howlinglibraries's Reviews (1.85k)

When I was asked to review Next Year in Havana, it was a tough choice to make. It seemed so far out of my wheelhouse and I’ve had bad luck in the past with celebrity book club picks, so I had no clue what to expect from this! Since I make a habit of not accepting review requests for books I don’t expect to rate favorably, I thought on this one a little, but when I learned that the story was (at least partially) inspired by the author’s own Cuban heritage, I decided to give it a chance—and I am so happy that I did.

To be in exile is to have the things you love most in the world—the air you breathe, the earth you walk upon—taken from you.

First, let me talk a little bit about the writing in this book. I typically don’t do any sort of permanent annotations in my books, but when I found myself reaching for my fourth page tab in only three pages, I gave up and grabbed a highlighter. My friends, my copy of this book is now at least 35% pink, because it seemed like almost every single page had quotable phrases or passages that hit me in the chest with how beautiful, poignant, or outright powerful they were.

Havana is like a woman who was grand once and has fallen on hard times, and yet hints of her former brilliance remain, traces of an era since passed, a photograph faded by time and circumstance, its edges crumbling to dust.

Some of my favorite facets to the story were the ways in which Havana herself—and Cuba, by extension—were treated less like a place, and more like a character. As we alternate perspectives between Marisol’s journey and Elisa’s letters, we watch Havana shift and fall into disarray, becoming something largely unrecognizable, and it brings about the most tragic sense of mourning in the ways the region is described.

“Very few can afford the luxury of being political in Cuba.”
“And no one can afford the luxury of not being political in Cuba.”

What surprised me most about Next Year in Havana was how immensely political it is. Don’t let the soft, lovely cover and synopsis fool you into expecting a love story—while there are two paralleling romances woven through, more than anything, this story is a forlorn love song to the freedoms that Cubans have been denied by both Batista and Castro over the decades. Intermingled with the discussions of tragedies, violent oppression, and missed opportunities, there is also a stream of incredibly relevant commentary on racism in Cuba and the US, the United States’ part played in causing the struggles of Cuban citizens, and the sense of dysphoria in the hearts of Cuban exiles and their descendants as they are torn between missing their home and feeling unwelcome there for having left.

We are silk and lace, and beneath them we are steel.

There’s also a beautiful message of feminism and the difficulties that come not only with being a woman in general, but also specifically with being a woman in Cuba during the political unrest. Likewise, there are pieces of dialogue regarding the classism in Cuba—both in Elisa’s and Marisol’s time frames—and the fact that the Cuban citizens in the modern sides of the story largely feel that they have been abandoned to make room for tourists. While many of these scenes are tough to read about, they open up space for us to see the fire in the hearts of the people who want to better their home in any way possible, at any cost.

I’ve become unmoored with my grandmother’s passing; Ana is right—my grandmother was my anchor, and now that she’s gone, I’m adrift.

If I can get a bit more personal for a moment, I also genuinely enjoyed Marisol’s memories of her grandmother, and the authenticity behind her grief at the woman’s passing. Though my upbringing was under very different circumstances, my grandmother had a major role in raising me—like Elisa did with Marisol—for the first twelve years of my life, and continued to play an important role for many years after. It’s been a few years now since she passed, but all of those emotions welled back up inside of me when Marisol grieved her, and it was such a cathartic process that I’m tremendously grateful to Chanel Cleeton for including it.

There’s a novelty to this that catches me off guard. He is both old and new at once, and I can’t ignore the voice inside me—
Pay attention. This is important. He is important.

I’ll try to wrap this up and not just keep gushing, but the last thing I wanted to say is that, even though it feels like the least important aspect of the story by far, I wholeheartedly enjoyed the blossoming romance in Marisol’s chapters, and found myself on the edge of my seat, knowing that there was no easy answer to her falling in love with a Cuban revolutionary like her grandmother before her. I found it poignant and sweet, and it held just the right amount of presence to lighten bits of the story and add emotional weight without ever detracting from what was most important.

That’s the thing about death—even when you think someone is gone, glimpses of them remain in those they loved and left behind.

Ultimately, all I can say is that I recommend this book so very highly, whether you enjoy historical fiction, sweet love stories, political commentary, or any mixture of the above. Not being Cuban myself, I obviously cannot speak to how accurate the portrayals of Cuba or her citizens are, but knowing that Chanel Cleeton’s own family came from Cuba, I can only imagine that she wrote her truth as genuinely as she could. I am tremendously grateful to have this story in my life, and to Berkley for offering it to me, and I will be waiting eagerly for the companion novel, When We Left Cuba.

Thank you so much to Berkley for providing me with this BEAUTIFUL finished copy in exchange for an honest review!

You can find this review and more on my blog, or you can follow me on twitter, bookstagram, or facebook!

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Buddy read with Courtney!

To me, the hardest part about being a book blogger is when you find a book that feels like it could have worked for you, but somehow, it just didn’t quite make it—and then trying to review that book in actual, coherent words and phrases, when all you really know how to do is kind of shrug and go, “Eeeeehhhh…?”

Like an afterimage: the ghost of light that’s left behind when you’ve been staring at something too bright for too long.

That’s my issue with Afterimage in a nutshell. It isn’t a bad book by any means—I didn’t find it to be hurtful, or problematic, or even poorly written—it just didn’t do anything for me! So, I’m going to try to be as fair and just as possible in this review, because it’s absolutely the sort of book that has an intended audience who could probably love this a lot more than I did.

I want him to hurt the way I’ve been hurt. I know it’s not really his fault, I know he might not even be real, but at the moment he’s all I’ve got.

I want to get the negative aspects of this review over with: first and foremost, I know the synopsis even mentions a time/space issue, but it felt so forced and out of place. The book starts off as what feels like it should be a solid government conspiracy thriller/mystery, but when the sci-fi aspects were thrown it, it totally lost me. Even though I like space/timeline plots, in this instance, I would have enjoyed the story so much more without any of that. The other, smaller complaint that I have is the character writing. Camryn, the narrator, is annoying: she’s a jerk and doesn’t think things through at all for the first 100 pages or so, but she does progress as the story goes on. The side characters, however, really felt flat and uninspired from start to finish, so I couldn’t seem to connect with anyone.

Panic Disorder: a self-fulfilling prophecy of suck.

On the other hand, let me just say that I genuinely enjoyed the representation of Camryn’s panic disorder. As a reader with an anxiety disorder and panic attacks as a real aspect of my own mental health, I was able to relate to a solid amount of what she described. In particular, there’s a scene in the beginning where she explains that because she had a really bad panic attack at this one location, she now gets anxious when she tries to return there, because she’s scared she’ll trigger herself into a repeat event—that is such a legitimate fear that I struggle with, and I’ve never seen it put so specifically into words in a story, so I definitely related to that and appreciated Naomi Hughes adding it in!

So, yeah—all in all, not a bad read, it just didn’t work for me. That said, if the synopsis sounds interesting to you at all, I would one hundred percent suggest picking this one up and giving it a try, because I honestly believe Naomi Hughes’ writing has major potential to thrill a lot of people, and I would definitely be willing to check out future releases from her.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Page Street Publishing for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

First of all, I’ll preface this review by saying I think that I get to look at this one from a pretty unique angle. I was raised in an extremely religious and strict Christian household, and though it wasn’t Catholicism, there was SO MUCH in this book that I could relate to 100% from my childhood. On the other hand, I don’t follow an organized religion at all now (if anything, I’d say I’m somewhere along the lines of pagan and pantheist), but my journey to get here took me through several years of atheism that looked remarkably similar to Michael’s various thought processes. Basically, my point is: this book was written for me, and I can acknowledge that long enough to say that, if you are committed to an Abrahamic religion and don’t enjoy critiques of said religious, this is probably one that you would want to steer clear of.

I don’t know why people assume shit like that. Like being an atheist requires some sort of tragic backstory.

While the book never entirely vilifies any one specific religion, there is a lot of criticism of Christianity and the Bible’s contents. The narrator points out a lot of flaws in the theology, and more than anything, a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in the school’s administration that, while not necessarily exclusive to religious private schools, is certainly to be blamed in this scenario on the specific beliefs of the people in charge at St. Clare.

“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “There’s room at this school for people like us.”

That said, I’d also like to inform you that something I appreciated about the story is the fact that it never feels like a conversion book. This book is not here to convert you to or away from any particular set of beliefs, but to show you the flaws and qualities to many. With such a diverse cast of characters, I felt that we were offered a lovely number of views, between Lucy’s feminist take on Catholicism, Eden’s paganism (Celtic Reconstructionist Polytheists is the exact label), Max’s Unitarianism, or Avi’s experience as a gay Jewish boy. Time and care are taken to tell us a little bit about each of these paths, and even to clear up misconceptions a few times (especially about Eden’s beliefs and rituals). At the end of the day, the message is clear: differences in religious beliefs do not have to cause divides between friends or even love interests. (ETA: I forgot to mention, but Lucy is Columbian and Max is Korean!)

“Sister Joseph Marie made me take my earrings off today. Because they have these Celtic spirals on them, and she said that was a pagan symbol so I couldn’t wear it, which is—ugh. Just because it isn’t a cross doesn’t mean it’s evil.”

As someone who was raised in a Christian home, there were so many moments that had me either laughing out loud or cringing from secondhand embarrassment, and you can take that as you will. We see depictions of many common problems in Christian youth settings, such as slut-shaming girls for not waiting until marriage to have sex, removing a woman’s right to consent and bodily autonomy regarding her clothing (such as a uniform inspection scene that was actually a bit triggering for me), firing teachers for not following “morality clauses”, public shaming of children as punishment, and mischaracterizing individuals from other religions in sometimes incredibly harmful ways.

This is the calmest cannibalization ritual I’ve ever seen.

There’s even a scene in which the characters discuss how colonialism is to blame for the wide reaches of Catholicism/Christianity in many countries, and that’s a topic that is not touched upon nearly enough in any setting, so I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of how important it is to accept and address this fact.

“You don’t have a monopoly on suffering, okay? Other people get to be mad about their lives. Your broken leg doesn’t make my sprained ankle hurt any less.”

All of that aside, there’s more to this story than just a commentary on religion and hypocrisy; there’s also an underlying story of family, friendship, knowing when to follow and when to break rules, and learning how to show forgiveness and empathy for our fellow human beings. We’re shown that there is no “one size fits all” answer, and that religion, despite its flaws, can be a tremendous comfort for many individuals and that’s perfectly acceptable.

“You can make mistakes, you can be human, but—you’re still the greatest good I’ve ever known.”

The only legitimate complaint I have about this book is the romance, which felt weak and lacking to me most of the time. First of all, with Lucy’s various ideals and goals in life, the relationship didn’t feel to me as though it had the chance for a very solid foundation. Second, I just couldn’t connect to the forming romance enough to root for them or to care much about whether or not they ended up together. Because of this, I’d say this is more of a 4.5/5 rating, but it’s such an important and underrepresented subject matter that it deserves the hype.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Katherine Tegen Books for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

You can find this review and more on my blog, or you can follow me on twitter, bookstagram, or facebook!

This story is heavy and deals with a lot of toxicity and abuse, so please know that going into it. I’ve heard a lot of friends say the synopsis made them think this book was about depression, and it is, but if you’re someone who’s triggered by abusive scenarios (especially emotional/mental abuse), please just proceed with caution and take care of yourself! ♥

Everything was always so good, is what I’m saying, until it suddenly wasn’t.

That aside, Imagine Us Happy is a fantastic portrayal of a scenario that so many people find themselves in, in relationships of all types. The unusual thing about emotional and mental abuse is that so many of us have no idea how to recognize it’s happening to us. We’re shown from a young age what physical and sexual abuse look like (though those lines can be hard for victims to recognize until they’ve already been crossed, too!), but many of us have no idea how to differentiate between an “argument” or “joke” and abuse, until we’re in the thick of it (if ever).

Kevin’s got this look on his face that I can barely stand to look at. Anger makes Kevin look like an entirely different person.

That’s why I have to say that my favorite thing about Imagine Us Happy is how genuine the abuse rep here is. As someone who has been in scenarios that were almost identical to what Stella goes through, I wish so badly that I’d had this book as a teen, because maybe it could have helped me recognize what was happening to me before the damage was done. I want to put this book in the hands of every teen, just to say, “Hey, look at this! This is never what a relationship or friendship should look and feel like!”

I spend all of my time lost in his words, or his eyes, or his touch, and every time I’m pulled back into reality, I want less and less to do with it.

The most realistic thing about Stella and Kevin’s relationship isn’t even just the abuse, but what comes in the gaps between the toxic moments, too. We see things that might seem justifiable to some, like Kevin’s constant obsession over whether Stella is cheating on him or not, or the way Kevin and Stella get so wrapped up in one another that Stella literally forgets important events in her best friends’ lives, because Kevin’s gravity has pulled her in so tightly and won’t let go. This is so common in toxic relationships. What’s also common is the way Kevin convinces Stella that he’s genuinely sorry, or the decency he shows her in between fights (like his strongly valuing her consent in certain scenes). Kevin is a perfect example of what many abusers look like, because he’s not a villain 24/7—he has enough good moments that he convinces Stella to put up with the terrible ones.

Here is a fact:
Sometimes I just get… sad.

Another thing I loved here is the mental illness representation. On one hand, we see how Kevin’s mental illness can make it difficult for him to react properly to certain situations—but on the other hand, Stella’s own mental illness struggles give us a clear balance that avoids vilifying or romanticizing mental illness in any way.

I guess that’s why I’m starting at the end. I don’t want anyone to be confused about the type of love story I’m about to tell, or where it’s going, or what to expect. And I don’t want to disappoint anyone in search of a happy ending. I’ll say it from the start: this isn’t that kind of story.

Finally, there’s the storytelling style. Imagine Us Happy is told in a nonlinear fashion, starting at the end before jumping back to the beginning, and occasionally giving us glimpses of the build-up to the ending (so, if you’re reading it and wondering why the chapter numbers don’t go in perfect order, it’s not a misprint). It is such a unique and cool formatting idea, and I felt like it really got the message across so much more clearly than a standard beginning-to-end reading style.

I know that the tenderness is as temporary as the flash of anger that preceded it, but I can’t help but let myself soak in it, cling on to it like a drowning man to a rope.

I feel like there’s more I could say, but honestly, just read it. This is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I genuinely hope to see this book promoted heavily, especially in school libraries, because I think the sometimes brutal honesty depicted here could help so many readers.

Content warnings for abuse, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Harlequin Teen for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

You can find this review and more on my blog, or you can follow me on twitter, bookstagram, or facebook!

Sometimes, you read a synopsis, and it’s like you just can’t get your hands on that book fast enough, right? That was Priest of Bones for me. I initially heard it marketed as “Peaky Blinders with swords”, and given how badly I’ve been meaning to find the time to watch Peaky Blinders, that felt like a sign that I should snatch this one right up! Antiheroes, gangsters, crime lords, and a general moral greyness on top of it all? It should’ve been a recipe for perfection!

There was a devil in me, and all my crew knew it.

Unfortunately, I vastly oversold this one for myself. I hadn’t reached the end of the first few chapters before I realized that the narrative was going to be a struggle for me, and it was to the very end. It’s not that the writing is bad by any means—in fact, I think Peter McLean is talented, and this book is going to find many readers who will love his style—but I couldn’t connect with Tomas to save my life.

Not only was Tomas impossible to attach myself to, each character in this story was wholly unlikable for me. I usually love morally grey characters and antiheroes, so that wasn’t the problem—this massive cast of characters was mostly just simplified and uninteresting. The closest I ever came to caring about anyone was Tomas’ right-hand woman, Bloody Anne, a violent, angry lesbian with a scarred face and a terrible fear of magic. She’s likable enough at times, but even she just fell flat for me much of the time. On the flip side, the worst character for me by far was Ailsa, the potential love interest, whom I wanted to throttle every single step of the way.

Harsh work, as I say, but we had done worse before.
Every one of us had done worse.

The world-building is another thing I want to comment on here, because I think it is going to be polarizing for a lot of readers. On one hand, the setting is really enjoyable; I love grimy city settings for stories, especially when crime lords and gangs are involved, and McLean’s writing is just atmospheric enough that you can feel the smog and filth of the surroundings. On the other hand, nothing feels built up enough. There’s a magic system that we learn very little about, and for there to be so much history in the city of Ellinburg, most of it seems to have been casually tossed away or swept under the rug. This is something that I suspect will be further fleshed out in the second book, but I still felt that it was worth mentioning for anyone who—like me—enjoys a lot of world-building in their fantasy series starters.

On a more complimentary note, something I enjoyed was the fact that McLean doesn’t shy away from brutal topics (as you’ll see by the long list of content warnings I’ll insert at the end of this review), but all the same, most of those issues are challenged by Tomas’ narrative. He opens the book by murdering one of his own men right off the bat for attempted rape, and that absolutely sets the tone for what an honorable man Tomas is at heart. Everything he does is for the sake of the citizens of Ellinburg and his loved ones, and it lends an interesting side of nobility to him.

My only complaint regarding the content warnings below is the endless fat-shaming regarding one of his men. It doesn’t carry any real venom, and it’s casual enough that most readers will miss it, but it is so constant; the man’s nickname is literally ‘Fat Luka’, and we can’t spend a single scene with him without a comment being made on his appearance, despite the fact that what should be the focal point is what an incredibly valuable asset he becomes to Tomas. Instead, it often felt like Luka’s triumphs were constantly overshadowed by his size.

Our Lady doesn’t help. Not ever. She doesn’t answer prayers or grant boons or give a man anything at all, however hard he might pray for it.

At the end of the day, Priest of Bones is not a bad story. McLean has some really enjoyable storytelling qualities, I loved the setting, and the plot itself is fine, if a bit unremarkable. Given the lack of attachment to the narrative, the fact that I couldn’t connect to the characters, and the gradual realization I had that I simply did not care about how the story will end, I can’t recommend it for anyone whose reading tastes match mine. That said, this is the kind of story that will have its intended audience, and if you think there’s even a slim chance you may be in that group, I strongly suggest picking up a copy and trying it for yourself.

Content warnings for sexual assault, pedophilia, fat-shaming, abuse (physical, sexual, verbal, emotional), homophobia, genital mutilation, frequent violence/death, torture, blackmail, child prostitution, alcoholism, substance abuse.

Thank you so much to Ace Books for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

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Buddy read with Kaleena—check out her review, too, for a more positive take on this story!

As a life-long horror fan, possession stories have always been some of my favorites. There’s just something so classic and iconic about the idea of a child or teen being taken over by some sort of dark entity, and even though the trope is typically filled to the brim with religious overtones and misrepresentation of many belief sects, they’re just fun. When I heard about this story’s twist—that the girl wants to be possessed and mourns the loss of her demon—I knew I had to read it. I just had to!

She was just a voice inside my voice, a body inside my body, a spirit inside my spirit, my demon. When She spoke I heard Her in my blood, and when She moved I felt Her in my bones.

Unfortunately, we’ve all heard the saying: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. While the synopsis behind this book caught my attention immediately, I was literally only a single chapter in when I realized that the subpar writing was going to ruin any chances I had of giving this book an excellent review. The narrative voice doesn’t read like a teen at all, and Clare’s internal monologue is so pretentious and angsty that it felt like I was reading some mid-2000s MySpace poetry. (Not in a good way. Is there a good way?)

I knew nothing could ever separate us, nothing could ever tear us apart. I was wrong.

On top of the narrative voice and the issues I had there, there’s another problem: if you’re a horror fan, you will predict every twist and turn this story has to offer. That said, if you don’t have much experience with horror (or, more specifically, possession and occult stories), then I think you could enjoy this a lot more than I did! I don’t lower my ratings for YA horror when it fails to impress me, because I know that I’ve been desensitized by much of the adult horror I read, but if I had, I think this would have been a 2-star read for me.

“It’s not weird,” he said. “It’s just different. Dad holds me and him to a higher standard than the rest of the world. Because we’re men of Christ.”

Next, there’s the topic of the religious representation, which was so all over the place. The picture the author has painted of Christians in this book is so over-the-top ridiculous and laughable that I was genuinely stunned to learn from the acknowledgements that Jimmy Cajoleas appears to be a Christian himself—because, seriously, the Christians in this book are terrible.

The solstice was when witches held black masses, or maybe the druids slaughtered a virgin or two.

Don’t get me wrong, though, it’s just fair treatment; the pagan and witchcraft representation in the story is downright gross. There are multiple comments and implications about all witches and/or pagans being dark, sinister, etc., and like the Christians, they’re all done in these outlandish caricatures that are positively villainous. If it had been toned down a little, it would have been at least a little bit amusing, but it felt like I was being hit over the head with a brick about it.

She always had a reason. She did it to protect me.

While I didn’t hate this book—I still think the synopsis had major potential, and it was a quick read that managed to keep me just entertained enough to keep reading—I can’t say that I would recommend it to anyone who reads much horror, as I think it would be a letdown. While Cajoleas shows definite potential to improve, I probably won’t rush to pick up any future releases of his.

Content warnings for demonic possession (obviously), violence, mutilation, animal abuse/mutilation/death, sexual assault, physical assault, slut-shaming, poor representation of multiple religions, parental neglect/abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, and overdosing/suicide.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Amulet Books for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I love haunted house stories, and I love haunted house attractions, so when I realized this was going to be a book about an actual haunted house being turned into an attraction, I was immediately sold. As someone who enjoys frequenting haunted house attractions every October, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t entertained the thought a few times—what if this house was really haunted? What if some of these people aren’t actors?

“Fuckin’ A,” Mike whispered to himself. “This is not a good house.”

Unfortunately, The House by the Cemetery failed to live up to almost all of my expectations. This was my first time reading anything by John Everson, and I can’t say that I’ll be rushing to try any of his other works in the future. First, the writing style and I did not mesh at all. There is a consistent over-usage of ellipses that was extremely off-putting, and the general sentence structure in much of the narrative felt disjointed and unnatural.

Beyond the writing, while the book switches perspectives often, the primary main character is Mike, the handyman who’s been hired to make the old abandoned shack usable enough for a season as a haunted house. He starts off the book with a good head on his shoulders—he’s heard the stories and he’s incredibly reluctant to step foot in the place, much less desecrate it by ripping out walls and replacing floors.

He’s interesting enough for the first little bit, but then he meets Katie—a girl who, for the record, he establishes very early on is likely way too young for him—and he becomes so sex-crazed and lust-blinded that I couldn’t stand it. She constantly says and does strange things, but this grown man who should know better ignores them all because he’s so desperate to get in her pants. You see the “twist” with her character coming a million miles away, yet Mike somehow doesn’t predict it—and even when it’s revealed, his reaction is unlikely, to say the least.

The final issue I’ll mention is that this book needs a team of sensitivity readers desperately. For one, the incessant fat-shaming literally reaches eye-roll worthy levels at times because it’s so over the top. On top of that, there’s an entire discussion regarding horror’s treatment of women and people of color which could have been something great, but instead turned into a vaguely preachy “people need to stop victimizing themselves” session.

Honestly, though, if you follow my horror reviews, you already know that I rate the genre lightly at times—problematic content is not enough for me to immediately trash the entire story most of the time, so it’s not like this would have been a positive review without those things. While they absolutely didn’t help my enjoyment of the story, at the end of the day, I just found this to be a mediocre haunted house story with a lot of unlikable characters and an anti-climactic plot I couldn’t bring myself to care about. I tried really hard to finish it, but ultimately caved and wrote the story just past the halfway point.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Flame Tree Press for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

As a lifelong night owl, night time is my favorite time—it’s when I’m most alert, happiest, and when I function the best. The best part of nighttime is dusk, when I can watch the world slowly begin to quiet around me as the sun dips below the horizon, the air chills, and everything takes on this hushed tone of mystery, curiosity, and adventure—or, as we see in this collection, maybe something a little more sinister, a little tougher to understand.

“This time of dusk—the time between times—is the time between the light and the dark. This grey area that we all find ourselves in from time to time is the fulcrum, the tipping point. This tipping point is the penultimate moment of change—where things either come good, or go badly, badly wrong.”
—Simon Dewar

Suspended in Dusk II is a horror collection of stories that all somehow involve this odd, captivating time of day—whether it’s through symbolism or fact, mysticism gone wrong or one’s impending demise approaching as the light fades. It’s a delightfully enjoyable collection, full of authors I recognized and loved as well as names altogether new to me, and I can absolutely recommend it to any fans of horror, but especially anyone looking for new indie horror authors to support.

Something else I have to gush about here is the fact that, right in the foreword of the anthology, it’s mentioned that the collection of authors involved is very diverse—authors here range from multiple gender identities, sexualities, races, religions, and backgrounds. Given that horror literature is viewed by so many as a white man’s sport, it’s always refreshing to put the spotlight on women and marginalized individuals in the community, and I appreciate Dewar’s efforts on that front tremendously!

Now, for my favorites:
→ THE SUNDOWNERS by Damien Angelica Walters, in which an elderly woman is convinced that people have taken her husband from her and are plotting against her.
→ RIPTIDE by Dan Rabarts, a story full of Maori lore and the tragedy that has befallen a man seeking his lost children.
→ DEALING IN SHADOWS by Annie Neugebauer, where we watch a woman mourning her father’s death consider striking a deal with Shadow People to get one last moment with him.
→ WANTS AND NEEDS by Paul Michael Anderson, a devastating story of a woman left to face a blizzard on her own after the death of her son and the end of her marriage.
→ LOVE IS A CAVITY I CAN’T STOP TOUCHING by Stephen Graham Jones, which revisits the memories of a man who, as a teen, shared a bonding moment with his girlfriend that involved consuming bits of one another’s flesh, and the ways that moment has shaped the rest of his life.

While these four were the stand-out titles to me, I gave almost every story in this collection 3-5 stars, and even the ones that didn’t work out as well for me were due to personal taste and not a lack of talent in any shape or form. All in all, Suspended in Dusk II is a skillfully crafted collection of spooky tales.

Content warnings for child death (several stories), pedophilia, child stalking, abuse, cannibalism, addiction, suicide, ableism, homophobic slurs

Thank you so much to the editor for providing me with this review copy in exchange for an honest review!

October 9, 2019: SALE ALERT! $0.99 on the Kindle store! This is one of my favorite horror collections of all time and there's no better time to read it than right now!

Like most horror fans, it should come as no surprise when I say that Halloween is positively one of my favorite days of the year. It has so much to offer, and given that October is general is my favorite month, Halloween is always the icing on top of the cake of excellence that is October. That said, there’s a shockingly low amount of actual Halloween representation in most of the horror books I read, so when I heard about this anthology full of horror stories taking place on Halloween, I didn’t hesitate.

Candy and costumes were all well and good, but Halloween was about that breach between the worlds and the magic which poured in.
—Curtis M. Lawson

Let me tell you, this anthology is one of the most fun horror collections I’ve ever read. True to its claim, each story very heavily focuses on Halloween—many of them including costume parties or trick-or-treating as a prominent feature—and this was one of those rare anthologies where I can say I genuinely loved almost every single story. There were two stories in particular that didn’t jive with me as well, but even they were still worth a read!

I’m not going to give a full breakdown for this anthology because many of the stories are hard to describe without spoiling (as is often the case in horror shorts), but I would like to tell you a little about my favorites from the collection:

→ A Plague of Monsters—Charles Gramlich

Sometimes you find a book that sounds like it’s going to check all of your boxes—especially as a horror fan, when you come across a plot that happens to specifically push some of your “fear buttons”—and it can be nerve-wracking to pick up those stories. If you’re anything like me, you hype yourself up (with or without anyone else’s help). Sometimes, things turn out perfectly, and your self-imposed hype pays off! Other times, well…

To have a sibling, especially a close one, is to have a greatest enemy and a truest friend, but it’s always been like that, hasn’t it?

Other times, the book falls flat on its face and leaves you wishing you had never even taken the time to read it, because not only have you spent hours of your time on a story you didn’t enjoy, but you’ve got post-hype-letdown disappoint looming over you. That feeling is exactly what I’m going through while writing this review. I’ve sat here for an hour staring at an empty Word document, trying to force myself to review this book, because I found it disappointing in so many ways that I don’t even want to get into them all.

Let’s start with the biggest issue: the narrative style. The entire story is very close to full stream-of-consciousness, and if you’re not familiar with that, it essentially means that the plot jumps around haphazardly as things pop into the storyteller’s mind. We constantly switch between Jack’s current-day thoughts and her memories, and that is a difficult narrative style to pull off.
As for the narrator herself: Jack is a tremendously pretentious, arrogant, rude, and unlikable woman, and reading this story through the lens of her memories as well as her adult biases on those incidents is downright eyeroll-inducing at times. Just a few gems for you:

1. After shaming the appearance of her blind date, she goes on an internal rant about how “out of his league” she is and how he must be stunned to even sit across the table from her (though she’s earlier admitted that she hasn’t had much luck with catching men’s eyes in the past).

2. She states on more than one occasion that she is smarter than most people (we are never given any evidence of this being true).

Babies do that sometimes. You don’t know me very well, but believe me when I say I didn’t kill her on purpose.

She’s self-absorbed enough to convince herself that everything and anything going wrong in the world around her is to blame on her mother passing away during childbirth—which is a piece of her backstory that we are reminded of in nearly every chapter. The guilt she describes not only feels insincere and put-upon, but it reaches repetitive levels very early in the book.

Beyond Jack, there’s her brother Andy, who is something else from the beginning. One of our first introductions to him involves mutilation of an animal that Jack thinks was already dead (we’re never quite certain), and it gets worse from there—but there’s nothing scary about Andy, because Jack isn’t afraid of him. This is one of those instances that I think could’ve benefited tremendously from a third person POV, because it’s hard to care about what a belligerent asshole Andy is when Jack is constantly making excuses for him or blaming herself (and the “murder” of their mother) for his behavior.

Finally, there’s the creature itself—the Toy Thief the story takes its name from—which is easily the best part of the story. The descriptions of this creature are creepy enough (I’m especially fond of the way it crawls around on walls and ceilings), but the development of its motives and history often felt clouded. It seemed as though there were a lot of random, small ideas thrown together into a conglomerate that the author hoped would stick. Then again, maybe that’s my fault; by the time we began to learn much about what makes the Toy Thief the way it is, I had stopped caring much about anything that happened in this story.

Final thoughts—do I recommend this story? If you enjoy stream-of-consciousness writing, aren’t picky about your narrators, don’t mind incredibly rude main characters, and aren’t going to look too long at the plot holes, sure, give it a try. Otherwise, there are definitely better creature horror reads out there, and other authors have done this whole storytelling-via-childhood-memories writing style much better.

Content warnings for death of a parent, mutilation, suicide

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Flame Tree Press for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

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