Tag: Book Reviews

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Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker: A haunting premise that never quite sinks its teeth in

Mandy Webster

The promise of Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker is immediate and irresistible: a blood-soaked, myth-laced horror novel where two lives—separated by centuries—intersect through a house that shouldn’t exist.

Set across two timelines, the novel follows Lee Turner in 2026, fleeing to his father’s secluded home in Japan after a brutal, inexplicable act of violence, and Sen, a young samurai in 1877 living in fear of both imperial soldiers and something far worse within her own home. The house behind the sword ferns becomes the connective thread between them—a place where reality bends, ghosts linger, and something buried refuses to stay that way.

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Despite the title, though, this isn’t quite the gothic experience I expected. Going in, I anticipated the kind of creeping dread that lingers long after you’ve put the book down—the kind that makes you think twice about turning off the lights. Instead, the horror here leans heavily into blood and gore, but never quite lands with emotional or psychological weight. There’s a noticeable fairy tale quality to the storytelling that creates distance rather than immersion. It’s vivid, yes—but it rarely feels real enough to truly unsettle.

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Molka by Monika Kim: A slow-burn descent into voyeurism, power, and the cost of being seen

Mandy Webster

There’s a particular kind of dread that creeps in when you realize the person watching didn’t just stumble into power—they built it themselves. In Molka by Monika Kim, that realization lands early and lingers long after the final page.

Set in a seemingly ordinary Seoul office building, the novel introduces Junyoung, an IT technician who has taken surveillance far beyond anything sanctioned or accidental. The cameras he watches aren’t part of the company’s security system—they’re his. Installed deliberately, carefully, and invasively throughout the building, including in restrooms, they give him total control over the private lives of the women around him. This isn’t passive observation. It’s calculated, obsessive, and deeply violating.

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That distinction matters. It transforms Junyoung from someone abusing access into someone who has engineered an entire ecosystem of control.

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Dear Monica Lewinsky asks who really owns temptation

Mandy Webster

Julia Langbein’s sharp, irreverent novel reclaims female desire from the shame imposed upon it.

Some novels arrive with a premise so startlingly original that you immediately lean closer. Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein is one of them—a novel that is at once profound and wickedly irreverent, using the ghost of Monica Lewinsky as both witness and guide in an excavation of female desire, shame, memory, and blame. Set for release on April 14, 2026, this is a book that refuses easy moral judgments. Instead, it asks a more difficult and necessary question: when women are punished for desire, whose sin is it really?

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Forty-year-old Jean Dornan has never truly escaped the summer of 1998. While studying abroad in France as a college student, she entered into an affair with her much older professor, David—a married man and a figure of institutional authority. When he reappears decades later with an invitation to his retirement celebration, Jean is forced back into the emotional wreckage of that summer. What follows is not merely a reckoning with memory, but a confrontation with the story she has been telling herself for years.

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Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar: A piercing look at journalism, grief, and the stories we choose not to tell

Mandy Webster

The most unsettling part of Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar isn’t the violence—it’s everything that gets ignored in its wake. Releasing April 14, 2026, this literary novel follows foreign correspondent Rita Das as she chases the biggest story of her career in a war-torn Middle East, all while quietly unraveling under the weight of grief, guilt, and a life she refuses to apologize for.

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Rita is not an easy protagonist to pin down, and that’s precisely what makes her compelling. She is fiercely independent, deeply ambitious, and committed to living life on her own terms—even when those choices isolate her from nearly everyone around her. The double standard is impossible to ignore: if Rita were a man, her career-first mindset and emotional detachment would be praised. Instead, she’s judged at every turn, with only her late mother—a doctor who lived similarly on her own terms—offering any real understanding. That absence lingers, because grief is one of the novel’s most persistent undercurrents.

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Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill: A strange, fungal dystopia about what marriage takes

Mandy Webster

If you’re expecting a straightforward horror novel, Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill will catch you off guard—and that disorientation feels entirely intentional. Set in a near-future enclave cut off from a ruined outside world, the novel follows Nicole, a young woman raised in isolation and taught to fear both the world beyond her window and the fungal growths that cover her own body. When she’s married off to a man she barely knows and relocated to his decaying mansion on the edge of town, her life doesn’t expand—it contracts. What unfolds from there is less a traditional plot and more a slow, unsettling unspooling of identity, control, and buried desire.

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Let’s get this out of the way: this book is weird. Not in a gimmicky, shock-value way, but in a deeply immersive, almost disorienting sense. Cranehill builds a world shaped by plague and patriarchal control, where fungi have merged with human bodies to the point that many women are more mushroom than flesh. The men, somehow spared the worst of the infection, have constructed an insular society that positions them as protectors—though what they’re really protecting is their own authority.

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These Familiar Walls by C.J. Dotson: A haunted house story where the real danger isn’t the ghost

Mandy Webster

The scariest part of These Familiar Walls by C.J. Dotson isn’t what lurks in the shadows—it’s the uneasy realization that the person at the center of the story might be just as unsettling. Set across two timelines, the novel begins in 1998, when a lonely preteen named Amber forms a troubling bond with a new boy in town—one whose fascination with fire and lack of remorse immediately set him apart. That relationship is brief but deeply consequential. More than two decades later, in 2020, the past comes crashing back when that same boy—now a man—returns, leaving Amber’s parents dead before meeting his own violent end inside her childhood home.

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What follows is a familiar but effective setup: Amber inherits the house and moves in with her husband and children, hoping to rebuild some sense of normalcy. Instead, she finds herself unraveling. Strange occurrences blur the line between psychological stress and something more sinister—whispers in the dark, reflections that won’t cooperate, and trancelike episodes that suggest the house is holding onto far more than memories.

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The Insomniacs by Allison Winn Scotch: When sleepless strangers become unlikely allies

Mandy Webster

In The Insomniacs by Allison Winn Scotch, releasing April 7, 2026, four strangers find themselves drawn together during the quietest hours of the night, gathering at an all-night diner in New York City to talk through the worries that keep them awake. What begins as a series of late-night conversations gradually turns into a fragile friendship—until one of them disappears, turning their insomnia-fueled support group into an amateur investigation.

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The setup is appealing right away. Sybil, a recently empty-nested mom; Zeke, a professional baseball player sidelined by injury; Julian, a reserved retiree trying to repair his relationship with his daughter; and Betty, the guarded diner waitress who serves their endless coffee, couldn’t be more different from one another. Yet insomnia—and the strange intimacy of late-night conversations—creates the space for them to open up in ways they can’t with the people already in their lives.

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Harmless Women by Rebecca Sharpe: A twisty thriller with a rebellious Thelma & Louise vibe

Mandy Webster

What happens when a professional con artist finishes a job—only to walk straight into a murder scene that turns everything upside down? Harmless Women by Rebecca Sharpe, releasing April 7, 2026, is a fast-paced thriller built around a clever premise. Avalon Dale is a skilled grifter who targets wealthy victims, sedates them, drains their bank accounts, and alters their appearance so they can’t easily prove who they are when they wake up. Her latest victim is Primrose Meath, a wealthy workaholic whose chaotic personal life makes her seem like an ideal target.

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By the time the story really kicks into gear, Avalon has already completed most of the job. She returns to Prim’s house to tie up loose ends and instead finds Prim’s cheating husband dead. The situation quickly spirals when a witness reports seeing a suspicious bald woman at the house, suggesting Prim may have been kidnapped. As the investigation unfolds, however, the police begin to suspect that Prim may have been involved in the scheme all along.

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The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan: A haunting debut where myth and fear blur in the Irish woods

Mandy Webster

Two children walk into the woods, and only one returns. From that chilling premise, The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan unfolds into an atmospheric psychological mystery that lingers long after the final page. Releasing April 7, 2026, this debut crime novel turns a rural Irish legend into something far more unsettling: a story where the real danger might be human—or something else entirely.

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Set in southwest Ireland in 1995, the novel opens with the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough. She vanished while playing the so-called “Counting Game” in the forest with her younger brother, Jack. The rules are simple: go into the woods, count to ten, and stay hidden. The problem is that only Jack comes out. Worse still, he refuses to speak about what happened.

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Love by the Book by Jessica George: A heartwarming story about friendship, growth, and unexpected connections

Mandy Webster

I’ll admit, when I first opened Love by the Book by Jessica George on my tablet, I paused. “Ew, a romance novel—why did I sign up for that?” I thought. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance, but it isn’t usually my cup of tea. I read the summary again and saw that it was about friendship—better, but still, what? Long story short, I was hesitant going in. But by the end, I was so glad I had given it a chance. There is so much more to this story than what the cover summary hints at, and once I got into it, I was fully invested.

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The novel follows Remy and Simone, two women at very different points in their lives. Remy, fresh off the success of her debut novel, finds herself suddenly adrift as her closest friends move away, start families, or return to toxic relationships. Her creative spark is gone, and with it, her sense of belonging. Simone, meanwhile, has long relied on her independence, enjoying her well-paying side gig and a close relationship with her family. But when a hidden aspect of her life comes to light, she faces isolation for the first time. When these two women collide in a bookstore, neither is expecting the connection that follows—but both may find the friendship they didn’t know they were missing.

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