I didn’t know my life was missing a story where Lady Macbeth (yes, the one from Shakespeare) and Klytemnestra (from Greek mythology - this version seems to be the one from Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon) were plucked from their respective stories and brought together in a sapphic horrormance until I read Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou.

Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka is kind of a haunted house domestic horror. Tenn, a documentary filmmaker turned wedding videographer because life be like that sometimes, and her husband Ward, move with their two kids from North Carolina to New York. In a tale as old  as time, or at least as old as The Amityville Horror, the move was meant to strengthen their marriage (though the pre-move details are unclear), and Ward sinks all their money into buying Tenn’s dream home.  They both have new jobs, but Ward’s is the one that will support them with his new six figure salary.

Everything Dead & Dying by Tate Brombal and Jacob Phillips is a collection of all five issues of the comic, which I had never read before, and I’m glad I read it as a collection because I don’t know how I would have done it if I’d had to wait between issues.

Two words. Ghost. Cat. The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean starts in 1970's Hong Kong and had two things going for it within the first pages: One - the aforementioned Ghost Cat which can go from a sweet little baby kitten to a powerful beast in a blink and Two: a protagonist who is my age (fully baked adult) - at least in the opening pages before it jumps back to a time I've coincidentally been reading about a lot lately - the WWII occupation of Hong Kong by the Japanese followed by the influx of refugees from the Chinese Civil war. It was a crazy time for Hong Kong.)

When you reunite with friends you haven’t seen in a long time, you’re spending time with the people you knew back then, twenty, ten, even five years ago, and that makes its easy to revert to the person you were back then, too, and the old dynamics resurface, good or bad.

With a spirit called “She Who Creeps Between”, there’s no question that She Waits Where Shadows Gather by Michelle Tang is going to stick with me for a while. She Waits Where Shadows Gather  is a Filipino Gothic horror novel complete with a haunted house, Filipino folklore, and a fractured family.

My cats demand breakfast each morning about 2 hours before my alarm is set, and sometimes I'll play a podcast repeat or music or something when I get back in bed. What does this have to do with This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum?

I made the mistake of playing this audiobook instead of music, and I could not stop listening.

I Know a Place by Nat Cassidy was a real roller-coaster. You never really know what you're in for with a story collection (also, for what it's worth, with Nat Cassidy), and this one really messed with me. I mean, I should have paid more attention to the subtitle, I guess, Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours because...yeah.

Who among us hasn't dreamt of finding a house in the woods hidden from the world where we can rest, recharge, center ourselves, maybe read (or write) a book or two? 

Maybe because I’m right in the middle of Gen X - no need to do that math, and we’re being accused of having a second adolescence (joke’s on them, we never fully escaped the first), I’ve been enjoying some YA horror lately.

How to Survive Camping: The Lady in Chains is the second in this series from Bonnie Quinn, and it was a lot of fun to return to Kate’s campground.

Monika Kim has done it again. Molka has the same "good for her", viscerally satisfying, eat the patriarchy vibe as her first novel (The Eyes Are the Best Part).

House of Rot by Danger Slater was a 125 pages of nightmare fuel, and I had to open a window while reading to relieve the claustrophobia. Any book that can cause a visceral reaction like that is worth reading.

Like a lot of people - including Caroline Bicks, author of Monsters in the Archives, I have been reading Stephen King since I was 11 or 12 years old, and I loved reading about her time studying his archives and the connections she draws between not only his work and Shakespeare but also his work and her own life, especially some childhood fears. 

I read mostly horror, so, as much as I enjoy a lot of what I read, I rarely find myself wishing I were part of the world of the book. But in The Creek, the Crone, and the Crow, Leah Weiss has created not only a world I would be happy to inhabit, she has created characters I would like to know and a mystery I would like to investigate.

The heroine in A Vow for Breaking by L.M. Riviere is Sloane McIntyre, a sharp, smart, poor young Irish woman from Boston who has inherited a demon as a constant companion - whether she wants him or not - and thanks to her witch ancestor, he doesn’t have much choice either.

Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon brings all the folk horror it promises in its title (and the title of the first story) and its cover art. It also brings body horror, cosmic horror, the supernatural, and ROCK AND ROLL! and addresses topics like mental illness, generational trauma, and body dysmorphia. And they say horror is not “real” literature.

Cross Stitch Cabinet Of Curiosities by Grace Isobel is full of patterns inspired by items that may make up a cabinet of curiosities.

The title told me Snarky Crochet by Lisa Ha was a book for me, and the introduction confirmed it. Her irreverent, punny patterns, she says, are to make gifts for people you don’t like - but you don’t want them to know you don’t like them.

The Last Witch by C.J. Cooke is a thrilling and infuriating historical horror novel based on the true story of the victims of the infamous witchfinder Heinrich Kramer who wrote the famous Malleus Maleficarum, a textbook on how to identify and deal with witches.