Hell is a company in Mackenzie Reed’s adult debut, and the joke mostly works. Our four-star review gets into the corporate-underworld satire, the slow-burn romance, the grief thread, and the worldbuilding that strains under its own reveals.
Penny Lane Is Dead Review: Home Invasion Horror
Penny Lane Is Dead delivers strong practical gore and real tension inside its beach house setting. But Hope Madden finds the home invasion horror undercut by tonal clashes and a third act aimed at the wrong target.
Vincent Ralph on Bleak Haven, Corpse Creek and the Uses of Grief
Vincent Ralph talks us through Corpse Creek, the grief horror centrepiece of his Bleak Haven series, and the drowned brother who will not stay under. He explains how four YA horror novels rework R.L. Stine’s Fear Street into something darker, and why Fear Farm had to end the whole thing in blood.
Still Lost by Sam A. Miller Review: The Sam O’Nella Academy Creator’s Sharp, Sad SF Debut
In Still Lost, Sam A. Miller hands the deadpan of Sam O’Nella Academy a nervous system. His eight linked near-future science fiction stories let a superior alien race fix every human threat, then watch us wreck ourselves anyway. A debut short story collection that runs warmer than Black Mirror and closer to George Saunders.
The Raven by Susan McCauley: A Plague-Year Gothic Horror That Freezes You Slowly
Susan McCauley’s The Raven is a four-star gothic horror novel set in the 1665 plague winter, where a Yorkshire cobbler’s grief, faith and madness braid into folk-horror dread. A patient, disturbing historical horror about the monster who keeps a kind face.
If We Survive the Night Review: Jo Salazar’s YA Horror Doesn’t Blink
Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night is apocalyptic YA horror built around one of the most compelling antiheroes the genre has produced in years. Quinn, sixteen, ASPD-diagnosed, and done with the systems that have failed her since childhood, finds herself at the start of the zombie apocalypse inside a residential treatment centre. What follows is a fast, psychologically precise survival story that asks hard questions about who gets written off as dangerous, who gets called a hero, and what those labels are actually worth when civilisation ends. Sharpened by Salazar’s social work background and driven by a protagonist you can’t look away from, this is feminist horror fiction doing exactly what the best of the genre does: using monsters as a mirror.
The Productivity Trap: How Multitasking Can Slow Your Success
The Productivity Trap: How Multitasking Can Slow Your Success In our very fast-paced world right now, … The Productivity Trap: How Multitasking Can Slow Your SuccessRead more
Creating A Space that Feels Beautifully Only Yours
Creating A Space that Feels Beautifully Only Yours A sophisticated home does not have to be … Creating A Space that Feels Beautifully Only Yours Read more
Should Authors Respond to Reviews? A Field Guide for the Fragile
A four part survival guide to authors responding to reviews, from the negative one you must never answer to the glowing one that earns the reviewer a lawn mowing. Written for any horror author currently refreshing Goodreads and reaching for the Reply button. The correct response is almost always silence, and occasionally chocolate.
An Interview with Susan McCauley: Gothic Horror and the Unraveling of Sanity
Susan McCauley talks about her forthcoming gothic horror novel The Raven, the York ghost story that inspired it, and why she keeps returning to themes of loss and madness. She also discusses writing from multiple points of view and the role of atmosphere in horror fiction.