Tag: Book Reviews

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Not Your Final Girl by Mikayla Randolph review: A slasher that can’t outrun its own past

Mandy Webster

Seven years after a prom night tragedy, a group of former friends reunites at a lakeside cabin—and quickly proves that time hasn’t made them wiser, kinder, or even remotely interested in leaving the past behind.

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In Not Your Final Girl, Mikayla Randolph builds a setup that feels immediately familiar: estranged high school friends, a remote cabin with no cell service, and a long-simmering grudge waiting to boil over. Darcy, weighed down by guilt and depression, and Ashley, whose controlling cruelty defines nearly every interaction, anchor the story’s emotional center—if it can be called that. Around them is a cast of characters who, quite frankly, seem to actively dislike one another. Trust is nonexistent, and affection feels like an afterthought.

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Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman: A haunting portrait of family, control, and the quiet damage we call devotion

Mandy Webster

The most unsettling thing about Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman is how easily it convinces you that everything happening might, in some warped way, be justified—right up until it isn’t.

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Set against the crumbling infrastructure of a state-run psychiatric hospital in North Carolina at the turn of the millennium, Thurman’s debut follows the four Cross sisters—JJ, Caro, Mimi, and Denise—who have grown up on the grounds of Mercy Hill under the rule of their formidable mother, Lisa Cross, head of psychiatry and self-appointed savior of the institution. From the outside, it’s a story about mental healthcare in America and the slow dismantling of public systems. From the inside, it’s something far more intimate and far more disturbing. Because what this novel is really about is a mother who conscripts her children into her life’s work.

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The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean review: A haunting gothic tale that asks who deserves forgiveness

Mandy Webster

The past doesn’t stay buried in The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean—it claws its way back, dripping with grief and unfinished business. Set against the shadowy sprawl of Hong Kong’s infamous Kowloon Walled City, this Gothic-tinged novel blends folklore, memory, and vengeance into a story that lingers long after the final page. With its May 5, 2026 release, Dean once again proves she’s operating in a space all her own.

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At the center of the novel is Mercy Chan, a woman with no past—or at least none she can remember. Washed ashore with nothing, she builds a life for herself in Kowloon as a ghost talker, mediating between the living and the dead. It’s a fascinating premise, but what makes it work is the texture of Mercy’s world. Despite the grime, the danger, and the ever-present spirits, there’s an unexpected sense of familiarity here—a kind of eerie coziness that settles in as Mercy navigates her routines among the haunted alleyways.

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Honey by Imani Thompson: A sharp, unsettling debut that turns rage into something intoxicating

Mandy Webster

There’s a moment early in Honey by Imani Thompson—out May 5, 2026—when a tiny, impulsive act spirals into something irreversible, and from that point on, the novel never loosens its grip. This is a dark, provocative debut that knows exactly what it’s doing, luring you in with something almost playful before revealing just how far it’s willing to go.

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Just like its title, this book is delicious. Yrsa’s first kill is so sweet in its construction—unplanned, quick, and disturbingly easy. What makes it even more compelling is that it’s not really the act itself that kills the man, but her decision not to intervene once things go wrong. It’s petty. It’s spiteful. And it’s chilling in the way Yrsa immediately recognizes the opportunity in front of her and simply… lets it happen. That moment sets the tone for everything that follows.

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Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka: A haunted house story that refuses to play by the rules

Mandy Webster

The first time something feels off in Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka, it’s easy to dismiss—just like Tennessee Cherish does. A faucet left running. A misplaced object. A strange sense that something isn’t quite lining up. But as the novel unfolds, that quiet unease starts to loop in on itself, building into something far more deliberate—and far more unsettling—than it first appears.

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Set to release on May 5, 2026, Accumulation follows Tenn, a former documentary filmmaker turned stay-at-home mom, who relocates with her family to the kind of dream house that’s supposed to signal a fresh start. Instead, it becomes the backdrop for a slow, creeping unraveling. Her husband is largely absent, her children begin behaving in increasingly disturbing ways, and the house itself seems to resist settling into anything resembling normalcy.

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Five by Ilona Bannister: A tense moral experiment that puts the reader on trial

Mandy Webster

There’s something quietly unsettling about the opening premise of Five by Ilona Bannister—five strangers on a train platform, one of whom will be dead in minutes—and the novel wastes no time making you complicit in that outcome. From the first pages, you’re not just observing these characters; you’re weighing them.

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Set against the ticking clock of an approaching train, the novel stretches a matter of minutes across its entire length. It’s an ambitious structural choice, and at times, a challenging one. Bannister intersperses the present-moment tension with flashback chapters that unpack each character’s history—the struggling gambler, the abrasive elderly woman, the overwhelmed mother and her volatile child, the polished yet fractured businessman. These glimpses into their lives are essential to the book’s central question: who deserves to live?

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The Hill by Harriet Clark: A searching, unsettling novel about who gets to have a life

Mandy Webster

What if your life never quite begins—because you’ve been living inside someone else’s choices from the very start?

The Hill by Harriet Clark (releasing May 5, 2026) is the kind of novel that circles its questions rather than answering them outright, returning again and again to the same emotional terrain: what makes a life a life, and who gets to claim one. Through Suzanna Klein—whose mother is serving a life sentence in a hilltop prison for a failed act of radicalism—Clark builds a story that is at once intimate and expansive, tracing the quiet, often invisible ways generations shape one another.

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From childhood, Suzanna’s world is split cleanly in two. There is the prison, where Saturdays feel almost ceremonial, filled with children dressed as if for a party, and where life and death exist side by side in the form of a nursery and a cemetery. And then there is home, where she is raised by a grandmother who refuses to visit her own daughter and instead surrounds Suzanna with a rotating cast of elderly women—friends, acquaintances, and relics of a political past that still hums beneath their conversations. These women, many of them shaped by histories they rarely name outright, spend their days debating ideology and their nights quietly reckoning with the lives they did and didn’t live.

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Ways to Find Yourself by Angela Brown: A thoughtful, quietly surreal novel about identity, memory, and starting over

Mandy Webster

At 33, Grace Whittaker is convinced she’s finally figured herself out. By 38, that certainty has unraveled completely. In Ways to Find Yourself by Angela Brown (releasing May 1, 2026), that shift—subtle at first, then all-consuming—becomes the foundation for a story that explores how fragile our sense of self really is.

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The novel opens with Grace at 33, secure in who she believes herself to be. But when the narrative moves forward five years, everything has changed. Her mother has died, her writing career has stalled, and her marriage is quietly falling apart. Returning to Sea Drift, the beach town of her childhood, feels less like a retreat and more like a last attempt to make sense of a life that no longer fits.

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Dark is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce: A chilling, slow-burn horror that burrows under your skin

Mandy Webster

I knew exactly what I was getting into when I picked up Dark Is When the Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce—or at least I thought I did. After how deeply Something in the Walls unsettled me (to the point that I had to stop reading it before bed), I expected dread. I expected unease. What I didn’t expect was just how suffocating this story would feel once it took hold.

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Set in the English countryside, the novel follows Hazel, who returns to her hometown of Idless after a traumatic divorce, intending to quietly rebuild her life. But when she fails to reconnect with her sister Cathy as planned, concern quickly turns into something darker. The town whispers. The woods loom. And the sense that something has gone very, very wrong settles in almost immediately.

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Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung: A darkly funny thriller where chaos, connection, and a cleaver collide

Mandy Webster

Desperation, dark humor, and a wildly tangled web of secrets collide in Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, a novel that transforms a grieving widow’s fight for survival into something far more unexpected—and undeniably entertaining.

Mrs. Shim is simply trying to keep her family afloat after losing both her husband and her job at a butcher shop. But when she answers a vague job listing and discovers her knife skills are needed for something far more dangerous, her life takes a sharp turn into the world of contract killing. What follows is less a straightforward thriller and more a darkly comedic descent into chaos, where misunderstandings, hidden motives, and unlikely connections drive the story forward.

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One of the most striking elements of this novel is its tone. There’s an almost slapstick quality to the violence and the situations Mrs. Shim finds herself in, giving the story a surreal edge. The idea that her transition from butcher to assassin feels oddly natural is part of the book’s charm—it leans fully into its premise and invites the reader to do the same.

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