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Welcome reader!
Thank you for visiting my little corner of the internet. Consider it my virtual book-lair where I talk about the books I read, and invite you to join me in that converstation. Feel free to browse around!
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Review: Solace House - Will MacLean
Genre: Mystery/Horror Published: Grove Press, May 2026 (UK) / October 2026 (US) My Rating: 4.5/5 stars "Oh yes, we are the lunatics, and yes we dwell in hell. The flames are hot but hey guess what? There’s torture here as well! Yet there’s a niggling conundrum, and that riddle go-eth thus: Are we dreaming this place, or is this place dreaming us?" I went back and forth on whether I could justify rounding up my rating to a full 5-stars.. On the one hand; objectively, this wasn

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Review: Carnalis by Tiffany Morris - a horror novella
Genre: horror novella Published: Nictitating Books, March 1st 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars “Humans are meat that dreams. Impulses of flesh within flesh, sinew and gristle, movement and longing, electric and chemical signals that create an experience called human.” There are a few tropes that I’d consider my “buzz-kill-words” in books. They are basically the opposite of buzz-words, meaning that if I hear your book contains one of these tropes, I will almost instantly lose interes

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Review: An Impossibility of Crows - Kirsten Kaschock
Genre: horror Published: University of Massachusetts Press, March 2026 My rating: 5/5 stars "No matter what it’s meant to grow, a lab works on principles of limitation and elimination, defined by what it excludes. Like the barn where I kept Solo. Like the house where I was kept. Isolation is a tool of analysis. It is not a state to maintain indefinitely." It’s been almost two months and a partial reread, and I still cannot find the words to do justice to the way I admired and

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Review: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts - Kim Fu
Genre: horror, haunted-house Published: Tin House Publishing, March 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars "What would Lele say? What would Lele do? She asked herself these questions all the time, her answers feeble and uncertain, never knowing if she was right. She’d made this ghost. It couldn’t tell her anything new." The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is an incredibly effective ghost-story with themes of grief, trauma and social isolation. It drew me in with its atmosphere, but truly snuc

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Review: Hemlock - Melissa Faliveno
Genre: literary horror, gothic, queer Published: Little Brown and Company, January 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars, first favourite of 2026 "Because no matter how far you run, she knew—no matter how hard you try to shed your old skin and become something else—the place you come from stays with you. It always calls you back." The second I finished Hemlock , I realized two things. First, this was going to be a marmite-book that I won’t be able to recommend to just any wide audience.

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Review: Humboldt Cut - Allison Mick
Genre: Horror Published: Erewhon Books, January 2026 My Rating: 2/5 stars On a semi-objective level, Allison Mick’s eco-horror debut deserves about 3/5 stars, so that’s the rating I settled on for now. However, on a personal level, I had more of a 2-star experience with it. This is not a bad book, but it’s a type of horror that’s not for me. Unfortunately, I would’ve known to avoid this beforehand, had the marketing been a little different. More on this later in the review.

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Review: Snake-Eater - T. Kingfisher
Genre: Cozy horror/fantasy Published: Titan Books, November 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars "'It was a small kindness you did' they said. 'But you and I are both small creatures, are we not?' So the kindness feels larger.'" In the afterword, T. Kingfisher herself describes Snake-eater as “The platonic ideal of a Kingfisher horror novel”, and honestly, I have nothing to add... Neither to that description of the essence of this book, nor to the formula of cozy-horror that is synonym

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Review: The Burial Tide - Neil Sharpson
Genre: Horror Published: Zando Press, September 2025 My Rating: 4.5 stars "Leave the dead. Look after the living." The Story: A woman wakes up inside a wooden coffin six feet underground, with no memory of her identity or supposed “death”. She desperately claws her way to freedom, emerging on the frozen ground of Inishbannock - an island just off the coast of Ireland. Not everyone in the small isolated island-community welcomes Mara’s return though... With the help of a han

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Suspiciously Specific #8: haunted-house-novels, but the house isn't your grandma's gothic mansion...
Echoes - Evie Wyld Genre : literary fiction Pagecount : 304 pages The haunted house is a modern-day appartment... Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. Rose/House - Arkady Martine Genre : sci-fi novella Pagecount : 115 pages The haunted house is a fully-automated futuri

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Reading Horror Novellas until I find a 5-star...
A reading-blog in which I attempt to beat my readingslump by reading recently released horror-novella's until I find a 5-star...

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Review: Ashes of August Manor - Blaine Daigle
Genre: Horror Published: Wicked House Publishing, June 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars "Everyone deserves to have someone at their side when...

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Review: The Croning - Laird Barron
Genre: Horror Published: Night Shade Books, 2012 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.” The Croning...

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Review: The Witch of Willow Sound – Vanessa F. Penney
Genre: (cozy) horror Published: ECW Press, September 2025 My rating: 3.5/5 stars I was originally drawn to this novel based on both its...

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Review: Overgrowth - Mira Grant
Genre: Sci-fi, Horror Published: Daphne Press (UK)/ Tor Nightfire (US), May 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars "We were the weeds of the...

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Review: The Sundowner's Dance - Todd Keisling
Genre: Horror, Supernatural Published: Shortwave Media, April 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars Fans of Iain Reid’s We Spread will delight in...

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Review: Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens – Lynn Hutchinson Lee
Genre: Eco-fiction, horror, novella Published: Stelliform Press, April 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars "The fen belongs to itself. Like us, it...

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Review: When the Bones Sing - Ginny Myers Sain
Genre: YA paranormal mystery Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, March 2025 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “A feeling that...

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Review: The Nameless Things - Ernest Jensen
Genre: horror Published : Rising Action Publishing, March 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars I truly wished I could justify a higher rating than...

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Review: The Lamb - Lucy Rose
Genre: Literary Fiction, Horror Published: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars To start off this review, I have to...

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Review: Root Rot - Saskia Nislow
Genre: Horror Novella Published: Creature Publishing, March 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars “He hadn’t really understood before, he mused...

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