"Perseverance is key. The price of success is hard work, so that whether you win or lose, you can be proud that you have applied the best of yourself to the task at hand."

Josie Schuller: a mother, a wife, a homemaker, and an assassin. Her husband has no idea that in addition to cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, and hosting his sleazy boss, beautiful and ruthless Josie is also excellent at stabbing and hammering people to death. A 1960s housewife is the perfect smoke screen, because who could possibly think that these women are capable of something like that?

Jones's art is the cherry on an ice cream sundae. Combined with Allred's and Madsen's color work, it captures the time period perfectly with a great color palette and lively action scenes. The story isn't always perfect, but it proved itself by withstanding a re-read. Hopefully the series will continue at some point, but until then I'll just love this vibrant collected edition. There's also a movie in the works!

3.5 stars
Some of you may know that I'm not good at keeping up with new releases and not that interested in doing it either. However, I did a rare thing recently and bought not one but two new books for my Kindle, because I desperately wanted something different than what I already had in there.

The other was Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (really excited to get into that soon), and the other caught my eye, because Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism (2016) was pretty fun. He also wrote a book about old horror paperbacks, so a novel about slasher films should be good, right?

It was! I actually liked this even more than MBFE, because not only is it clearly for adults, but it's also very aware of the genre it juggles with and has well-constructed characters who are all interesting in their own way. Regular readers of thrillers and horror might enjoy the twists and turns as well, but the story is first and foremost a nice homage to the classic Friday the 13th type of horror and filled with references to the familiar tropes. The killer's identity wasn't as big of a surprise as I would have hoped, but I do appreciate that there was effort to create several twists.

2.5 stars
Oops, clearly I'm not that into reading/posting if I find a good TV show or if I focus on movies. Let's get back to books now, and all the way to the prehistoric age!

I'm usually more mindful about my book purchases, but I'm only human and sometimes I make mistakes. Creatures caught my eye because of the beautiful cover, but I've also been meaning to read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, so I thought it would be fun to start with this.

Clearly I overestimated how much I would like to read dinosaur poetry or scientific articles. I generally like Valancourt's publishing choices, though, and there were still pieces that stood out: The Monster of Lake Lametrie is kind of Doctor Moreau-ish and has a creepy ending, whereas The Dragon of St. Paul's is an entertaining adventure about London getting attacked by a pterodactyl. There was a Doyle story as well, but I'm expecting The Lost World to be better.

I'm pretty exhausted from this ride, so I don't know when I will have the opportunity to go through my notes to write a review of some kind, but until then: everyone should read this.