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.
Hope Madden reviews Never After Dark, Dave Boyle’s Japanese ghost story about a travelling medium sent to a remote inn. Moeka Hoshi leads a slow burn horror that borrows the look of early 90s J-horror without feeling borrowed. It takes its time as a supernatural thriller, then gets nasty when it counts.
China Miéville returns after fourteen years with The Rouse, a vast work of weird fiction that folds grief, war and necromancy into a single twentieth-century epic. It is a formidable, demanding ghost story, and it rewards patience far more than it courts it. Our four-star review sorts the wonder from the sheer weight of the thing.
