Book Review: The Willows

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood This is technically more of a short story than a novel, but someone had mentioned it was the inspiration for The Hollow Places, which is a book I adored, so I thought I’d check it out. Actually, the critique of The Hollow Places asserted that T. Kingfisher hadn’t just used …

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Book Review: All Systems Red

By Martha Wells I loved Martha Wells’ City of Bones and Death of the Necromancer, which I read decades ago, but I hadn’t seen anything by her in a hot minute, until this series started coming up on my feed. This isn’t a novel-length work; it’s more like a novelette or long short story, which …

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Book Review: The Sentence

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich The logline got me to put this book on my wishlist: bookseller is haunted by a ghost. I expected maybe something cute and a little bit spooky, like a cozy mystery with supernatural elements. But this book is much deeper than that. I hadn’t realized it dealt so much with …

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Book Review: The Fisherman

The Fisherman by John Langan I wanted a book that scratched the same itch as T. Kingfisher’s horror, and this one did the trick. It’s very firmly ensconced in the real world, and yet the supernatural elements seemed plausible. One of the ways in which Langan brings the reader into the supernatural elements is through …

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Book Review: House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski I’d heard about this book for years as being a unique book that was dark and trippy. It’s been compared to Lovecraft, which is the name people always dredge up when they want to say “horror, but literary.” The only thing I knew about the plot was that …

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