Look on almost any substantial list of “best horror novels of the 2000s,” and the odds are fairly good that Scott Smith’s 2006 book The Ruins will be on it. It’s a grim, ever-escalating survival nightmare of cruel and heightened nature, and it’s pretty damn gross, to boot. It was made into a decent film … More Books: The Ruins by Scott Smith
There’s kind of a funny story behind how I ended up reading and reviewing this book, a story that illustrates pretty clearly the fact that I have read so many books over the course of my life that I’ve forgotten which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. So a while back, I was … More Books: Mrs. God by Peter Straub
Award-winning author Bryan Smith is largely known for his splatterpunk works, and although his 2021 novella The Unseen definitely has some slasher-type gore, it’s actually more character-focused, and has an absolutely great premise that I had a lot of fun with. I also have to give a shout-out to Scott Cole, who did the cover … More Books: The Unseen by Bryan Smith
Pennsylvania-based author and poet Oliver C. Seneca recently contacted me by email and offered to send along an ebook of his latest novel, Faces in a Window, for me to review. Of course I agreed, because hey, who am I to turn down free horror books? Faces in a Window, published by Sunbury Press in … More Books: Faces in a Window by Oliver C. Seneca
The book I’m discussing today was one that I was seeing everywhere when the hardback first came out in the summer of 2020; it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and a bunch of horror book reviewers I follow, as well as pretty much all the “mainstream” book reviewing channels, were covering it. … More Books: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
As you guys might remember, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed a 2019 scifi/horror novel called Intercepts by T.J. Payne not too long ago, so when the same author’s follow-up book—The Venue: A Wedding Novel, from 2020—popped up in my Kindle Unlimited recommendations, I was immediately intrigued. The cover was stark and eye-catching, and the brief … More Books: The Venue by T.J. Payne
The haunted house subgenre, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, is usually my favorite type of horror to read, and although I love a good classic haunted house tale, I also like when an author tries to do something of a fresh take on it. J.W. Ocker’s 2019 novel Twelve Nights at Rotter House is … More Books: Twelve Nights at Rotter House by J.W. Ocker
Back in 2020, it seemed like Samantha Kolesnik’s debut novella True Crime was everywhere; it got a massive amount of buzz in the horror community, and even though I successfully avoided any synopses or reviews of it prior to reading it for myself, it was hard to miss seeing its (awesome) cover popping up in … More Books: True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik
British author Ross Jeffery’s harrowing novella Only the Stains Remain was published in 2021, and immediately caused something of a buzz in the reviewer community. It is an excellent book (though I have a couple of minor quibbles, which I’ll get into later), but it is most assuredly NOT for everyone, as it deals with … More Books: Only the Stains Remain by Ross Jeffery
I am an absolute sucker for a well-told and terrifying short story. Sure, novels are fantastic too, and can conjure an entire world that you can lose yourself in for days or weeks at a time; but there’s something really special about that sharp jolt from a short tale that can be read all in … More An Appreciation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories That Scared Even Me
