2025
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad follows Sam, now a published author, getting kidnapped by the Bunnies during her book tour so they can tell their side of the story from the original novel. What should have been a return to Awad’s brilliantly unhinged world instead felt like tedious Bunny fanfiction – all the surface elements are there, but the magic that made the first book so weirdly captivating is missing. The mystery and ambiguity that made Bunny so compelling gets replaced with heavy-handed explanations and lore that I never wanted or needed. When a second POV kicks in partway through (the bunny-turned-boy creation), it briefly livens things up with its childish, emoji-filled narration, but even that novelty wears thin across nearly 500 pages. I found myself wishing Awad had left the Bunny universe unexplained and perfect rather than giving us this tedious expansion that somehow manages to be both overlong and underwhelming. (September 23, 2025)
Oddbody by Rose Keating This short story collection lured me into a macabre carnival of bodily oddities that’s occasionally stomach-turning but magnetic in its strangeness. Women lay eggs during breakfast shifts, fathers become worms in bathtubs, and ghosts become unwelcome third wheels in relationships – all described in sparse, matter-of-fact prose that makes the bizarre feel strangely normal. I’m usually pretty oblivious to metaphors, so while other readers point out heavy-handed symbolism about depression, relationships, and societal pressures, I just enjoyed each story at face value, letting the visceral imagery of consumption, transformation and rupture burrow under my skin like a grotesque parasite I’m both repulsed and transfixed by. Keating creates these deeply uncomfortable scenarios where the women protagonists accept their bizarre circumstances with a shrug while continuing about their daily lives. The collection feels like witnessing ten different fever dreams where bodies betray, transform, and consume in ways that made my skin crawl but somehow left me hungry for more.
Root Rot by Saskia Nislow Nine children gather at their grandfather’s lake house, but instead of names, they have labels like “The Liar” and “The Secret Keeper.” This storytelling choice initially confused me, but soon I was pulled into Nislow’s hypnotic collective “we” narration as reality shifts around the children – mushrooms bleed, faces distort, and the landscape seems hungry. The book captures that disorienting childhood experience of being thrown together with cousins, creating a strange mythology while adults remain distant figures doing incomprehensible adult things.. The vacation setting transforms from familiar to alien in ways that feel both disturbing and fascinating. There’s no tidy resolution and I finished the book partly confused but strangely content with a story that perfectly scratched my itch for creative weirdness in the stories I consume.
El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott Megan Abbott has this strange talent for pulling me into worlds I never expected to care about – first with The Turnout where I found myself invested in ballet despite my complete disinterest in dance, and now with three formerly privileged sisters in post-recession Detroit getting sucked into a pyramid scheme. Harper, Pam, and Debra carry decades of shared history and complicated loyalty as they chase financial salvation through “The Wheel,” an exclusive investment club where women pay thousands to join, recruit others, and supposedly watch their money multiply without selling a single product. The slow-burn story shifts when death enters the picture, casting suspicion across sisterly bonds that were already fragile. Abbott captures the acute anxiety of downward mobility – these women clinging to middle-class respectability while pretending everything’s fine. The ending makes perfect sense in hindsight, though I was too caught up in the sisters’ desperation to properly suss it out.
Party of Liars by Kelsey Cox Sophie’s ridiculously Texas-sized Sweet Sixteen becomes a crime scene when a body crashes onto the dance floor from a balcony above, transforming teenage revelry into small-town scandal. Cox structures this whodunit around multiple perspectives – the young stepmother Dani, the bitter ex-wife Kim, the Irish nanny Orlaith, and Sophie’s best friend Mikayla – each hiding their own secrets and resentments. The book plants subtle hints about certain relationships that completely misdirected me until a surprising revelation midway through changed my understanding of the characters and their motives. While there wasn’t anyone I was particularly rooting for and the ending felt a bit underwhelming after all the buildup, it was a quick, entertaining read for when you want rich people behaving badly, petty grudges, and murder all wrapped into one party disaster.
Shy Girl by Mia Ballard Broke and depressed thirty-year-old Gia accepts an unusual offer from Nathan, a man she meets on a sugar dating website – be his pet dog in exchange for paying off her debts. What begins as a strange but seemingly straightforward arrangement quickly turns into something darker, freakier, and more twisted as Nathan reveals his true intentions. As Gia’s bizarre arrangement morphs into captivity, her humanity is gradually stripped away and she evolves into something feral and vengeful, I found myself increasingly disconnected from both the character and the story. I’m honestly not sure if it was the writing style, the heavy-handed metaphors that others pointed out, or simply that this type of story doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe all of the above? This wasn’t terrible by any means – I didn’t connect with it the way others clearly did, and I can’t quite articulate exactly why. I picked up this book based solely on the beautiful cover art, knowing nothing about the story itself. Had I known about the frequent sexual violence throughout the narrative, I would’ve given this one a pass – the animal transformation premise itself wasn’t the issue, but rather the uncomfortable context it was presented in.
The Brood by Rebecca Baum Mary Whelton, a cutthroat NYC lawyer with questionable ethics, crashes her car while fleeing the press and wakes up captive in a remote cabin with a strange woman she only knows as “Girl.” What begins as a Misery-like hostage situation quickly turns bizarre when Mary discovers Girl mistakes her for her missing mother and has an unhealthy obsession with a local cicada population and something called “The Brood” which has disturbing (and that’s an understatement!!) plans for Mary. Baum’s uncomfortably and unpleasantly detailed descriptions of women’s bodies – their secretions, transformations, and functions – made this a challenging read that had me physically, squirmingly ill at times. The constant focus on breasts, feeding, and the grotesque manipulation of female biology created a visceral horror whether bugs freak you out or not. I found myself both repulsed and weirdly captivated by the twisted mother-daughter dynamics and the increasingly strange body transformations. A revolting read that I desperately wanted to put down, yet somehow could not. (October 28, 2025)
The Compound by Aisling Rawle Imagine waking up in a desert compound with nine other beautiful women, cameras tracking your every move for a reality TV show where contestants must couple up to avoid banishment while competing for increasingly lavish rewards – all while the outside world slowly burns. I’ve always felt smugly superior about not watching reality TV (what does that say about my cultural elitism?), but here I was completely hooked by this book from the first page. There’s something uncomfortable about my willingness to consume the exact same content when it comes packaged as literature rather than television – as if the medium somehow legitimizes my guilty pleasure. It was perfect airplane reading – I was both literally and figuratively a captive audience for this fraught, escapist fantasy. Lily isn’t particularly deep or likable, but I found myself weirdly invested in her journey as she navigates the show’s manipulations, forming strategic alliances and pursuing diamond earrings with single-minded determination. What made this work was how it used the addictive format to deliver an underlying critique of consumerism without ever getting preachy. The strange mix of boredom, forced intimacy, and manufactured drama created an oddly compelling world, while hints of environmental collapse and war in the background create an unsettling undercurrent. I blew through it in one sitting and finished feeling both thoroughly entertained and vaguely uncomfortable with how much I enjoyed it.
Strange Houses by Uketsu A nameless narrator gets roped into examining floor plans for his friend’s potential house purchase, only to discover bizarre “dead spaces” hidden between the walls. With his architect buddy, he embarks on a puzzling investigation where they stare at diagrams and somehow leap to wild conclusions from almost nothing. The prose has that mechanical quality I’ve come to expect from Japanese translations – not unpleasant, just that distinctive flat-affect style I’ve noticed over years of reading translated works. The characters possess about as much personality as the floor plans they’re analyzing, serving mainly as vehicles for the puzzle-solving. Their eye-rolling, far-fetched deductions in the face of minimal evidence was utterly ridiculous, but the sheer absurdity of it all kept me turning pages. I’d honestly be more interested in checking out the manga adaptation, which probably makes the diagram-heavy mystery solving more visually engaging than reading conversations about floor plans.
How To Survive A Horror Story by Mallory Arnold Seven strangers, including six horror authors and one random aspiring writer, get invited to a dead horror author’s mansion for a will reading, only to be trapped in a “deadly” game where they must face their past misdeeds or die trying. The dialogue was as painful, the inner monologue was cringy (OMG, that one quote about Jennifer Aniston…lordy), and what was supposed to be scary or mysterious came across more like a mediocre Halloween haunted house where the employees are required to stay six feet away from the guests. I kept waiting for the characters to develop personalities beyond “selfish jerk” or “slutty blonde,” but no such luck. This seemed like it wanted to be a clever horror-comedy mashup of Clue and House on Haunted Hill, but somehow managed to suck the fun out of both concepts while adding nothing of its own.
The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke Set in the 1950s and 60s, this gothic tale follows two unwed mothers – Pearl and Mabel – who end up at Lichen Hall, a crumbling manor surrounded by eerie woods where pregnant women are sent away to give birth in secrecy. The dual timeline structure creates a nice back-and-forth rhythm as we gradually discover the house’s dark secrets through both women’s experiences with the strange proprietors, the Whitlocks, and their bizarre grandson Wulfric. Despite the mushroom angle (add this to the growing pile of fungal horror novels colonizing my shelves), I found myself drawn in by the genuinely atmospheric setting of the decaying manor and the heartfelt relationships that form between the women as they navigate their shared trauma. Oddly enough, this is the second book I’ve read in two months about unwed mothers’ homes, though the villain reveal felt a bit silly and undercut the otherwise creepy vibes.
The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li follows the aftermath of Hollywood starlet Vivian Yin’s death, when her daughters Lucille and Rennie expect to inherit her sprawling California mansion but discover she’s left it to Elaine, whose family once worked for Vivian decades ago. Both families end up living in the house together while they sort things out, which goes about as well as you’d expect – especially when supernatural occurrences start plaguing everyone and the overgrown garden literally begins creeping toward the house. The story jumps between different time periods, revealing Vivian’s rise to fame and the secrets that tore these families apart, though I found myself wondering why it took so many scenes to establish that certain characters were genuinely terrible people – it felt like beating a dead horse. The exploration of Chinese American identity in old Hollywood felt authentic and added a real sense of depth beyond the gothic atmosphere, and I appreciated how the mansion itself becomes a rotting symbol of broken dreams. By the time everything finally came together in the last chunk of the book, at least the pieces fit, even if I’m still puzzling over some of the earlier hauntings that seemed to drift away unresolved.
Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester spans three centuries in the cursed town of Hawthorne Springs, following women who fall prey to a mysterious illness when they step out of line—boils in their mouths, teeth falling out, the whole gruesome package. The setup has potential: Anne Bolton makes a dark bargain in the 1700s, Mary Shephard has a forbidden affair in the 1950s, and Camilla Burson questions her preacher father’s congregation in 2007, all connected by this sinister legacy. DeMeester clearly knows her way around body horror and feminist rage, and the concept of generational curses tied to female rebellion should have been right up my alley. But despite all the right ingredients—witch trials, religious hypocrisy, queer longing—the execution felt sluggish and overly heavy-handed with its themes. The multiple timelines never quite clicked for me, and by the time the big revelations arrived, I was more relieved to be done than genuinely surprised. (December 9, 2025)
Y/N by Esther Yi was part of my challenge to read all the library books whose holds I let lapse in the past few years, and I’m so glad I didn’t let this one slip away. A Korean-American woman living in Berlin becomes obsessed with Moon, a member of a K-pop boy band, and abandons her entire life to fly to Seoul and track him down after he mysteriously retires from the group. It takes exactly three pages for her to go from sneering anti-fandom intellectual (“my spiritual sphincter stayed clenched to keep out the cheap and stupid”) to completely, absurdly fanatic, and she begins writing Y/N fanfiction -where “Your Name” gets inserted so readers can pretend they’re dating Moon- to cope with these emotions too enormous for her body to hold. The story unfolds like a bizarre dream, where random people appear precisely when the narrator needs them, and Yi’s strange, dense writing makes you feel like you’re sinking into someone else’s fixation. I adored this cynical snob narrator even though she made me remember exactly why I find intense fandom so insufferable, but Yi transforms it into something gorgeous rather than just sad.
The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala follows Ollie Veltman returning to the queer vacation island of Anchor’s Mercy after a year away caring for his dying mother, only to find himself in the middle of a supernatural plague rising from the ocean. The setup is solid – an eccentric drag queen-run paradise off the Maine coast suddenly overrun by mysterious contagions and sea monsters – and La Sala structures it as a mix of Ollie’s story and friendships and scattered documents trying to piece together what went wrong. I appreciate La Sala’s writing and characters even when his plots don’t totally land for me (I suspect that I, like many readers, read La Sala through The Honeys-tinted glasses, and even when it’s not perfect, it’s still more Ryan La Sala which is better than the alternative of no Ryan La Sala) and this one kept me reading despite some jarring timeline jumps between past and present. The horror elements work well, especially the genuinely grotesque creatures, but I wanted more time to actually experience this island and its fabulous before everything went to hell. The cliffhanger ending feels a bit manipulative but also makes sense, given how much story is clearly left to tell. (September 16, 2025)
The Myth Maker by Alie Dumas Heidt promised Greek mythology meets serial killer thriller, but what I got was elaborate murder scenes based on the most surface-level goddess details—I kept thinking it would be more fascinating if the killer had tapped into their more esoteric aspects instead of just the obvious stuff. Detective Cassidy Cantwell’s investigation follows a predictable cycle of murder, mythological explanation from a convenient professor, suspect interviews, repeat, and I lost track of the dozens of characters pretty quickly. The video game-influenced killer reveal felt overwrought, and honestly, I’ve already forgotten most of the details despite finishing it just two days ago. I’ll probably read the sequel anyway since Cassidy’s cold case about her murdered best friend seems infinitely more interesting than this by-the-numbers procedural.
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy turns into something much stranger than the werewolf story the title suggests. Struggling actress Jess finds a terrified five-year-old hiding outside her apartment, and after an incredibly violent and extremely bizarre encounter with the boy’s naked father, they’re on the run together. The horror that follows them is more imaginative than I expected, and much closer than Jess realizes, with Cassidy crafting genuinely unsettling body horror while exploring how fear and trauma can literally transform us. Even if you go in expecting some weirdness, it spirals far beyond that into territory I didn’t see coming, all while developing the sweet, unlikely friendship between Jess and this damaged kid.
Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su delivers exactly the kind of messy, ridiculous protagonist I’m weirdly drawn to. Vi is a 23-year-old college dropout working hotel reception, avoiding her bubbly coworker Rachel, and generally making terrible decisions when she finds a sentient blob outside a drag club and decides to take it home. What starts as a drunken impulse becomes an attempt to mold the blob into her perfect boyfriend, feeding it cereal and pop culture until it transforms into a conventionally attractive man. The premise is absurd, but Su uses it to dig into Vi’s loneliness and self-sabotage and maybe the ways we try to control the people we claim to love.Vi is genuinely awful at times—selfish, avoidant, cruel to people who care about her—which somehow makes her both insufferable and disgustingly compelling. There’s something uncomfortably familiar about watching someone so stuck and stagnating make such spectacularly bad choices, even if you tell yourself you were never quite that terrible.
John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet is a collection of essays adapted from Green’s podcast where he reviews random aspects of human existence – everything from air conditioning to cave paintings – on a five-star scale, weaving in stories about his own struggles with mental health and finding hope during dark times. To be honest, I never listened to the podcast, so I didn’t actually know the conceit before I started reading, but what could have been a gimmicky concept becomes something genuinely moving about how we find meaning in small things. The reviews that work best are the ones where Green stops trying to be clever about the rating system and just lets himself be vulnerable – the chapter on googling strangers made me cry because it’s less about the topic and more about how desperately we all want to understand each other. As Green writes, quoting Harvey, “In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant,” and that shift from smart to pleasant is exactly what makes this book work. So many of his insights, connections, and observations resonated with me on such an immediate and deeply fundamental level that I bought myself a used copy after finishing the library loan.
Fiend by Alma Katsu follows the uber-wealthy Berisha family, whose thousand-year-old import-export empire seems impossibly blessed – their rivals suffer convenient strokes, buildings catch fire at opportune moments, and whistleblowers end up dead. The story alternates between present-day chaos and childhood flashbacks as three siblings, reluctant heir Dardan, power-hungry Maris, and idealistic Nora, discover the ancient evil that’s been fueling their family’s success for generations. This is Katsu’s first contemporary horror after her historical novels, and honestly, it was fine – a quick read that somehow also managed to be a slow burn. The complicated family dynamics – all the backstabbing and competing for power while trying to keep their supernatural secret – work well enough with the horror elements, but I’ve been liking each of Katsu’s books a little less than the one before, with The Hunger still being my favorite. This one continues that trend without being actively disappointing, but it never quite grabbed me the way her earlier work did. (September 16, 2025)
How Bad Things Can Get by Darcy Coates drops Ruth, the sole survivor of a childhood cult, onto Prosperity Island for what’s supposed to be an influencer’s dream party with hundreds of his most devoted fans. When the island’s dark history connects to Ruth’s past and the elaborate games turn deadly, guests start disappearing in increasingly violent ways. I usually love Coates’ work, but this one felt pretty absurd to me – the over-the-top influencer premise, the characters making the most ridiculous decisions, the elaborate scenarios that somehow everyone just goes along with. The cult backstory had potential but got overshadowed by all the island chaos, and while the blood and violence ramp up considerably in the second half, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would work so much better as a movie. I’d absolutely watch the hell out of this on the big screen with a tub of overpriced popcorn, but on the page it just didn’t quite work for me the way her other books do. (August 26, 2025)
Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell opens when Nina receives an unexpected gift from Nick Radcliffe, claiming to be an old friend of her recently deceased husband Paddy. As Nina falls for Nick’s charm, her daughter Ash grows suspicious and starts investigating his past, while across town florist Martha struggles with her frequently absent husband Alistair’s increasingly suspicious behavior. Maybe it sounds smugly naive to say this, but I genuinely do not get how all these smart women got taken in by this man who manages to be both incandescently diabolical and audaciously mediocre at the same time. The manipulation tactics were so transparent and the red flags so abundant that I spent most of the book wanting to shake sense into everyone involved. That said, I love Lisa Jewell’s work, so I had to see where this story was going, and she does deliver her signature twisty plotting and satisfying resolution. Even if I couldn’t buy into the premise, my affection for Jewell kept me reading through to the end.
I absolutely adored Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks, even though it was maybe a bit twee and precious at times – but just the right amount of twee and precious for me. Alice and her young daughter Fern move into a creaky former sanatorium turned apartment building, where Fern discovers a dead body and starts investigating despite her paranoid mother’s warnings. Alice has secrets of her own – there’s a reason they’re always moving and she’s so paranoid – and she’s also a miniaturist, which adds to the book’s precious quality but also speaks to her need to keep things small and controllable. The story unfolds in this wonderfully weird world populated by the kind of people you’d expect to live in a converted sanatorium: there’s someone who performs as a mermaid, a neighbor who communes with spirits, a professor specializing in obscure medieval topics. The writing itself is lovely, but there’s something about the whole story that has this magical, kooky, almost childlike sense of charm to it – not undeveloped or simplistic, just delightfully earnest in a way that feels younger than typical adult fiction. As someone who’s not usually drawn to YA, this hit exactly the right balance of whimsical gothic mystery with enough substance to satisfy, and I found myself not wanting to leave this strange little community Sparks created. (October 14, 2025)
Ghost Music by An Yu was another in my challenge to finally read my lapsed-hold books. Song Yan gave up her concert piano career to become a wife, but her husband Bowen refuses to have children and grows increasingly distant, especially after his mother moves in and starts blaming Song Yan for the lack of grandchildren. When mysterious packages of mushrooms start arriving at their Beijing apartment, Song Yan discovers they’re from Bai Yu, a famous pianist who disappeared a decade ago, and she gets drawn into a surreal world where she talks to an orange mushroom in her dreams. This is one of those spare, eerie books where you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s metaphor, and honestly I didn’t understand half of what was happening, but something about the dreamlike atmosphere and Song Yan’s quiet desperation had me strangely invested.
Endling by Maria Reva follows Yeva, a malacologist who funds her snail research by participating in Ukraine’s romance tour industry, entertaining Western men seeking “traditional” brides. When she teams up with sisters Nastia and Solomiya to kidnap a group of bachelors as a protest stunt, their plans are disrupted by Russia’s invasion in early 2022. At first, this setup feels almost absurd – a scientist obsessed with endangered snails, romance tourism, a kidnapping scheme involving a mobile lab – but it quickly becomes clear this isn’t some kind of quirky romp at all. The connection between the three women felt genuine and compelling, watching how they were transformed by this brief but intense shared experience gave the story real emotional weight, and I found myself completely absorbed by Yeva’s passion for saving endangered snail species. The sections where Reva breaks the fourth wall and inserts herself as author pulled me out of the fictional world, though I realize how spoiled and selfish that sounds when she’s grappling with how to tell a story while real war unfolds around her relatives and homeland. While I wished those meta elements could have been handled differently – perhaps as an afterword or in a separate section – I also recognize this as essential reading that forces us to confront our own ignorance about what’s happening in the world. This review feels intimidating to write because the work is several layers smarter than me in every regard, and I’m sure there were nuances and historical context I simply don’t grasp, but if nothing else, I appreciated how Reva forces readers into a necessary reckoning with our own limited understanding of the world.
When Noah finds his parents locked in a violent trance in front of the TV, he discovers it’s not just them – it’s happening nationwide in Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman. What he uncovers is an epidemic where people become possessed through certain media channels and websites, turning families into literal enemies who tear each other apart. This was…something, and I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. Chapman’s writing is undeniably skilled – he builds tension expertly and creates genuinely nightmarish scenarios – but I felt bludgeoned to death by the political commentary, and I say this as someone who agrees with his politics completely. I know that was the point, but still – maybe we’ve reached a moment where subtlety just isn’t cutting it anymore. Yes, it was grotesque and extreme and revolting, and okay almost obnoxiously nasty but that’s clearly the territory Chapman is working in here. The social horror metaphor felt both obvious and necessary, even if I’m still not entirely sure what Chapman was trying to accomplish beyond making us all feel terrible about the state of things. And maybe also trying to make us barf.
More fool am I for picking up Nobody’s Fool by Harlan Coben. Former detective Sami Kierce has spent twenty-two years haunted by waking up next to his dead girlfriend Anna in a Spanish hotel room, covered in blood with a knife in his hand, until he spots her very much alive in his private investigation night class. Harlan Coben maybe has okay ideas for stories, but I don’t think he’s a great writer – the plotting felt convoluted and the character motivations never quite made sense, especially Tad Grayson’s, which I still don’t understand. The timeline was completely off, the technology references felt like an old guy trying to sound current, and don’t even get me started on the moment when Sami walks into his kitchen to find his wife talking to Anna and thinks “wow, I have made love to both of these beautiful women.” Oh my god, so fucking gross, Jesus Christ. I kept reading because Coben does know how to keep pages turning, but by the end I was mostly just annoyed at myself for expecting anything better from someone whose writing consistently feels several notches below the premises he comes up with.
The Rotting Room by Viggy Parr Hampton sets up an intriguing premise: Sister Rafaela joins the cloistered Sisters of Divine Innocence, where nuns tend to decomposing corpses in a sacred burial ritual, but she begins to suspect something sinister when a mysterious stranger’s body resists decomposition. This had some fascinating ideas and the concept of the rotting room itself was genuinely disturbing, but Sister Rafaela was as dumb as a box of rocks – insipid and wishy-washy in a way that made me want to shake her. Father Bruno was equally useless, a complete ding dong who spent most of his time being inexplicably horny for Rafaela instead of actually helping solve anything. The worst part was the tiresome amount of time spent on mundane details – “first I went here then I went there then I sat down for lunch but I had no appetite” – rinse and repeat for what felt like endless pages. Hampton clearly did her research on historical burial practices and created an effectively creepy atmosphere, but the repetitive internal monologue and flat characterization made this feel much longer than it needed to be. I kept waiting for either character to do something, anything, decisive, but instead got stuck in their endless hand-wringing until an abrupt and unsatisfying ending.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna Jane is a biracial writer desperately trying to support her family, including her artist husband Lenny whose work doesn’t sell, while they bounce between house-sitting gigs and perpetually unstable housing situations. When her decade-long novel – her “mulatto War and Peace,” as she calls it – gets rejected, she pivots to television writing by stealing an idea from a friend…which is bad enough, but the friend owns the house they are living in! Jane is the worst friend ever. I actually liked this one despite never wanting to be friends with Jane, because Senna pulls no punches about any of it, the financial desperation, the racial dynamics, the creative sellouts, and that kind of unsparing observation is what makes it work. And also Senna lets her characters make jokes and observations that would be completely unacceptable coming from anyone outside their community – it’s the kind of risky writing that only works when you’re writing from the inside.
Wicked Things by John Allison I adore John Allison, and while this wasn’t my favorite thing he’s done, any John Allison is good John Allison. Charlotte Grote gets framed for murder at a teen detective awards ceremony and ends up working with the London police to solve other cases, but the fact that she’s not particularly motivated to clear her own name struck me as genuinely weird for this character whose whole thing is sleuthing and detectivation! Max Sarin’s art is wonderful as always, and Lottie’s character is still that fun combination of charming and Very A Lot even when her priorities seem baffling.
The Sirens by Emilia Hart Lucy wakes up with her hands around some guy’s throat after he shared intimate photos of her, so she flees to her estranged sister Jess’s coastal house where men keep mysteriously disappearing into the sea – except Jess has vanished too, leaving behind only her diary and an unlocked door. Through the diary and her dreams about Mary and Eliza (twin convict sisters from 1800 whose bodies are changing as their ship sails to Australia), Lucy discovers her family’s supernatural heritage as sirens who lure abusive men to their deaths for generations. This was such a letdown after Weyward, Hart basically swapped witches for mermaids, and Lucy is so maddeningly passive that she spends 200 pages wandering around doing a bunch of nothing while her sister is missing!
A Killing Cold by Alice Kate Marshall Theo gets engaged to wealthy Connor after six months and heads to his family’s isolated winter retreat to meet the skeptical relatives, only to discover a childhood photo of herself taken at the very same place. Ugh with the totally convenient coincidences! There’s so many of them in this book! Through recovered memories, Theo realizes she lived there as a small child when something terrible happened that the Dalton family has been covering up ever since. The coincidence of them meeting and falling in love without recognizing each other is absolutely wildly stupid, but Marshall somehow kept me reading anyway with short chapters and enough genuine mystery about what happened to Theo’s mother. I found myself genuinely curious despite knowing the whole setup was completely ridiculous.
The Great British Bump Off by John Allison Shauna enters the beloved UK Bakery Tent baking competition hoping to charm the judges and make friends, but when a fellow contestant gets poisoned during filming, she volunteers to solve the mystery while still competing in the challenges. I don’t actually love GBBO (even though it’s cozy and gentle, it’s still a game show and I find that stressful), but this was such a neat way to enjoy the concept of the show without the stress. Allison basically created a murder mystery version of The Great British Bake Off with all the expected contestant types and a Paul Hollywood knockoff. The mystery isn’t particularly great (you can’t solve it yourself because important clues seem to come out of nowhere) but honestly I’m not here for that anyway – John Allison writes fantastic friendships with quirky character dynamics and excellent hi-jinks, so I didn’t care because the whole thing was just ridiculous fun.
Ladykiller by Katherine Wood Gia, a wealthy heiress, goes missing from her Greek estate, leaving behind only a manuscript detailing the events leading up to her disappearance, including her hasty marriage to a suspicious new husband and the bizarre guests they entertained that summer. Her childhood best friend Abby and brother Benny rush to find her, but the manuscript raises more questions than it answers about what’s real and what’s fiction. This had all the elements I usually love – rich people behaving badly, Greek island setting, messy friendships – but I honestly can’t remember much about how it all wrapped up, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how memorable it was.
The Dollhouse Academy by Margarita Montimore Ramona and her best friend Grace get accepted to the ultra-exclusive Dollhouse Academy, a secretive boarding school that churns out entertainment industry superstars, where they meet their idol Ivy Gordon who’s been trapped there for eighteen years. The first half drew me in completely with its creepy dark academia vibes and the slow revelation that something sinister is going on behind all the glamour and talent training. But my loan expired right when things were getting good, so I bought the book and waited a week or two to pick it up again, which totally killed the momentum – by the second half I just wasn’t as invested and felt like I wasted my money on what turned out to be a pretty predictable “evil entertainment industry conspiracy” story.
Strange Pictures by Uketsu I’m sure there’s an audience for Uketsu’s gimmicky sketchbook picture-puzzle mysteries, but I’m clearly not it. This one is a collection of seemingly unconnected mysteries – from a pregnant woman’s disturbing blog sketches to a child’s drawing of his home that contains a dark secret – that all connect through nine childlike pictures containing hidden clues to various crimes including murders and suspicious deaths. The book starts with a child psychologist explaining how she uses patients’ drawings to understand their mental state, then jumps between different cases where amateur sleuths analyze these creepy pictures to solve the mysteries. Like in Strange Houses, the characters have all the personality of calculators and somehow divine elaborate theories from the flimsiest clues imaginable.
The Unraveling of Julia by Lisa Scottoline After Julia’s husband is murdered, she retreats into isolation until a mysterious letter arrives offering her an inherited villa in Tuscany, prompting her to travel to Italy where she starts having visions about a Renaissance duchess and gets caught up in family history and astrology. The supernatural elements had potential but felt more like YA than a proper thriller. A few things that took me out of the story: there’s some casual poisoning that never gets satisfactorily resolved, Julia’s relationship with her best friend is inconsistent and all over the place, and most bewildering is how this woman who became a fearful recluse after her husband’s death suddenly has no problem navigating a foreign country with impossible ease. (July 15, 2025)
The Party by Natasha Preston A group of teenagers throw a party at a remote English castle that’s about to be demolished, but when a storm traps them there and people start dying, they realize there’s a killer among them. I don’t know if this was actually marketed as YA but it sure read like it – the writing feels like it was done by an actual teenager, the characters make zero logical decisions, and the ending is so ridiculous and unmotivated that I actually laughed out loud when the killer was revealed.
I had a good time with Breathe In, Bleed Out by Brian McAuley, even though something about the main character, Hannah, bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Hannah and her friends head to a spiritual retreat in Joshua Tree where she’s hoping to heal from the trauma of her fiancé Ben’s death during a wilderness trip, but someone starts picking off attendees in increasingly gruesome ways instead, so no healing for Hannah I guess. McAuley clearly knows his slasher tropes and the kills are absurd and creative in that stomach-turning way slasher fans want, plus his satire of wellness culture hits the right notes without being too heavy-handed. But Hannah just never clicked for me – she seemed weirdly assertive and confrontational for someone who’s supposedly been isolating herself and falling apart, like she had zero problem getting in people’s faces or standing up for herself. (This could be just me; traumatized and at my lowest or even on a day I am feeling 100% amazing I could never be as combative as Hannah.) Also, these friends genuinely seemed to hate each other, which made me wonder why they’d vacation together in the first place. The book works as a fun, bloody romp through familiar territory, but I kept wishing I could actually root for the final girl instead of just waiting for the next ridiculous death scene. (September 2, 2025)
The Break-In by Katherine Faulkner turned out to be one of the most enjoyable domestic thrillers I’ve ever read, even though Alice made some brazenly, outrageously stupid decisions that had me wanting to shake her. Also, I hate the term “domestic thriller,” it feels dismissive somehow? But I am not sure what else to call this genre? Anyway. When Alice kills an intruder in self-defense during a playdate at her London home, she can’t let go of the incident despite everyone telling her to move on, especially after strange phone calls and online comments suggest there’s more to the story than a random break-in. This hooked me from the first page and I found myself very resentful and grumpy every time I had to put it down! The plot twists did get a little convoluted as Alice digs deeper into who the intruder really was and why he targeted her house, but nothing that didn’t make sense, which I really appreciated. Sometimes I’ll finish a mystery with a dazed sense of “what just happened here?” but I never got that from The Break-In. Faulkner manages to keep all the threads coherent even as the revelations pile up, and while Alice’s choices often made me cringe, I was too wrapped up in the mystery to get derailed by her mind-boggling behavior. (August 26, 2025)
I liked It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest okay enough, though, is it me, or do a lot of this author’s books involve house restoration? Ronnie buys a run-down mansion sight unseen, unaware that it was once owned by silent film star Venita Rost, whose vindictive spirit still haunts it, along with the trapped ghost of guilt-stricken Inspector Bartholomew Sloan. Ronnie narrates every bit of daily minutiae – brushing teeth, calling contractors, texting her sister-in-law, eating sandwiches – in a way that felt extraneous, maybe meant to ground the story but mostly just slowing things down. This struck me as more of a slice-of-life comedy than horror; these aren’t scary ghosts, they’re just chatty ones. (July 22, 2025)
Rental House by Weike Wang was the third in my challenge to read lapsed holds. Keru and Nate are a married couple dealing with the uphill battle of trying to blend their completely incompatible families – her strict Chinese immigrant parents and his rural white working-class family who have nothing in common except mutual bewilderment. We see this unfold over two vacation rental disasters where everyone’s worst tendencies come out, and you watch this couple slowly realize that maybe love isn’t enough to bridge every cultural divide. I enjoyed Wang’s wry take on how exhausting it is to constantly translate between worlds that will never understand each other, and as many reviewers remarked, it’s a perfect illustration that you aren’t just marrying your partner – you’re marrying their whole family.
William by Mason Coile Henry is a reclusive engineer with agoraphobia who’s been hiding in his attic working on an AI robot called William, while his pregnant wife Lily has no idea what he’s been up to. When Lily’s coworkers Adam (with whom Lily may be having an affair) and Paige, a tactless oddball with no concept of appropriate conversation, come over for brunch and want to meet the mysterious husband, Henry decides to show off his creation, which turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea when William starts getting violent. This was pretty corny in that B-horror movie way, but despite all the silliness I did find it genuinely creepy at times, and the twist actually caught me off guard. It wasn’t an amazing book, but I’m not mad about spending time with it – I think I would have enjoyed it more as a film, or even as a Twilight Zone-esque episode of some horror anthology series.
The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani Badass, streetwise fighter Yoriko Shindo gets kidnapped by yakuza and becomes reluctant bodyguard to crime boss’s sheltered but sharp-tongued daughter Shoko, sparking a violent story where every male character seems committed to being as over-the-top vile as possible. Despite being crass, vulgar, and packed with misogynistic threats, I found myself weirdly riveted by this blood-soaked grindhouse-style tale of female rage and the unexpectedly tender bond that develops between the two women. Comes with major content warnings for sexual violence, but if you can handle that, it’s an entertaining revenge fantasy that left me unexpectedly moved and more than a little heartbroken.
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