A short trans horror story featuring a trans man suffering. It was dark and scary, but I feel I could have liked it better if it was longer and let us sit with the various horror scenarios a bit more, so the emotional punch of it all could have been increased. I would have also liked to know more about the villains in here. Interesting set up, but the ending left me a bit unsatisfied.
Also I want to add a TW for sexual assault for this one, which is not mentioned in the trigger warnings at the beginning of the story, but that I feel is necessary as the story does feature nonconsensual penetration and fondling of genitalia, even if it does not necessarily have a sexual connotation for the perpetrators.

The second thriller following Erin McCabe's dangerous existence as a lawyer. In this book she is stuck in a confusing case of online espionage when her client packs up and runs. Shortly thereafter an undercover detective approaches her about a case that seems to be connected to it and again she finds herself defending a transgender woman against a group of the rich and powerful, who want nothing more than to shut her up.
I quite enjoyed this book. The issues I had in the first book where taken care of (the mexican trans woman wasn't given a racist accent and her cultural heritage was not portrayed one-dimensionally and the bi-erasure was fixed, awknowleding it as a false idea and having Erin embrace her identity as a bisexual woman!) and the thriller aspect was tense and nailbite-worthy.
I also enjoyed the inclusion of some technological aspects and especially the respectful handeling of such a tough topic as the abuse that was handled here. I also liked that Mark got some more character and we found out a bit more about Swisher (still would love to know more about him though!). Erin's family played a bit less of a role this time around, but I found the handeling of her mom's cancer diagnosis to be well done. Particularly Erin's own insecurities of being a trans woman and this being her first relationship with a man post-transitioning and what people may think about him as a result also play a big role.
The only two issues I had was that the villains (again) were at points over-the-top villainous and evil and that some dialogues seemed a bit 101 trans education for a cis audience. Still I really enjoyed this thriller and I'm excited to start the third one!

TW: suicide, murder, sexual assault, child sexual assault, child pornography, cancer, transmisogyny, transphobia.

I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

I was quite excited to check out this horror short story collection, but unfortunately I found myself bored or underwhelmed by most of these short stories and wasn't able to find anything particularly intruiging in most of them. Most of the stories tend to follow pretty obvious horror tropes (lovecraftian cult, hungry haunted house, crazy cannibal killer), featuring women getting assaulted (and in general nearly always as victims), men being horrible (or sad), obvious and predictable twists and concepts that just weren't explored as deeply (or as darkly) as they could have been and thus a lot less horrifying. The only story I actually enjoyed in here was "A letter to my future corpse", a haunting story about recovering from abuse and trauma, a short story that was gross and sweet at the same time and included really fascinating descriptions of art. In general I feel like this short story collection suffered from trying to explore dark themes in it, without daring to actually dive into them. This is particularly true for "To taste her Flesh", a short story which features a haunting that attempts to tempt the MC into doing some truly despicable things (

Spoiler

such as sexually assaulting the husband of his unrequired crush who recently died

), but didn't dive deeply enough into the horror of such an act for the perpetrator, which cheapened it considerably to me. I also felt the same way about "In the Labyrinth", which also features

Spoiler

a weird tentacle (which read as non-consensual to me) sex scene and the ritualistic murder of the MC's wife

, but doesn't truly dive into the why, which could have added to this short story.
All in all unfortunately this was not a horror collection I enjoyed.
I took some notes on each short story and included trigger warnings as I was reading, which you can read here. Spoilers ahead:

Spoiler

Jealousy - a relatively disjointed story, jumping around in time repeatedly, the twist was preeetty obvious and to me it felt all in all rather boring, i did like the idea of a haunted bathtub and the fear of the drain was an interesting concept, but unfortunately that did not play as much as a role as I hoped it would, 2/5 tw murder, cheating

A letter to my future corpse - about recovering from abuse and trauma, cool art descriptions, gross and fucky and sweet, 4/5

I have swallowed sin - a haunting of a mentally ill person, not sure if the writing style wanted to give the impression of a child or a person with intellectual disabilities (mc was at least 16 years old), but it didnt sit right with me, the horror did not work for me either as it was just too vague and underexplored, 1/5 tw murder, ableism

In the labyrinth - weird lovecraftian erotic horror devoid of any real eroticism (featuring hot women w big tits getting fucked by our clueless stupid mc & the eldritch horrors) & his wife dies for manpain of our MC, really quite bad & not at all innovative, felt very 80s horror in its everything and so just wasn't at all interesting to me, 1/5 tw abduction, murder, rape (potentially, maybe just fucked up monster sex)

Cornelia - a man is kidnapped by a crazy cannibal killer and his wife, features women as victims and sex objects, misery but waaaay worse, 2/5

The incident at shore run road - a hungry house and the family it devours, okay, creepy if nothing special, 3/5, tw murder, suicide

To taste her flesh - a man grieving the loss of the woman he had a unrequited crush on confronts her surviving husband spurred on by a ghost, could have been fun if the author delved into the darkness instead of just hinting at it and hiding, tbh if you include an attempted rape from the rapists pov it has to make sense from a character perspective and here it absolutely did not, 2/5 stars, tw suicide, rape

Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

I have never read something by this author before and so maybe I went into this expecting the wrong things? Either way I found myself disappointed throughout most of the collection. This is probably because this 212 pages collection features 38 seperate pieces, including stories/poems/little essays and the longest piece is around 40 pages, so you can imagine what that means for the remaining 37.
There were some short stories I liked such as the 3 Suicide Notes included, which were emotional and beautiful, full of pain and love and hate and both heartbreaking and interesting to read. The lenght also worked for them. I also enjoyed Schrodinger's Cat, a haunting short story about what to do if your cat ran away into a parallel universe and your girlfriend went after it to bring it back and explores the question of if you can be sure who returned. I also enjoyed Chasing Bill, where a sentient mannequin foils the terrorist plans of a med student. And lastly I enjoyed Help Us, a very short but interesting look into a world ravaged by a virus and two young lovers, who seem to be immune, it gets quite dark towards the end and I enjoyed that! This is one of the short stories that worked really well, despite being so short.
Unfortunately the number of stories I didn't really connect to (mostly due to lenght (or you know, the lack thereof)) is a lot higher than the number of stories I enjoyed. There's a story in there that just feels like a retelling of Cabinet Man by Lemon Demon. But set in a museum. There's many stories about abusive man, lost and hurt women, a variety of ghosts (also ghost pirates in space!) that should have made me feel more than they did, but just didn't work for me due to being so incredibly short that I just couldn't really feel anything for the characters. Often the ends were abrupt, the stories low on detail and very dialogue heavy and the characters thus often stereotypical or underdeveloped.
And then there where two stories I disliked, including "Stockholm Syndrome A Love Story" a trite beauty and the beast retelling where the beast turns out to be abusive afterwards as well. It doesn't add anything to the genre and was incredibly boring and predictable. I also disliked "Adam's Apple", where a virus is spread through contaminated toilet paper that turns humans uncaring and is currently causing the apocalypse through turning them into stereotypical stoners. This would be no problem, if it didn't also include the fatphobic stereotype of "humanity grows fat and lazy and that's why they go extinct".
All in all I do believe that some of these short stories could have done better if they had been extended and there are quite a few promising ideas in here, but I think that throwing all of them into one collection together did them a disservice. I really did love the idea of ghost pirates. In Space! But I didn't connect to the story a lot due to it being so short and low on detail. I do think that the writing and the plot ideas have a lot of potential though and if you are interested in flash fiction you might get more out of this collection than I did.

Trigger warnings for suicide, rape, domestic abuse, suicide, medical abuse, vomiting, fatphobia and ableism.

Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

DITCHLAPSE/ [REALLY AFRAID] is a collection of poetry and one act plays exploring growing up, modern social media, trauma and mental health.
DITCHLAPSE mainly collects poetry, often using modern tiktok slang and exploring certain online trends, which I quite enjoyed. It explores certain online subcultures and seems to be more focussed on the author's recent/more current experiences.
My favorite pieces from Ditchlaps where "you say i'm delulu for explaining levels of dissaciation (b-movie titled "inside me, there are two wolves")", "you approach as the average person is a self-directing credit?" (including the wonderful line: "crying without tears is so clearpilled and angelgirl chique, like how could anyone think you did anything?"), the "interruptions" called "infomercial as the moment", exploring ads and existing online and "*~tommy's room~* as a TikTok live" (which felt very We're All Going to the World's Fair).
I did enjoy this first part of the book, but I didn't feel blown away yet. It was interesting poetry and some pieces definitely made very interesting use of words, but it hadn't yet fully touched me. [REALLY AFRAID] would change that.
[REALLY AFRAID] features some pieces that are connected and thus allow us to spend more time with certain thoughts, and the pieces features are exploring Tommy Wyatt's growing up, dissociation, trauma and identity.
The media referenced here was often horror, which made it a lot more interesting to me and some of the pieces will stick with me for a long time. I also enjoyed that some different forms of presenting poetry were employed here, such as making use of text overlaid over other text and a lot of empty space sometimes, which was very interesting to read.
My favorites here were "lachrymoe//lacuna, a series of one-act plays review of THE VACATION. A REVIEW FOR FANS OF SKINAMARINK (dir. Kyle Edward Bell), AND NON_FANS OF BUFFY: THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (dir. Joss Whedon), VERTIGO (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), & SLEEPAWAY CAMP (dir. Robert Hiltzik).", "The Vacation scene 1", "happy valentines day? love, schadenfreude", "are you an internet cryptic? (as told by your tweets)", "hey, have you ever considered the word "rewind" may drop from the next generation's lexicon", "you never said your favorite color is green?", "the physical exam, or an erasure?" + "the physical exam, or the interpretation", "wow! this could be a david firth video!", "the future as an omen" and "self-help guide to understanding dissociative identitiy disorder once you reached crisis mode. who are you: tommy, kyle or josha?".
As you can probably see from this long list of pieces I enjoyed I really, really enjoyed [REALLY AFRAID] and Tommy's writing style which managed to paint a vivid picture for most of the pieces. The growing up it portrays feels both nostalgic at points and yet so incredibly modern through its combination of some memories that seem to be from before the big technology change really arrived in everybodies hands vs the tiktok generation now. I really enjoyed seeing that dichotomy presented.
All in all this is a very intruiging collection of poetry and one I will be thinking about for a while.

TW: dissociation, self-harm, sleep paralysis, nightmares and night terrors