Don’t Fear the Reaper is like an increasingly passionate correspondence with a long-distance lover. Also, the ink is blood and the paper is made from crushed-up bones.
Tag Archives: Horror
‘Kaiju’ Highlights Fun in Scalzi’s Latest
Literature can be so many things, and The Kaiju Preservation Society reminds us in the best way that one of those things is entertainment.
‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills
Rural towns and wide-open fields have proved fertile material for horror stories for decades. What moves in the corn? Nothing good, probably. But in Ann Fraistat’s What We Harvest, it’s what’s underground—what’s in the very soil—that you have to watch out for. The farmland that 16-year-old Wren’s family has worked for the last six generationsContinue reading “‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills”
‘Little Eyes’ Not Looking to be Liked
Growing up, my little sisters had a Furby. It was one of the first-gen ones, not these smarter, freakier modern things, but it would still say things that seemed way too canny for being a hunk of plastic and fake fur. In Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, the Furby-like creatures in question can’t speak, but theyContinue reading “‘Little Eyes’ Not Looking to be Liked”
‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror
The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher‘s take on Arthur Machen’s short story The White People, has still left me, three years after reading it, uneasy around dolls and deer skeletons (which, to be fair, I encounter more often than the average person). The picture on the cover of What Moves the Dead was of a mangled-ish rabbit andContinue reading “‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror”
‘The Fervor’ An Uncomfortably Relevant Horror
Good horror will send a shiver down your spine. Great horror will revisit you in your quiet moments, reminding you that you’re never quite safe. But the best use of horror is the one that both frightens its audience and shows that the things that go bump in the night are nothing compared to whatContinue reading “‘The Fervor’ An Uncomfortably Relevant Horror”
‘Survivor Song’ a Prescient Tale
I had to stop multiple times while reading Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song to check whether it had been written before or during the pandemic. And then check again, and again, because the way his fictional society reacted to his fictional outbreak felt far too close to reality circa March-April 2020. But Survivor Song was publishedContinue reading “‘Survivor Song’ a Prescient Tale”
‘Song for the Unraveling of the World’ Strange and Compelling
The first story in Brian Evenson’s collection Song for the Unraveling of the World is less than two pages long. That page and a half, though, is a good litmus test. If you don’t like it, you can confidently move onto some other short story collection. But if you find yourself intrigued and uneased, there’sContinue reading “‘Song for the Unraveling of the World’ Strange and Compelling”
‘Sundial’ Not For the Faint of Heart
In horror, fear can come from a variety of places. Ghosts, demons (real or imagined), zombies, fascists, fascist zombies—the possibilities are endless. In the case of Catriona Ward’s Sundial, the call, as it were, is coming from inside the relationship. From the outside, Rob looks like a picture of suburban perfection: nice clothes, a polishedContinue reading “‘Sundial’ Not For the Faint of Heart”
‘Violent’ Doesn’t Quite ‘Delight’
The premise of These Violent Delights is absolute catnip for me: Romeo and Juliet, retold in 1920s Shanghai as rival gangs. So, Shakespeare influence, check; decadence of the Roaring Twenties, check; political intrigue and organized crime in pre-Revolution China—just download it straight into my brain! So the charitable analysis of how I ended up feelingContinue reading “‘Violent’ Doesn’t Quite ‘Delight’”
Ring Reads 