Tag: Books

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to them, so much so that even death wouldn’t be a rest (Yes, I know the series resolved well. I just gave up for a long time around season 10.)

But I also love people struggling against forces that they don’t understand. I love people trying to survive long odds—not undamaged, but coming out alive. I love man vs. monsters. I also really love the style. A lot of horror writing is extremely visceral (no pun intended) and powerful. It’s a genre of senses. The creeping cold around your ankles, that scratching of claws against your window, the scent of something subtly wrong, and on and on and on. Love that. It’s probably the most sense-driven genre.

So this month I read:

What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher

In this novella, a soldier decides to take a sojourn at their cabin in the woods, mostly to facilitate their batman’s affair with a mycologist. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Easton arrives to find the caretaker dead and something lurking in the woods. I really adored What Moves the Dead, the first novella in this (hopefully long-running) Sworn Soldier series. I adored it, even though it used the Fall of the House of Usher as its springboard. I have contradictory opinions about books based on other fiction—suffice it to say that I approach all books of that ilk with suspicion.

What Feasts at Night was not quite as good as the first novella but was still an excellent read and a keeper. Kingfisher is really wonderful with setting and characterization. I always feel like I am immersed in her world, and I would love to hang out with her characters. I’m adding this series to my shelf with Sarah Monette’s Grave Key.

What Grows in the Dark – Jaq Evans

This is a tricky book. It has a heroine who is not particularly likeable, being repressed, and a con artist of sorts. She claims to be a psychic so that she and Ian, a college friend (who doesn’t really know her that well) can travel around making a little bit of money making youtube videos. She gets called back to her small town by her dead sister’s girlfriend who says something is taking other kids. The way it took her sister. Usually, I dislike characters who aren’t forthcoming with their friends and allow situations to go from bad to worse, but here, it works. This book never really gets terrifying, but it is definitely slow burn creepy.

A Cosmology of Monsters – Shaun Hamill

Strange, strange book. I loved it. It’s a literary sort of horror, about a family over decades, primarily the youngest son. And of course, it’s about the monsters that are haunting them. I really liked the monsters and their relationship to humans.

Where He Can’t Find You – Darcy Coates

A YA horror novel.

This one might be my favorite read of the month, not just of the horror books I read. I adored this book from page 1 to the end. It’s got a fairly standard premise: there’s a killer in a small town, and if you’re not careful, it’ll get you! But what really made this stand out is that everyone knows what’s up from page 1. The Stitcher is the town bogeyman; the teens think they know who he is, and the police agree, but! There’s no evidence. There’s none of that slow “we must convince people we’re right!” They start off believing two things at once: that the creepy man who smiles is the Stitcher, and that the Stitcher’s kills come on a crest of inexplicable events—technology failing, animals being born deformed, etc. I’m not a huge Darcy Coates fan; her books are hit or miss for me, but this one is a definite hit.

The Grip of It – Jac Jemc

This piece is as hard to follow in some ways as a fever dream, and that’s really what this book is like. Nightmarish. But you’re in it, and you’re accepting it, and then you wake up. The premise is a straight-forward as these stories go: a married couple with some problems buy a haunted house. Things get worse. This is definitely a book where the style is what sells it. If you want your hauntings wrapped up with a bow, though, this is not the book for you.

I also watched The Dead Boy Detectives, which I mostly liked.

All of these books were good reads.

Three Things and Another One

It’s cold and I’m rewriting a novel. I have no thoughts to spare. Arguably, at this point I have no thoughts at all.

That said, here is one thing in general that I have loved this last month–MYSTERY– and three things in particular.

Nina Simon’s Mother Daughter Murder Night. A fairly low stakes mystery–I wouldn’t really call it a cozy, though I have seen others do so–that shines because of the characterization. I loved that the mother and daughter have a fraught history between them, but that the author doesn’t take the easy route out and tar one of them as “villain” and the other as “wronged”. They’re both stubborn women who know how to fight, and the third member of the trio–the grand-daughter–is just like them both. One of the dangers with amateur sleuths is that often it feels too forced or contrived that they would be able to solve the case, especially when there are police involved. Here, the women are placed in good position to find out what they need to know to beat the police to the solution. The mystery holds up all the way through and was just a pleasure to read.

Death & Other Details on hulu. There was little to no chance that I wouldn’t watch this given the glut of advertising, Mandy Patinkin’s role, and my fondness for mystery. But I really loved the first three episodes: the writing is exactly to my taste, the clues are doled out well, the time jumps are interesting, and I feel like the mystery is going to play out properly–surprises, but surprises that we will have been set up for. That’s the big thing in mysteries, right? That we have faith in the writer. That they’re going to tell their story well, laying out the clues in the right way, and not randomly ambushing us with bullshit twists for the sake of twists. I am grateful to Knives Out and Rian Johnson for proving that mysteries can be well-plotted and profitable again (and probably to a lesser extent Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot outings, which were not faithful to Christie’s books but were still intriguing.). More mysteries please! With the classic form of the amateur detective–the well-respected private investigator. As a side note of no importance, I do love the name Imogene. I hope to see more from the writing crew of Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss.

In the same vein, I have just this moment started A Murder at the End of the World, and so far, it has the same quality as the above: writing that feels confident, an actor who is compelling, and an amateur sleuth I immediately want to root for. If it turns out to be bad, don’t tell me! I’ll just be disappointed.

A fourth thing, tangentially related: Mystery, yes; amateur sleuth, no. In this instance, The Puppet Show by MW Craven was a really interesting police procedural of the type I like: the protagonist is not without his (significant) flaws, but never to the point where you wonder, how on earth is he even capable of detecting? It is also, despite its very dark subject matter, not unrelentingly grim. I enjoyed it and because for once my library has let me down, bought the second book online.