Horror 2023 Book Reviews

For the year of 2023 I attempted to read a horror (or horror-adjacent) book for every month of the year. Below is a ranking list, from best to worst book that I've read in this challenge.

Below that are my actual reviews, which are listed in order of when I read them.

My rankings are: I Love It/Pretty Good/A Good Read/Eh, It's Readable/Absolutely Not

  1. The Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton)
  2. The Cobra Event (Richard Preston)
  3. Paradise 1 (David Wellington)
  4. The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones)
  5. The Twisted Ones (T. Kingfisher)
  6. Sphere (Michael Crichton)
  7. The Reddening (Adam L.G. Nevill)
  8. A God In The Shed (J-F. Dubeau)
  9. The Lost Village (Camilla Sten. Translated by Alexandra Fleming)

The Only Good Indians - By Stephen Graham Jones (Published 2020) Discussion
Rating: Pretty Good!
Tropes: Persistent Predator, Indigenous Horror, One by One Retribution, Supernaturally Influenced Madness
Summary: Four young Blackfeet men go hunting for Elk, out of season and out of the hunting boundaries for young men like them. When they find a herd, they unleash carnage on the unsuspecting animals that’s antithetical to every tradition and cultural law they’ve been raised on. Years later, the four men have grown apart and have lived different lives, but they soon find themselves coming back together as retribution starts hunting them.
Review I think if you read a lot of books, you can come to find yourself reading a lot of stories that fall short in any matter of areas; characters, pacing, plot, tropes used, structure, etc. All of them are subjective really, and I don’t think any one book can excel in all factors that make a novel. Some books excel in areas so much that you can forgive the areas they don’t, and the inverse is true for a lot of books too. Some areas of a book just don’t work, and even the better bits can’t save the story as a whole. The Only Good Indians is a bit of an enigma for me, because I think it excels in more than enough areas, but somehow it hasn’t earned a spot in my personal favourites.

All the characters are very grounded and believable, you could definitely pick these characters off the street and I’ve known people in my own life who could be right out of this book. The pacing and structure are both pretty good, they facilitate a really good lead up to the horrific climax of the main four men in the plot, and really sells the tension. For tropes, it honestly employed some of my favourites in horror; predator becomes prey and persistent predator. If you’re someone like me you may be worried about the use of supernaturally influenced madness, but rest assured, it’s not like that. It’s an actually well written manipulation of paranoia that aligns perfectly with both the plot and the themes, and makes you very sympathetic to the character while generating some great scenes of horror, something that I find is very rare.

I think the only reason I’m not fawning over the book is the atmosphere. I wouldn’t know how to improve it, and honestly I don’t think it needs to be changed, it just didn’t hit me as hard as possible. Which I think is actually a strength; I’d be more inclined to recommend this as a stepping-stone book for people who get scared easily or don’t really like horror but still want to try, and I’d be confident knowing that I at least gave them a good book. I also didn’t get some of the cultural references, but I’m Australian. I knew while reading that anything I didn’t understand about basketball, would be just the equivalent of AFL in a First Nations horror story from here.

If you want a horror story that's very mechanically sound, has really compelling characters, and showcases a wonderful example of what Indigenous Horror can be: I’d recommend The Only Good Indians.

The Andromeda Strain - By Michael Crichton (Published 1969) Discussion
Rating: I love it!
Tropes: Hard Sci-Fi, Scientific Mystery, Cold War Politics
Summary: A research satellite crash lands in a small remote town in Arizona, and the collection team soon finds every citizen in that town dead by unknown means. When the team on the ground quickly dies too, a top secret containment program is triggered: the Wildfire Project. Consisting of the top minds in America, the satellite and two survivors are taken to a research facility to be studied. To find the source of whatever virus that killed the town and neutralise it before it reaches civilization properly and nuclear war is enacted, and whether that source is alien or not
Review I honestly love the Andromeda Strain, it’s one of my favourite books, however I know it can be very polarising of a book in terms of enjoyment. When I say it leans into hard sci-fi, it leans in. I don’t think you need a degree in a STEM field in order to understand the twists and key plot points, but I think if you don’t want to feel clueless while reading, you kind of need to be familiar with some scientific concepts. (Nucleotides in DNA and how diseases mutate will be your best bet).

Which is kind of why I love the book; I’m currently an undergrad in a biology-related field, but I’ve long been the science nerd who went above and beyond to learn about different scientific topics. I feel mentally stimulated reading Andromeda Strain, and it’s exhilarating reading a nucleotide analysis and knowing exactly what is happening before you reach the paragraph written in English. It’s also a sci-fi book written in the 60’s, but in the contemporary of 60’s science. If you maybe can’t empathise with the hard science in the book, looking at it as an alternate-history sci-fi gives it a fun new perspective, especially since the techniques of 60 years ago are both so different and very much the same as today.

For the story itself: It’s definitely written like a normal narrative despite calling itself a report. It’s short and to the point, providing you enough information to justify why the story is focusing on one scene or another without any build up, except for what leads directly to the climax points of the story. The main characters are a little one-note, but it’s not like the story was aiming for deep characters and fell short. It’s very clear that they’re vehicles for plot points, and the focus is meant to be on what the horror of the Andromeda strain is. It doesn’t really have a satisfying ending, it just stops, which I think only highlights how the story is about the Andromeda strain and not the scientists studying it.

If you want to read a time capsule on the 60’s, that era’s attitudes on scientific discovery, the anxiety of both the cold war and the biological unknown, and read something that’s very to the point: I’d recommend ‘The Andromeda Strain’.

BONUS: There’s a two-parter TV movie from 2008, and a 1971 movie adaption of this book. For the love of whatever you believe in, do not watch the 2008 version. As a piece of media, it’s very bad, and as an adaptation, it’s also very bad. The 1971 movie is an almost perfect recreation of what’s in the book, so if you want to watch old cinema to avoid reading this, watch that.

The Reddening - By Adam L.G. Nevill (Published 2019) Discussion
Rating: Eh, It's Readable.
Tropes: Old Gods, Cannibalistic Cult, Small Town Cult
Summary: Deep within old caves along the British coast, a cavern system is discovered with the remains of a long dead people, who survived the ice age by ritualistic and cannibal means. After this discovery, a journalist stumbles onto an insidious conspiracy about suicides and accidental deaths of tourists that plague her little slice of paradise, and maybe that long dead civilisation may not be so long gone after all.
Review I went looking for the Reddening purely because I was a little familiar with the author’s other work, as he wrote the book behind the 2017 movie ‘The Ritual’. I liked The Ritual enough; it’s a standard modern horror film, but with a very fun creature that we see in the latter half of the movie. I am very partial to creatures. But I didn’t want to tread on already walked ground, so I figured reading the author’s newest book would be the best bet.

In terms of how the novel is written, it’s perfectly fine, if not better than a few horror books out there. There’s a lot of good prose that highlights the isolation, the eeriness, the impending doom that haunts the characters. There’s good chunks of this book where you’re completely swept up in knowing that the protagonists are brushing up to danger, or that the danger is following them like a predator hunts its prey. I’m about to get into the flaws of this book, but before that I want to say that this book is a valley of highs and lows. These areas of good writing are very good, but where it falls, oh does it fall hard.

No way around it; it’s British (derogatory). There are threads throughout this whole book that I’ve found are uniquely held by British people, steeped as they are in the whirlwind of colonisation and class they invented. While I appreciate that the two main protagonists of the story are women, both have their identities tied directly to their capacity as child-bearers, and there’s moments throughout the book where they are belittled or sexualised or otherwise are the example of an off-hand comment that I think shows how women are considered ‘lessor’, either in the eyes of the author himself or British culture at large. It is glaring, and often out of place with how the characters are written outside of these moments. Sharing the same coin; from about the middle of the book onwards, the author gives up on trying to develop more than one-note antagonists, and falls back on using shorthand to identify evil characters. As a horror fan who often has these ‘evil’ traits, it’s boring, and disappointing

I’m also a huge fan of cannibalism in stories, there’s a lot of potential in how it can be used. The Reddening keeps to it very literally however, which wasn’t entirely disappointing. What was disappointing was how the lore of this story was handled. Hints and small pieces of this rich tapestry of violent culture kept coming up, slowly building this mythos of possessive and overbearing violence from primal spirits relishing in the faults of man that’ll free them from their tombs. It was captivating. But then… the British rot disintegrated this tight knit and well crafted horror. The introduction of this grandiose, interconnected, web of cult nobles came far too late in the story. It also didn’t make sense. Treaties and deals and alliances were being thrown around for interpersonal drama between these cult nobles, but nothing had been indicated prior to this that this long-dead barbaric civilisation would have used or needed this very modern concept of politics. It felt so out of place, as though the author needed these fur-clad cannibals to have the decorum of the lords and ladies appointed by the modern monarchy.

I think what truly showcased the British rot was the ‘gotcha’ reveal right at the end. Dropping the overwhelming supernatural presence to show off the ‘realistic’ reasoning for how a cult of that size could sustain themselves financially. While drug dealing had been mentioned early on in the book, it seemed like a laughable red herring for the clear supernatural presence, which I took as a fun nod to the genre and had a good chuckle over. But no, by the end, it’s revealed that it was just drugs! The cult was just a front for a drug operation! And not any ole drug, no no it has to be the one that I think would make any proper englishwoman clutch her pearls: weed. The cannibalism? That’s just the munchies from the weed. The horrific experience of one of the protagonists experiencing a hole to hell appearing before her? She was just being hotboxed.

I cannot express how disappointing that ending was because the author could not commit to an actually scary premise, and instead had to fall back on demonising and the kind of fear mongering that reminds me of the 50-60s. There is a good book in here, somewhere. I think if you want Monstrous Women, you could slog through the rest of the book in order to enjoy the manic violence these ancient spirits covet, but it is not a book I recommend wholesale. Read at your own risk, not of fear, but of wasting your time.

A God In The Shed - By J-F. Dubeau (Published 2017) Discussion
Rating: Eh, it’s Readable.
Tropes: Old Gods, Small Town Cult, Old Magic in a Modern World
Summary: Saint Ferdinand is a small town that has been haunted by a serial killer for decades. When the killer is supposedly caught, after the tragic death of a little girl, the normal residents finally feel a sense of release. But the real danger isn’t contained, it’s just been released, and a poor teenage girl has accidentally trapped it in her backyard shed.
Review I have a funny feeling, from whatever list I pulled this book from, that it may have been mislabelled. While certainly a horror, it has all the hallmarks of a young adult fiction, and unfortunately, I aged out of the young adult genre a couple of years ago. Teenage protagonists, prophecies and familial ties, some action thrown in, it’s something I probably would’ve eaten up when I was about 14 and still reading Cirque du Freak by Darren O'Shaughnessy.

I was initially enchanted with the prologue. It’s no secret, I love creatures, and often authors in fiction will assign very autistic traits to their horror creatures. I’m sure it's to invoke otherness, or wariness, for the reader to understand that the character in question is Other and suspicion needs to be placed there. That never works for me; I always end up far too endeared to the creatures in question, since the horrific monster is far more like me than the protagonists trying to kill it. It is the same here, to the point where I was actively rooting for the antagonist throughout the story, when clearly as the reader I should not have been. So be aware, if you’re neurodiverse of any kind, you might find yourself being the model of ‘hatred and destruction’.

Outside of the creature, the rest of the characters are predictably more one-note. However, I’m not going to disparage the story for that. The target audience is clearly younger, maybe around the 15-16 age group, and while I’m sure teenage readers would benefit with being presented with complex characters, being more action focused is probably just as entertaining for teens reading for the afternoon. The main three are typical archetypes; older-sister type of older teen, the too perfect jock, the too nerdy for her own good main protagonist. The adult characters are much the same, except for two parents who lose their small child right at the start of the book. Throughout the rest of it, they’re cookie cutter, but their backstory is sympathetic and hints at a greater complexity than the book gives time for. The same for a key adult character that eventually turns into one of the main antagonists. Despite being hinted at with the most complex character motivation out of all them, he is still just a cookie cutter archetype of chief small town inspector. That’s the real crux of this story, I think. There’s so many characters, but so little time to actually examine them and see them as characters, instead of just triggers for the main plot.

And the plot is… a lot. It sets up a universe for a multi-installment series, where I’m sure everything mentioned in this book will eventually be prevalent in another story, but it’s a lot of one-off lines and ideas that are dropped at your feet. Interesting enough, but this book isn’t going to cover it, and it’s left in the corner until I presume it’s eventually covered in a future book. It feels like a lot is thrown at you almost all at once, when for the first two thirds of the story it was a lot more clear and entertaining. If you’re a teen though, I am sure it is just enough information to rapidly hold your attention, but as an adult, I’m more concerned with the story I’m currently reading than the roadmap of a grandier story waiting to be read over uninterrupted weeks.

My only real complaint, outside of the very clearly autistic monster who is a monster because of his autistic traits, is the abusive father. And I make it my real complaint, because he is not actually pitched as an abusive father. His quality as a father is actually highlighted as his one good trait, which confused me so much as the author details the man’s extensive anger management issues affecting his son, the neglect, and his son who in any other situation would probably have a severe breakdown by 25 due to undressed trauma. I do not know if truly the author just doesn’t see it as abusive, or it is a hand-waving attempt to make the character sympathetic as a way to enact cop apologia. Who knows.

Either way, in terms of its construction and prose, it was perfectly normal. Unless you are already someone who reads young adult fiction, I’d only recommend it to bookish teens who are into horror.

Sphere - By Michael Crichton (Published 1987) Discussion
Rating: A Good Read.
Tropes: Supernaturally Influenced Madness, Deep-Sea Peril, Civilian Experts for Military Mission
Summary: A team of civilians are brought by the military to an underwater facility to investigate a centuries old spaceship, based on the ideal composition of different fields that could tackle first contact with Aliens. Instead, they find an incidental ‘Made in the USA’ time machine that has been sitting on the ocean floor for 300 years. Now, this team has to tackle the mystery of a paradox, and a clearly alien device, hundreds of feet underwater.
Review I think, possibly, reading two disappointing books prior to reading Sphere may have skewed my reading experience. I read this book within the span of a week, in maybe 3-4 sittings. Which isn’t something I’ve done in years, but I got quite close to it when I read The Andromeda Strain. I think it’s interesting that both books I’ve read so far by Michael Crichton had that effect, so I’m willing to put it on record; his books enthral you to keep reading.

However, Sphere is not as good as The Andromeda Strain. Once again, a scientific field is picked as the book’s subject, and the conflict is centred around the possibilities of that field. Unfortunately, Crichton picked Psychology as his subject. I will say, the book takes that approach in an exciting and different way than what most stories would. The plot focuses on the natural instinct of human imagination, and what could go wrong if the unregulated imagination of the human mind is given unlimited power. In any other story, the angle would not be a broad concept that just uses the characters as guinea pigs for a thought-experiment. It would be a hyper-focused analysis on the characters, and probably centre the dark machinations of the human mind. So I give the book props for its uniqueness there.

But, I said unfortunately earlier, and it’s earned. Psychology, even now, can be an extremely detrimental and harmful field of medicine. For those who have gone through the wringer, especially more than once, it can seriously be a lottery chance to find a psychologist who doesn’t despise mentally ill people in their foundation, or despise the very specific condition that you are seeking help for. The field has been rife with pseudoscience and bigotry from the start, and it’s only been within the past few years that has started to change. This book was written in the 80’s, and it uses a very misogynistic opinion that has been commonplace in psychology for decades. If you are sensitive to women being treated dismissively, especially for their natural responses to past sexual trauma, then some lines in this story may be triggering.

This is part of the payoff of Crichton focusing more on writing characters though, instead of just the plot. Even the side characters that we don’t see much of are well rounded, and the main cast all have motivations and clear shapes to them that they aren’t just plot triggers or cardboard cutouts for the story. They may be stereotypical, and possibly a little cringeworthy, but a vast improvement on the presence of character than in The Andromeda Strain. It’s a tight cast, that of course is reduced to the final three about two thirds of the way through, but the conflict between characters is just as important as the action. And there is a lot of action in this story. There’s spaces where characters talk and work through the mystery of their situation, but they’re present only in the lulls of the impending doom that cyclically attacks.

If you’re looking for a unique sci-fi action story, that has both thought-provoking and terrifying moments, then I’d recommend Sphere.

The Cobra Event - By Richard Preston (Published 1997) Discussion
Rating: I love it!
Tropes: Hard Science, Catch The Killer, Race Around New York
Summary: Dr Alice Austen of the CDC is enlisted by a higher up to investigate an unknown death in New York City. What she finds is a horrific array of symptoms that troubles her, not just as a person, but as an epidemiologist as well. It then becomes a race against time to trace the source of the illness, as it becomes clear that it’s not just the evolution of a new deadly disease that could wipe out humanity, but a manufactured one.
Review Oh it’s so nice to read a good horror book.

I initially started reading this on my commute, but after a few pages in I had to stop reading this book on the train. And I couldn’t pick it up again for a couple of weeks because I was too scared! Only in the safety of late at night, bundled up and warm from the winter chill, did I feel stable enough to keep reading.

This book does not shy away from gore; it’s written plainly and matter-of-fact, but leaves you sick to your stomach each time organs and viscera are brought up for the story. In fact, the whole book is written plainly and matter-of-fact. Sometimes it can feel a little condescending, but I think that only comes off as such if you know something about what’s being explained. Everything that could possibly need to be explained, is, so it’s exceptionally approachable even to readers who would know nothing about diseases or how they spread.

The plot is also terrifying. I’m sure it hits a little harder in a ‘post’-pandemic world, but it felt as though every couple of chapters there was a moment where I felt some level of dread in the development of the main character’s investigation. The first quarter of the book felt a little disjointed, as some chapters were following a more background plot, but by the end of the story ALL of the things that had been introduced at the start of the book had fired off (à la Checkov’s gun), and slotted in perfectly to solve the mystery.

The characters themselves were also complex enough that they didn’t feel like a bag of stereotypes or cardboard cutouts, but don’t go into the book expecting the story to be about the characters. The pace is fast, and the story is very focused on the investigation and how everything needs to be stopped before it all goes wrong. There was a moment where I thought the story would start a romance between two characters who had no developments together, right at the end of the book in the climax of the plot, but it was truly just two sentences and never brought up again. Which was such a relief, as I didn’t want the story to veer so far after getting so hooked on the dread and action.

It very much felt like both an informative fiction, and a classic action movie from the 90’s. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it as a horror book, both for those that love hard science or diseases, and for those who don’t know anything about it, but want to feel sick to their stomachs.

The Lost Village - By Camilla Stern. Translated by Alexandra Fleming (Published 2019) Discussion
Rating: Absolutely Not.
Tropes: Abandoned Land, A Long Past Tragedy, Torture Porn, Suicide Cult
Summary: Alice has been obsessed with the story of a small rural mining town going missing overnight since she was a little girl, raised on the harrowing tales of her grandmother, who was raised in the village herself and left before everyone disappeared. Now, as an adult, Alice wishes to make a documentary in order to get answers. When she arrives at the abandoned town with a small crew, intent on getting basic footage to push for funding, everything soon starts going wrong.
Review It took me a very long time to write this review, because I was conflicted. Not on any merits of the story, but on just how disappointed and angry I was in it.

Horror as a genre has a deep, complex, and very long history with disability. It’s not in the least surprising, so many aspects of disability can be very frightening; the way the world treats you differently when you’re unwell, how your body or mind may now be suffering, the limitations that are now imposed upon you whether that be outside forces or your own internal workings. There is also, of course, the very long history of the abled exploiting aspects or aesthetics of disability, to invoke unearned shock or fear. There is a reason why media symbolism, and in turn media literacy, has any hint of disability be also the sign of maliciousness in characters outside of the Horror genre.

I bring this up, because different disabling mental illnesses, and also physical disabilities, are a key aspect of this story. The main character has depression and a failed suicide attempt under her belt, and while I appreciate the take on making her an asshole using her depression as a shield for her past behaviour, under any scrutiny the facade of nuanced take on a depressed character starts to crumble. I’m sure a lot of people who have depression understand the “burden” they place on those closest to them, and feel a deep shame over it that adds to their condition, both during and after debilitating episodes.

This author however seems to revel in a revenge fantasy; where a depressed person appears to ‘take advantage’ of a “normal” person trying to support them, and when they are obviously heartbroken over that emotional support being revoked when they were at their lowest, it turns out their anger was misplaced because they could not ‘see’ the level of action that “normal” person was undertaking behind the scenes for them. I support that this is a revenge fantasy played out straight, because within the novel; almost immediately after the main character and this wronged character reconnect and this reality of the past was shared, the supportive character dies, leaving them a tragic martyr and the main character to wallow in her guilt over her wrongdoing in the past.

The main character is of course, not the only character with mental illness. Another supporting character has psychosis, but is treated as just another Thing to be scared of within the plot of the story. Once again, an author is using psychosis for the shock and fear without critically thinking of it. This character is relegated to scared animal status very quickly, with no consideration of her perspective and agency as a human being. What makes this take so insidious however is the format, as this book is written in first person. As a reader, you get to see an attempt not to paint psychosis as initially scary, but soon find that instead there is only pity for someone experiencing an episode.

The same is done for another character, who does not have a confirmed diagnosis, but is described as having autism with some physical disabilities in addition. She is once again, only seen with pity, with no consideration for her agency and personhood. Despite her significance to the story, she is a background character to another character’s storyline, furthering the distance of seeing her as a real character. It was certainly horrific to read the chapters that feature her, as a reader you are condemned to consume how this important character is only a slab of meat to be pitied, and used to present torture-porn of historic abuse that similar women in that position have suffered for decades. There is no nuance, there is no positive take I could make; there is only the exploitation that attempts to mask itself by using pity instead of unfiltered glee that stories have had no problem celebrating in years past.

On this alone, I think it is unreadable. My tolerance on things like this are exceptionally high, I’m a horror nerd, you have to get used to it. What I found here was I think worse than standard because it tried to paint itself as this different take, because it was frank on the illnesses it was showing you, but that led to it creating this insidious nature of participating in the same exploitation while trying to hide it. What makes this disappointing is that this is a horror book, the genre that has both explored and exploited disability the most. There were tried and true methods to avoid this, there was certainly space to make this a horror that didn’t exploit disabilities, and yet it decided to do it anyway.

Even if you could ignore this, the rest of the book is not good either. The majority of the cast is women, but none of them are written without the presence of a man as a key character trait. There is also classic misogynistic girl warfare, that makes these women in their mid to late 20’s feel like teenage girls. And the actual horror plot, the evil presence, is just a derivative cult leader that does not introduce anything new or fun to the trope, not even supernaturally.

Do not bother reading this book. Beyond the fact that it is not good, I can’t in good conscience even recommend it to those who love bad stories, as it doesn’t even fall into the fun pitfalls that usually attract those who love poorly made narratives.

Paradise 1 - By David Wellington (Published 2023) Discussion
Rating: Pretty Good!
Tropes: In-Space Survival, Hivemind Enemy, Not Allowed to Die
Summary: After fucking up a major case, Firewatch Officer Petrova is sent off on a low-level babysitting-type post, for a newly established colony deep in space. Her fellow passenger and pilot for the trip seem to be in similar positions; being sent off to nowhere to hide after major fuck-ups at their respective places of work. Except, they fall under attack as soon as they arrive in the system, and find they’ve been thrown into a life or death mission that could spell the fall of humankind, if they don’t somehow find the answers they need before they ultimately perish.
Review I think in general most books select just a handful of tropes, elements, and themes, and go with that for the narrative. Which I am absolutely not trying to despond that choice, having focus and slimming a story to what's needed is most likely the most efficient and probably preferred method for crafting any kind of story. And so many amazing, terrifying, horrifying stories come from the author having a singular focus and a limited scope of what they want their story to be.

Paradise 1 is kind of the opposite. While yes, this book does have a small cast, and that cast keeps their personal themes intact throughout the whole novel, there is so much going on. It does not throw every horror trope at you, but it does throw a whole spaghetti pot full of them, in rounds of cooking. Things like Cannibals in Space, Falling Apart Spaceship, Scared of Light, Self-Disassembly, Machine Innards, Unknowing Ghost, two different kinds of Hiveminds, and of course a smattering of classic military-related tropes like Renegade Cop and even The Cold War. Which might seem overwhelming, but I had such an enjoyable time experiencing the carousel of classic horror tropes being present one after the other in a kind of tour of the terrifying! It was fun!

Because of the structure of the novel, it felt very episodic. Each ship that the crew visited had a theme and attached horror trope with it, and of course each round revealed another puzzle piece to solve the mystery surrounding the planet and why all of this was happening to the characters. A major complaint I have however is that the ‘chapters’ in question can be insanely short. Often a chapter will end and the next one will start when characters merely only change location, like to the next room, or even when the conversation moves to a different topic. It reminded me an awful lot of a script for screen, where you would divide a story like that to streamline the production process after the writing step, not for a medium where the writing is possibly the only major step in the creative process. At nearly 700 pages, it certainly is not a small book, but 170+ chapters is excessive for what actually happens in the story. There would be many chapters that I would combine, to let conversations and scenes end naturally as a whole rather than cut up, and I think something around the 100 chapter mark would make more sense for this work.

I also appreciate the complexity given to the main character, a woman! It is a minefield having female characters, if you’ve either consumed books before or read some of my previous reviews, you’d know. She has a complex relationship with her abusive mother, and over the course of the story relives her traumas, confronts different aspects of her past, and there’s a lovely mirroring relationship between the main antagonist and whatever created it, that culminates in the main character shedding her previous identity of an abused child for it to be reclaimed by the main antagonist. While probably not the point of the scene where it happened, as it wasn’t the focus, I thought it was really poignant to have that kind of complex relationship between the main character and the antagonist. And while I do not have much to say, deeply, about the characters, the medical doctor and the ship’s robot were my two favourite characters in this book.

I would absolutely recommend this book to those who have consumed a lot of horror before, and would love a whirlwind of nonstop fun from a range of classic horror tropes. Though, I would perhaps suggest that you wait a hot minute to read this book, only because the story will end in the sequel, and this specimen was published this year in 2023.

The Twisted Ones - By T. Kingfisher (Published 2019) Discussion
Rating: A Good Read.
Tropes: Open Town Secret, Rambling Old Tome, Things in the Woods, Ye Olde Fae
Summary: Mouse has been asked by her ailing father to take care of her grandmother’s home, now that she has passed away and the dust has settled. She wasn’t expecting her dead grandmother to be a hoarder, but with her dog and her truck, she feels more than capable of clearing out the old house in the back-country of North Carolina. Soon noises and unnatural sights start to terrify her, both at night and in daylight, and the written ramblings of her grandmother’s dead husband worm into her brain with warnings about what is out there in the wilderness.
Review This is the second book in my challenge that was written in first-person, and at least for this challenge, I can say that this novel definitely raised my opinions on how far a first-person point of view can go in a larger piece. My complete opinions on first-person works haven’t changed after reading The Twisted Ones, but this book was certainly a valiant effort in trying to offer up a good story written in first-person.

Our point of view character, the main lead, is a woman! I know horror stories have a bad record so far on writing women, but Mouse is; very personable, very modern, has consistent writing throughout the story, and is certainly relatable. Unfortunately, Mouse also feels very dated. Even though I am reading this story in 2023, it’s already coming off as written for a late 2019-early 2020 audience. Certainly a time capsule for this era; Mouse as a character reflects this anxious-nonchalant, meta-referential, uber-relatable woman, but she mirrors the stale cardboard shapes that you might find in a Marvel movie. She is of course surrounded by a small cast of diverse character types, leaning very heavily into the setting of ‘small town’, but does offer a more kind look into the classic archetypes you find in bumfuck nowhere. Overall, it’s a breath of fresh air to have a female lead given the same complexities of her male counterparts in modern fiction, it’s just disappointing that lead characters in the modern era reflect this bland default setting

The plot is fairly simple, and allows a lot of opportunity for scares, but doesn’t have a seamless transition from what feels like two very different stories happening. There’s a fairly classic ‘Something in the Woods’ plot line in the first three quarters of the book, that’s well supported by the atmosphere, the scares, and the diary Mouse finds belonging to her grandmother’s late husband. But then in the last quarter it switches to a different story. It’s almost like there were two movies airing on the tv at the same time, and the channel has just been switched during an ad break. It’s a little jarring initially; Mouse is still the same character, but she is the action-adventure protagonist version of the Mouse that’s been established in this horror narrative. A new character is introduced, along with a lot of important worldbuilding, that didn’t have any foundation or foreshadowing in the first three quarters, even though there was plenty of time and room to do so. It’s a pretty significant tonal switch, and it doesn’t find its horror legs again until right at the end.

If you’re looking for the horror novel equivalent of a Blumhouse production to read for the afternoon, then I’d recommend The Twisted Ones.