Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne: A lush, terrifying descent into the Void

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below is an immersive fantasy horror novel filled with lush worldbuilding, gruesome monsters, claustrophobic environments, and enough heart-pounding action to make you feel as though you’re trapped alongside its characters in the depths of the earth.

At the edge of the City of the Void lies a massive chasm that stretches miles underground. Known simply as the Void, its layers are filled with monsters, carnivorous plants, and dangers that become increasingly difficult to understand—and survive—as travelers descend. For Petra and Jade, two orphaned best friends living in the city’s slums, the Void is also a way out. They make money by guiding tourists who are willing to risk their lives in search of whatever treasures might be waiting below.

Continue reading “What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne: A lush, terrifying descent into the Void” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy: A Southern Gothic about family secrets and inherited expectations

Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s The Sisters of Crimson House is a Southern Gothic horror novel about a family of psychics, a haunted Memphis mansion, and the secrets that can shape a person’s entire understanding of who they are. I have to admit that I approached this book with some skepticism. Lately, just about every book I’ve read that has been compared to Practical Magic has turned out to be a dud for me, so when I opened the description of The Sisters of Crimson House and saw that comparison, I groaned. Out loud. But I had already received the ARC, so I figured I might as well give it a chance.

Fortunately, The Sisters of Crimson House turned out to be better than the recent Practical Magic comps that have disappointed me. It isn’t a book I would put in the same category as one of my favorites, but there was enough going on to keep me reading, and that’s something. At least I didn’t DNF this one.

Continue reading “The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy: A Southern Gothic about family secrets and inherited expectations” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan: When the perfect life becomes a horror story

Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife is a sharp, unsettling horror novel about the dangers lurking behind the perfectly curated image of domestic bliss, using social media, patriarchy, and the modern trad-wife movement as the raw material for a genuinely disturbing story. The novel follows journalist Jenny Kaplan to Black Swan Farm, where she expects to expose the deception behind trad-wife influencer Mia Wright’s idyllic online persona. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a nightmare in which nothing—and no one—is quite what it seems.

This is the second novel I’ve read this year with Trad Wife in the title, and I believe there’s at least one more out there that I haven’t read yet. That alone says something about how much cultural attention this particular phenomenon has received. The trad-wife trend has become a subject of endless discussion, particularly on social media, where women debate everything from the validity of choosing a traditional domestic role to the political implications of promoting that lifestyle to millions of followers. It’s also an excellent example of the way our cultural anxieties inevitably find their way into art, and particularly into fiction. We write about the things we are afraid of, fascinated by, angry about, or simply unable to stop discussing. And in Trad Wife, Langan turns all of that discomfort into horror.

Continue reading “Trad Wife by Sarah Langan: When the perfect life becomes a horror story” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Buzzard by Inez Ray: A dystopian future where exploitation never ends

Inez Ray’s Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian novel about reproductive control, corporate power, and the terrifying possibility that our technological future could look very different while the fundamental structures of human exploitation remain exactly the same.

Set in 2086, Buzzard imagines an American future in which the United States no longer exists, abortion is illegal, fertility is closely monitored, and corporations have effectively replaced government. Midwife Mae Bastet has spent seven years imprisoned in Buzzard, a private prison in the Sonoran Desert operated by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan. She was arrested for providing reproductive health care to women and separated from her two sons. Now she is trying to survive long enough to get back to them.

Continue reading “Buzzard by Inez Ray: A dystopian future where exploitation never ends” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman: Grief, strange creatures, and a world that keeps moving

Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers is an unusual and deeply thoughtful blend of memoir and speculative fiction that uses the arrival of a mysterious new species to explore grief, human nature, and the unsettling realization that the world keeps going even when your own world has changed forever.

A few months after the death of her mother, novelist Naomi Alderman installs a wildlife camera in the garden of her parents’ home. What it captures is something no one has seen before: a strange, badger-sized animal with a flat face and a long, trunk-like nose. Soon these creatures, called mimmoths, are appearing everywhere. They spread across the United Kingdom and then around the world, seemingly without explanation. They don’t behave like ordinary animals. They won’t take food from humans, they can’t be captured, and they seem to possess an intelligence and purpose of their own.

Continue reading “The Strangers by Naomi Alderman: Grief, strange creatures, and a world that keeps moving” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm: A haunting story of home, memory, and inherited trauma

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.

Continue reading “Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm: A haunting story of home, memory, and inherited trauma” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock: A witch, a familiar, and a relationship that gets increasingly uncomfortable

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.

Continue reading “Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock: A witch, a familiar, and a relationship that gets increasingly uncomfortable” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Incarnate by Alma Katsu: A chilling techno-horror take on The Picture of Dorian Gray

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.

Continue reading “Incarnate by Alma Katsu: A chilling techno-horror take on The Picture of Dorian Gray” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Call Off the Dark by Hallie Shepherd: A haunting thriller about grief, isolation, and the things that follow us

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.

Continue reading “Call Off the Dark by Hallie Shepherd: A haunting thriller about grief, isolation, and the things that follow us” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Antique Picker’s Daughter by Melanie Dugan: Survival, exploitation, and the gray areas of morality

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.

Continue reading “The Antique Picker’s Daughter by Melanie Dugan: Survival, exploitation, and the gray areas of morality” →