Unquiet
Things

53 days until The Art of the Unknown is loose in the world!

When I was writing this book, I read everything I could get my hands on. Thinking about how artists engage with mystery, with the uncanny, with liminal space, with things that resist explanation, means understanding mystery from about fifty different angles at once. A color theorist sees it one way. A mystic sees it another. Someone writing about the history of an artist’s practice sees it differently still. You can’t really explore the unknowable by staying inside a single framework. You have to move between them, hold multiple versions in your head at the same time, slot one way of seeing beside another and see if they line up, or overlap but don’t quite fit, or point you somewhere you weren’t expecting.

So I read about wonder and how to think about it. About ideas that haven’t surfaced yet, the ones you have to go diving deep, sometimes holding your breath, in the dark. About words that almost exist, all the emotions we feel but can’t name. About how to look at something and actually see it, not just recognize it. About color as a language, how certain blues and golds change what your brain does. About the weird and the eerie as their own separate territories, not just variations on creepy.

I read about women painting things nobody else could paint, who saw invisible worlds and made them visible anyway. Those who understood that the body was a place where ceremony happened, where suffering happened, where magic was real. I read about stones and what they’ve witnessed, what they remember. About journeys through actual landscape and journeys through the landscape of your own mind, and how sometimes they’re the same thing. About spaces that don’t quite belong anywhere, the in-between places. About how artists have always been trying to show us what we can’t see: the hollow earth, the spirit world, the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing.

I read neuroscience alongside mysticism. I read about the brain’s capacity for wonder next to essays on being human in an age that doesn’t seem to value wonder. I read about artists who fished in their dreams for images. I read color theory. I read sci-fi art from the 1970s. I read about artists working in impossible spaces, making impossible things.

Some of the reading confirmed what I was already seeing—the same questions showing up in different mouths, different eras. Some of it sat uncomfortably next to the other stuff, didn’t fit, and made me hold both ideas at once without picking a winner. Some of it hassled and wrassled with my preconceived notions and things I thought I understood.

A bibliography is useful if you want to know what someone cited. It’s a paper trail, a record of the official sources. But I think … it’s not the same as the actual reading that shapes a book. I want to know what other writers were living inside when they created their work. Not just the stuff they quoted directly, I want the things that haunted them, that rerouted their thinking, that squatted in their head taking up space and changing the shape of how they see. I assume there are people like me who want that too. People who are curious about the texture of someone else’s musings, the threads of their obsessions, the fabric of their focus, the full tapestry of their inquiry. So that’s how I handle this list at the back of the book.

The further reading list at the back of The Art of the Unknown isn’t organized by relevance or by how directly each book appears in the text. It’s not a ranked list of “essential” sources. It’s arranged alphabetically because that seems logical and fair. The books that shaped this work, all weighted equally, with no hierarchy. Some I read cover to cover. Others I dipped into for a single image or idea. Some I quoted, some I referenced vaguely, some merely colored the way I thought about this, that, or the other thing. Some I just absorbed in a way that only I might ever know, and I lived in them for a moment while I was pondering a particular detail, and maybe it made no difference to the caption about a painting or sculpture I wrote, or maybe it did, but it felt right to include.

The books on this list don’t all point toward the same thing. They don’t all agree. Some of them would probably argue with each other if they could! But that’s exactly what you need when you’re thinking about the unknowable. One answer is never enough!

What book have you read that changed how you see without ever being directly “about” the thing you were working on? What have you read that became essential even though it seemed tangential? Tell me about a book that’s still shifting and reshaping the way you think about things and exist in this world? I want to hear all about the mysteries lining your shelves!

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin Ava and Aliya meet at a small university near London and fall into a kind of friendship that is its own closed world. They are the strange girls; they write stories that bleed into each other; they are each other’s entire point of reference for a few years. The novel moves between two timelines, Aliya’s perspective during their university years and Ava’s a decade later, when they’re thrown back together at a mutual friend’s wedding, and everything that was left unsaid between them starts surfacing. Ava’s life has stalled; Aliya got the book deal they both wanted. The power has shifted, and neither of them quite knows how to stand in it. Hasin writes their friendship — claustrophobic, electric, all-consuming — with exacting precision, and the campus atmosphere has that immersive and tragic quality of a world that felt infinite while you were in it and shrank the moment you left. [The ending lands in the past, at what feels like a tentative, fragile attempt to give the friendship another go … and then it just stops. You already know, from everything you’ve read in the present timeline, that it didn’t take. But you don’t know why, or whether the attempt was halfhearted, or whether the rift was simply too deep. It’s a devastatingly perfect place to end a book.

The Anniversary by Alex Finlay Quinn and Jules are seventeen when their lives collide on May 1st, 1992 — he gets arrested breaking up a fight, she survives an attack by a serial killer who has been striking every May Day for years. The novel then follows them both across the next decade, checking in on each May 1st as they separately try to piece together what happened and why. The structure is interesting in theory, and there’s a lovely warmth in watching these two find their way toward each other over the years. It’s a serviceable thriller with an earnest heart, just not one that surprised me very much. (courtesy Netgalley)

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm There is a moment in There Is No Antimemetics Division where a character arrives at her job, settles in, and gradually realizes she has been doing this job for decades. She is in charge of things. She has an entire history here. She just can’t remember any of it. That character is Marion Wheeler, Director of the Antimemetics Division, and she is the closest thing the book has to a beating heart. She is driven and capable and fighting a war she can’t remember fighting, against enemies she can’t remember encountering, with colleagues who may or may not still exist. The book lives in that register throughout. A secret organization exists to study and contain entities that protect themselves not through teeth or claws but by making themselves impossible to perceive or remember. Look away and they’re gone. Leave the room and you never knew they were there. The horror isn’t really the monsters. It’s the vertiginous, howling gap where the monsters were. On paper, the premise sounds unwieldy, and the book itself is a bit episodic; it began as installments for an online collaborative horror project called the SCP Foundation, and it reads that way, interconnected short stories rather than a traditional novel, each self-contained, each pulling you a little deeper. Characters are thinly drawn. Plot threads drop away without resolution, which is either a flaw or entirely intentional, given what the book is about. The ending goes big and then bigger, but then, the concept itself is pretty wild, so who am I to nitpick? What I can tell you is that it’s strangely, almost suspiciously easy to lose yourself in. The horror sneaks up on you after you’ve gotten comfortable. You think you have a grasp on how things work. But you really, really do not. What I retained after finishing it was next to nothing, just a simmering smattering of symptoms. Paranoid. Devastated. Destabilized. Whether I’ve forgotten the details because that’s simply how my brain works, or because the book worked exactly as intended, I genuinely cannot tell you. (I’ve been ruminating on this one so much I wrote an entire Rue Morgue column about it in the current issue!)

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey Celia has tried MLMs. She has wanted a baby, lost pregnancies, and kept moving forward in the vague way people drift along when they don’t have anywhere in particular to be moving toward. Desperate and tired, she arrives at Kindred Cove, an isolated island community that holds an annual festival for carefully selected outsiders. The island promises healing and transformation and belonging, and Celia is someone who has been trying to build those things for herself for a long time without much luck. You understand immediately why she’s into this place, even as the weirdness and wrongness of her stay becomes weirder and wronger. The book takes its time getting where it’s going, maybe too much time. Multiple POVs and timeline jumps are fine in theory, but layered on top of an already slow burn, they start to feel like obstacles rather than exciting or intriguing texture. Every time I got traction in one thread it would shift, and the momentum would have to rebuild from scratch. The cult mechanics seemed extremely well-researched; the manipulation here is warm and attentive rather than overtly sinister, which is more unsettling, but the repetition of the community’s language and rituals started to work against the book rather than for it. By the end, I wasn’t surprised by where things landed. Celia felt fated for this place from the first page. Whether that reads as tragedy or arrival probably depends on you. (courtesy Netgalley)

Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell Daye is a girl woven from flowers by Rory’s older sister, who needed the eight-year-old off her back and decided a botanical companion was the solution. It’s a loose reimagining of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, which is a premise I love, and the early sections, where Daye is new and strange and Rory is just a lonely kid, have a pleasantly eerie fairy tale quality. Then Rory grows up and develops feelings for the creature his sister made him, and the book follows that dynamic for a very long time, through many repeated seasonal cycles, and it is slow and it is uncomfortable in ways that did not feel productive or illuminating to me. I understand what it’s doing thematically. I just did not want to be there for it.

The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson I’ve never read a book of fiction, horror or otherwise, that uses this particular piece of Irish folklore as its central conceit, and The Burial Tide is a hell of an introduction to it. Mara Fitch wakes up inside a coffin, six feet underground, with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She claws her way out and emerges on Inishbannock, a small fog-wrapped Irish island where everyone seems to know her, and nobody seems to want her back. The opening scene yanks you by the collar and you tumble headfirst into the story whether you’re ready or not. From there, it unspools as both a mystery and a folk horror, Mara piecing together her identity while the island’s secrets close in around her, and the creatures that eventually emerge are grotesque and strange, and like many other things in this story, I’ve never encountered their like. Sharpson keeps you uncertain about who to trust right up until the end, and I had a good time with every second of it.

Crossroads by Laurel Hightower The crossroads as a place of supernatural transaction has a long history: Robert Johnson, folk tradition, the idea that where roads meet, something waits for yearning, for blood. Hightower takes that mythology and builds a story of profound grief around it, about a mother two years out from losing her son who returns nightly to his roadside memorial and one evening inadvertently bleeds into the ground there. Short, sharp, effective.

The Estate by Sarah Jost Camille Leray is an art historian who can slip inside a piece of artwork and inhabit the emotional world of the artist at the moment of creation, taking others with her if she chooses, which makes her either the most valuable person in any auction house or the most dangerous, depending on what she finds. After her weird powers lead her to make a call about a piece that costs her her job, Maxime Foucault, an aristocratic heir with a sprawling Brittany estate and a history with Camille, offers her a chance at redemption by authenticating a collection of sculptures by a mysterious vanished artist. The chateau is atmospheric, and the art world details are intriguing, but Camille’s dumb obsession with Maxime, who is fairly transparently a tool from the beginning, drags down everything around it. You spend the book waiting for her to see what everyone else already has, and the patience that requires is not really rewarded. The friendship between Camille and Lila is the more interesting relationship and the one I wished the book had focused on.

The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham  Bellerton College in 1951, is all velvet ribbons and strict rules and prestige, and Deena Williams is a working-class girl doing everything she can (kinda on the unethical downlow) to pass as someone who belongs there. She falls in with five other freshmen, and they become the Belles, singled out by the college president’s wife as the most promising—and also kind of the shittiest— girls on campus. There are also disappearances and possibly hauntings! The setup is exactly what dark academia promises and for a while it delivers… the atmosphere is good, the sense of something sinister underneath the propriety is well sustained. But after a while it loses steam or loses its way, or loses something. But Deena herself never quite worked for me, and the mystery, when it finally resolves, doesn’t pay off what the buildup promised. I was rooting for this one. We were all rooting for you!

The House of Whispers by Laura Purcell I keep waiting for another Laura Purcell novel to jazz me up the way The Silent Companions did, and, sadly, this one is not it. Hester arrives at Morvoren House in Cornwall to care for the now mute and partially paralyzed Miss Pinecroft, finding a household of superstitious staff performing rituals and muttering about fairies and whatever lurks in the caves beneath the house. The second timeline takes us back forty years to Louise Pinecroft’s childhood, watching her family succumb to consumption while her father fills those same caves with sick prisoners for his experiments in sea air as a cure. The bones of a good Gothic novel are all here: Cornwall, caves, fairy folklore, a woman with a terrible secret locked inside her, but it never quite happened for me. The atmosphere is present without being immersive, the characters present without being compelling.

Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou “The decision to try for beauty meant I could also fall short of it, which would be more painful than not trying at all.” That line is from somewhere in this collection, and I can’t recall exactly where, or who said it, or why, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as I read it, I just knew this book was going to be practically perfect. Seven stories, each one its own strange world. A mail-order bride arrives from Taiwan, packed in a cardboard box. Two teenage girls plot to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. A father reconnects with his estranged daughter by sneaking onto the set of her film as a background extra. And then there is “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” in which an American woman moves to Paris to find herself and instead finds her French doppelgänger — someone closer to who she always wanted to be — and I laughed out loud and felt a little sick and then wanted to immediately read it again. Elaine Hsieh Chou writes with ruthless precision, funny and dark and strange and occasionally disturbing, and every story goes somewhere different than you thought, delightfully unpredictable. If you like fiction that is funny and dark and unsettling, uneasefully human, this is your book.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue Rachel is a broke university student in Cork working at a bookstore when she meets James, and they fall into one of those friendships that immediately swallows everything else. They move in together, they scheme together, they enable each other’s worst impulses with tremendous enthusiasm. When Rachel develops a crush on her married English professor and James helps her devise a plan to seduce him at a bookstore reading, it backfires in a sadlarious kind of way that changes everything and sets the rest of the novel in motion. O’Donoghue is very good at writing people who are making genuinely bad decisions for reasons you completely understand, and the friendship between Rachel and James is the kind where you lose the ability to talk each other out of anything, which is both the best and worst thing about it. My one complaint — and it is a small (?) one in a book I loved —is that James spends a fair amount of the book as the gay best friend, the comic relief, and sometimes it’s written so broadly that when you laugh you start to feel a little bit like part of the problem.

Little Wild by Laura Evans opens with an hourly countdown to Joanie’s arrival at Snare House, and that structural conceit captures the obsessive, breathless quality of Margaret’s inner life perfectly. She has been living as a ward of Joanie’s family, in love with her in the way that has nowhere to go in 1937 Suffolk. When they’re discovered together, Margaret is banished to her father’s cabin in the woods, and the book shifts a fair bit of strangeness — magpies, inherited magic, the shadow of her mother’s fate, dreams she wakes from with dirt on her feet. The forest atmosphere is poetic and beautiful, and Evans writes the creeping unease of Margaret’s isolation wonderfully. But the book never quite commits. The magic stays ambiguous in ways that feel less like deliberate restraint and more like uncertainty about what the story actually is, and by the end, it has neither gone far enough into the dark nor resolved enough of what it set up. Margaret’s obsession with Joanie is vivid and consuming, but Joanie herself barely registers, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the love story at the center of everything. A gorgeous idea, imperfectly executed. (courtesy Netgalley)

Marla by Jonathan Janz Marla Gorman is the local legend of King’s Branch, Indiana — the strange girl who never leaves the creepy Gothic house she shares with her mother, spotted staring from her bedroom window at the exact moment murders begin to occur around town. The setup is all small-town atmosphere and creeping dread, and the elusive figure at the window…very much 1980s pulp horror energy, which I mean descriptively rather than as a complaint (except that the 1980s also had a particular way of writing women and about women that I found myself bumping up against here. The male gaze is present and accounted for.) Marla herself remains frustratingly opaque, her motivations, her history, the why of what she is, and I kept wanting the book to give me more of her rather than more of the men trying to figure her out. A fun romp of a horror novel that I wished had trusted its central character a little more. (courtesy Netgalley)

The Unknown by Riley Sager In 1926, five women vanished from New Avalon, a remote Vermont island that had been home to a commune of spiritual mediums. Their dresses were found hanging from an oak tree, no bodies, and to this day, no explanation. A century later, struggling actress Marin Keane (whose only screen credit is an eczema cream commercial) unexpectedly lands a lead role in a film about the disappearances, opposite legendary actress Violet Wright and under the direction of Ronan Peters, who insists his actresses actually live amongst each other on the island for a week — period clothing, no electricity, no phones — to prepare for their roles. Things are awkward and uncomfortable before the freaky stuff even starts happening. Daisy Rue was one of the women who vanished in 1926, and her diary entries run alongside Marin’s increasingly panicked present, the two timelines mirroring each other in increasingly unsettling ways. I’ve been let down by Sager’s last few books, so it was a relief to find this one working. The eerie island atmosphere is thick and sustained, the twists piled up in ways I didn’t see coming, and Marin, ambitious but naive, vulnerable, and surrounded by people she can’t quite trust or read, is easy to root for. A return to form! (courtesy Netgalley; pub date August 4, 2026)

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker Lee Turner has just killed his college roommate (or thinks he has, the details are blurred and bloody ) and flees to his father’s remote house in Japan, a place hidden by sword ferns where the bedroom window is not always a window and a woman with a sword keeps appearing in the yard. In 1877, Sen is a young samurai’s daughter hiding in the same house, doing terrible things to earn her father’s approval. The two timelines circle each other and eventually collide, and the Japanese mythology woven through it gives the whole thing a haunting, otherworldly texture. A few chapters from the end, something shifts, becomes more mythological, stranger, and I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I absolutely did not. Still a little confused about Hina, but I don’t think that’s entirely the book’s fault?

The Season of Sinking by Daphne Woolsoncroft Imogen Bly returns to her lakeside Washington hometown after her mother’s sudden death, joining her twin sister Amelia to pack up the family house, and almost immediately starts sensing that something is wrong — that someone is watching her, that her mother’s death wasn’t accidental, that the town is keeping secrets. There’s a third narrator running through the book, anonymous, watching Imogen from the shadows, and I guess that part kinda works. But the weird writing kept pulling me out of it. Coffee does not dance down a hallway. (Drift, waft, sure.) A small voice does not shine like the sun. (WTF?) There is too much smirking, particularly from men, and at one point a character says, “I just want to get out of this place and never come back,” like a cranky child who has been told she cannot have dessert. Ugh. Reading this book was mostly painful.

Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen Mia was thirteen when her cousin was murdered at an Austrian castle, and her testimony put the killer away. A decade later a true crime podcast starts poking holes in the case, and Mia returns to the castle — now being converted into a luxury hotel — working undercover as a nanny while she reinvestigates. The story moves between timelines and incorporates podcast excerpts alongside the main narrative, which gives it a neat, layered quality. The castle atmosphere felt pleasantly moody, and the mystery unspools at a decent pace. I don’t remember much of it now, but I was clearly entertained while I was in it, because I noted it as 4 stars.

…and that’s it! I don’t think I’ve been reading as much these past few months as I usually do. But that’s fine! I’ve been working on other things, and sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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I recently wrote about building my own personal curriculum to better understand 1) the ideas and concepts around the term “hauntology,” and 2) wrap my head around Julia Kristeva’s writings. But it occurred to me that I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention my own books in terms of creating some courses for self-learning!

I put together a (hopefully very shareable) slideshow of graphics about how each book might assist in studies of the arcane & esoteric, the darker side of life, and the fantastical, and how you shouldn’t skip the visual component when you’re deepening your understanding of this, that, or the other thing. (Coming from a rather lazy student, I mean obviously more pictures and less words is the way to go hehehe.)

Building Your Personal Curriculum: Where My Books Fit

If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen people talking about “personal curriculums,” essentially, self-directed courses of study built around whatever you’re genuinely curious about. Instead of following someone else’s syllabus, you’re creating your own path through a subject, pulling together books, films, essays, art, music, whatever feeds your particular obsession.

It’s a beautiful way to learn, and it’s having a moment because people are hungry for depth, for expertise that comes from genuine interest rather than algorithmic recommendation. You get to be both student and curator of your own education.

I love this concept because it’s exactly how I’ve always learned: following threads of interest across mediums and disciplines, building connections between visual art and literature and history and folklore. It’s also, not coincidentally, how I approach curating my books. (It’s also a good reason to buy new notebooks!)

Which brings me to this: if you’re building a personal curriculum, here’s where my Art in the Margins series fits.

Studying the occult, symbolism, or esoteric art history?

The Art of the Occult belongs in your visual studies. From theosophy and kabbalah to the zodiac and alchemy, from spiritualism and ceremonial magic to the elements and sacred geometry—this book brings together artists who have been drawn to these unknown spheres and created curious artworks that transcend time and place. Whether you’re learning tarot, diving into the history of magical practice, or exploring Hermetic traditions, you need the visual language that goes with it. These works stem from a soul-deep desire for truth and awareness, revealing the hidden rules of nature and our world through imagery that has haunted and inspired across centuries.

Exploring Gothic aesthetics, melancholy, or the beauty of darkness?

The Art of Darkness is your visual companion. This book celebrates artists who have been obsessed with darkness throughout history—creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, and play on our innermost fears. From dreams and nightmares to matters of mortality, from depravity and destruction to gods and monsters, these artworks indulge our greatest fears while asking: what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? If you’re studying Victorian mourning culture, exploring Gothic traditions, or simply trying to understand why certain aesthetics speak to something deep within you, this is your sourcebook. Denial of our darkness leads us to fear it….better to create a connection with our shadows and revel in all the inspiration and wonder we may find there!

Deep-diving into fantasy worldbuilding, mythology, or the fantastic?

The Art of Fantasy gives you the visual language. Artists have explored imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures for centuries, expressing the unreal and impossible, the mystical and mythical through paint and illustration. This book presents a compendium of artworks inspired by myth, fantasy, and the unreal—from beasts and beings to forgotten realms and wonderlands, from dreams and magic to faith and philosophy. If you’re studying folklore, reading epic fantasy, learning about mythological traditions across cultures, or working on your own creative worldbuilding, these visual flights of fancy and imagination show you how artists have conveyed the vast swathe of hopes and dreams in our collected hearts. Fantasy is not simply an escape from reality…it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.

Why Visual Art Belongs in Your Curriculum

Whatever you’re studying, visual art deepens your understanding in ways that text alone cannot. It shows you how ideas manifest aesthetically, how concepts become tangible, how symbolism operates visually. The artists in these books are thinking deeply about their subjects, creating work that’s in conversation with history, mythology, spirituality, and culture across centuries.

If you’re building your own curriculum for any of these subjects, please don’t skip the visual component! These books are resources, and they’re meant to be referenced, returned to, absorbed alongside whatever else you’re studying.

And if you’re building a curriculum around something else entirely? Tell me about it. I want to know what you’re learning, what threads you’re following, what obsessions are driving your self-directed education. That’s always been my favorite kind of conversation!

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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My latest column for Rue Morgue’s March/April issue 2026 is about the personal curriculum trend: a Gen Z TikTok thing where they assign themselves monthly syllabi on whatever they’re obsessed with, from sourdough to astrophysics. (See also “analog hobbies”, or, as us crusty old farts call them, you know, “hobbies.”)

I make the case for horror fans doing the same thing,  actually studying what we love instead of just passively consuming it. In the piece, I offer four example curriculums shaped by my particular fixations: fashion in horror, grief as monster, surrealism and dread, and women directors beyond the Final Girl.

Naturally, the moment I submitted my draft, I realized … I wanted to study other things. Although I don’t know if they would have made the article any more interesting, so that’s okay. Things I’ve been circling around for years, name-dropping without really understanding, using as aesthetic shorthand without doing the work. Time to actually engage with the theory books gathering dust on my shelves! So I’m building my own curriculum around two concepts that keep surfacing in horror criticism:

Hauntology: Mark Fisher’s term for how we’re haunted by lost futures that never arrived,  the world we were promised but didn’t get. It’s not just nostalgia for the past, but mourning for futures that feel more real than the present we’re stuck in. The Cold War’s end didn’t bring utopia; instead, we got a kind of cultural stasis where we endlessly recycle old aesthetics because we’ve lost the ability to imagine genuinely new futures. Is what we remember as “the past” even real, or has it been programmed into us by the culture we consume and the ideologies we absorb? There’s a deep melancholy to this, the sense that we’re living in an epilogue to history rather than its continuation. It’s why folk horror works on us, why the obsession with lost rural pasts feels so contemporary, as well as VHS aesthetics, found footage, etc., they don’t just look old, they feel like artifacts from parallel timelines that branched off from ours. They’re ghosts of possible worlds. Obsolete media becomes the language of contemporary dread because it carries the weight of futures that died before arriving. We’re haunted by what never was.

Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection: The horror of what disrupts the boundary between self and other, the revulsion we feel toward what reminds us we’re just meat. It’s about things that should stay inside the body but don’t: blood, vomit, shit, the contents of a wound. It’s about corpses, which were once a living person but are now just matter, collapsing the line between subject and object. Abjection is that visceral “get it away from me” response to anything that threatens the integrity of the self, that reminds us the body is just a temporary container that will eventually fail and leak and rot. It’s why we recoil from decay, why certain textures make our skin crawl, why body horror gets under our skin in ways other horror doesn’t. Kristeva gives us the theoretical framework for understanding why Cronenberg’s transformations devastate us, why that scene in The Substance made theater audiences physically recoil, why we’re drawn to and repelled by images of the body breaking down. She gives us language for the unnamed disgust. Maybe? I could be wrong about all of that? I don’t really understand it, which is the whole point of all of this!

So that’s my current curriculum. If you’re interested in any of that, I have gathered up the books all in one place. What do you think you might study if you were building a curriculum for yourself?

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Last summer I wrote a blog post musing on the green slime that got unceremoniously dumped on your head if you uttered the words “I don’t know.” (80s babies remember You Can’t Do That On Television, right?)

If at the time you read it and thought, this feels like it’s going somewhere … you were right. That was a plant. A deliberate, sneaky little entree designed to get you thinking about uncertainty and not-knowing, so that when I finally announced this, you might feel the satisfaction of having seen it coming.

So. Here it is.

The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained is my fourth book, following The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, and it publishes September 1st from Frances Lincoln/Quarto.

This book has been a long time coming, and it grew from a handful of frustrations that had been rattling around in my head for years. People I know, generally smart and interesting people, making shit up rather than simply saying “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.” Decades of images circulating on Tumblr and Pinterest and a thousand fashion blogs captioned “artist unknown,” and nobody bothering to wonder who or taking a few seconds to search around. The creeping cultural sense that not knowing something is either A. just the way it goes because it’s too hard to find an answer or B. a failure best not admitted, rather than a starting point to find potentiall something really cool.

And then there was the Richard Bober mystery. Some of you were there for it! In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a A Wrinkle in Time paperback cover I had been obsessed with for years, lurid, hypersaturated, genuinely nightmare-inducing, and could not for the life of me find an artist credit for. That post took on a life of its own: Reddit ran wild with it, WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast picked it up, the New York Times covered it, and eventually the mystery was solved. The artist was Richard Bober. I wanted that image for The Art of Fantasy but couldn’t use it because I didn’t know who made it until after the book was published

Well, guess what friends? It’s in this book!!!

Mystery, curiosity, the refusal to shrug and move on, and the extraordinary things that happen when you sit with and marinate in the not-knowing long enough to let it become something. That’s what this book is about.

Twelve chapters. Four parts. Forces Beyond, Realms Between, Remnants, Relics and Revelations, and The Human Mystery: cosmic forces and hidden watchers, parallel worlds and liminal spaces, restless souls and forgotten knowledge, visionary states and sacred cycles. Everything that lives at the edges of what we can explain, and the artists who went looking for it anyway.

Inside its pages: Wenzel Hablik painting the cosmos like a living, crystalline, pulsing thing. Agnes Pelton alone in her converted windmill, layering gossamer veils of translucent color until her surfaces pulse with starlight. Jan Konůpek building cosmic architecture that follows dream logic rather than physics. Ionel Talpazan, Romanian refugee and self-appointed ambassador between worlds, devotedly documenting extraterrestrial craft in feverish techno-spiritual blueprints that are part technical manual, part cosmic philosophy. Léon Spilliaert on his nocturnal wanderings through a desolate seaside town, drawing staircases that spiral into the abyss until your inner ear and your intrusive thoughts reach perfect, terrible agreement.

Louise Bourgeois transforming the human torso into a living panopticon, a constellation of watching eyes. Pamela Colman Smith painting what music looked like to her, unlocking what she called “a beautiful country” that existed somewhere between her ear and her eye. Penny Slinger, feminist Surrealist, starring in her own ghost story as both haunter and haunted. Frida Kahlo splitting herself into two competing identities on a lonely bench against churning skies, blood spilling onto pristine fabric, both faces maintaining identical, unnerving composure. Which version of ourselves do we nurture, and which do we allow to bleed away?

And many, many more artists and creators who have ventured into the realms of the impossible and ineffable and returned with field notes from the other side of whatever it is we think we know.

The front cover is Linda Westin’s staggeringly sublime work. Infrared photography revealing colors that exist beyond human sight. A shadowy Swedish forest where the branches create a perfect oculus. A lush, kaleidoscopic vortex of a thing that feels less like a photograph of a forest and more like what a forest dreams about itself.

The back cover is Nona Limmen, whose photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget. That figure on the staircase, enshrouded in diaphanous white, five candles held aloft in the dark. It feels less like art and more like evidence. (If you haven’t read my recent  profile of her work, that’s your next stop!)

Both artists appear inside the book alongside hundreds of others spanning centuries and cultures, and I’ll be introducing them properly over the coming weeks and months. They trusted me with their work, and I am so deeply grateful.

…Now, can we talk about pre-orders for a moment?

I know it can feel like a small gesture, clicking a button months before a book arrives, but I want to be honest with you about what it actually does, because it matters more than most people realize. Pre-orders are counted in a book’s first-week sales figures, and that first week is disproportionately important. It’s the number that tells booksellers how many copies to stock, that signals to publishers whether a book has momentum, that influences everything from front-of-store placement to whether an author gets offered another contract. The algorithm that determines visibility on retail sites weights early sales heavily. A strong pre-order showing can mean the difference between a book that gets hand-sold by booksellers who believe in it and one that  disappears.

Publishers don’t promote books the way most people imagine. The work of actually getting this book in front of readers is on me. That’s on most authors, at every level. If this book, or any of my books, has ever meant something to you, pre-ordering is the single most effective thing you can do to help it find the readers it’s looking for. More than sharing, more than reviewing, more than telling a friend, though please also do all of those things.

The pre-order link is here (and peppered liberally throughout this post, as I am sure you have noticed). Thank you, genuinely, for being here for all of it.

I went down so many deliriously art-drenched, visually stupefying, aesthetically overwhelming rabbit holes while researching this book, and like any good rabbit hole, The Art of the Unknown will not offer certainty or even clarity. That’s not what you go down one for. (At least that’s not why I go down rabbit holes! I go to get lost!)

Anyway, what it will offer you instead is wonder — and wonder, I’ve come to believe, is the better deal.

✥ 2 comments

The Apparition Phase by Will Maclean Tim and Abi are thirteen-year-old twins obsessed with the supernatural, they’re “Too obtuse, too weird, too clever by half. We didn’t care. We had each other.” That line alone sums up everything about them, the kind of precocious insularity that would alienate most people, but for them it’s enough to have one person who gets it, who speaks the same language, who wants to spend hours in the attic discussing hauntings and folklore and the macabre. When they fake a ghost photograph to scare an unpopular girl at school, they set in motion something neither of them could control. Abi disappears. Years later, Tim finds himself pulled into a paranormal investigation at a decaying country house called Yarlings, surrounded by people chasing ghosts, chasing proof, chasing answers that might not exist. But what captured me most was Maclean’s writing. He moves through the 1970s with phrases like “Like the vanished Neanderthals, we knew our forebears largely by their wall art” and “Seven souls, their little human essences glowing dimly in a grey wash of static, like distress beacons, broadcasting their vulnerability.” He can describe concrete gnomes “pushing wheelbarrows into nowhere” and make it ominous. He asks the question that haunts the whole book: “Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is?” This is the book I have been actively chasing with every single word on every single page of every single story I have ever read. The one that nails that ache of loss and absence, the feeling of something you recognize but can’t quite claim. Maclean took feelings I never had from a time I never lived through and made them mine, made them nostalgic, made me think this was the best book of its kind I’d ever read when in fact it’s the book I’ve always been wanting to find. The writing is so good it makes the past feel like your past, even when it isn’t.

Bed Rot Baby by Wendy Dalrymple Reading this felt like meeting a new friend who’s as weird and fucked up as you are, and realizing your weird matches their weird in a way that feels like a threat and a promise. Baby is a mess; she’s broke, she’s a shoplifter, she’s selling feet pictures, she’s a sugar baby who’s not even good at it and doesn’t really care to try, she’s rotting in bed literally and metaphorically after a bad breakup. And Wendy Dalrymple writes her with a glorious specificity and dark humor that makes her feel completely real, and completely relatable. A mysterious woman assaults Baby in a parking lot, and she begins to literally rot, her body decaying in grotesque, inexplicable ways. Baby has to hunt down her attacker to understand what’s happening to her and find a way to stop it, all while her roommate Elaine watches her disintegrate and everything else in her life, her sugar daddy, her shoplifting hustle, her attempts to stay afloat, falls apart around her. When her body starts to decay, when she’s losing fingernails and toes and pieces of herself, she doesn’t stop being a person you understand. The body horror is gross and visceral and specific—she describes a bisected person as resembling a “flayed hot dog,” and I will never get over this, it is a thing of beauty. The way Dalrymple writes Baby is a hoot, absurd and specific and dark. True story. When I was a teenager, my mother was Baker-Acted. Twice. When my sisters and I overheard popular girls at school talking about how their mothers took them shopping for Bongo jeans at the mall over the weekend, we would smirk at each other and say, “Oh yeah, well MY MOM got Baker-Acted this weekend!” One, I feel like Wendy Dalrymple probably gets pitch-black humor as a coping mechanism/survival strategy. I recognize this humor. I know this humor. And two, I know that the Bongo jeans reference really dates me. Read via Netgalley

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack Murder Bimbo wants you to know she’s capable of great love and connection, that she matters, that you won’t forget her. She’s a sex worker in her early thirties who gets tangled up in a plot to assassinate a right-wing politician, and she tells the story three different ways—to a podcaster, to her ex-girlfriend, to herself—reshaping it each time to be the version that makes her look best. The thing is, every version circles back to the same person: her. Her needs, her desires, her desperation to be seen as someone worth remembering. Novack structures the book around this circular logic, each retelling revealing a little more about how she actually thinks. It’s a fun ride watching someone reshape their story depending on who’s listening, each version tailored to land exactly right with that particular person. Don’t we all catch ourselves doing this? Minus the political intrigue, maybe. She’s not trying to deceive so much as she’s constantly negotiating who she needs to be in order to matter. The repetition of the three tellings drags in places, but you understand why she’s doing it—each version is a performance, and the only audience that really matters is the one in front of her at that moment. Read via Netgalley

Accumulationby Aimee PokwatkaTenn is a filmmaker-turned-housewife who moved into her dream house for her husband’s new job, except the dream seems like kind of a fucked up nightmare from day one. A faucet that won’t turn off. A doll that appears in every room. A human tooth in the floorboards. Her children start acting strange, looping through the same destructive behaviors over and over. Her husband, Ward, is absent most of the time, consumed by work, but it feels like he’s actually trying, caught between a demanding job and a family falling apart in a house that might actually be haunted or might be haunting them through his wife. I loved Tenn; her inner voice is sharp, it’s real and grounded. Even as things are spiralling out of control, even when she doubts herself and her reality, she remains basically herself. She thinks, she questions, she grieves what she’s lost—her career, her sense of self, the person she thought she’d be. The house gets weirder and weirder, but Tenn never stops being a person, a real person, moving through it. Pokwatka does this thing where the characters get caught in loops, doing the same things over and over. You turn the page and read almost the same sentence again, and you think, did I accidentally reread something over again? It’s confusing, and it throws you off, and it happens a few times, and it gets you every time. It could have been annoying, but it was, in fact, pretty freaky. The ending reveal comes, and it’s an interesting spin, but it ultimately lands in a sentimental space, the Lifetime movie resolution, that feels a bit safe when it could have felt darker, more tragic somehow. But who cares? This was a great read! Read via Netgalley. Publishing May 5, 2026

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino Margo Miyake and her husband Ian have lost eleven bidding wars in the Washington, DC suburbs housing market, and it’s destroying her. She’s obsessed with one specific house—the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, the one that’s supposed to fix everything! When she gets a tip that it’s coming on the market, she decides she’ll do whatever it takes to get it before anyone else. And I mean whatever. Stalking, trespassing, manipulation, blackmail—Margo, like a honey badger, doesn’t give a shit. What makes this book a hoot is that you’re rooting for her the entire time, even as she spirals into complete derangement. She’s relentless, uncompromising, willing to do anything without guilt or hesitation. Her desperation is mortifying to behold for the reader, but Margo is absolutely shameless, and Kashino writes her with such dark humor and relish that you can’t look away. Margo becomes increasingly, irrepressibly unhinged, her tactics more insane, and somehow it’s funny. The housing market satire is sharp, but what really makes this book work is Margo herself, a character with no off switch, no surrender. She is utterly unfuckwithable. Who cares about the ending? Getting there was a blast.

The Vacancy in Room 10 by Seraphina Nova Glass Cass manages the Sycamores, a dumpy, run-down motel converted into apartments, blackmailing cheating men to supplement her rent after her boyfriend dumped her for someone younger. Anna moves into her dead husband’s studio at the same building complex in the wake of a distressing phone call wherein he confesses to murder and is soon found dead afterward—and Anna is, of course, grieving and confused and wants to figure out what happened. Cass is attempting to bury her secrets, Anna is attempting to dig up secrets, and although this at first puts them at odds, the mystery draws them to each other and toward something like genuine friendship anyway. I also loved the slow reveal of these residents, people who at first seem a bit trashy and obnoxious, as genuinely good, decent human people. But I feel like the story plays it safer than it could have. I kept waiting for it to get messier, darker, willing to actually spiral instead of managing the darkness so carefully.

The Last Ferry Out by Andrea Bartz Abby travels to the remote, hurricane-battered island where her fiancée Eszter died, convinced it wasn’t an accident. (Eszter always carried her EpiPen. Where was it? Hm!) The setting is the best thing here, moody and atmospheric, the kind of place that used to be a big deal and isn’t anymore, and Bartz wrings quite a bit unease out of the isolation. The expat community Abby infiltrates is uniformly suspicious in that low-grade, hard-to-pin-down way that’s either careful misdirection or just everyone being vaguely weird, and I couldn’t always tell which. The pacing is slow, Abby isn’t interesting enough to compensate for that, and the alternating timeline fleshing out her relationship with Eszter left me more confused about them than invested.  The twist/resolution is kinda underwhelming.

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward Suffering from starvation and abuse under their guardian, Cousin, Riley and her frail younger brother Oliver run away in the dead of night, seeking refuge at Nowhere—a burnt-out ranch in the Rocky Mountains where feral runaway children have supposedly made a home. When they arrive, they find other children living there, bound by their own hierarchy and rules. But nothing about the place is sanctuary. Ward scatters the story across multiple timelines that feel like they’re happening simultaneously. An architect who worked for movie star Leaf Winham (Nowhere’s former owner) before the fire that destroyed it. A documentarian chasing the legend of Nowhere. Riley and Oliver navigating the situation at the burnt ranch. The history of the apple farm where it all started. The overlapping timelines and disoriented chronology could have scattered the narrative, but Ward uses that fragmentation deliberately, with each timeline illuminating the others. I’m not sure I came away knowing what was real at Nowhere, which part of the experience was ghosts or hallucinations, or something else that Riley was experiencing…and I am not sure Riley knew, either. The stories converged brilliantly and the ending was the sort of devastating that was also inevitable, and would have felt untrue to the story had it happened any other way. It wouldn’t be Catriona Ward if it weren’t some heady combination of bewildering, broken and brutal. Read via Netgalley

Dark Is When The Devil Comes by Daisy Pearce Hazel returns to her small English hometown after a divorce, planning to house-sit for her parents and reconnect with her estranged sister Cathy – however, a chance encounter with a dangerous stranger derails those plans. When Hazel doesn’t show for their meeting, Cathy begins searching, eventually teaming up with Hazel’s childhood friend Suzie along the way. The fog-drenched countryside and its accompanying creepy folklore add just the right amount of atmosphere, but the extra disturbing bits relate to the ghostly (?) body horror (?) element tied to Hazel’s past, which seems to have resurfaced in ways that blur the line between reality and Hazel’s deteriorating mental state. I never quite understood the kidnapper’s motives or how he initially targeted Hazel, which left me feeling like I’d missed something important. What I did love, though, was watching Cathy (former mean girl, still sharp-edged) and Suzie (perpetual good girl) forced to work together, their tentative friendship forming as they navigate the search. I’m not sure everything came together for me in a way that left me satisfied at the end, but I had a good enough time with the story along the way. Read via Netgalley. Publishing April 28, 2026

Cruelty Free by by Caroline Glenn Former star Lila Devlin returns to Hollywood a decade after her daughter’s kidnapping, determined to reinvent herself with a skincare brand and move forward. The story opens with a clever mixed-media structure, interviews, excerpts, internet posts, that captures how the press and true crime obsessives have picked her life apart, gossiped about it, profited from it. Then she kills someone, and the book pivots into revenge, with her devoted publicist Sylvie becoming her partner in the bloodbath. It’s a fun ride watching them systematically work through the people who made money off Lila’s suffering, but then there’s a moment where she brutally kills a dog, and the pointlessness and cruelty of it made me thoroughly, actually murderous, whereas the rest of the book had been a good time. I still don’t know whether that was meant to be the tipping point when we stop rooting for Lila and start wanting her downfall, or if it was just shocking and gratuitous. Sylvie’s devotion feels real enough, and her derangement tracks from beginning to end, but Lila’s shift from grieving mother trying to move forward to serial killer feels unmoored. The setup suggests she’s come to some kind of peace, found a way to rebuild, and then the book just sort of…decides that’s not the story. By the end, I was unsure what the book was actually trying to be, and I’m not entirely convinced it knew either. Read via Netgalley

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan I picked this up by accident, confused it with Notes on a Scandal, but I read it anyway. James Whitehouse, a Junior Minister, is accused of raping Olivia, a parliamentary researcher he’s been having an affair with. His wife Sophie believes he’s innocent and stands by him. Kate, the prosecutor, is certain he’s guilty—and she has reasons of her own for wanting to win this case. Everyone went to Oxford together, and there’s something about what happened back then that connects to what’s happening now. It was fine. Well-constructed, competent courtroom drama. But it’s well-trod territory; a powerful man, a gross accusation, the wife who stands by him, the lawyer with her own agenda, seeking justice for her own reasons. It held my attention while I was reading it, but I haven’t thought about it since.

Body Count by Codie Crowley Sundae was a child when she and her mother fled her abusive father and ended up at a motel in Wildwood, where a monster in the pool offered her three wishes in exchange for a price she couldn’t yet comprehend (and that also he conveniently forgot to mention.) Years later, she returns to Wildwood for prom weekend and meets Lia, a musician playing a show at the motel where she and her cheerleader friends are staying. They have amazing chemistry, and a connection that could actually be beautiful. But Sundae is exhausting to spend time with. Not because of who she is as a person; she’s got confidence and swagger, and I respect that, there’s something appealing about that. The problem is Crowley keeps filling her mouth with language that’s so stupidly, aggressively trendy it sounds dumb coming out of her. To be fair to Sundae, it would sound dumb coming out of anyone. Every time there was space for something real to happen between her and Lia, the dialogue would pull me out of it completely. I wanted to care about them. Instead, I found myself irritated by the way Sundae talks. If I were Lia’s friend, I might be furtively shaking my head and sternly whispering at her every chance I got, GIRL NO. The monster is even worse. I never understood what he actually wanted or why he was doing any of this. The book doesn’t explain his logic or his motivation in any way that makes any damn sense. He shows up demanding payment, he kills people, but, like…why? Crowley clearly has a vision for this. There’s fun in the chaos and the gore and the campy beach-town dread, but I found myself frequently closing the book out of sheer exhaustion and embarrassment. The humor was so cringy that it kept taking me out of every moment that could have mattered. The dialogue kept pulling me out. The villain kept pulling me out. I kept waiting for something to truly pull me back in, but it never did. Read via Netgalley. Publishing May 5, 2026

Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, Molly Llewellyn (Editor) Do you like stories about women who give zero fucks about being likable? Ok, well, likeable is the least of the fucks these women don’t give. This anthology collects sixteen tales featuring con artists, murderers, revenge-seekers, and women ruled by ambition, grief, spite, or rage, with contributions from contemporary weird fiction superstars like Chana Porter, Sarah Rose Etter, Alison Rumfitt, Aliya Whiteley, and Lauren Groff. I enjoyed this overall, with a lot of great stories offering cathartic fun alongside some that were just okay. My favorites were “Fuckboy Museum” (a middle-aged Black woman exacting revenge on mediocre men from dating sites) and “Aquafina” (beautifully written, left me wanting more, questioning what I was reading the entire time). The collection succeeds in giving us complicated, messy women across a genuinely diverse range of experiences – Black, brown, trans, disabled women from different backgrounds, not just the usual white upper-middle-class antiheroes. Some stories leaned literary, others into magical realism or horror, and the standouts balanced out my lesser favorites, making what seemed to me a pretty fantastic collection.

Molka by Monika Kim Molka scandals in Korea are real. Hidden cameras in bathrooms, intimate videos spread without consent, women’s privacy invaded and weaponized while the men who perpetrate these crimes often face minimal consequences. Monika Kim takes this horrifying reality and builds a novel around it, moving between Dahye’s naive perspective and her coworker Junyoung’s depravity that we are treated to right out of the gate. We watch him degrade his mother, obsess over the women in his office, install cameras in their bathrooms. We know exactly what kind of predator he is long before Dahye realizes the threat he poses. Dahye herself is caught in a relationship with Hyukjoon, a wealthy heir who records her without consent and then abandons her when the video surfaces online. She’s left alone to manage the fallout while her dead sister’s ghost lingers on the margins of her life. I was enraged and infuriated through most if not all of this book; not at Kim for her writing or her choices as an author. But rather angry at the men on the page and at the systems that protect them, and the ways women are left to survive what men have done to them. The pacing stumbles just a bit in the middle, and the revenge is not nearly as bloody and ferocious as I would like in the end. I’m still sitting with it, unsure where I land on whether the restraint serves the story or undermines it. But I enjoy this author’s ideas, and I am always thrilled to read more from her. Read via Netgalley. Publishing April 28, 2026.

Headlights by C.J. Leede Daniel is an FBI agent burnt out and pulled back into a serial killer case in Denver, where people are blacking out and waking up on the highway wearing victims’ skin, a strand of hair tied around their tongues. The book starts tight and creepy, but halfway through it becomes cosmic and metaphysical, and it never finds its footing afterward. The romance between Daniel and victim/suspect Hannah develops too soon, too fast, too intensely (and doesn’t really earn or deserve that intensity), and the sex scenes feel …not exactly shoehorned in, but just…why? Instead of deepening my connection to these characters, I was pulled out of their momentum entirely. By the second half, there are too many threads, all the supernatural mythology, cult shenanigans, procedural mystery, grief processing; it was a bit of a tangled mess instead of weaving into something cohesive. It’s clear this is a love letter to Stephen King and The Shining, to Colorado, to loss and mourning, and there are genuine moments where, through Leed’s cinematic, visceral prose, that devotion -pardon the pun – shines through. And I will say I absolutely loved Tillman, Daniel’s police partner, who appears to be a laid-back stoner type, seemingly zoned out half the time, but he’s actually paying close attention, smart and observant, catching details Daniel misses while he’s too caught up in his own head. But the book reaches for too much and loses the thriller momentum from the opening. I want to love all of this author’s offerings, but. It just wasn’t the book for me. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 9, 2026.

Doll Parts by Penny Zang Nikki and Sadie attend Loch Raven, an all-girls college outside Baltimore, where Nikki becomes obsessed with the Sylvia Club—a campus legend surrounding the deaths of Plath-obsessed students. Nikki digs into their stories, follows the threads, becomes convinced there’s something more sinister happening than what the college will admit. And then something unspeakable happens. An accident, but not an accident—something that binds them together and destroys them at once. Twenty years later, Nikki is dead, and Sadie finds herself pregnant by Nikki’s widower, living in her preserved house, sensing Nikki everywhere. This is a book about that specific era—grunge, Courtney Love blaring from car speakers, college girls in black dresses holding seances, melodrama as a way of understanding the world. “I hated it in the way I hated everything I also loved.” That’s the feeling running through it, the way Nikki and Sadie knew each other completely and then couldn’t speak to each other at all. “Happy memories were the worst kind.” That’s what it costs to lose someone who was your whole world. Zang’s writing captures all of it, the darkness, the closeness, the specific ache of that time in your life. I loved this book.

Watching Evil Dead: Unearthing The Radiant Artist Within by Josh Malerman Josh Malerman spends an entire book asking a question that has been plaguing him: What does an author deserve? He’s just published Bird Box, the success is beginning, and he’s wrestling with what that means, what he’s owed for the work. Over one night with his girlfriend Allison and two friends, they gather to watch Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead—a movie Allison has never seen—and as they drink and smoke and watch, getting sillier and more philosophical under the heady fog of it all, Malerman circles this question again and again, moving toward an answer that unfolds gradually: the artist deserves the work itself. Not the money that follows, not the film deals or the accolades or the recognition from strangers. The victory isn’t the dotted line or the sales figures. The victory is the completion of the thing, the knowledge that you’ve said what you needed to say, that you’ve expressed yourself fully and without compromise, that the words are exactly as they needed to be. That’s what an artist deserves—not what comes after, but the act itself. A book written like this is inherently self-indulgent. You’re reading his night, his thoughts, his obsession with one question. You’re a captive audience to his voice. This isn’t a tightly structured, traditional memoir with writing advice wrapped in narrative. It’s Malerman thinking out loud, circling back, getting drunk and stoned and philosophical with his wife. The book is messy and digressive, and sometimes it felt excessive, but if anyone gets to do this…it’s a writer, right? You can’t convince me a writer can’t/shouldn’t be self-absorbed on their own pages. Did I love the experience of reading this? Not really. But I liked the overall message, and I respect the author who does it like this, which is to say, however the hell they want to. Read via Netgalley

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the serviceberry tree—a tree that produces abundant fruit for birds, bears, and humans without asking for anything in return—as a meditation on gift economies versus market economies. The essay explores how Indigenous worldviews understand resources not as commodities to be owned and hoarded, but as gifts that create relationships and demand reciprocity. Gratitude and generosity become the currency, and wealth is measured not by what you accumulate but by what you give away. It’s short, really just an extended essay, but it works. Kimmerer doesn’t pretend gift economies can replace our current system entirely, but she argues for them to coexist with it. In public libraries, in Little Free Libraries, in neighbors sharing tomatoes from their gardens. The whole thing hinges on a simple shift: if you see the serviceberry’s fruit as a gift instead of a resource, your relationship to it changes. She writes that assigning a market value to a gift destroys it. You can’t sell manna without spiritual jeopardy. It’s aspirational, maybe naive, but sitting with it feels good anyway. Because in a gift economy, wealth comes from what you give and the relationships you build. Joy is what you get from that. And as she writes somewhat cheekily (but I am 100% here for it), the ones who have more joy win.

Sing Backwards And Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan Mark Lanegan’s voice sounded like two stones rubbing together, like gargoyles fucking. It was one of the most beautiful sounds in rock music, and I loved listening to it—he was a gorgeous, devastating musician. But. Jesus Christ. I finished this book, and I felt like I needed an exorcism. This memoir is vicious and visceral and harrowing. Lanegan walks you through his addiction, his violence, his cruelty with a kind of unflinching honesty that’s almost admirable except for what it reveals. He was selfish and cruel and nihilistic. He hated his own band while they were carrying him. He was contemptuous of people he deemed beneath him. He was angry in ways that addiction shaped but didn’t excuse. He performed toughness like a sacred duty, and underneath it was just a guy who was genuinely difficult and self-destructive. Edgy in the way that edginess always is—cruelty dressed up as honesty, aggression justified as self-defense, meanness rebranded as truth-telling. But I don’t know if any of this is true, not really. He could be performing the worst version of himself for the page. He could be so ashamed that he’s exaggerating his own cruelty. Or it could be exactly how bad it was, filtered through the memory of someone who was high for most of it. You can’t trust his account of his own life, which means you can’t condemn him and you can’t forgive him either. The book becomes relentless in the final chapters. Just more and more punitive reading. It’s just degradation, deterioration, scraping by with no relief. Then a few pages of rehab, Layne Staley dies, and it’s over. That abruptness is brutal in its own way. It mirrors the despair of what we’ve just read. Does any of this change the way I feel when I put one of his albums on now? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. But what I do know is that for the rest of my life, I will be cackling at the things he said about Liam Gallagher. “All I knew was that in my 31 years on Earth, I had never encountered anyone with a larger head or tinier balls.”

Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss A radical, resolute, and utterly tireless creator, who spent a lifetime engaging with the fundamental questions of human existence, Hilma af Klint broke with academic tradition to produce abstract paintings decades before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich claimed to have invented abstraction. Her work was driven by theosophy, by spiritualism, by her conviction that she was receiving commissions from higher planes of existence through seances and meditation. When she couldn’t find a place to show her work, she wrote to Rudolf Steiner asking if she should just burn it all. Very Scorpio. Julia Voss learned Swedish to write this biography. That tremendous dedication shows up on every page of this book; the research is extraordinary, meticulous, and comprehensive. And yes, it’s dry. The book doesn’t sing the way you might hope. But perhaps that’s the cost of doing this work properly. Voss gives you everything she found, and what emerges is a portrait of a woman who was utterly committed to her vision, to her spirituality, to her art, even when the world had no use for any of it. We create for likes, for validation, constantly checking if anyone cares. Hilma created because she was compelled to, trusted that what she was doing meant something, that the meaning was in the making itself. We’re still trying to catch up to what she already understood.

Audition Katie Kitamura An actress, unnamed, meets a young man for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. He claims she is his mother. She tells him that’s impossible. They seem to leave it at that. Or do they? She is in rehearsals for a play, struggling to find her way into a role; one transitional scene in particular that keeps eluding her, a bridge between two very different versions of the same character. The book has the same problem, or maybe the same project: two halves that don’t reconcile, a gap Kitamura never explains and doesn’t try to. In the second half, he is her son, having just moved back home with her and her husband, and that lunch feels like it happened in a different life, or maybe even a different book, entirely. I went back a few pages more than once, trying to get my footing, and eventually just let go, which I think is the only way to experience this. The prose has this quality of making ordinary observations feel faintly ominous, Lynch by way of Levin, an atmosphere of domestic unease that builds with breathless surreality. I kept underlining sentences not exactly because they moved anything forward, or because they were pithy zingers, but because they felt uncannily true. “I had a natural inclination to press my face against the glass, to peer at the mystery of other people, but I also had an instinct for self-preservation.” That’s the narrator, but it could just as easily describe the experience of reading the book.

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz is narrated by a woman in the French countryside who is coming apart,  postpartum psychosis, or something that was already there before the baby arrived and simply metastasized, the book never clarifies. She fantasizes about violence, she shoots the family dog, she hides in the woods with her infant while search parties look for them.  Harwicz never lets up on the disjointed-bordering-on-incoherent intensity for a single page. I guess it must be said that I came to read this book because the film trailer was arresting, and I was intrigued when I found out it was based on a novel (though I have at this point not yet seen the film.) The problem, for me, was that I couldn’t find my way into the main character. Not because she does terrible things, but because her specific unraveling felt so remote from anything in my own experience that I ended up watching it from a considerable distance the whole time, unable to close the gap. I can recognize that it’s a remarkable piece of writing, or so a lot of people say, but I just never stopped feeling like an observer.

The Country Will Bring Us No Peace by Matthieu Simard Simon and Marie leave the city for a rural village after the death of their young daughter, hoping a quieter life and another baby will heal their struggling marriage. The village is weirdlyhostile in ways nobody will quite explain: the locals will sell you things and invite you places but make clear you are not welcome, there’s an abandoned playground everyone warns you away from, a mute girl wandering the streets, and an antenna looming over everything that gets blamed for the town’s slow collapse without anyone elaborating on why. The book tells you almost immediately that Simon and Marie are going to be “the murder-suicide couple,” and then you spend the rest of it watching them move toward that anyway, in a village where the birds have stopped singing, in the house Marie’s cello sits untouched in its case. It is relentlessly grim. The novel alternates between their two perspectives, and having both of them gave me something to orient myself around, even if neither of them were particularly reliable narrators of their own lives or each other’s.  The story was carried almost entirely on vibes and dread, and I can’t entirely tell you why I liked it but I did. I read this back to back with Die My Love, which shares some of the same DNA — rural isolation, relentless grimness, a relationship coming apart at the seams. But where Die My Love locked me inside a single consciousness so fractured I could never quite find my footing, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace gave me two people, two perspectives, one terrible trajectory, and somehow that was just enough of a handhold.

Hollow Inside by Asako Otani Hirai is 38, working a boring office job, living with her colleague Suganuma who’s 42. The fact that she lives with another woman—even platonically—is treated as deeply aberrant by her coworkers, something that needs explaining or justifying. She has an aversion to men that the book acknowledges but never explores. She feels hollow, like she’s supposed to want certain things but doesn’t. The writing has that particular Japanese quality of emotional distance, observing rather than diving in, which works sometimes but here it keeps you at arm’s length from actually understanding her. It’s a quick read, and there are interesting threads (the strangeness of her situation, her queerness that goes unnamed, the weight of societal expectations) but the book just skims the surface of all of it. It could have been something, but we never quite get there to know what. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 2, 2026.

The Fox and the Devil by Kiersten White When a mysterious, impossibly beautiful woman kills Anneke’s father and leaves coy letters in her wake, Anneke becomes obsessed with hunting her across Europe, assembling a team of detectives to track a string of murders that may or may not be connected to something far worse than a serial killer. And when I say far worse, I mean exponentially more boring. Anneke tells us repeatedly how brilliant she is while doing almost nothing brilliant, mostly just sitting around thinking about this gorgeous, haunting killer while her team actually solves the case. There’s nothing wrong with the writing, really, but this story and its characters and plot (and I guess literally everything else about it) did nothing for me, and come to think of it, I didn’t enjoy a single second of it. Why a whole three stars, then? Because I can’t thoroughly articulate all the ways I didn’t like it, and so maybe that’s on me. Read via Netgalley

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn The Wax Child is narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, a Danish noblewoman accused of witchcraft in the early 1600s. Buried in the soil, somehow all-seeing, the doll pieces together her account from animals and objects and god knows what else, which is an nteresting conceit, strange and eerily poetic. The doll herself is fascinating. The women she’s observing, much less so;  they never quite cohered into people I could grasp onto in any meaningful way. The narrative is disjointed and confusing in ways I couldn’t always attribute to the doll’s unreliable sourcing versus just the structure of the thing. I love the idea of surreal, formally adventurous historical fiction, but I don’t always love it in practice, and this was one of those times.

The Secret Attic by Chelsea Conradt Addison and Luke return to his hometown to clean out his late mother’s massive estate, a woman who never liked Addison and made that clear from day one. The house is a hoarder’s nightmare, rooms packed with years and years of accumulated, inexplicable junk. But as Addison digs through the boxes, she finds something crazier than nutty clutter: a hidden attic filled with dolls labeled with people’s names, dolls made with human hair, dolls that seem connected to a string of accidents around town. Creepy dolls are fine and well if they’re your freaky hobby! But these aren’t Addison’s dolls. They’re her dead mother-in-law’s dolls, and they’re tied to real people, real accidents, real trauma. Luke grows increasingly hostile and evasive, gaslighting her about what she’s finding, lying about what he knows. I feel like the premise itself is actually pretty cool, the house shifting with the weight of its secrets, the crows dropping mysterious tokens at her feet, but none of it, not a single part of it works. The book buries itself in Addison’s endless internal monologue about how much she loves Luke while he’s being cruel to her. She spends so much time in various parts of the house and the attic, opening box after box after box, and the author finds new ways to describe them all, which is impressive in a technical sense but mind-numbing in practice. Slippers in Addison’s size show up—why? We never find out. The crows are eerie, but the book never explains why they care, what they want, or what they’re actually doing there beyond being atmospheric. By the end you’re sitting with questions the book never bothers to answer and an abrupt twist that doesn’t justify any of the buildup. It had potential. It just never committed to anything. Also, honestly, Addison lost any reliability as a narrator the moment she mentioned her cute jean jacket. Forget it about ghosts existing or not; I refuse to believe in the existence of a jean jacket that is not 100% hideous. Read via Netgalley. Publishing June 2, 2026

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier Pizza Girl is an eighteen-year-old Korean-American delivery driver in suburban Los Angeles, pregnant, grieving her alcoholic father, unmoored and adrift, and really hasn’t quite managed to develop much of a personality yet. When she becomes fixated on Jenny, a desperate housewife who orders pickled pizzas for her son every week, it makes a certain kind of sense. Jenny is something to look at, something to organize your thoughts around, a manic-pixie-dream-cougar onto whom Jane projects everything she can’t articulate about her own life. What Jenny’s actual problem is remains somewhat opaque, which is either the point or a missed opportunity, I’m still not sure. But the experience of being inside the sad sack oddball mess of Jane’s head, that’s what the book is really selling, and it delivers on that.

My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney Eden Fox comes home from a run to find her key doesn’t fit her house, her husband doesn’t recognize her, and a woman who looks exactly like her is living there as his wife. Six months earlier, Birdy inherited Spyglass, a house in Hope Falls, and discovered a clinic that can predict your death date. These two stories collide, and apparently everyone’s been lying about everything the whole time. The mystery doesn’t work. It’s just reveal after reveal with no setup, no logic, nothing to suggest how any of these people figured anything out. You can’t read it back and see the clues because there aren’t any. It’s all arbitrary information being dumped on you. But the bigger problem is the prose. Every page is stuffed with clichés. “Something ugly can sometimes be turned into something beautiful.” “Some people leave a mark on your life, others leave a stain.” “Feelings are like visitors, they come and they go.” It’s exhausting. Feeney stops the story constantly to hand you a platitude, like you need her to tell you what to feel. I got this, Alice! You don’t have to spout greeting card schmaltziness at me! By the end, I was so angry I wanted to scream.

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell Leaving an abusive relationship is impossibly hard, especially when you’ve been ground down intimately and deliberately, your autonomy stripped away so gradually you can’t pinpoint when you stopped being a person anymore. Ciara knows this. She’s already tried to leave Ryan once and been sucked back in. But this time, something snaps, and she drives away with her daughters and a handful of cash, into a Dublin housing crisis that offers nothing but a hotel room and the daily humiliation of proving she’s desperate enough to deserve help. Ciara goes hungry so her daughters can eat, attempts to decorate their tiny hotel room, trying to build some kind of home in a space that’s meant to be temporary. All of it shadowed by the fear that she’s destroying their childhood, that she’s made everything worse. She stays anyway, even when every system, every doubt, every manipulative text from Ryan makes going back seem like the easier, safer choice. And in that hotel, in that degradation, she finds other women, and her daughters find other kids, and somehow that becomes enough to hold onto. Reading it made my heart race, my vision blur at the edges, I was literally panicking most of the way through this book. I was glad to have read it but even gladder to finish it.

Paper Cut by Rachel Taff Lucy Golden killed someone getting out of a California cult when she was sixteen, and that murder became her entire identity for the next twenty years. She’s spent those two decades managing her own mythology while the spotlight won’t stop burning, dealing with hecklers at book signings and trolls online, a stalker, and a narcissistic artist mother who’s still somehow managing to overshadow her. The book moves between Lucy’s memoir—the official story she’s been selling—and her actual life now, and the gap between those two things is where the meat of the story lives. A documentarian shows up wanting to “set the record straight,” which is rich because Lucy’s already been rewriting it, and capping it off with a 10-year anniversary edition to boot. The cult stuff is gross, as cult stuff usually is, the family dynamics are messy, and watching her navigate all of it while a podcast and a film and the internet itself are all trying to reshape her story—it’s smart and savvy about how trauma gets packaged and sold, how true crime has turned people’s worst moments into content, and Lucy’s caught right in the middle of it all, complicit and aware and unable or unwilling to stop any of it. Read via Netgalley

The Keeper by Tana French I know these books don’t get the same love as French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, but I’m realizing I actually really love this series despite (or maybe because of?) how slow it is. This is the third book following Cal Hooper in Ardnakelty, and by now we know him, Lena, Trey, and the village itself so intimately that the stakes feel much higher when things start going wrong. When Rachel Holohan (about to be engaged to Eugene Moynihan, son of the local big shot) goes missing and is found dead in the river, the community fractures along loyalty lines. The Moynihan family, especially patriarch Tommy, is clearly up to something, and as Cal digs into Rachel’s death while trying to maintain his hard-won place in the community, he and Lena and Trey uncover a scheme that threatens the entire village. I think I love this town and its convoluted feuds and gossipy old farts at the pub, and honestly I can’t separate my feelings about the characters from my feelings about Ardnakelty and the way it shapes everyone who lives there. The first half moves at a snail’s pace while French luxuriates in atmosphere and scene-setting, but the second half pays off when everything erupts and the tension becomes unbearable, and I find the whole thing weird and intriguing and scary and satisfying, all at once. Read via Netgalley. Publishing March 31, 2026.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab In 1532, María grows up stifled in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a girl who knows her own mind but is trapped by circumstance between being a prize or a pawn. When a beautiful stranger offers her escape, she vows to have no regrets. In 1827 London, Charlotte’s idyllic life on her family’s estate ends after a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped away to her aunt’s house to be cloistered and prepared for her own coming out. When a mysterious widow offers her freedom, Charlotte is swept away—though the cost proves steeper than imagined. In 2019 Boston, Alice moves across the world to become someone new, but an out-of-character one-night stand results in strange and terrible consequences and sends her hunting for answers and revenge. Schwab braids these three stories across centuries, watching what these women become when immortality amplifies what was already there. María arrives hungry and calculating, willing to destroy even those who showed her kindness. Charlotte tells herself a story of deep sensitivity that her choices contradict. Soft, gentle Alice, fueled by grief and rage, reveals sharper edges and a harder heart. What happens to each of them under immortality is different. María’s hunger calcifies. Charlotte’s complicity deepens with every choice. Alice is still fighting against it. But the ending rushed past what should have been its reckoning. The final confrontation needed room to breathe, space for us to feel the full weight of what these women have become.

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Wouldst thou like to live uncommonly/strangely/mysteriously, etc.?

I can help with that! I am still slinging my spooky, weird, gently used books over on Pango, and I just did a little shop update!

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The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan Metal band Queen Carrion returns to an Oregon cabin a year after their lead singer Brynn vanished in the woods, only to encounter fungal body horror weirdness that begins infecting and transforming them one by one. The premise had real potential – mycelium horror meets heavy metal in the Pacific Northwest, which should have been catnip for me – but Kaplan tries juggling seven different POVs while jumping between timelines, and it just never found its footing. The first half had some unsettling body horror and atmospheric moments that held my interest, but around the halfway point, it started dragging, and I found myself losing momentum as the characters kept making baffling choices (staying in a cabin with no reviews feels like extremely questionable judgment). What could have been a tight, nasty little horror novel needed serious trimming. I kept hoping it would pull itself together, but instead it just kept going and going until I was exhausted and resentful of the whole story and everyone in it. Publishing March 10, 2026

The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward A scholarship student with bipolar disorder navigates the toxic social hierarchy of an elite 1990s boarding school, where the relentless bullying from queen bee Greta Stanhope becomes entangled with her struggles to distinguish between reality and her own unraveling mental state. This isn’t the thriller the marketing promised, but rather a slow, heavy character study about mental illness and teenage cruelty that happens to include a death near the end. I found myself completely absorbed anyway. Ward’s portrayal of severe bipolar disorder felt convincing and unflinching (the way Sarah’s illness becomes its own unreliable narrator, the long dissociative tangents, the constant questioning of her own credibility), though I understand why some readers found those sections exhausting or distracting. I picked this up last year, bounced off after two chapters, then tore through it in one sitting this time; I think if you go in expecting a twisty dark academia thriller you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re prepared for something darker, sadder, and more interested in Sarah’s internal landscape than in plot mechanics, it’s pretty compelling.

Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski uses portals, sometimes literal sci-fi gateways, sometimes metaphorical escapes, to explore asexuality, difficult marriages, and the desire to be someone other than who you are. The stories share recurring characters and situations that feel like variations across parallel dimensions, which creates an interesting structural concept but also leads to a sameness that became overwhelming for me by the midpoint. I appreciated the unflinching examination of topics rarely explored in fiction (asexuality in conflict, coercive sex in marriage, the unglamorous reality of parenting neurodivergent children), and a few stories like the witch one and the AI replacement service really worked for me. The collection has ambition and Urbanski’s prose has real power, but ten stories covering such similar emotional territory felt like too much; I kept wishing for more variety or a tighter selection of maybe six or seven pieces instead of revisiting the same themes and character dynamics repeatedly.

Dollface by Lindy Ryan A masked killer starts slashing through a New Jersey suburb, targeting PTA moms one by one, while horror writer Jill tries to figure out who’s behind the murders before she becomes the next victim. Jill’s juggling her codependent relationship with her sister Kitty, trauma from her mother’s death, pressure from her editor for new pages, and desperately wanting to fit in with the Brunswick PTA despite her horror movie t-shirts and Final Girl coffee mugs. This had potential as a campy suburban slasher and the unhinged neighbor Darla (who calls everyone “dear” despite being maybe in her forties, which cracked me up) was mildly entertaining, but the killer and the twist were so obvious from very early on that I spent the rest of the book waiting for something I’d already figured out. Publishing February 24, 2026

Needle Lake by Justine Champine Fourteen-year-old Ida, neurodivergent and living with a congenital heart defect in the tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington, finds her quiet world upended when her charismatic sixteen-year-old cousin Elna arrives from San Francisco for the winter. Elna introduces Ida to shoplifting, drugs, and a kind of reckless confidence Ida has never experienced, but after the cousins witness a man drowning in Needle Lake on Christmas Eve, their relationship shifts into something darker and more complicated. I kept expecting some big dramatic reveal or confrontation that never materialized, only to realize in the final pages that the real story – Ida’s gradual understanding of herself, Elna, and their family’s secrets – had been unfolding quietly the whole time through Campine’s gorgeous, atmospheric prose. The pacing felt uneven (the ending rushed after so much careful buildup) and I wanted more resolution, but I found myself completely absorbed in Ida’s voice and the way she navigates a world that doesn’t quite make space for someone like her.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from this 1950s housewife-slowly-unraveling story, but it turned out to be more slow-burn domestic drama than psychological thriller, following Lulu Mayfield as she struggles after giving birth to her second child and becomes fixated on her new neighbor Bitsy while everyone around her dismisses her concerns as hysteria. This was on the lesser side of fine for me. There were two twists I didn’t see coming – one genuinely heartbreaking, the other feeling like it tried to tie everything up with a neat medical explanation that somehow answered too much and too little at the same time – and while the exploration of women being gaslit and dismissed by doctors resonated (because yes, that still happens), the whole thing felt like it pulled its punches when it should have leaned into the bleakness it was building toward.

Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton Thea’s third baby Lucia is born with a full set of teeth, grows at an alarming rate, and announces she wants to eat her brother, which would be horrifying enough without Thea also grappling with dark memories from her own childhood and wondering if she’s passed some monstrous inheritance down to her daughter. I liked this even though it got weird and nonsensical; Moulton uses the “monster baby” setup as an extended metaphor for intergenerational trauma and maternal anxiety, and it works until suddenly it doesn’t (maybe? I can’t decide?) veering into bizarrely fantastical territory that seemed like it was aiming for catharsis but left me uncertain whether it resonated the way it was meant to. The dark humor against the heavy themes worked for me, and I appreciated how short it stayed (173 pages) rather than dragging the metaphor out past its usefulness. It’s inventive and original in ways that don’t stack up predictably, which I found compelling even if I’m still not sure how I feel about where it all went.

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein When Dayna (39, unemployed, recently dumped via Reddit) agrees to help turn a decrepit LA mansion into an influencer hype house, the job comes with a complication: Becca, the tarot card reader who used to live there and amassed a huge following, has vanished. The mansion has a strange history and seems to exert its own influence on the young creators living there, while Dayna navigates her complicated past with Craig, the owner who she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years, gets involved with Jake, the last person to see Becca, and teams up with nineteen-year-old Olivia to investigate what happened. I actually really liked this despite some baffling character choices; Dayna was weirdly out of touch for someone who’s only thirty-nine, considering I’m 49 and more plugged in than she seemed to be at the start, but then she’d suddenly have these confident, on-point ideas about how things should work and just run with them immediately. Her observations about visibility, aging online, and the cost of being seen were pretty sharp, but Stein seems to borrow from Gothic fiction (a crumbling estate, a mysterious disappearance), without fully embracing it ….this is more a decaying mansion with Wi-Fi than a brooding psychological mystery (though at some point the mystery stopped feeling like much of a mystery anyway.) I had a good time with it anyway.

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran In the aftermath of devastating hurricanes, Vietnamese-American teen Noon and her grief-stricken mother navigate the waters around Mercy, Louisiana, where a red algae bloom has transformed the landscape and mutated sea creatures into something grotesque and unrecognizable. Noon’s mother refuses to leave, convinced her dead husband and son have been reincarnated as sea creatures, leaving Noon feeling invisible – not enough as a daughter, not enough as a person, despite being alive and right there. When the town’s local thug forces them to hunt down whatever creature is lurking in the swamp and sends his daughter, Covey, along to keep watch, Noon is navigating grief over her lost family, trauma from an assault, rage and self-loathing she can’t shake, and the growing sense that she might be undergoing her own monstrous transformation. I wanted to like this more than I did – there were so many elements I appreciated (the body horror, Vietnamese mythology, the metaphor of monstrous transformation as response to trauma and alienation from one’s own body) but they didn’t coalesce into an enjoyable whole, feeling sluggish and scattered instead. I really like Tran and their ideas though, so I’m glad I read it and will always pick up more from them.

The Haar by David Sodergren Muriel McAuley is eighty-four and has no intention of leaving her Scottish fishing village of Witchaven, not even when an American developer shows up planning to evict everyone and build a golf course. A mysterious fog bank called the Haar rolls in from the sea, bringing something ancient and monstrous with it that becomes Muriel’s unlikely ally, and what follows is equal parts gore-soaked revenge tale and surprisingly tender love story. I think if I hadn’t been listening to the excellent narrator on audiobook, this wouldn’t have kept my interest – I went in expecting atmospheric dread and creeping horror, but got something that felt more romantic than frightening despite all the visceral violence. I genuinely liked Muriel as a protagonist, and I can appreciate love and sentimentality and grief all tangled up with body horror, but this didn’t work for me as the horror story I was hoping for. Viewed as its own strange hybrid thing, maybe it’s actually pretty great, but I kept wishing I could split it apart – give me the story of the town being bought up by a rich developer with one stubborn old woman refusing to sell, or give me the ancient entity lurking by the sea, but mashing them together left me wanting each piece to breathe on its own.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison After her mother Alex dies, influencer Clio Barnes inherits the childhood home where Alex claimed a demon lived, specifically obsessed with Clio – claims that got Alex stripped of custody and labeled crazy. Clio’s sisters want nothing to do with the place, but Clio sees house-flipping content gold and begins renovations, only to discover her mother might have been right as she finally reads Alex’s out-of-print book about the possession. I liked parts of this: the sister dynamics felt real, the book-within-a-book structure worked was neat…but something was missing, like I wanted more of who Alex was before the house, more about how young Clio might have interacted with the demon, just more demon in general. What I actively disliked, though, was Clio herself, the bratty baby sister with her “I do what I want! Deal with it!” energy who dismisses her sisters’ legitimate trauma as manipulation while seeing dollar signs everywhere. I know that’s intentional character work, but I have a real problem with people who act like that (maybe because I’m an oldest sister), and her behavior grated on me so much it overshadowed basically everything else Also, blueberry bagels are Clio’s favorite, which just cements my dislike of her – sweet bagels are garbage, and if you want a round baked good with a hole to be sweet, just admit you want a donut already and stop dragging the poor bagels into it. They should be savory and loaded with fish and onions and terrifically smelly, as god intended.

The Salvage by Anbara Salam A Victorian shipwreck containing the remains of Captain James Purdie – a celebrated explorer who’s achieved near-cult status among the islanders – gets towed from Arctic waters to the remote Scottish island of Cairnroch in 1962, and marine archaeologist Marta Khoury arrives to salvage what’s inside. On her first dive down, she photographs artifacts and bones, but when she returns days later to retrieve them, everything’s gone, and she’s certain she saw a dark crouching figure in the wreck – which feeds right into the guilt she’s already drowning in from something terrible in her recent past. The Cuban Missile Crisis and a historically brutal winter strand her on the island, where she’s treated with suspicion as an outsider and has to navigate complicated relationships with Sophie (her boss/husband’s assistant, sent ostensibly to help) and Elsie, a local hotel worker she grows close to. I loved this, even though the 1960s Scottish island setting confused me initially since it’s not territory I usually encounter. The wintry atmosphere is spectacularly done and while many readers thought it dragged when the village freezes over and everyone’s scrambling for survival, I genuinely enjoyed watching the female friendships develop and spending time with these flawed, complicated characters navigating their various guilts and desires. The romance worked for me despite not usually wanting love stories in my ghost stories, though I’ll admit the casual attitude about the relationship didn’t feel entirely realistic for early 1960s Presbyterian Scotland.

The Search Party by Hannah Richell Max and Annie Kingsley invite their old university friends and their families to their new Cornwall glamping site for a trial run, but the reunion sours when the kids fight, the parents take sides, old resentments surface, and someone vanishes just as a massive storm rolls in. The setup had potential (isolated location, secrets, missing person, police investigation told through multiple timelines), but nothing about it really landed for me beyond people having predictable meltdowns in expensive tents. The one character I felt for was Kip, Max and Annie’s adopted son who has selective mutism and gets treated poorly by basically everyone. I finished it easily enough, but now all I can recall is a blur of dramatic confrontations and bad weather without any real sense of why I should have cared.

Smile For The Camera by Miranda Smith A reunion documentary brings the cast of cult slasher Grad Night back to the original Tennessee cabin location twenty years later, where they’re all hiding a terrible secret from the original shoot. Ella Winters, the movie’s final girl, finds herself navigating old resentments and cast drama before someone dressed as the movie’s killer finally starts picking off cast and crew members, which raises the obvious question of why this revenge plot waited two decades to kick in. I finished this easily enough and found parts of it entertaining, but the fictional movie Grad Night itself sounded incredibly dull (kids go to a cabin, kids get killed, there’s a final girl, the end), and there’s a weird twist that felt like it came out of nowhere and was never properly addressed in a way that made sense.

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Kinsey leads a research team at a remote desert outpost where they discover a strange, grotesque specimen buried in the sand, which she breaks quarantine to bring inside, and the longer it stays the more everyone starts unraveling because this thing is searching for a host and making everyone weirdly, aggressively horned up Gailey commits fully to the strangeness here (Kinsey is sexually attracted to viruses, for instance), and while I generally find smutty stuff boring and would rather read about literally anything else, this was so boldly weird that I actually had a good time with it. The timeline jumps between present action and character backstories disrupted the momentum when I was invested in what was happening now, but overall, this was short, strange, and entertaining.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman Forty women live locked in an underground cage with no sense of time, no understanding of how they got there, and only the vaguest memories of the world outside. The sole exception is our narrator, a young girl who remembers nothing before captivity and has grown up entirely within the cage’s fluorescent, timeless hum. When a moment of chance and a sliver of ingenuity allow them to escape, the world they emerge into is far stranger and more desolate than anything they imagined, and the girl becomes both witness and sometimes interpreter—to a landscape devoid of answers. It’s part eerie survival tale and part philosophical unraveling, as the women wander through an empty world not knowing whether they’re the last people alive or simply the most forgotten. I loved this, even though the starkness of its setting, bleak plains, abandoned structures, and a world stripped to its bones, initially felt so spare I wasn’t sure how much emotional attachment I’d find. But the atmosphere is astonishing: quiet, unsettling, and strangely luminous, especially in the scenes where the women try to rebuild some kind of life with almost nothing to anchor themselves. I was captivated by the narrator’s loneliness and the way she tries to make meaning inside a reality that offers none. The sadness is constant but beautifully rendered, and the final pages left me equal parts hollowed out and grateful. I think I’m drawn to stories like this, and even to books as seemingly different as Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Boxcar Children (which probably sound ridiculous as comparisons, but hear me out), because I love narratives about people figuring out how to survive and build something from almost nothing, finding small moments of comfort and connection in a world that’s fundamentally indifferent to their existence.

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry The abandoned house on Jessie’s Chicago street has been there her whole life, crouched and waiting, and she’s the reason her little brother Paul disappeared inside it when she dared him to go in as kids. The book follows Jessie over decades as she grows up on that same block, builds a life, and watches darkness spread from that house until eventually her own son vanishes into it and she has to confront what’s been festering there all along. I’m always here for a creepy haunted house story and loved the neighborhood friendships and support system around Jessie, but this never quite worked for me, despite wanting it to. What started as fairly standard supernatural coming-of-age/grief horror suddenly veered into something oddly fairytale-esque at the very end, a bizarrely fantastical pivot that fell awfully flat.

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson Vietnam vet Duane Minor is bartending in Portland in 1975, trying to stay sober and raise his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, when he crosses a vampire named John Varley, who retaliates by murdering Minor’s wife and sending what’s left of their family on a vengeful pursuit across the Pacific Northwest. This has a gritty 1970s noir feel and reads more like a crime thriller than typical vampire horror, which I appreciated, and while it wasn’t weird or extraordinarily wild in any way, I can say I’ve never read another vampire book quite like it. I think that uniqueness comes from getting Varley’s perspective, along with Minor’s and Julia’s, watching all three of them from different angles as the hunt unfolds. The grief and rage driving Minor and Julia felt raw and devastating; their bond developed naturally over the course of the book, and the whole thing was brutal and emotionally gutting without feeling manipulative about it. This was an utterly satisfying read and exactly what I want from horror.

Night Watcher by Daphne Woolsoncroft Nola Strate hosts a late-night radio show in Portland about hauntings and cryptid sightings, but when a caller describes something chillingly similar to her childhood encounter with a serial killer called The Hiding Man, she becomes convinced he’s back and targeting her (yet somehow does absolutely nothing to keep herself safe in ways that stopped feeling like character behavior and started feeling like the author needed her to be a reckless moron for plot reasons.) This could have been so good, but I was deeply disappointed by how it turned out, starting with the fact that the author telegraphs early on exactly how the killer is accessing his victims, which removes most of the tension. The writing felt simultaneously over-detailed about mundane things (kombucha, coffee, endless mentions of Powell’s Books to remind you we’re in Portland) and strangely flat when it came to actual character development or emotional stakes. When the killer is finally revealed, it’s someone so random and disconnected from the story that you’re left thinking “oh, that’s just dumb.”

Self Care by Leigh Stein Everyone’s got a favorite trashy genre, and for the past few years, this has been mine: something about wellness and social media and influencer culture, sometimes through the lens of a thriller, sometimes presented as sad girl/weird lit fic, but there’s something so garbagey junk food about it that I can’t get enough of. This one follows the female cofounders of wellness startup Richual as they struggle to balance their feminist values with profit margins while their company implodes from various scandals, including sexual misconduct allegations against a board member and a PR nightmare when COO Maren Gelb tweets something terrible about the President’s daughter. I flew through it and enjoyed the specificity of the brand-dropping, the absurd self-care products, the performative wokeness, and the way it captures how these companies commodify feminism while exploiting the people working for them. The ending felt abrupt and left me wanting more closure or comeuppance for certain characters, but overall, this scratched the exact trashy itch I was looking for.

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer Macy Mullins is broke, grieving her father’s death, and desperately trying to provide for her younger sister when she takes a caretaking job she finds on Craigslist that involves following mysterious rituals at an isolated Oregon Coast house to prevent some incomprehensible evil from escaping. My stress levels while reading this were off the charts—poor Macy just could not get her shit together, screwing up the instructions at every turn in ways that left me frustrated with her and for her. The plot veers into such bizarro territory that some readers will absolutely be put off, with that meandering weirdness that made me think of the r/nosleep community, and when I looked it up, I realized that’s because Kliewer was a writer there. The dread and tension were real, but I closed it feeling like it was almost good rather than anything approaching actually great. Publishing April 21, 2026.

The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church. The premise here involves haunted audio tapes from an abandoned RAF base that caused an experimental artist to murder his entire family in 1983, and decades later, true crime podcaster Cally Darker decides to investigate.  The writing had serious weird/gross/annoying problems throughout: at one point, Cally is using sex to distract her boyfriend, but the narration tells us she wasn’t trying to distract him anymore because she was “genuinely enjoying herself.’ I find this extremely doubtful, classic man-writing-women garbage. At another point, Cally puts on a pair of gold harem pants. Gold harem pants. Seriously? What!  At least two completely different interview subjects both use the word “benighted” in the span of about two chapters, and aside from that, these two very different characters spoke almost exactly the same. The same wry, sardonic tones, similar turns of phrase, etc. I don’t know that I could let that go in a book I was actually having a good time with, but in this one, it was exceptionally egregious. And the villain was such an over-the-top incel caricature that I wanted to throw the book every time he said “pretty Cally Darker.” By the end of this, I think I was hate-reading it.

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir Unnur reunites a lost black cat with its owner Ásta, a local woman who seems a bit vulnerable and squirrelly (we soon learn why); Unnur agrees to keep the cat temporarily, which leads to an unlikely friendship between the two women. I tore through this in one sitting—it’s a quiet little book (gruesome but not bombastic about it) that leans more thriller than horror, and I liked it better than Knútsdóttir’s last one. The friendship felt genuine, and I was really invested in watching Unnur transform from someone living a bland, isolated life with a terrible married boyfriend into someone who actually cares about another person, especially once it becomes clear Ásta is in an abusive relationship and things take a violent turn. Short, focused, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Publishing May 26, 2026.

Too Close To Home by Seraphina Nova Glass This is the first Seraphina Nova Glass book that didn’t quite work for me, which surprised me given how much I’ve enjoyed her other work. An upscale lakefront community is thrown into chaos when a car bomb explodes at the annual Labor Day party, killing the wrong person, and the story follows three suburban moms, Regan, Andi, and Sasha, whose lives are all tangled up in the aftermath. I love Glass for that close-knit, neighborly intimacy and the way she weaves community together, but this felt too sprawling and ambitious, with so many plot threads (bomb threats, missing persons, messy divorces, resurrected husbands) that I never found my footing. The three women were so interchangeable that I struggled to keep them straight well past the halfway point, and while everything technically came together at the end, the resolution felt both over-the-top and underwhelming. I missed the warmth and tight focus of her other work. Publishing April 14, 2026

Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard Starting over is hard enough without your new house hiding someone else’s deadly secrets, but that’s what happens when Hannah moves to 1 Delaney Row under a new name, trying to escape her past. At first her situation stressed me out because it reminded me of Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive—desperate woman, creepy house, creeping dread—but thankfully the book doesn’t bloat like Nevill’s did, dragging on for 600 pages. The dual timeline structure following two women whose stories eventually converge around the house worked well enough, but the mystery’s resolution felt unfairly convoluted: when a barely-there neighbor character suddenly becomes the keeper of crucial secrets the whole story hinges on, it doesn’t feel earned, it just feels like information was withheld arbitrarily. Readable enough, but that resolution soured whatever goodwill I had toward the book. Publishing July 28, 2026

Nothing Tastes As Good by Luke Dumas A clinical trial for a very experimental weight loss product promises miraculous results, and retail worker Emmett Truesdale, over 300 pounds and desperate for change, enrolls only to discover the side effects include lost time, overwhelming (and alarming) cravings…and a possible connection to people who were cruel to him now disappearing. You could tell this was written by an actual fat person who has experienced actual fat person struggles, from the way society treats Emmett to the constant bullying to the self-loathing, all of it felt authentic in ways that made parts of this horribly relatable, even when other parts were gross and cringe. Emmett’s childhood trauma around his weight happened in his own home, where he should have been safe and protected, which adds another layer of devastating realism to his character. The social commentary on fatphobia and diet culture isn’t subtle, but I appreciated the inclusion and found myself caring about Emmett despite knowing things weren’t going to end well for him. The ending went a bit over the top, but this worked for me more than it didn’t. Publishing March 31, 2026

The Lamb by Lucy Rose A mother and daughter live isolated in a cottage by the forest, their quiet life interrupted only by strangers who knock at their door seeking shelter, strangers they consume after feeding and caring for them. When Eden arrives during a snowstorm, everything rapidly shifts in ways both tender and terrible. Mama becomes utterly besotted with Eden in a way she never was with Margot, desperately in love, while what she’d given her daughter had always been something fraught with resentment and possession rather than genuine affection. Eden seems to care for Margot while also returning Mama’s passion, leaving Margot nowhere to belong, and whether Eden’s arrival was accident or design is never quite resolved (though in a story this dreamlike and fairytale-esque, do we even question where new entities come from?). This was weirdly beautiful and terribly, monstrously sad, told entirely through Margot’s childlike perspective.

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Now that I’ve spent December celebrating everyone else’s books, it seems only fair to mention my own. There are still a few shopping days before the holiday, though I can’t guarantee anything will reach you in time.

But if you’re shopping for friends who trace sigils in the margins and dream in symbols, the family member who gets lost in museum rooms for hours, who collect visual obsessions like other people collect recipes, or if that person is absolutely, unquestionably you sitting there right now thinking “yes, actually, I do deserve something gorgeous and weird that rewards endless returns”—here’s my trilogy.

The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic is where sacred geometry meets spirit art, where witches conjure alongside alchemists, where astrology and Kabbalah and ceremonial magic all get their visual due. Over 175 artworks spanning centuries, organized into The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and Practitioners. Artists driven by that soul-deep hunger to reveal hidden truths, to make the invisible visible, to show us the secret shapes underlying everything. Essential for tarot readers and Hermetic scholars, for anyone who’s ever traced a sigil or stared into a crystal ball, for those building occult study curriculums or simply hungry for imagery that transcends the ordinary and reaches for something vast and glimmering and strange.

The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is nightmares and plagues, mourning art and murder ballads, the monstrous feminine and supernatural beings, memento mori and existential dread. Artists who understood that darkness carries weight and beauty, that our shadows deserve attention, that facing our demons might actually comfort us. Over 200 artworks across centuries asking: why are we drawn to the macabre? What happens when we stop denying our darkness and start reveling in it? Essential for Gothic souls and Victorian mourning enthusiasts, for anyone who’s ever felt more at home in graveyards than crowds, for those who understand that beauty and horror often share the same face.

The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal is beasts and forgotten realms, myth and impossible landscapes, artists building entire worlds from imagination alone. Dragons and wonderlands, magic and philosophy, hope made visible through paint and illustration. Fantasy isn’t escape—it’s that irresistible impulse toward wonder, that refusal to accept reality as the only option, that hunger for what could be. Essential for worldbuilders and folklore scholars, for anyone who’s ever needed to see how you make the impossible feel real, for those who understand that imaginary worlds deserve our fiercest attention and deepest study.

You can find these wherever books are sold, or order signed copies from me directly. I can’t promise they’ll arrive in time for your Hexmas gifting needs as the postal gods remain mysterious and unknowable, but I promise to get them in the mail today. Receiving a book in January when you’ve half-forgotten you ordered it feels like a gift from your past self anyway—an extended holiday, a little magic arriving precisely when January gets bleak, and you need it most.

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