I have a deep appreciation for literary scholars who aim to draw once-popular but now obscure authors out of the shadows and back into the light for a new generation of readers to discover! Donald K. Hartman does just this with The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini, which came out last year. This is the third installment in Hartman’s series of books that highlight the role of hypnotism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century horror, mystery, and weird fiction. I have previously reviewed Death by Suggestion and The Hypno-Ripper, and I can now say I fully share Hartman’s fascination (if ..read more

“At times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct….” I just read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the first time, the 1990 novel that inspired the iconic Steven Spielberg film series. The film franchise, with its groundbreaking CGI dinosaurs and star-studded cast, has become so pervasive in the popular imagination it’s hard to imagine a time before T-Rex stalked the nightmares of multiple generations. But the source material is just as terrifying as the blockbuster films that came after. Jurassic Park draws on a long tradition of blending science fiction w ..read more

Humans are not meant to live in total isolation. Many of us had just a small taste of this during the shutdowns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Sunny Moraine takes social distancing to the extreme in their apocalyptic horror novella Your Shadow Half Remains, which came out last month.  Riley lives alone in the lakeside cabin that still bears the bloodstain from her grandparents’ gruesome deaths. Of course she lives alone—a strange condition has been ravaging the world for the past few years that causes people to descend into violent madness if they look each other in the e ..read more

I have written before about how detective fiction (and the mystery genre more broadly) emerged out of the Gothic. I even touched briefly on this particular book. But today I want to give a much more in-depth examination of the Gothic elements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, first published in serialized form in 1901–2.  While you can see some Gothic influence in many of Doyle’s works, The Hound of the Baskervilles in particular engages in a narrative strategy that was especially popular in the early days of mystery fiction and contin ..read more

The world of professional ballet can be cut-throat—literally. Jamison Shea’s debut YA horror novel, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, takes an unflinching look at ambitious young women in a highly competitive field and the hellish lengths to which they will go to achieve their dreams. If you like morally gray female characters who embrace their dark sides, you definitely don’t want to miss this book, which came out last summer. Laure Mesny knows that the deck is stacked against her. Not only is she the only Black ballerina in her class at the prestigious Parisian academy, but she is ..read more

Going through high school as a social outcast is hard enough when the school itself isn’t trying to kill you. At the Scholomance, being a loner can be deadly…. I’ve finally read A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, a young adult fantasy novel which came out back in 2020. I’ve been a fan of Novik since first stumbling upon Uprooted in 2015, but even more so ever since I read her Slavic fairy story Spinning Silver. I’ve been hearing great things about the Scholomance series for years, and now that all three books in the trilogy are out, I figured it would be the perfect time to pick up Book 1.&nbs ..read more

If you could walk out of your old life, leaving everything behind, and into a new one filled with beauty, magic, and wonder, would you? Two sisters are confronted by this question in Tara Isabella Burton’s latest literary thriller Here in Avalon, which came out earlier this month. I loved the decadent dark side of New York City that Tara conjured up in her debut Social Creature. With this book, Tara explores the same city through a lens of glittering magic. But even the most ethereal of artists and dreamers cannot truly live inside a fairy tale…. Rose has always been the practical sister. Thou ..read more

Happy 2024! First things first: as I mentioned at the end of last week’s post, I will be moving to an every-other-week posting schedule this year. But though I’ll be posting less often, I am still just as excited as always about all of the new books coming out this year! Here are just a few of the new releases I am most looking forward to: 1) The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan (set to be released January 9) This Gothic horror novel is set off the coast of South Africa in a ruined mansion haunted by a djinn. When a young girl named Sana moves in with her father, she uncovers the es ..read more

What a great year for reading it’s been! This is the first year in at least a decade that I haven’t participated in the official Goodreads Reading Challenge, since I stopped using Goodreads to track my reading. I did, however, still set reading goals for myself and keep track of each book I read, and I found 2023 to be one of the best reading years of my adult life. My 2023 Reading Log Snake, with a color-coded key: Purple for short story collections; light blue for mystery/thriller; gray for nonfiction; dark blue for “other”; black for horror; red for romance; green for sci-fi; and yellow for ..read more

As my various posts over the years about Christmas ghost stories might suggest, I’m on a bit of a mission to bring this spooky seasonal activity back into fashion. But I’m not alone in my quest! The British Library has started publishing annual collections of haunting Christmas tales as part of their Tales of the Weird series. Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights, edited by Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk, is the third such collection, released in December 2022. If you, like me, would like to start spending your Christmases telling scary stories around a fire, I cannot re ..read more