The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride’s party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord’s mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.

As Chih and the bride-to-be explore empty rooms and desolate courtyards, they are drawn into the mystery of what became of Lord Guo’s previous wives and the dark history of Do Cao itself. But as the wedding night draws to its close, Chih will learn at their peril that not all monsters are to be found in the shadows; some monsters hide in plain sight.

Though all the novellas are standalone, I would recommend reading at least one or two earlier ones to get a feel for the world and more information on the background of Chih and Almost Brilliant.

Dear Nghi Vo,

A new Singing Hills novella with Cleric Chih! This time it’s got some weird goings on, a strange family, a mystery. But where is Almost Brilliant?

Cleric Chih, a story gatherer from the Singing Hills Monastery, is on the road, traveling with a young bride and her parents on her way to meet a man her parents want her to marry. Pham Nhung is very young, sweetly charming, and acts and is treated as if she’s more fragile than fine porcelain. When the retinue reaches the compound, Nhung takes Chih with her ahead of the rest and surveys the strong walls that surround it, wondering aloud if she will find her future here.

The events get weirder after that when a bizarre young man warns Chih to have Nhung ask the lord what happened to his other brides. Wandering around the grounds that night, Chih and Nhung enter several buildings with Nhung coyly asking Chih to go in first and check for monsters. The mystery of the place deepens when the lord’s son, the young man from earlier, warns Chih and reveals something awful about his situation there and old family secrets. But the monsters Chih is expecting aren’t the ones they find.

“The world starts with a story. So do dynasties and eras and wars. So does love, and so does revenge. Everything starts with a story.”

Once again, a perfectly paced story unfolds in novella format. Some novellas end up too rushed or too thinly written with not enough to keep me interested. With the Singing Hills stories, I know that this won’t be the case. Words are carefully used to create and shade in the background worldbuilding which is filled with characters given nutshell sketches that tell us all we need to know about who they are without wasting pages on unneeded information.

The terrible situation is slowly built up, little by little with an aftertaste of unease, like a fire started and then allowed to heat up before bursting out in raging flames. There are subtle clues but they are softly dropped into the story and the reader is allowed to notice them and ponder what they mean before all the plot points are tied together and everything is let loose.

What didn’t work quite as well for me is

~Jayne

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A Haunting in the Arctic is emphatically not a romance, but it has some elements that are relevant to our interests, specifically female rage and mermaids and selkie legends. It’s very atmospheric and creepy, but it forgets to make sense. The plot revolves around a LOT of rape, and also includes graphic violence, self-harm and gaslighting.

If I had realized that the plot involved so much rape, much of it committed on page and the rest implied, I would not have read this book. Once I started though, I got invested and couldn’t stop reading, which does speak well for the pacing of the book in thriller/horror terms. However, instead of getting any kind of catharsis from the story, I was just left feeling sad and, for lack of a more sophisticated word, icky, as well as confused.

Because the story is a mystery/horror/thriller/ghost story, it’s hard to describe any of the plot in any meaningful way without spoilers. It’s told from two points of view in alternating chapters. One is the point of view of Nicky, a woman who finds herself on a whaling ship, the Ormen, in 1901. The other is that of Dominique, an urban explorer in the present day who wants to explore and document the wreck of the ship, which washed up on the coast of Iceland, before it is dragged out to sea and sunk. There’s also a mystery about what happened on the ship in 1973, when it was a research vessel, and what happened to Skúmaskot, a village near the location of the wreck.

Not only is there rape, on page and off, torture, and death and trauma, but major plot elements are brought up and then dropped, questions are raised but never answered, and supernatural aspects to the story are only partially explained and explored. As a result, I was mostly confused when I wasn’t horrified by what was happening.

I can’t wrap this up without discussing a surreal and disturbing chapter in which the ship docks near an Inuit village. It’s not a spoiler but I’m hiding it anyway because it is just so very racist.

When I read horror/thriller/suspense, I’m looking for a certain cathartic feeling. I did not get that feeling with this book, because both heroines are passive until the last minute. Both heroines deal with their trauma by becoming numb, compartmentalizing, and dissociating. This is realistic and valid. However, their frozen state, and the limitations imposed on them by their respective situations, leaves them unable to exercise much agency. Once the revenge kicks in, it’s not satisfying because it’s not fairly directed and because it leaves the victim even more trapped in their identity as victim instead of allowing them to feel empowered and free. Not everyone looks for the same experience when reading this kind of material, so my dissatisfaction might not apply to every reader.

An even bigger problem is that the twist at the end does not bring coherence to the story. Linda Holmes wrote a review of Don’t Worry Darling which helped me understand why A Haunting in the Arctic doesn’t work:

The mechanics of a good mystery are usually such that as the story builds tension, it’s like the construction of a complicated lock on an ornate door. Every piece of new information creates another complication within the mechanism of the lock. Then, at some point, you are given a key. You put the key in the lock and you turn it, and there is a satisfying click as it disengages the lock and lets you in.

The story in A Haunting in the Arctic fails to give that satisfying moment when things fall into place. The pieces of information in the book appear and disappear willy-nilly. The ending hinges on a major choice, but the reason the character makes that choice is unclear. The motives and reasonings and emotions behind the characters are inconsistent and often illogical – not in the understandable way that real people are often illogical, but as though the puzzle of the book was simply not completely thought out.

This book isn’t all bad. I loved the atmosphere. It was genuinely spooky and scary and I kept reading, devouring the whole thing in a day. But afterwards, I felt grimy. I felt exploited instead of empowered. And, most damning from a literary perspective, I lacked the satisfaction of hearing that click as things fell into place. Instead, I felt more adrift and confused than I had before. There are not enough vengeful selkies in the world to make me read this book ever again.

A vanished star. A haunted film. A mystery only love can unravel…

1968: Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Now the actress is on the cusp of obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has changed—but her dream is about to turn into a nightmare. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is alive. She’s been pulled into the film. And the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. Gemma must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.

2007: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries—one that’s captivated film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw L’Étrange Lune for the first time. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma that shouldn’t exist. Curiosity drives Christopher to unravel the truth. But answers to the film’s mystery may leave him trapped by it forever.

CW/TW – alcoholism and drug use by a parent, child neglect, emotional abuse, suicide, sexism, riot, institutionalization of a parent, death of a parent, mentions of miscarriage, unwanted sexual advances, gore, and violence.

Dear Ms. Sayers,

Here I am again, trying something different and not entirely sure whether it worked for me or not. I enjoyed parts of this book, didn’t like others, and in the end, had to keep reminding myself that it’s a bad horror film, wrapped in a dual-timeline story. Would I read it again? Probably not. Did I want answers and did I read all the way through to get them? Yes, I did. I’ll add one thing to the blurb and specify that heroine Gemma is pulled into the movie as if she’s living in the set which is now real.

I liked the descriptions given – especially for the 1968 part of the story. The information that Gemma’s physical appearance was inspired by French actress Francoise Dorleac helped me visualize her. I could see Gemma getting her start in early 60s California beach films and tiring of the genre, as her desire to try her hand at scriptwriting grew. Was a French director, trying to make an improved (French) version of a Hammer horror film without actually having ever seen a horror film, any more receptive to this than the male rulers of Hollywood? Of course not. Gemma’s over-the-top self involved rockstar lover fit right in with the other drug taking British singers of the late 60s.

The opening of the story threw me for a loop though. Who was this ten year old boy whose job it seemed to be to take care of his drug taking, mental health issues challenged mother? Well, that took a while to figure out. As a character later told Christopher, everything was carefully thought and planned out. I’m not sure I would have wanted to date an adult Christopher as obsessed as he was with this strange film that was only shown every ten years to a select group of people who were supposed to be acting under a bizarre series of rules. Would those rules really work? Well, obviously not as Christopher and Elizabeth (plus a few others) went full bore “conspiracy theory” about the film. How strange all this was was perfectly encapsulated by the scene when Christopher bores the pants off of a cousin and their dates as he did a deep dive into the various nutjob trains of thought on L’Estrange Lune. I could almost see the three of them slowly backing away from him.

The romance? Eh, I didn’t think so. It’s more obsession and Gemma meeting up with a male who isn’t a total wank loser. In fact the more I thought about it, the creepier it got. As a child with a sad backstory, Christopher was pitiable but as an adult he was bland and blah but fixated. His “nearest and dearest” thought that Christopher was dangerously obsessed (there’s just no other word that fits as well) with the film and I found I agreed with them. It was unhealthy and the fact that he himself realized that no one would miss him if he disappeared? Yeah.

Who did I like the best? That would be Gemma who tried to advance her film career beyond Beach Blanket Bingo and twice got tossed into the deep end of a shit show – the first when she arrived and began filming of L’Estrange Lune. in the face of many who denigrated her and the second when what happened, happened. She kept her head above water and managed to claw agency out of it, even in the face of some shameless victim blaming.

Right … so the film. When I read something in the 1870s “Amboise” section of the book (when Gemma is trapped inside the film) that set off my klaxon alarms of historical inaccuracy it helped me peel myself off the ceiling by thinking, “Just remember, it’s a film. It’s supposed to be a bad horror film that’s being reshot. Historical authenticity has no place in it. We’re talking “Hollywood authenticity” is good enough.” That helped as well with the horror scenes because the vampires veered between laughable and gross. Hitting the end though, was full on euwww though the final bits answered the main questions about the whole set up.

Still, the way the “how did all this get started” was explained was just another section of villain exposition or telling instead of showing which added to all the other instances of information being conveyed in slightly irritating ways. The villain magically typing answers to Gemma?? Was there a better way to make sure readers had all the necessary information? Surely so. I also thought that tightening or eliminating some scenes (Gemma goes to 1878 Paris!) would have moved things along. There was way too much unnecessary description of the places and clothes. The arc I read also had a lot of typos that I hope were fixed. And yet, there I was, reading until the end to discover “what next” so it did work for me on some level. I just wish Gemma had been left with her own agency to triumph over both the villains who got her into that mess. C

~Jayne

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A Haunting on the Hill is a horror novel set in the same mansion as Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House. There are brief references to the events in Jackson’s novel and a snippet of her dialogue, but those were the only things connecting the two books.

 For me, this was an excellent, creepy book that worked well as a standalone, but I think people especially nostalgic for The Haunting of Hill House and wanting to return to that world might be disappointed. Aside from a shared setting, and a few references to the original work, this novel didn’t remind me much of Jackson’s book.

Holly Sherwin is a teacher by day, but her real passion is playwriting. She’s working on a new play, The Witching Night, based on the real-life case of a woman burned for witchcraft. She was awarded a grant and is using that money to rent a mansion called Hill House where she will host a residency to finalize her play. Staying with Holly is her girlfriend, Nisa, who is composing and singing original murder ballads that will appear in the play; her friend and sound engineer, Stevie; and Amanda Greer, an actress with a dark past who will be playing the lead role.

Holly is warned against renting Hill House by the locals, including the housekeeper who never stays past sunset. True to horror conventions, Holly ignores all of this and moves forward with her plans for the residency.

Also true to the original, Hill House is a character in itself, ominous and “demented” in one character’s words. It seems alive, sinister, and hungry. The layout of the house makes no sense, some rooms have cold spots, and Holly and her group hear strange voices at night. Things are very clearly wrong with the place, and yet everyone stays, their judgment infected by Hill House’s malignancy.

As a standalone horror novel, A Haunting on the Hill is great. It’s scary without violence or gore, and as I was reading it kept steeling myself for a jump scare even though I really don’t get those in books. I was tense in the fun “OMG this is spooky way.” At one point, Stevie finds a tiny little door in the baseboard of his room, and from there things spiral into the delightfully weird and frightening.

So if you are looking for a classic haunted house story that’s scary without being violent, then this is a really great book. If you’re looking for a read influenced by some nostalgia for The Haunting of Hill House, then this book might disappoint.

For me, The Haunting of Hill House was always less of a haunted house book and more of a haunted person book. Eleanor Vance, the main character, has spent her adult life caring for an unpleasant, ailing mother, only to find herself with no real home or life of her own when her mother passes. She sleeps on a cot in her niece’s bedroom, living with a sister and brother-in-law who barely tolerate her. Eleanor is painfully lonely and has very little sense of self.

Eleanor is an empty vessel for the strange spirit of Hill House to fill. She’s occupied a traditional gender role (caring for an aging parent) that has left her depleted and lifeless, and so while others are terrified at the goings-on at Hill House, to a degree Eleanor is delighted to feel anything even if that experience is undeniably toxic. Add to that Eleanor and fellow guest Theo’s implied queerness and The Haunting of Hill House has a lot to unpack about female gender roles and sexual identity, all wrapped up in the guise of a haunted house story.

A Haunting on the Hill really doesn’t have those layers. There’s references to a fetch, a creature similar to a witch’s familiar that is an empty vessel which could be a reference to Eleanor, and the three of the characters are queer, but that’s about it. This is, more or less, just a really good haunted house story. If you want the more that makes The Haunting of Hill House a classic, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Now, personally, sometimes I just want a really good haunted house story. What’s behind that tiny door? Tell me! I want to be scared! For me, this book was a lot of fun and made for excellent spooky season reading. I think most readers who love all those elements and are seeking similarly spooky stories will feel the same way.

My Goodness, what have I become? There was a time when I was positively oozing the milk of human kindness. I was so full of empathy that I couldn’t bear to read about a character losing so much as a drop of blood. And yet, somehow, I’ve turned into a person who reacts to a scene of a character’s face being scoured off by tentacles with teeth by chirping, “Oooh! Carnage!”

If this is relatable to you, you will enjoy The Dead Take the A Train, but if you think, “Ugh, why would I want to read about someone’s face being eaten by tentacles with teeth?” then this is not going to be your thing, and that’s O.K. Further, if you like your romance with lots and lots of graphic carnage, you might like this book a lot. It’s horror, not romance, but it does include a rather lovely f/f friends-to-lovers romance.

The Dead Take the A Train is a horror novel with a romance by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. It is absolutely soaked in gore. I haven’t seen this many entrails since…well, since the last Cassandra Khaw book I read (The Salt Grows Heavy, which got a ‘SQUEE’ grade review from me). Seriously, before we go any further, you need to know that this book is hard R, maybe X rated horror, with various characters enduring eternal suffering, blood and guts on the wall, worms and other bugs popping out of corpses, smells, mutilation…I mean, it’s intense. So if that is not something you want to have imprinted on your brain, I totally get that, and you should go read something, anything, else.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s trying to establish herself as a major Psychic Operative in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top.

Desperate to break the dead-end grind, Julie summons a guardian angel for a quick career boost. But when her power grab accidentally releases an elder god hellbent on the annihilation of our galaxy, the body count rises rapidly.

Picture Jessica Jones, only with more visible scarring, no innate super powers, a lot of learned and purchased spellcraft, and harder drugs, and you have Julie. Things become complicated for Julie when her best friend, Sarah, shows up, on the run from an abusive boyfriend. Julie and Sarah are clearly madly in love with each other but they are both too afraid of damaging their friendship to say anything, to the vast amusement of pretty much everyone they encounter, especially their friends Dead Air and St. Joan.

Meanwhile Julie’s ex, Tyler, is climbing the corporate ladder at Thorne and Dirk, an evil law firm. If you ever watched the television show Angel and are familiar with the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart, you will know exactly the kind of office environment I mean. Anyway, Tyler involves Julie in his shit, and there’s a lot of plot, and at some point I stopped following the plot very closely although I’m pretty sure it mostly made sense and it all involves a lot of apocalyptic type things. Carnage everywhere, you guys.

As urban horror-fantasy goes, this is great stuff, with a lot of action and intrigue and entrails. However, I felt cheated by the fact that the Dead do not, in fact, seem to take the A Train, although there is an occult bookstore with a door that opens into a club wherein patrons such as the Barghest Sisters consume…things. If you like angry women who are good at their jobs and who just generally don’t give a fuck, you’ll love Julie, whose life can be summarized with this handy quote from Chapter Four:

Julie wasn’t sure what pissed her off more – that she was woken up by the one-eyed tomcat who’d somehow slunk into her appointment, or that her phone was ringing at seven in the goddamn morning and the caller ID said “Fucking Dickbag.”

It was Tyler.

I don’t know why that cracks me up so very much, but here we are. Lest you be fooled, although the book is very humorous, the horror is very horrific. There’s a lot, a LOT, of body horror. Things incubate in places where they, in my opinion, should not incubate. Bodies rot. It’s not pretty. There’s a tremendous amount of cosmic horror with

Meanwhile Sarah is the embodiment of goodness, whom everyone underestimates and wants to protect. Julie’s acceptance of the fact that she should be treating Sarah as an equal instead of being obsessed with protecting her, and the reader’s growing awareness of Sarah’s inner complexity and steeliness, are important parts of the story that I hope will be explored more in the second book.

Most of the romance between Sarah and Julie happens before the book starts, yet I found it to be pretty satisfying if for no other reason than the power of Sarah and Julie’s absolute loyalty and devotion to one another. They have a friends to-lovers/cannot-spit-it-out dynamic that would be maddening if it did not amuse their friends so very much. By the time they reunite in this book, we are already aware that they fell in love in the backstory so it’s less a matter of waiting for them to fall in love and more a matter of waiting for them to admit it, as in this passage wherein Sarah tells Julie that if Julie dies, Sarah will die with her:

“Then I die with you.”

Without thinking, Julie brushed her lips over the knuckles of Sarah’s right hand, with the solemn and tender courtliness of a revenant come home one last time, her eyes never leaving Sarah’s own. Whatever other objections Julie might have raised, what argument or scant logic she might have mustered in her already embattled condition, died. The enormity of the words left Julie overwhelmed and if Sarah had asked her then to take a leap from the hospital roof, Julie would have thrown herself into the sky with no thought of how badly she’d splatter on the pavement below.

“You’re the best friend a girl could ever ask for,” said Julie, thoroughly ruining the moment.

“I don’t say this lightly,” said St. Joan. “But you are an absolute and complete idiot.”

I really enjoyed this book. There’s a lot of dark, snarky humor, and snarky humor is my very favorite kind. The satire of corporate culture is as hilarious as it is horrifying. The horror is very, very horrifying with body horror, your basic supernatural beings, and just oodles of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Not enough trigger warnings in the world, people. People suffer eternally, no contract is without its fine print specifying your eternal soul as collateral, there are cursed books, and teenage vampires hanging out at the bar watching The Lost Boys (“They were sharing an enormous bucket of popcorn, and laughed hysterically at every other interaction between the actors.”) The book is the first of the Carrion City Duology, so it leaves some loose threads, and I’m really eager to see what Julie and Sarah’s relationship looks like given the events at the end of The Dead Take the A Train.

Nobody has a “normal” family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly…something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn’t return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.

Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper’s beloved cousin Rosie. It’s to be hosted at the family farm. Have they made an exception to the rule? It wouldn’t be the first time Vesper’s been given special treatment. Is the invite a sweet gesture? An olive branch? A trap? Doesn’t matter. Something inside her insists she go to the wedding. Even if it means returning to the toxic environment she escaped. Even if it means reuniting with her mother, Constance, a former horror film star and forever ice queen.

When Vesper’s homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she’s forced to reckon with her family’s beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.

CW –

Dear Ms. Harrison,

I’m not usually one for horror. I don’t like horror movies and don’t watch them (a coworker also hates them but watches them for the delicious thrill of being scared shitless by them). I rarely read books with the label but after checking out the excerpt for “Black Sheep” something compelled me to give it a whirl. Vesper Wright learns an important lesson. Not “you can’t go home again” but in her case “you shouldn’t go home again.”

Vesper is making a life for herself (working in the food service industry which involves wearing a crappy green polo shirt and singing the Shortee’s birthday song) after running away from home shortly before her eighteenth birthday. Geographically she didn’t go that far from the remote farm in southern New Jersey where she was raised along with friends and family and the other (relatively few) members of the religious cult in which she was raised. Once you leave, that’s it. But after an awful night at work (double shift and a table of obnoxious bros), she staggers home to find a wedding invitation. At first she’s gutted to see that it’s for her (former) first love and her (former) best friend. The handwritten note clinches it though – she’s just got to go back.

Arriving at the homestead (old house, old barn, old worship facilities) in the midst of the rehearsal dinner, Vesper is surprised by how welcoming people are, including the bride and groom with whom she Has History. Vesper’s mother – scream queen actress Constance – is her usual dismissive, cold self. Well, Vesper didn’t really expect that to be any different.

The wedding is planned to a T and Vesper has to go along with the religious stuff in order to attend (they’re that strict) but she’s stunned when a certain guest arrives for the wedding dinner. Then she’s gobsmacked at who people think this person is. Then she flees again only to be reeled back into the madness. Will Vesper get to the bottom of her relationship with these people? And will she survive it?

Sadly, the early sarcasm is soon abandoned. I liked how the book serves up some faux horror in the various movie props that Constance has accumulated over the course of her career and which she insists on displaying all over the house. Growing up with that must have been difficult. The true nature of the cult is revealed suddenly and with – dare I say? – glee. I’ll try not to spoil things and will admit that I had read some reviews that hinted enough to give me an idea of what to expect but it still took me aback to see it in black and white. Yes, I know devotees actually exist but the people in the book are devoted.

Faux horror gently slides into the realms of discomfort as Vesper remembers her upbringing – something she had just thought of as “normal” while growing up. That’s bad enough but the toxic relationship she has with her mother is another form of awful. Is it better to have a Mommy Dearest or a mother who ignores you when she can and makes it clear she wants little or nothing to do with you when she can’t? Another uncomfortable thing for me was

Things get real at the end. And by “get real” I mean get messy and horrid. Since the book is told in first person POV, it’s clear that one person survives after things go to hell in a handcart but this person will have scars (real and mental) for life and a whole lot to discuss with a therapist (which happens). Vesper might be seen by some readers as unlikeable (her co-workers call her Your Highness) but she gets shit done and often others don’t like this sort of person. There were a few times when I thought, “Really, Vesper? How could you be this naive about your life?” I enjoyed the book but I’m still not someone who is going to go looking to read horror books. B

~Jayne

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