Horror

Indigenous horror and a certain French flavour: November 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, French, Horror, Indigenous, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Never Whistle At Night edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Version 1.0.0

This was a highly anticipated collection for me – as soon as I knew it existed I went to get a copy.

In this book, indigenous authors use elements of their own cultural background to revisit and reinvent many tropes and archetypes commonly found in horror fiction.

As this is an anthology by many authors, the tones, approaches and styles vary enormously from story to story. In fact, one of the best things about this collection is that it’s allowed me to discover writers I’m now very curious about and would love to read more from in the future. Here there is a short list of the stories I enjoyed the most:

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Some dark retellings: October 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Graphic Novels, Horror, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

Diaries of War by Nora Krug

I love Krug’s graphic novel memoir Heimat, which is a fascinating meditation on the value of historical fiction, not only for the descendants of those who have been treated unfairly but also for the descendants of those who perpetrated violent acts or allowed them to happen because they benefited them in some way or another.

It is clear that Krug is interested in the consequences of war and conflict – and how people deal with them. So Diaries of War is a bit of an experiment (and an interesting one at that). Right after Russia attacked Ukraine and a war between these two countries started (an ongoing conflict) she contacted two people she knew from the arts and literary industries. One was a journalist in Ukraine, and the other one was an illustrator in Russia. She proposed them she’d get in touch once a week to ask for updates on their daily lives as the conflict progressed – she’d then illustrate these to create a book that captured perspectives from both sides.

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Seahorses, aliens and willows: September 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Horror, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher

This is the third book I read by T Kingfisher and it’s possibly the one that I’ve found the spookiest. By now I know Kingfisher is an author I enjoy – I’ve literally devoured all her books. What I love the most is her fast-paced writing style and her characters.

In this story, we follow Kara, a thirty-something-year-old recently divorced who goes back to live with her uncle Earl in North Carolina. Now, Uncle Earl has quite a special job. He’s the owner and curator of a very particular museum: Natural Wonders, Curiosity and Taxidermy. You can imagine the deal: all sorts of quirky stuffed animals (including a Fiji siren) and strange artefacts. Kara, however, is anything but spooked. In fact, she has very good memories of growing up around the museum, so when her uncle offers her a job there helping him out she immediately accepts.

Things are going normal until one day, when she’s taking care of the museum while his uncle is in the hospital healingfrom back surgery, she discovers a strange hole in the wall. At the beginning she tries to patch it up but ends up realising that the hole is actually quite large – she gets inside (of course!) and discovers that she’s actually in a tunnel in a completely different dimension. That’s how she ends up accessing another world. Now, this new space she discovers is one of my favourite parts of the book. A strange alien, empty land filled only with water and willows.

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Travelling all Over: August 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

Last Call by Tim Powers

I’m so confused about this book – I’m still trying to decide if I like it or not. First of all, I bought this book ten years ago when I wanted to get into steampunk because I had heard that Powers was a master in the genre. Obviously, I didn’t do my research well because this book is definitely not steampunk.

Back then this was the book I took with me on the plane when I first moved to Lancaster (ten years ago). That day I read a few pages, I was quite confused (the beginning is quite convoluted, although in a good way) and then forgot completelyabout it as I was trying to adapt to life in England while studying for an MA.

This summer I was looking at my bookshelf at home and I realised that ten years had been way too long and I needed to give this book a chance. I was quite eager to get into it and curious. 

Well, let’s start with the good stuff first. The writing. Tim Powers knows how to write, and that’s undeniable. He reminded me of Stephen King in that he uses multiple POVs to show the scope of his plot. This was a very entertaining book to read, and you know, as I type this I think that’s enough. I like this book because I had a good time reading it.

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There’s more than one side to a story: June 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Queenie by Candyce Caty-Williams

Perhaps because the cover I have of this book is neon pink I was convinced it would be a sweet romance but this ended up being much darker and dramatic than I could have anticipated. Also, I loved this book much more than I thought I would, even if I sometimes wanted to scream at the main character (red flag, RED FLAG! RED FLAG!!!!!) 

Queenie is a twenty-five-year-old English girl from a Jamaican family living in London. She has what many of us would consider a dream job – she works as a writer for an important newspaper. She has a group of supportive friends. She lives with her white boyfriend in a flat they rent together. All seems perfect but it couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s struggling with her relationship – her boyfriend is slowly breaking up with her, saying she’s ‘too intense’ and accusing her of always messing up things with his family (who are a bunch of, well, entitled racists, for the most part, but also the kind of racist people who would openly deny being racist…) She may not be able to be who she really is around her family. At work, her bosses would discourage her from writing anything remotely political or critical because they don’t think there’s an audience for it. As for her friends, not all of them are as supportive of her as it may seem; her friend Rebecca for example seems to secretly enjoy lending her money whilst at the same time questioning a lot of her life choices (for context here, Rebecca is white from an affluent family, Queenie is the first person to go to university in her family and has been brought up by her grandparents and her aunt as she has an absent mother and a father she never knew).

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On injustice: March 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Nature Writing, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally J Morgan

I picked this book because it was intrigued by its premise: it’s partly based on the encounter its author had with the infamous murderers Fred and Rose West in the 1970s. Sally J Morgan was a young girl hitchhiking who decided not to get in their car – but was impacted by the encounter – as she later learned what she had really escaped from.

This novel is about women, the relationships they share, and the sexism and cruelty they faced in 1970s England (which actually, still feels pretty relatable these days).

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Parents, Families and Trouble: February 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Crime Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Weird Fiction

Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher

I really enjoyed T Kingfisher’s writing style when I read The Twisted Ones, so when I got this book for my birthday I was really looking forward to it – especially as some of my friends said they thought I’d love this one even more. They were right.

First of all, this is a revenge quest, and I have a thing for revenge quests. I adore them, there’s something about getting what you are owed in the end that I just– yeah, I know life is not often like this, which is perhaps why I really like characters to get some retribution in fiction.

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A thought-provoking darkness: January 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Caliente (Hot) by Luna Miguel

I learned of Luna Miguel by chance, in one of those late night internet searches which took me to an old blog of hers. I saw that she’d published plenty of poetry but also some non-fiction and became curious. When I was in La Librería de Mujeres (The Women’s Bookshop) – one of my favourite places in Madrid, they recommended this book to me, and so I bought it and read it in a couple of days.

Luna Miguel explores female desire in this book, which starts with her personal experience of going through a divorce after being with a partner (and also married) for many years and having a child in common. What follows is an exploration into self-pleasure, female masturbation and poliamory. It’s interesting to note here that Miguel brings in many other authors and examines their work and their life experiences to develop some of her points.

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Best Reads of 2023

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

This year I read more books than usual – making this my best reading year post-PhD. I’ve also realised more than ever that reading – especially in this age when we have so many things competing for our focus, such as email and social media – is like a sport. A muscle that you need to exercise regularly. After those times in the year when life became too much and I couldn’t read regularly – for example, July, when I was travelling a lot, doing job interviews and trying to plan another house move across England – reading became more difficult and during August I had to ease myself back into it. The good news is that after three or four days of reading regularly focus always comes back, and I find that the more I read the longer I can stay with a book in my hands without falling asleep. It’s actually kind of amazing to think that when I was a child I had much more natural endurance when it came to reading and I could spend hours and hours stuck to a book…

Also, libraries are wonderful, I still get a high every time I get to visit them and pick all the books I want to read and it’s for free! Nobody wants my money! It’s simple, accessible pure pleasure! Kindness! Let’s all please love libraries and care for them and never take them from granted.

So here we go with my best reads this last year.

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On Desolation: December 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What a read.

I picked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when I was twelve or so in the public library (translated into Spanish). It caused a great impression in me, because it wasn’t like any other fantasy book that I had read before –  I’m looking forward to rereading it as an adult in its original language.

Piranesi, on the other hand, didn’t draw me in as much when I first saw it in a bookshop. I remember working at Waterstones when it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and we were selling heaps and heaps of them. And yet, when I read the blurb, it didn’t sound attractive to me at all – it seemed so vague.

I know, judging a book only by its the blurb. I should know better.

Sure, there are many potential issues and plot gaps in this book but I adored it and I read so fast. One of the most astonishing achievements of this book – which you could call a novella because of its length and the way the plot works – it’s how it manages to suggest such a complex world in very few pages.

Piranesi has something I have a passion for: strange vast and desolate landscapes. I can’t explain it, but I feel attracted to such places, which explains why Abandoned Places is one of my favourite books to look at and chill with a cup of tea.

In Piranesi, most of the plot is set in the House, a building of mammoth proportions composed of halls with impossible tall ceilings. There’s nothing in them but statues of all the things you can possibly imagine, including, for example, a woman carrying a beehive. (Because, why not.) To complete the picture, there is also a sea in the House so now and again, and depending on the tides, some of the halls get flooded. Because of this, there are fish, and sometimes seagulls, and even albatrosses. Apart from that, there are no other beings aside from Piranesi and the Other.

Can you imagine anything more beautiful?

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