This is one doozy of a weird book that reads like Christie writing Poirot fanfic, jerking him out of the genteel English parlors of his comfort zone to make him jump off of trains and don disguises in search of a quartet of international supervillains bent on world domination and chaos for... reasons? I lost count of how many times Hastings passed out, only to awake safely after the action concluded to hear how Poirot narrowly thwarted doom yet again, and I cringed every time a caricature of a Chinese person appeared on page to speak in offensive dialect. Not Christie's finest moment.

The entirety of my Karen Carpenter knowledge before reading this book could be summed up in the span of four songs (only two of which I knew were Carpenters songs until I saw the titles again) and the broad strokes of how she died, but this book was no less interesting for my lack of both fandom and expertise. This is due to the author's personal involvement in Carpenter fandom and the way it influenced her as a member of a musical Filipino family and as a lesbian. Read at Mina's behest.

The wedding planning mishaps in this book gave me more vicarious anxiety than any fictional murder ever has.

Mallory O’Meara of the Reading Glasses podcast recommended that I read this one when I was looking for horror-adjacent Halloween books. It’s kind of like “The Monster Mash,” but half of the monsters are trying to summon the Elder Gods and the other half are trying to thwart them. Oh, and it’s narrated by Jack the Ripper’s dog, Snuff. A fun and kooky seasonal read. (Not to be confused with the Richard Laymon novel of nearly the same exact title.)

I find that I like each new Grady Hendrix novel more than the previous, and The Final Girl Support Group is no exception. In this one, Hendrix brings his characteristic high-concept approach to the slasher genre, examining the various ways survivors deal (or don't deal) with their trauma and taking the reader along for a tense, twisty road trip through wryly familiar slasher movie tropes. I don't think this is a book to wax philosophical about, but I had a great time ripping through it.

I decided to read Averno after Victoria Lee referenced Glück's poem "The Night Migrations" in A Lesson in Vengeance, the lesbian dark academia novel of my dreams. Then I remembered that I also read a Glück book, Meadowlands, during October of 2020, and read a poem of hers in a workshop I took circa October 2019, so it's possible that Glück is just my October poet now. And I'm not upset about it.

Averno is beautiful in a way that makes a kind of soul-sense even if I wasn't always sure that I was getting the brain-sense of all of the pieces. Glück melds mythology and autobiography and loss and loneliness in ways that feel familiar to me and my own poetic preoccupations, and I left this book thinking that I really need to buy a copy, because I'm going to want to come back to it again. It slots in with Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts on the list of books I've read over the past couple of years that feel Very Important to me in ways that haven't fully bloomed yet, but that I think will do so.

The pacing in the middle felt slower than I would have preferred and I had some other points of contention, but I liked the setting, the beginning and ending, and the scenes with Samson and the wildfolk. If you like dark fantasy, tales of hardship and retribution, and the aesthetics of The VVitch, then this is a book you'll want to add to your TBR.

This was my most anticipated 2021 release based on the cover art alone. The contents match the tone it sets, following a group of friends as their stay in a Heian mansion with a dark past goes awry, spiraling into a night of ghost stories, secrets revealed, yokai, and inevitable bloodshed. Khaw's combination of ornate language and cringe-inducing gore was unlike anything I've read recently. I think if this were a full-length novel instead of a novella, it would have been a perfect book. I think that a story so dependent upon festering resentments would have benefited from more space in which to establish them, and more time to draw out the moments of mounting dread.

I definitely thought about the ohaguro-battari in the early hours of this morning, when I had to walk from my bedroom to the bathroom in the dark.

Spookytime short stories!

The tales included here run the gamut from spooky fantasy to no-holds-barred gore. While every story won't be for everyone, this collection definitely offers something for every horror reader. Kind of like a trick-or-treat haul: You might not like the licorice, but there's plenty of chocolate in the bag, too. Hell, you might even find some full-size bars.

Here are my favorites:

"The Rye-Mother" by Curtis M. Lawson
A Halloween changeling story? You can't strike any closer to my heart or my literary interests than this. Immediate seasonal classic for me, right up there with The Halloween Tree and The Graveyard Book.

"Rusty Husk" by Evans Light
Engages the senses in the beautiful-but-terrible way good horror should. Reading this gave me the same shivery, creeped-out kind of fear that I felt reading scary stories as a kid. And that assonance!

"Between" by Ian Welke
Beautiful, atmospheric, dark urban fantasy steeped in Los Angeles. I've never been there, but I found the theme of change almost uncannily relatable in light of when I read this story.

"Many Carvings" by Sean Eads and Joshua Viola
A vaguely historical, fantasy-tinged tale that went in a wildly different direction than I thought it would. It's fun to still see an evil witch crop up from time to time.

"Offerings" by Joanna Koch
The thought of suddenly becoming the caretaker of three demonic children? Panic-inducing.

"Masks" by Lisa Lepovetsky
Lepovetsky masterfully builds suspense in a way that kept me reading just to find out what was going on, which slyly mimics the Halloween party at which the story is set. It, too, culminates in a final unmasking. I love when the macabre and attention to form meld so well.

This has to be one of the strangest books, structurally speaking, that I’ve ever read. Because I don’t know that much about Soviet history, I felt like I was missing some punchlines. (I appreciated the endnotes in my edition.) However, there is a large, talking cat who drinks vodka, and even I can understand that.