Quirk Books (This review contains minor spoilers.) Reader, before you find out what I thought about Clay McLeod Chapman’s Whisper Down the Lane, you must understand that I am an utter mark for material of this stripe. Anything even tangentially related to moral panics—and the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s in particular—is hopelessly alluring to my lizard brain. The sheer weight of that topical interest may render me wholly ineffectual when it comes to seriously evaluating fiction that touches it. You’ve laughed at people who put their money into NFTs—we all have—but I must concede that if ..read more

Night Shade (this review contains minor spoilers.) The Croning features one of the most memorable opening chapters I’ve encountered in recent memory: a grimly whimsical (and slightly horny) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a royal spy tracks the fabled bargainer to a hinterland and finds that his quarry serves an esoteric deity called Old Leech. The strange god is a primordial cosmic entity who exists in some unknowable outer darkness but regularly makes their presence felt on Earth. The spy returns to his queen with the dwarf’s name, but when the fated day comes round, the hard-won kn ..read more

(This review is spoiler-free.) Ritual Limited In the opening chapter of All the Fiends of Hell, readers are thrust into a surreal nightmare where the protagonist, Karl, emerges from a fortnight of fever-induced delirium to witness his neighbors flying upward and vanishing into the night’s sky. High above, a bloody, thick-veined moon hangs over the scene, seemingly drawing those below to its horrific mass. The air is filled with the cacophonous boom of great bells, their reverberation blotting out all other sound. For anyone familiar with the (mostly American) evangelical Christian concept of ..read more

Moonstruck Books In the ecological hellscape world of The Rain Artist, rain falls only in ballrooms and penthouses, a manufactured novelty experienced exclusively by paragons of industry and commerce. Earth is ravaged husk marked by storms of copper dust, ever-growing plastic islands, and chemical swamps that extended to the horizon. The majority of people reside in overpopulated urban centers, surviving on hydration slurries and lab-grown nutrients while desperately clinging to a hardscrabble existence where the wolves of destitution are never far from the door. At the heart of the novel is ..read more

Tor Nightfire (this review contains mild spoilers.) Slewfoot is one of those novels that I came to purely through word-of-mouth. I never saw an ad, read a review, or connected the author to another literary fixture where I was invested, but time and again the novel was mentioned in numerous circumstances as one of the best under-the-radar horror entries of the past few years. I came in with high expectations, primed by the consistent accolades, and expected a solid-if-predictable tale about a witch during the early colonial period. In the end, only half of that expectation was met, but it’s ..read more

Crystal Lake Publishing (This review is spoiler-free.) Anthologies hold an odd place in the modern popular literature landscape. They’re a ready way to explore a collection of viewpoints through the lens of a particular theme or mechanic, but also present a limited impression of what each individual contributor’s creative locus really is. Rarely do these collections receive mainstream critical praise, and many reviewers would struggle to name one such collection we adore with the same enthusiasm we employ when recounting dozens of novels. Most anthologies are tied to a pivotal theme or motif ..read more

I don’t know that I’ve reviewed a true, self-published indie horror novella like The Last Day since launching Vogue Horror, but props to the author, Seann Barbour, as he performs the necessary hustle to get folks reading his book. I have read a number of comparable self-published horror works in my time, and a fair few of them are deserving of wider attention—The Last Day included. While there were a few things that nagged at me, the strengths of the work considerably outpaced any shortcomings, and I would recommend anyone with even a sliver of interest in the story to drop $2.99 and help a c ..read more

Del Rey (this review contains spoilers.) I’m not going to be cynical about the premise of Mister Magic even though it’s egregiously blatant nostalgia bait for millennials like myself. At the center of the plot is a mysterious 90s children’s program, Mister Magic, which has no analog legacy or physical artifacts connecting it to the current day. The program seemingly only exists in the aging memories of its viewers, whose forum posts and wiki articles on the topic are frequently deleted, removed, or edited shortly after their appearance. An American of my age with a public television-up ..read more

Shortwave Publishing (this review is spoiler-free.) In my assessment, Ai Jiang is among the foremost emergent speculative fiction authors today: she has a narrative style marked by instinctive wit, hard-won humanity, and an keen understanding of the emotions which are more often endured than outwardly expressed. Her stories are like deep water, holding depth their blurb or summary does not immediately give away, and her characters are clear-voiced and complete. She’s one of those rare authors with a distinct creative throughline that underpins each work, and writes with confidence as an auth ..read more

Turner Publishing When Turner Publishing reached out to me to review Pre-Approved for Haunting, describing it as a collection of dark stories based on millennial anxieties, I couldn't agree to do so quickly enough. I’m uncharacteristically interested in the very soft science of identifying and assigning generational attributes (especially so in the case of my own generation) and having the chance to mingle this curiosity with horror fiction sounds like a wonderful break from the awards-bait I had been spending my time with. This was my first exposure to the fiction of Patrick Barb, and I cam ..read more