The Neurospicy Bean

  While this book isn’t doing anything particularly new or unique, I thought that what it is doing, it does well. In particular, it’s an effective, if not particularly subtle, critique of the true crime genre obsession. It’s set at a true crime podcast’s competition to find the remains of a serial killer (this doesn’t seem like it can possibly be legal for a recent case, but whatever), and over the course of the novel we watch the competitors slowly unravel. Whether it’s a desire for power or romanticizing the killer, the distance between the competitors and the subject of their obsession slowly narrows, and although there’s a supernatural element at play, the reader is left to wonder how much of that unraveling is because of the supernatural and how much is simply the consequence of a culture that idolizes murderers. Balancing this out somewhat, though, is Caroline, who uses true crime as a processing mechanism for her very real trauma. This book does a nice job of walking the lin...

Unfortunately it’s been a few months since I read this, so I just don’t remember it as well as I would have liked to (though that’s in part because some of the stories just aren’t terribly memorable). So I can’t do a detailed review of each story. The three that I remember most clearly are “Kushtuka” (Mathilda Zeller), “Navajos Don’t Wear Elk Teeth” (Conley Lyons), and “Snakes Are Born in the Dark” (D.H. Trujillo). Each one carried a nice eeriness to it, each in a very distinct way. But oddly, I actually think the major highlight of this book was the foreword by Stephen Graham Jones. I don’t really have the words to describe it, but it is easily the part of the book that has stayed with me the most. There’s an intensity to it, a really excellent take on the horror genre, and a fascinating connection between Indigenous history and horror. All the stories were fine to read, but the introduction is the absolute most important part. If you don’t read anything else, read that. Otherwise, wh...

  Hmmm so many complicated thoughts on this one. I genuinely love the premise – anything with prehistoric creatures is an automatic draw for me. In fact, all of the bits of this that were original were pretty compelling. But man, as soon as it got into the traditional thriller elements, there were some problems. Most importantly, Cash was an incredibly one-dimensional cliche of a strong woman. She had no personality beyond being offended by men doing things for her. She kept dropping hints about some kind of incident in her past, but then it never actually got revealed? And then the sheriff was nearly as bad. Take a generic cop, put a cowboy hat on him, and that’s about the impression I got. All the characters were pretty much along these lines; every interpersonal dynamic was predictable. Also, content warning for animal death. Without spoiling anything, there was a scene I found deeply upsetting as far as that goes. But the fundamental concept was great, and there was clearly a t...

  I feel kind of betrayed by this book. I mean, there is SO MUCH POTENTIAL here, right? There’s nothing I love more than a good wintery horror story when I’m home for winter break (yes I read this book six months ago it’s fine), and this anthology is just packed with talent. So it should have been absolutely amazing. And yet it was just…meh? I’d go through them one by one, but only a couple have actually stuck in my head enough to really comment. “The Mawkin Field” was really interesting and built a real sense of dread throughout the story, but then it just…ended without really getting anywhere.  In fact, that was probably my main problem with most of these stories. They had interesting ideas for the most part, but almost none of them really had any grip to them, and the endings were mostly confusing instead of scary. The one that I think was the strongest was “The Lord of Misrule.” It was creepy and disturbing, and the ending was actually comprehensible, which, you know, is k...

  Honestly I don’t even know how to explain what the plot of this book was. Basically, our main character Felicity has returned to her prep school after the death of her girlfriend. When she arrives she discovers that famous teen author Ellis Haley now lives in the same dorm as her. Ellis is working on a book about the “Galloway Five,” a group of suspected witches who died gruesome deaths at the school. Felicity gets drawn into helping Ellis with her method writing as Ellis tries to prove to Felicity that she’s not actually being haunted by her dead girlfriend, and things just get really, truly unhinged. This book was trying so hard to be dark academia that it just came across a bit self-conscious, and all the pieces didn’t quite fit together in a way that made sense. Now I have to admit that it had the misfortune of coming right after quite possibly the best book I’ve read this year, so my perspective was probably warped, but I also just generally had a really difficult time getti...

This book’s major failing is that the ending was tonally completely inconsistent with the entire rest of the book. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: endings are the trickiest part of a horror novel. My complaint is usually that they’re too confusing and hard to follow. However, the other problem that tends to crop up is an overly happy ending. A horror story cannot have a genuinely happy ending, in my opinion, to be really effective. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that it wrapped things up far too nicely to be a proper horror ending. It took this wonderful, atmospheric, horrifying story about the prices people are willing to pay for security, and then ended in a jarringly cheerful way. It’s like Hide, if Hide didn’t interrogate itself at all and assumed that yes, sacrificing people who can’t consent to preserve a traditional lifestyle is a normal and valid thing to do.  This probably comes across as very harsh, and most of the book doesn’t deserve that; like I s...

  This was so thoroughly not what I was expecting it to be. We’re introduced right off the bat to Tamsin, who’s just the most irritating girlboss, treats all her coworkers like crap, and also is working to conceal from the public the fact that the city is sinking and no one knows why but it might be related to her research. As I said. Girlboss. But then an apparent clone of her shows up from the door that has mysteriously appeared in her basement and things get REALLY WEIRD. A lot of the book (maybe more than necessary) is spent watching Tamsin’s classic descent into madness. Which she also works to conceal from everyone around her, including her handler, Lachlan. I have to say, Tamsin’s relationship with Lachlan (and Lachlan as a character) was actually the highlight of the book for me, and I really wish there had been more of it. It became shockingly sweet and gentle, and also I really want a tall hot lady with a prosthetic arm to come busting into a basement to rescue me.  ...

       So once in a while there will be a detail at the beginning of a book that sort of sets me against it and I can just never get over it, and that happened here. Basically the entire premise of the book is that the main character, Jade, has to go stay with her dad in Vietnam in the French colonial house he’s renovating so that he’ll pay for her tuition at UPenn. She explains that she’s lied to her mom that tuition is fully covered when in fact it’s actually still around $30,000 for her freshman year, but she doesn’t want her mom to have to take out loans, and that she has no money for her own tuition because it all went to school application fees.      So, I happen to have some quasi-personal experience with this, because my girlfriend actually goes to UPenn and most of her tuition is covered by financial aid. I actually directly asked her how much financial aid a student coming from a family with three children raised by a single mother who works ...

  I gotta be honest, I simply have no feelings about this book. I read it because it was on my NetGalley app and because I don’t like DNFing books, but I really didn’t care much about the characters or the plot or any of it. The social commentary was kind of on the nose, the plot was confusing, the horror uninspiring, and the characters hard to tell apart. Plus I’m generally not a fan of demonic horror and magic systems in the first place; I think it’s really difficult to keep them from becoming contrived and to avoid getting bogged down in all the religious context. Not to mention most people either don’t find the devil to be an inherently frightening concept anymore, or are uncomfortable with the Biblical undertones (in my case, a bit of both). And there was just nothing about this book that addressed any of those issues. There wasn’t anything that I aggressively took issue with either; I just have no real thoughts or feelings about any of it. What I’m looking for in a book is so...

  I have two slightly silly bones to pick with this book before I get into the actual meat of the review. First, it’s pitched as “Scream meets Clueless.” I disagree; I think it’s much more like Scream meets Heathers, with its sardonic social commentary and campy theatrics. So take that for what it’s worth, marketing team. Second, and somewhat more meaningfully: the title of the book stems from the story’s serial killer’s schtick, which is to leave a note on the bodies of his victims saying “Your lonely nights are over.” The serial killer is nicknamed Mr. Sandman, after the song “Mr. Sandman,” where the line your lonely nights are over ostensibly came from. Except…it’s not? I happened to hear the song purely by coincidence while I was partway through the book, and the line is definitely “your lone some nights are over.” I checked every single version and cover of the song I could find, including the original from 1950-something, and in every one it was lonesome, not lonely. And I ...

  (NetGalley eARC) I really loved the concept of this book – there’s such a long, complicated history of queerness in horror that an anthology like this absolutely makes sense. Unfortunately, the execution of this one just wasn’t what I wanted. The main thing is that every single one of them needed to be longer. They needed more room to establish characters, lore, relationships, and atmosphere – or they needed to try to do fewer of those things. Most of the stories attempted to cover them all, which is just too much for the length of these stories. In some of the stories the ‘horror’ element felt like little more than a set dressing to set up the story the author really wanted to tell. The really frustrating thing is that every single story had so much potential, and some of them had genuinely creepy endings. But because they were so short and tried to accomplish so much, none of them landed the way I wanted them to. Also, I wanted the tone to be overall a little bit more cohesive,...

  It sometimes takes me a little while to figure out exactly how I feel about a book. Not so with this one. By halfway in, I knew I absolutely loved it and the second half did not disappoint. The one thing I will say is that calling it horror isn’t quite right; it’s a ghost story but that’s really secondary, and there’s nothing I found more than mildly spooky. But it was still a phenomenal ghost story. I loved the way Taylor’s story tied in and I loved Jaime and Theo’s relationship as well as the friendship between all three characters. Basically the book opens with Theo finding Jaime mysteriously trapped in a house in the woods, and Taylor is off doing her own thing. But soon they get brought together to solve not just Jaime’s imprisonment, but the story behind the house. Like I said, the friendship between the three of them was so fun to read. The book also did a great job of addressing racism and homophobia and how they impact the characters’ lives without feeling heavy-handed o...

  This review is based on an eARC provided by the early review platform NetGalley. This book just confused me so much. As far as writing style it wasn’t necessarily actively bad, but it wasn’t good either. But the plot. I don’t understand it at all. I can’t really explain my issues with it without going into spoilers, so spoilers below. Okay, first and foremost, WHY WAS THE INCEST PLOTLINE NECESSARY? The dynamic between Gabriel and Lodie was already super creepy because, you know, he was her high school teacher, and then it turns out they’re related?? Why?? It was so icky and I just don’t understand what it contributed to the plot. Honestly I don’t know what most of the decisions in this book contributed to the plot, maybe because the characters weren’t very realized at all. With Gabriel, it felt like the reader was just supposed to magically understand why he was so messed up, but it wasn’t clear at all. And of course with Lodie, the book ends with her somehow magically sending th...

  Holy heck these books just get bleaker and bleaker. Which of course means I love them. This one picks up a bit after Into Charybdis with Cher Hunt, Shy’s sister. A journalist, Cher wants to uncover what exactly happened to Shy, and it turns out to be a lot more than she bargained for. This book isn’t nearly as gory and violent, but it still takes an incredibly cynical view of politics. Which, fair enough, although it does get kind of frustrating, because why are these people just making the same stupid decisions over and over again, knowing full well what happened to the people before them? But again, fair enough – people haven’t exactly done a ton to disprove that. But on the other hand, because everyone didn’t die immediately, this book actually had room for more relationships to develop, and they were quite nice to read about, especially Davis’s relationships with just about everybody. I haven’t got a lot else to say honestly, other than that this is just a really fun thriller...