Rachel Louise Adams follows No Rest for the Wicked with a Coldren County novel set on a Wisconsin kill floor, and it is a slaughterhouse horror novel with real bite. This Where There’s Smoke review explains why Dolores Hawthorne’s second case earns five stars, and how Adams turns the meat trade’s soft words against the men who run it.
In a guest essay for Ginger Nuts of Horror, Rachel Louise Adams reveals why the second Coldren County novel, Where There’s Smoke, swaps Halloween for a slaughterhouse. She traces the choice to her PhD research and to the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat. The result is a slaughterhouse crime novel she calls darker and more personal than No Rest for the Wicked.
Madison Tyler Nelson’s supernatural horror debut follows Tatum Alexander, who sees the dead, as her best friend’s murder drags her back towards her imprisoned mother. In this Portrait of a Haunting review, I argue that a found family horror novel with a prickly heroine is cleverer than it first looks. For fans of witch coven novels and books like Ninth House.
Micaiah Johnson builds a house where nothing bad ever happens, then asks where all the bad … The Unhaunting by Micaiah Johnson Review: The House That Wants GhostsRead more
The crone has been part of horror since long before cinema existed, from Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs to the witch under the oven in Hansel and Gretel. This feature traces her through the European witch trials, hagsploitation cinema and films like Relic and She Will, and lands on Keith Rosson’s new novel Crone.
In this A. Rushby interview, the author of All Her Beautiful Deaths talks Victorian death photography, the ethics of looking at other people’s grief and why her sentient Culpepper House wishes its family well. She also explains why, after the darker Slashed Beauties, she wanted a feminist gothic full of yearning, and names the YA horror novel that gave her nightmares.
Phil Keeling’s debut horror short story collection moves from the fall of Babel to a low country monster hunt and a wounded angel in a root cellar. Our Be Not Afraid review finds religious horror with teeth, dark humour and Southern weird fiction at its sharpest. This is a self-published horror book that earns every one of its five stars.
Hervé Commère’s YA thriller comes as twenty-one sealed letters, one to tear open each day, as a young man in London races to save the sister who vanished ten years ago. This 21 Days of Fear review looks at how the advent calendar format turns waiting itself into fear. A five star epistolary thriller built for December.
