#horror book reviews

[walkonpooh]

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski Review

“This is not for you”

Okay.

Okay.

If you haven’t read it, House of Leaves is a post-modern book written by Mark Z. Danielewski in 2000 written in epistolary form. It’s a story within a story within a story within a story. What do I mean by that? Well at the heart of House of Leaves is The Navidson Record, a proposed documentary about a photographer, Will Navidson, who buys a house to reconnect with his family; his partner Karen Green and their children, Chad and Daisy.

Not missing any opportunity to work, Navidson sets up cameras around the house to capture little moments of their daily lives. Then one day, they notice that the inside of the house is a little bigger than the outside. Then a little bigger. And bigger. Then one day a doorway that wasn’t there before appears in the living room of the house. Opening the doorway they find a hallway. The bulk of The Navidson Record is the exploration of that hallway.

So I say bulk of The Navidson Record, isn’t this the book? Well, yes and no. Because taking a step back, we have Zampano. Zampano is a blind uh, I guess maybe former academic? Zampano is examining the truthfulness of The Navidson Record, touching on the filming style of it. Examining the lives of Navidson and Karen. Delving into critical discussions, photography, architecture, Biblical studies. Only House of Leaves doesn’t stop here.

Because Zampano recently died. So we’re introduced to Johnny Truant, who was introduced to the deceased Zampano through his friend Lude, who knows that Truant will love this guy’s apartment and the rabbit hole of The Navidson Record. So we’re also given through Truant’s footnotes of the story his life story; way more of his sexual encounters than I cared to know about, his lusting over a stripper who frequents the tattoo parlor he works for named Thumper, on account of her tattoo based on the Disney’s Bambi character.

Finally, we have the unnamed Editors of House of Leaves, who are adding footnotes to all of the above throughout the entirety of the story. Also keeping in mind is the author, Mark Z. Danielewski and the reader, all taking part in this story, published now twenty-three years ago.

So House of Leaves is a book I’ve *attempted* to read several times and failed to do so until this past week, when I devoured the book. As I sit here writing this, I’m sort of mixed on whether devouring House of Leaves is the proper way to read it, or if not reading it alongside another book, sort of ploddingly moving through it would not have been the better method.

House of Leaves is fairly infamous at this point, unlike when I first heard about it. It’s funny because it’s origins are similar to The Blair Witch Project. I remember people claiming that no, this book was based on true events, which of course plays right into the post-modernity style Danielewski was going for. Critiquing literature and literature critics. One of the reasons it’s infamous for the style the book is written in. So I described the layers of the onion, so to speak, but I’ve read and watched quite a few opinions of the book at this point and I agree that the book in and of itself is the labyrinth of The Navidson Record.

That is you’re meant to get lost in it and like a labyrinth, there are dead ends. Unlike a labyrinth, I can’t say that at this point, twenty-three years into the story that I enjoyed “solving” the labyrinth. And that’s primarily for the Johnny Truant sections of the book. Johnny is fairly certain that The Navidson Record is a fabrication, which to me, along with the story of Johnny’s mother, Pelefina, her notes, is actually a fairly big clue that Johnny is falsified.

Post modernism was a huge thing in the early aughts, where I don’t feel like its influences today are as far reaching, but pretty cliché by this point in time. But there was The Blair Witch Project, like I said that had the is this real-is this not real and all of the commentary that came with that. In video gaming you have Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, a post-modern video game, which critiques the very people playing the game, playing off their expectations of what a sequel to Metal Gear Solid should be. There’s Mulholland Dr., which came out the same year as House of Leaves and is playing with *very* similar themes and to me, is superior.

So because of Johnny’s mothers letters, it seemed pretty clear to me that Johnny, the Johnny we’re reading about, is a fabrication of Pelefina. Her letter about creating a son who could live the life she never had is written nine months before Johnny’s birth. I think Pelefina actually choked Johnny to death and everything else that happens in House of Leaves is her way of coping with having done this, ala Diane in Mulholland Dr. and the events of that movie being a fever dream of Diane’s.

Anyway, so like this is all just interpretation and there’s probably no “answer”. That’s one aspect of post-modernity that I do like, the chin stroking that happens from it is just part of the cycle of this stuff. So do I like House of Leaves? A day after finishing it. Sitting here thinking about it, I like it more today than I did yesterday. I bounced off Truant’s footnotes pretty hard while reading it. As I write this though, I like the idea of that story quite a bit (the slight comparing it to Mulholland Dr. is no slight, that’s a Top 10 movie for me). The Navidson Record parts were pretty great, especially the earlier parts. Some of the later parts didn’t hit as hard for me, especially as they escape the house, but I also didn’t read this in optimal conditions. Oh, but I did *love* The NeverEnding Story aspect of House of Leaves being a book within House of Leaves. And I sort of wonder if like being frustrated by the Truant parts is akin to being frustrated by the labyrinth. I would have liked to learn more about Zampano, I think some of what we learned about him is interesting and I think I’d prefer that over Truant, but then that’s kind of the point of my interpretation.

Would I recommend House of Leaves? That’s a hard sell for me. Because how do you succinctly sell House of Leaves to someone in a way that doesn’t ruin the surprises or put them off the book? I feel like *most* people who want to read this story will seek it out and I think the reader knows pretty early on whether or not this story is for them.

4/5

#house of leaves #mulholland dr. #metal gear solid: sons of the patriots #halloween reading 2023 #post modern #post modernity #post modernism #mark z. danielewski #horror #horror fiction #horror books #horror book reviews #the navidson record #will navidson #zampano #johnny truant #the neverending story #pelefina #the blair witch project

[deludedimages]

Review For Forgotten Sisters by Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo

My oldest and I went to Chicago when they were six. It was Father’s Day weekend. I’ve wanted to go to Chicago since I was a kid. I’ve been a Blackhawks fan since I was in Mites. If you don’t know, I was seven or eight. I’ve been fascinated by it. By the lake, the river, and the sports teams. We went to the Adler Planetarium. We stayed at the Hotel Lincoln, where I had a ghost experience and…

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#Book Reviews #Cynthia Pelayo #Forgotten Sisters #horror book reviews #NetGalley

[nerdynatreads]

☆☆YouTube | Tumblr | Instagram | Storygraph ☆☆

book review || The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

video review || 5 by 5: Goodreads 2021 Horror Finalists || 5 Horror Reads and Reviews

This book is weird and I’ll admit, really unsettling in a way that I can’t pin down. We alternate POVs between a husband, wife, and their teenage son. After moving into Nate’s, the husband, childhood home, they start experiencing weird occurrences, each in their own way. It’s pretty obvious this has to be paranormal horror, which definitely adds to the uneasy tone.

There’s a male and female narrator for the audiobook, though the man doesn’t do a change in voice for Nate and Oliver to showcase a change. Sometimes POV changes happen at the chapter mark, other times midway through. In the writing, though, it is pretty easy to keep each character distinct. Nate and Maddy seem to have a healthy relationship, genuinely feeling like a couple who have been together for over 15 years. Oliver actually does read like a teenage boy as well. However, Oliver is empathetic to a fault, and can actually see the pain other people feel, which is a very intriguing element of his character. Unfortunately, he’s also pretty naive.

I will praise that as for logic, even though Nate and Maddy are both experiencing these otherworldly things they can’t explain, they do at least talk about it with one another. Oliver hasn’t, of course, since he’s a fifteen-year-old boy.

Wow, I did not expect this to develop into what it did, but unfortunately, that’s not a super positive thing. As I guessed, the juiciest bit of this story was the last 25%, but I think this just tried to do too much, making the beginning a slog.

The reveals at the end were shocking! They interweave sci-fi horror, a haunted house, a serial killer, and black magic, which is all cool, but put together just seemed like a mess. It makes sense the book is so long, because Wendig had to set up each of these avenues, but some of them felt really unnecessary by the end. The world-building is pretty strong and directly ties in with all those different avenues the story has, but it does sometimes make for repetitive reading and a very slow pace. Even with that, my intrigue was pretty high the entire time, but toward the end, I couldn’t believe there was still more to happen, because it took so long to reach the climax, and even then, felt pretty slow-moving.

Oliver’s character was probably the most interesting to follow and had the best development in this story. I really liked how his empathy ability was handled. Nate and Maddy were still strong characters and I do think each had their own arcs as well, but they didn’t stick with me as much as Oliver’s did. The ending that all three had was nice, though, not very surprising.

3.5 / 5 stars

#book review #the book of accidents #the book of accidents by chuck wendig #horror books #horror book recs #horror book recommendations #horror book reviews #studyblr #bookblr #booklr #book tumblr #booktube #booktuber #book youtube #bookshelf #book end

[ionlycareabouthhn]

There's Something Wrong in 'Salem's Lot: A Horror Book Review

#salems lot #stephen king #horror book reviews #horror #books #literature #classic books #halloween reads #video #Youtube

[effemar]

MY BLOOD WAS FULL OF GAGS AND OTHER PEOPLE'S DISEASES. MY MONSTROUS LITTLE MEMORY HAD SWALLOWED ME WHOLE. IT WAS THE YEAR I OFFICIALLY BECAME THE BRIDE OF JESUS.

#trc #my art #my review of the raven king 2018: 10/10 loved the body horror. and the gay rep. the combination body horror and gay rep. #trc spoilers #< for anna my friend anna who hasn't finished the books yet 😭 #adam parrish #ronan lynch #mmmm i think i will tag it as pynch #pynch

[lakecountylibrary]

If you liked Camp Damascus, try Hell Followed With Us

and vice versa!

There's a lot to love in both Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. As horror novels about queer youth with, shall we say, complicated relationships with religion, they have a lot in common - if you liked one you very well may like the other. Let's take a closer look.

Characters:

Both books feature queer, autistic youth fighting back. The characters are trying to survive in a world created for them by abusive adults and religious institutions that hold power over them.

In Camp Damascus we follow Rose (autistic, lesbian). In Hell Followed With Us we follow Benji (neurodivergent, trans) and Nick (autistic, gay).

Genre:

Both books are horror, but with two distinct flavors. Camp Damascus has more of a creepy factor, while Hell Followed With Us leans more toward gore. In Camp there is some mystery to the evil, but in Hell the evil has a name, a face, an address - and a to-do list.

Both books deal with Christian cults and the horrors of indoctrination. They deal with the characters' complicated relationships to Christianity as an institution and God as a concept. They also both quote Christian scripture heavily.

Vibes:

While both books are horror, they do feel very different, largely because the primary emotion that drives each story is different. In Camp Damascus, it's love. In Hell Followed With Us, it's rage. You'll certainly find both emotions in certain quantities in either novel, but what they primarily put forward distinctly changes the vibe of both books.

-

So there you have it! Two fantastic reads in close thematic conversation with each other - but still quite distinct. If either sounds good to you, do yourself a favor and check out both today!

See more of Robin's recs

#camp damascus #hell followed with us #andrew joseph white #chuck tingle #lgbtq books #lgbtq reads #lgbtq authors #lgbtq characters #horror #horror novel #queer horror #book review #book recommendations #books and reading #booklr #book recs #LCPL recs #robin's recs

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kelly Link's "Book of Love"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/13/the-kissing-song/#wrack-and-roll

Kelly Link is one of science fiction's most important writers, a master of the short story to rank with the likes of Ted Chiang. For a decade, Kelly's friends have traded whispers that she was working on a novel – a giant novel – and the rumors were true and the novel is glorious and you will love it:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/book-of-love-9781804548455/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239722/the-book-of-love-by-kelly-link/

It's called The Book of Love and it's massive – 650 pages! It is glorious. It is tricky.

If you've read Link's short stories (which honestly, you must read), you know her signature move: a bone-dry witty delivery, used to spin tales of deceptive whimsy and quirkiness, disarming you with daffiness while she sets the hook and yanks. That's the unmistakeable, inimitable texture of a Kelly Link story: deft literary brushstrokes, painting a picture so charming and silly that you don't even notice when she cuts you without mercy.

Turns out that she can quite handily do this for hundreds of pages, and the effect only gets better when it's given space to unfold.

Hard to tell you about this one without spoilers! But I'll tell you this much. It's a story about three teenaged friends who return from death and find themselves in the music room at their high school, face to face with their mild-mannered music teacher, Mr Anabin. Anabin explains what's happened in frustratingly cryptic – and very emphatic – terms, but is interrupted when a sinister shape-shifting wolf enters the music room.

This is Bogomil, and whenever he speaks, Mr Anabin turns his back – and vice versa. Anabin and Bogomil appear to be rivals, and Bogomil may or may not have been the keeper of the land of the dead from which the three have escaped. There's also a forth, a tattered shade who's been dead so long they don't remember who they are or anything about themselves. Bogomil would like to take the four back to the deadlands, but Anabin proposes a contest and Bogomil agrees – but no one explains the contest or its rules (or even its stakes) to the four dead teenagers.

That's the wind up. The pitch that follows is flawless, a long and twisting mystery about friendship, love, queerness, rock-and-roll, stardom, parenthood, loyalty, lust and duty. There's a terrifying elder god of Lovecraftian proportions. There are ghosts upon ghosts. There are ancient grudges. There are sudden revelations that come from unexpected angles but are, in retrospect, perfectly set up.

More than anything, there are characters. It's impossible not to love Link's characters, despite (because of) their self-destructive choices and their impossible dilemmas. They are so sweet, but they are also by turns mean and spiteful and resentful, like the pinch of salt that transforms a caramel from inedible spun sugar into something that bites even as it delights.

These characters, so very likable, are often dead or at death's door, and that peril propels the story like an unstoppable locomotive. From the very start, it's clear that some of them can't survive to the end, and Link is merciless in making you root for all of them, even though this means rooting against them all. This, in turn, creates moments of toe-curling, sublime horror.

Link has built a complex machine with more moving parts than anyone has any business being able to keep track of. And yet, each of these parts meshes flawlessly with all the others. The book ends with such triumphant perfection that it lingers long after you put it down. I can't wait to read this one again.

#pluralistic #romance #books #reviews #kelly link #magic realism #horror #gift guide #fantasy #cthulhoid #fhtagn #rock and roll #queer

[horrorlesbion]

i roll my eyes so hard whenever someone reviews a piece of media with dark/upsetting/sensitive themes with "why do we need more of this theres already one good book about humans being evil why would anyone create more..." idk girl why are there 28573 brainless romcoms in every bookstore i walk into!! maybe people enjoy reading these books!!! maybe there are subtle differences noticed by people who actually enjoy the genre!! if you dont then get the hell out of here!!!!

#goodreads reviews full of ppl who lose their whole shit when confronted with a serious book #or horror as a concept at all #like some ppl cannot fathom others enjoying media that is not happy #fuck shakespeare why arent we still shuffling the same 3 greek tragedies around #captains log

[nedlittle]

wow dude do you think oscar wilde may have been gay? should we tell the discord? should we inform rupaul?

#the picture of dorian gray #book discourse #sorry to keep beating this dead horse but i tried looking for the review i referenced in that damnèd post but only found more horrors #i appreciate storygraph's lack of hierarchy for review sorting but it really is a bitch when you're trying to find a review for something #extremely popular with over 17k reviews #'why is rupaul here' i blanked on mainstream gay celebs and he was the first i thought of which makes it funnier

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #12 – What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

I initially meant to read this back last year when it was up for a Hugo nomination, but well – honestly I forgot my copy in an airport waiting room and it’s presumably now living a good life somewhere in a New Jersey compose heap. But a friend had a copy and said they enjoyed it, so! Stole it for a few days, and very glad I did. It’s a quick, fun shot fungal gothic, great for stormy nights.

The basic plot is, well, it’s very explicitly Fall of the House of Usher with a slight admixture of Ruritanian Romance. The Ushers are a genteely impoverished family of minor aristocracy in Ruravia, a less than impressive principality in Eastern Europe. Alex Easton, Roderick Usher’s former commanding officer in some recent war (the Gallacian Army they served in having a habit of getting into these quite habitually) receives a letter from Roderick’s sister Madeline begging company and help, as she is deathly ill. Of course by the time Easton arrives the pair of them look like they’re one stiff wind away from dying, and the estate and the lands around it are both decaying and full of unnerving strangeness. The only person who seems happy to be there is Eugenia Potter, an Englishwoman and amateur mycologist studying the great variety of mushrooms and fungus to be found in the area.

So yes this is very much aiming to be Gothic Classic, at least in aesthetics and trappings. An overgrown and decaying estate several times too large for the last remnants of the family who now occupy it. Genteel madness and disease, hidden behind polite euphemisms and high walls. A deep, atavistic horror at parasitism and the desecration of the human (especially the well-bred, young and female) body by an alien presence. There’s even a cowboy for some reason. It definitely all works for me, but then my exposure to the genre is all a bit second hand.

Speaking of parasitism – mushrooms! The book expresses decay and desecration basically entirely through the idiom of fungal infections, both in terms of metaphor and imagery in descriptions and just in the actual source of the horror here. The lights in the tarn are fungal blooms, Madeline’s disease and her reanimation are both the result of almost drowning and inhaling that fungus into her lungs, and so on. There are two really effective horror beats in the book for me – the image of an infected hare which had just had its head shot off slowly jerking back to its feet as a dozen others placidly stood there and watched it be shot, and the moment of realization that Madeline’s oddly long and wispy body hair is in fact mycelia growing out of her skin – and both play off of this pretty directly.

I very awkwardly didn’t use any pronouns for Easton when giving the plot synopsis because the book actually plays around a bit with gender and pronouns in a way I’ve always loved and wish I saw more of. Easton is Gallacian (unrelated to the actually existing Galicia, I think), and the Gallacian language has a variety of pronoun sets beyond just he and she – one for children, one for God, and one (ka/kan) particularly for soldiers. Which, due to the exigencies of early modern warefare’s manpower requirements, eventually led to both men and women being perfectly eligible to become ‘sworn soldiers’. So y’know, Enlist today! Service guarantees citizen-transition!

(But actually I enjoy the thought and at least superficial sociological plausibility/consideration of what gender means in Gallacian society a lot more than how a lot of modern spec fic just kind of assues that every culture in the world has the perspective on gender of a well-educated 21st century progressive, material conditions be damned).

Anyway yeah, overall very entertaining read. Though Goodreads tells me it’s now the first in the series, which given how cleanly this one ended is not something that fills me with an abundance of faith.

#book review #what moves the dead #t. kingfisher #horror #sff

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: Unbreakable by Mira Grant

Author: Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)Publisher: Subterranean PressReleased: March 31, 2023Received: Own Book Summary: Unbreakable Starlight was one of many groups of girl warriors tasked with defending the planet. Unfortunately, their name was not quite accurate, as most of the group fell – alongside every other warrior. Only two survived the massacre. Piper and Yuina. Now the government has…

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#Book #Book Review #Books #Fiction #Horror #Literary #Literature #Mira Grant #Review #Science Fiction #Seanan McGuire #Subterranean Press #Superhero #teen superhero #Unbreakable #Unbreakable by Mira Grant

[walkonpooh]

Whalefall - Daniel Kraus Review

Jay Gardiner had a rocky relation ship with his father Mitt. Mitt is a locally renowned diver who has always wanted Jay to follow in his footsteps. Jay wanted to set his own path in life and the two diverged, Jay leaving home to couch surf until he reached college age. Then Mitt is diagnosed with cancer and commits suicide. Jay's reunites with his Mother and two sisters, but feels that his relationship with his father was unresolved. Because the suicide happened at sea, there wasn't ever a body to bury and Jay decides to go to the location where his father died to attempt to find his bones and bring them back to his family, hoping the act will resolve their relationship and give him and his family closure. During the dive, Jay is attacked by a giant squid, which is fleeing a sperm whale. Suddenly, both Jay and the squid are swallowed by the sperm whale. Stuck in the sperm whale's stomach and his oxygen running out, Jay has to try to remember everything his father taught him about the sea in order to survive. So yeah I had been anticipating this one for the last month or so and I really liked this one. It's a horror version of Andy Weir's The Martian and while I didn't find Jay as likeable as Mark Watney in that book, I liked him enough to root for his survival in a harrowing situation. I loved Kraus using the PSI of the oxygen tank as chapters and a countdown for Jay's survival, really added to the tension of the situation. The descriptions of being in the sperm whale's stomach really reminded me of a certain scene from Jordan Peele's Nope that I loved. So yeah, highly recommend this one and I plan on checking out more from Kraus!

4/5

#halloween reading 2023 #daniel kraus #reading #horror #horror book reviews #horror reviews #whalefall #thalassophobia #sperm whale #giant squid

[deludedimages]

Review for Looking Glass Sound By Catriona Ward

I read this in about a week. Honestly, I’ve had trouble reading Catriona’s work before this one. I couldn’t get into Needless Street. It’s one of my wife’s favorite books, but I struggled and DNF’d it because of those struggles. I try to find a connection to books while reading them—something from my past or, with this one, something from my childhood. My parents divorced when I was in third…

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#Catriona Ward #horror book reviews #Looking Glass Sound #Writing

[harringtonfan4]

#thriller books #books and reading #books #books & libraries #booksbooksbooks #book blog #book quotes #book recommendations #bookaholic #book review #booknerd #bookshelf #horror books

[baroness-von-poontang]

I have just finished this book and oh my days. Let me tell you, I’m not easily weirded out by reading a horror story at 3am but damn this got me!!

The story follows Mouse, a thirty-something woman tasked with clearing out her dead grandmother’s house. Now they did not have a good relationship, but Mouse feels obligated to take on the task due to her father's poor health.

So Mouse, being the good daughter she is, sets off to the butt fuck middle of nowhere to deal with a dead hoarder's home.

Things begin to get a little peculiar and escalate quickly, leaving Mouse in a state of paranoia and fright.

Think - creatures in the woods, inhuman beings, cryptic puzzles that must be solved.

Absolute 10/10 for me, I could NOT put the book down 🖤.

Get it on your TBR list; you won’t regret it!!

#horror #book blog #book review #booklr #books #goth #books and literature #booklover #booksbooksbooks #bookblr

[abz-j-harding]

"All things must come to an end, and Parliament of Rooks ends its run on a high note."

-Rory Wilding

April 30, 2024

#parliament of rooks #parliament of rooks review #comics #parliament of rooks 5 review #gothic horror comics #parliament of rooks comic book series review #artist #artists #artists on tumblr #comic books #comic art #original comic #webcomic #web comic