Lena Johnson receives an invitation to take part in the Lakewood Project, which purports to be a series of research studies relating to mind, memory, personality and perception. There is something about the letter that makes her uncomfortable – but with paid expenses, housing and perhaps even life insurance, Lena finds the offer more enticing…
Modern Hauntings, Victorian Torments: Belle Vue by C. S. Alleyne
Claire Ryan has been evicted by her landlord, but chances to find an affordable alternative: a flat in a building that was once a Victorian asylum called Belle Vue. Her boyfriend Alex, a history student, is more than happy with this development as he can base his latest research project around the building’s heritage. In…
REVIEW: The Girls Are All So Nice Here
Our reign was short and bloody. What came after it was worse. When an email arrives in Ambrosia “Amb” Wellington’s inbox, she deletes it immediately. It’s from her Alumni committee, inviting her to a ten-year reunion, but Amb does not want to go. Then strange notes start to arrive. Something VERY BAD occurred when Amb…
Black Magic and Dark Secrets: Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching
Immanuelle Moore is a teenage girl who lives in Bethel, a town gripped by an authoritarian religion. The Good Father of Bethel’s faith is opposed by a Dark Mother, a demonic figure associated with witchcraft and devilry. Immanuelle has been treated with suspicion from birth as her late mother, Miriam, was a witch. Yet she…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Containment
Reading through Charlee Jacob’s fiction, it is easy to identify the varieties of horror that she found most fertile. For one, she showed a particular fascination with relationships between predators and prey: strong characters, often men, brutalising women and children in a process that warps and damages both victim and perpetrator. Jacob’s stories incorporate this…
REVIEW: I Read Good Neighbors So You Don’t Have To
Good Neighbors dissects one summer when the residents of Maple Street implode, hunting down a potentially fabricated boogeyman. All against the backdrop of an unbearable heatwave, the appearance of a massive sinkhole, and the recovery of a body. The story pits the Wildes—a down-and-out family from Brooklyn who are new to Maple Street and don’t…
Remembering Charlee Jacob: Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch was nearly the last Charlee Jacob novel to be published (only one more, Containment, was to follow), yet it was the first that she wrote. She penned it in the ’80s, after which it remained a “trunk novel” until 2016. Jacob evidently revised the manuscript to some extent prior to its…
REVIEW: Forget Russia Is Frustratingly Forgettable
I volunteered to review Forget Russia by L. Bordetsky-Williams because I saw the word “Russia” in the title and thought, “Oh, this is relevant to my interests.” The summary was also promising: an American girl with Russian roots exploring her heritage and identity is something I can generally get behind, as a Russian Jewish immigrant….
Fugitive Telemetry lets Murderbot Crack the Case: Spoiler-free Review
Fugitive Telemetry, the sixth Murderbot book in the bestselling science fiction series by Martha Wells, has the beats I love from locked room murder mysteries and procedural crime dramas, and it has the voice and themes I love from the Murderbot series. It’s just as engaging and affirming as the rest of the series has…
REVIEW: Legendborn Reimagines the Roots of King Arthur’s Return
Revisiting Arthurian lore, Tracy Deonn introduces a young hero who will turn what the longstanding Order believes about the Roundtable’s descendants upside down in Legendborn.
Remembering Charlee Jacob: The Myth of Falling
Published in 2014 by Sinister Grin Press, The Myth of Falling is both Charlee Jacob’s final collection of short stories and the single most personal work in her bibliography. In most of her collections, save for Up, Out of Cities that Blow Hot and Cold with its brief introductions for each story, Jacob allowed her…
Vampires on the Margins: Forbidden Desires
One reason for the enduring appeal of the vampire as a concept is its erotic element, and this is something that manifests in both heterosexual and homosexual terms. From the lesbian vampire exploitation films of the seventies to the queer undead of Anne Rice’s bestsellers, modern audiences have come to expect vampires to exist outside…