Girl Dinner follows two women, college sophomore Nina Kaur, eager to join the most exclusive sorority on campus, known as “The House”, and adjunct professor Sloane Hartley, returning to work after giving birth to a daughter Isla, now 18 months old. Nina becomes the first sophomore to join the sorority, and Sloane is asked to be the House’s academic advisor, and they both realize that something sinister is going on as the benefits of being a part of this feminine space are unusually exceptional as all the girls are extremely healthy and beautiful- and go on to be extraordinarily successful in their chosen careers - more than can be accounted for by simple sisterhood.

Rebecca Cuthbert’s The Hauntings Back Home is a beautiful, haunting, sweet, sad, funny collection of stories that explore grief, death, and fear.

Kill the Beast by Serra Swift is a mostly cozy fantasy about identity, found family, and forgiveness with plenty of adventure, humor, and a little romance.

Lyssa is a complicated heroine, who overcharges the rich so she can defend the poor - but she also has a heart filled with vengeance and becomes enraged at the sight of and kills all hounds and other creatures in search of the Beast that killed her brother which has earned her the nickname of “the Butcher”.

The Haunting of Payne’s Hollow by Kelley Armstrong has a classic horror premise: to earn a family inheritance from her grandfather, Samantha Payne must stay at the family’s lakeside cottage for one month.

Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks is a quiet, atmospheric cozy gothic horror that is darkly humorous with an undercurrent of melancholy.

Margaret Culpeper is desperate. She has a rare autoimmune disorder whose symptoms - especially the pain - and the impact they have on her make it hard to keep a job or relationships; even her family doesn’t understand, and she’s struggling to stay afloat. So when she gets an opportunity to join a highly experimental study at Graceview Memorial Hospital - which includes a stipend along with complete coverage of all treatment expense - that could cure her, she is quick to accept, in spite of an urgent warning she receives from Isabel, one of the nurses, who urges her to leave.

One of Us by Dan Chaon explores themes of the self, otherness, found family, and what it means to live and die in the trappings of a thrilling adventure novel.

The novella and the short stories all seem to have a nod to folklore or urban legends but (mostly) from a slightly different angle than I’ve seen before, and overall some were more my taste than others.

Though it’s a modern gothic (unlike the A.G.Slatter Sourdough books I’ve read), The Cold House has the one thing that keeps me reading her works: a smart, snarky, relatable heroine.

Why did I do this to myself?! Or, more to the point, Gemma Amor, why did you do this to me?! I guess the new way Gemma Amor fans will recognize each other is by the squirming and scratching. I only made it about half a dozen chapters into ITCH! before the creepy-crawlies commenced, and I haven’t stopped itching since. 

Lee wrestles with personal demons - her mother’s drug addiction, how she treated her friends and classmates, and recognizing her own dependence on alcohol - the latter which made for one of the most poignant passages in the book as we see that through her children’s eyes - in order to reestablish her connection to the land so she can harness the power she needs to save herself and those loves from the physical demons that someone has unleashed. 

As someone who also grew up in the South as an “other” (though not in the same ways), a lot of this really resonated with me on a personal level which I did not expect, and I definitely expect to go back over some of these paragraphs and chapters again from a mindset of personal growth vs. entertainment and review purposes.

Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman has the two things  I want from a mystery novel: a snarky narrator and clues that build to an exciting and meaningful conclusion.

Just when I thought I knew what was going on, I did not know what was going on - and I loved it!

Demon Song by Kelsea Yu is a chilling Gothic tale based on Chinese mythology, but it’s also a bittersweet coming of age story of a girl being raised by a single mother who moves her from place to place fleeing a string of abusive relationships.

What makes the book stand out for me is the way Mitchell and Venditozzi balance their respect and reverence for these victims with a sense of humor in the writing. The footnotes, which provide helpful bits of context for the chapter, are also filled with opinions and asides which makes the reading that much more approachable.

There are moments where I felt my stomach drop as I realized what was happening to someone, moments where I felt my stomach tighten in grief as the women lost loved ones, and moments where I felt my stomach heave at the descriptions bordering on body horror of how the ghost/demon manifested.

America’s Most Gothic is a charming blend of storytelling, folklore, and history. After an introduction explaining why the authors, Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes, connect these American ghost and folktales to the Gothic, they share the tales with a wealth of interesting background and related facts, theories, and stories. 

Perfect Happiness by Jeong You-Jeong is dark, tense, sad - and I could not stop reading it. Twelve hours later, and I still have a knot in my stomach thinking about Yuma Shin. 

It’s not as lyrical, but Perfect Happiness could have been called, “It’s Yuma’s World, and We’re All Living In It”. 

Clever, loyal, and (mostly) brave soldier Alex Easton is back in T. Kingfisher’s What Stalks the Deep, and they are bringing all the snark and relatability we’ve come to expect from the Sworn Soldier. 

To put it bluntly, I love this series. I loved the first two, and I’m excited to get to this one. 

Scream with Me by Eleanor Johnson is a must-read for anyone who thinks about or wants to learn about how horror reflects or can impact society - in this case with a focus on feminist issues such as bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.

Textbook-level research has gone into this (which makes sense as the author teaches horror history in her curriculum at Columbia), but Scream with Me is as easy and engaging to read as a novel.