count, Rountree delivers.

This monster has built a life for himself at the peripheries, surrounded by a found family of outcasts and orphans, and if Rountree writes more at liberty of monsters than of the good Doctor, it’s because he’s of the monster’s party (and I think he knows it). The Unkillable Frank Lightning, much like The Legend of Charlie Fish, becomes a kind of paean to the outcast, to the monstrous, and to a land where, once upon a time, there was room enough for them find both love and acceptance.

The Unkillable Frank Lightning will release on July 15th of 2025. Preorders are available now from Tachyon Publishing.