Amanda L. Webster is the author of If You Didn't See It Coming, One Bad Cat, Demons of the Night, DIY High, Valley of the Bees, and F-ing Freddy Fisher. She is also a writing teacher who lives part-time in a sorority house.
I’m excited to announce the release of my new picture book, How Do You Spell That Sound?—a playful celebration of language, imagination, and all the wonderfully strange sounds that don’t always fit neatly into words.
Have you ever heard a sound and thought, “How do you even spell that?”
A sneeze. A crash. A buzzing bee. The sound of something squishing, popping, rattling, or roaring. We have plenty of words for sounds, but sometimes the best way to capture a sound is to invent one of our own.
Some stories teach us about history by giving us facts. Others make us feel what it means to live through that history. Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm belongs firmly in the second category. This lyrical, unsettling debut follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the history of their family, the loss of their ancestral home in Haifa, and the supernatural consequences of a trauma that has never really been allowed to end.
It is a heart-wrenching story, but it is also an important one. There are some subjects that fiction can illuminate in ways that straightforward nonfiction cannot, because fiction allows us to inhabit the emotional reality of an experience rather than simply learning about it. Helm uses the conventions of the haunted-house story to explore displacement, cultural erasure, generational trauma, and the complicated meaning of home. The result is a novel in which the supernatural elements are disturbing, but the real-world horrors behind them are even more so.
There is an important difference between a story that deliberately leaves some things unanswered and a story that leaves readers unsure what is happening because the narrative has not given them enough information. Both kinds of stories can be confusing, but they create very different kinds of confusion. One invites interpretation; the other makes it difficult to understand the story at all.
This distinction matters because writers are often encouraged to trust their readers. We are told not to over-explain, not to resolve every mystery, and not to tell readers exactly what a story means. That is good advice when the writer is deliberately creating ambiguity. It becomes bad advice when the writer uses “ambiguity” to excuse a story that is simply difficult to follow.
There is something undeniably fun about a novel in which a college student is secretly a cat, falls in love with a witch, and discovers that the two of them are connected by a dark magical history. Strange Bedfellows, Amanda Mortlock’s debut novel, has an inherently strange and entertaining premise, and for much of the book, I was perfectly happy to go along for the ride. This is not a novel that is trying to be deeply literary, and it doesn’t need to be. At its best, it is dark, steamy, weird, and playful in exactly the ways its premise promises to be.
Unfortunately, the further I got into the novel, the more its problems began to outweigh its charms. Strange Bedfellows follows Cleo, a college student who has an impossible secret: sometimes she becomes a cat. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, the attraction between them is immediate. Things become considerably more complicated when Wes discovers that the cat who has been part of his life is actually Cleo. Even more complicated is the revelation that Wes is a witch and Cleo is his familiar.
In today’s author interview, Meg Howrey discusses Body Language, her latest novel about Alzheimer’s, caregiving, family conflict, and the difficult question of how we honor a person’s wishes when they can no longer make decisions for themselves.
When I finished Body Language, I found myself thinking about it long after I’d put the book down—not because it offers an easy answer to the difficult questions at its center, but because it refuses to. Howrey’s novel asks what it means to honor someone’s autonomy while also forcing us to consider the very real emotional, financial, and practical costs that can fall on the people left to provide care.
Meg Howrey is the author of Body Language, which released September 1, 2026.
What I especially appreciated about the novel was the way Howrey lets each of the three sisters—Sloane, Laurel, and Nanette—have a legitimate perspective. None of them is simply the voice of reason while the others are being selfish or misguided. Their feelings about their mother’s wishes are tangled up with their own histories, fears, relationships, and ideas about what they can realistically take on. And somehow, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Body Language is also genuinely funny in places.
The most frightening thing about Alma Katsu’s Incarnate isn’t the deepfake technology, the violence, or even the possibility that an artificial person might become more real to the world than the person who created her. It’s the realization that the world social media creates around us may already be an illusion—and that we are remarkably willing to believe it is real.
Incarnate is Katsu’s modern reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, transplanted from the world of decadent Victorian society into the age of influencers, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence. Dorothy Wagner has spent her life wanting to be seen. When she takes a job with a brilliant visual effects artist whose company is developing cutting-edge deepfake technology, she discovers a way to turn that desire for recognition into something much bigger. In secret, she uses her employer’s technology to create Isabella, an impossibly beautiful girl who takes social media by storm.
Sometimes grief makes us do things we would never do if we were thinking clearly. In Hallie Shepherd’s Call Off the Dark, one grieving widow makes a series of increasingly questionable decisions that leave her isolated on a remote farm with a husband she barely knows—and eventually face-to-face with a man who is supposed to be dead.
Call Off the Dark is an atmospheric thriller that blends psychological suspense, supernatural uncertainty, and a surprisingly tender story about love and loss. The result is a strange and unsettling novel that kept me engaged precisely because I was never entirely sure what was happening—or who I could trust.
There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a woman finally decide she’s had enough. In revenge thrillers, that moment can take a lot of forms: a carefully plotted act of vengeance, a vigilante mission, a long-buried secret coming to light, or simply a woman realizing that the man who has controlled her life no longer gets to call the shots.
These ten revenge thriller novels put women at the center of that reckoning. Some are dark and disturbing, some are wickedly funny, and some blur the line between justice and vengeance until you’re not entirely sure who you’re rooting for. But they all tap into that irresistible fantasy of watching bad men finally face consequences—and letting the women decide what those consequences should be.
When lonely true crime fan Catherine thinks she has finally found a way to make a difference, she begins a secret mission to track down men who have escaped justice and make sure they can’t hurt anyone else. But as her carefully planned encounters with dangerous men become increasingly elaborate, Catherine’s quest for revenge forces her to confront the darker side of her own obsession.
What happens when the person who saves you is also the person taking advantage of you? That question sits at the heart of Melanie Dugan’s The Antique Picker’s Daughter, a compelling novel about survival, exploitation, and the uncomfortable space between doing good and doing harm. Releasing September 15, 2026, the novel follows Frankie, a young woman living on the streets of Toronto, who finds an unlikely protector in Francis, an older man who teaches her how to make money buying and selling collectibles and small antiques.
When winter approaches, Frankie is fortunate—or perhaps simply less unfortunate than she could have been—to cross paths with Francis. He takes her off the streets and gives her food and a place to sleep. In return, she becomes part of his business, traveling with him through small towns and villages across southern Ontario as they acquire items to resell for a profit. Francis teaches Frankie the rules of the game, and she proves herself to be remarkably capable at it.
There’s something in the woods, and it has been waiting for someone to notice. Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is an atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, guilt, missing children, and an ancient presence lurking in the woods. The slow-burn mystery kept me reading, but the rushed final act and underwhelming reveal kept the novel from reaching its full potential.
In Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait, the woods surrounding Devil’s Den State Park are more than a backdrop. They are a presence—ancient, watchful, and seemingly hungry. Fifteen years after Audrey Figg’s younger brother, Benny, disappeared from the park, she has made a life for herself among the very trees that swallowed him. As a park ranger with expertise in wilderness search and rescue, Audrey has turned her grief into a vocation, spending her days protecting hikers and searching the backcountry for the person she has never stopped hoping to find. When a young girl named Ivy disappears from the same woods, Audrey sees too many similarities to Benny’s disappearance to believe it is a coincidence.
