Birdie lost everything when her son died. Now, on track to rebuild her life, she has to evade her abusive partner Russ’s rage and manipulations while also worrying about a home-invading serial killer that has descended on her community. Told through multiple POVs, from a decomposing murder victim to Birdie’s day-to-day battle with domestic violence and grief to the horrific crimes of the killer, Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day will shock, disgust, and break your heart as the dark secrets unfold and Birdie does whatever she feels is necessary to protect the ones she loves. ​

Emma E. Murray is one to watch. Her second, excellently named, novel “Shoot Me In The Face on a Beautiful Day,” is yet another sickening, but beautifully done, piece of work, and further evidence that she is carving out her own bloody, exquisite space in the genre. Raw and tender, and bruised and bleeding, in her latest, out August 26th from Apocalypse Party Press, Murray allows us to glimpse the psyche of the very worst humankind has to offer, and the woman who stays with him. A novel about abuse, desperation, devastation, and what people will endure for what they’re convinced is love and survival, just like her debut “Crushing Snails,” this is a piece that refuses moral binaries and revels in the deeply uncomfortable spaces between. Emma continues to wade deeper into the murky waters of transgressive fiction, and I plan on diving right in after: her writing is something I’m ready to drown in.

We follow Bernadette or Birdie whose content family life crumbles in an instant. When she hit rock bottom, grieving a child and the wreck of her marriage, it was Russ who was waiting to pick her up. The man has a temper, and the lows are low, but the highs? He’s steady, attentive, attractive, and always there. Apart from when he storms off after an argument, only returning in the early hours. But still. Her friend Juliana seems to see something that Birdie can’t, something more sinister than a little hot-headedness and jealousy, and when a police sketch for a rapist and murderer, with Russ’ cold blue eyes begins to circulate, she’s quick to clarify her position- but Birdie, of course, knows better. 

There’s a lot going on. We are given the genuinely distressing perspectives of various women targeted and attacked, most in their own homes. The truly unimaginable horror that is endured, and repeated violations of the sanctity of the home, a refuge, and against the body, create an element of real, explicit horror.

 The bulk of the story follows Birdie and her relationship with Russ, which is in many ways much harder to read. I’d be lying to you if I said that this element of the story isn’t repetitive. It’s quite literally, and deliberately, a pattern of conflict and forgiveness, in which, each time, there is greater violence, and then greater justification and faster reconciliation. An up-close, intimate examination of a love that is corrosive and confusing and consuming, this element of the story is deeply upsetting, and is written in a way that can only be lived in.

Finally, perhaps more interestingly we read the lament of a decaying body, waiting to be found, longing for closure and grief- it’s something a little different, and is where the bulk of the most viscerally repulsive and unapologetic horror lies. Body horror aside, it’s also an examination of how unanswered questions can haunt, and a literalisation of how the female body is objectified, disrespected and becomes significant only when cold.

The three strands intertwine into a gnarled, complicated, bloody mess. An emotional, physical and structural anatomy of violence, with one man and its centre. Murray highlights just how difficult it is to break from a cycle of abuse, how so often women are spat at and catcalled and stalked, allegations that nobody takes seriously until it’s far too late, and exactly why so many would choose the damn bear every time. 

Emma E. Murray continues to astonish with the caustic, exquisite literature she produces, and “Shoot Me In The Face on a Beautiful Day,” is a searing, worthy addition to her remarkable body of work. An uncomfortable, and limit-pushing but important, gorgeously-written, viscerally-felt read, I am in a constant state of craving whatever Emma is putting out next- and you should be too. 

Captain Evangeline Coarse is halfway through her journey home from war when her ship loses power and she’s left floating in the dark. Now, she must find a way to survive not only the cold loneliness of space, but also the maddening stink of one hundred thousand war-corpses in the hold. 

I’ll level with you, having read both “Edenville,” and “The Poorly Made and Other Things,” by Rebelein, I went into “MEATSHIP,” aware it would probably be a little weird. It’s also called “MEATSHIP,” which felt like at least a subtle indication that what was to come might be unhinged. Maybe that’s just me. Even with my expectations primed, Sam found a way to once again frazzle my brain in the most gloriously foul way, with just how absurd this rotten, bio-mechanically nauseating gem of a story is. It packs a cosmic punch and an other-wordly stink. A smelly sci-fi horror that can only be described as truly, deeply strange, “MEATSHIP,” does a lot in its slim page count, commenting on how not to do parenthood, legacy and the emptiness of space. Rapture Publishing are putting this one out June 24th, and you’d be a fool not to treat yourself, and order it here. 

I’ll tell you a little about the plot, although I have to say, if you’re not already sold… because it’s a sci-fi horror called “MEATSHIP,” (one word, all caps of course) then you’re probably not the implied reader. It’s exactly as surreal and squelchy as it sounds.  We follow Captain Evangeline Coarse who is flying the WBMC CHARRON during the war with the Far-Giants. You’re following right? Her role as the captain of a death ferry is essentially to return human corpses back home, which sounds grim but rather noble and rewarding… until something goes wrong, the lights go out, and the dead bodies in the hold start to decompose. 

As I said, this is a story with a whole miasma (if you will) of good stuff packed into it. There’s a whole lot of meat on its bones. There’s pointed commentary on the atrocity of war- the government sucks, patriots die, nothing is resolved- even on an intergalactic scale. Beyond the warfront it discusses the pressures exerted upon us by parents, and the detrimental effects that can have in trapping people in careers they hate, corroding their self-worth and creating ludicrously high standards. It also highlights that appearances aren’t always what they seem, and that often truths are sinister. But amidst all that unpleasantness, it goes to show that we as individuals control our own fate, and we can end up on the right side of history, should we choose to be. 

I haven’t been able to smell anything since I got COVID nearly 5 years ago. I’d like to personally thank Sam Rebelein for the realisation that should I ever find myself upon a space ship of decomposing bodies, I am uniquely suited to survival. Silver lining. I digress. Truly an unforgettable read, if you’re looking for something short and full of stink, something potent and pungent in equal measure, hold your breath, and dive into “MEATSHIP.”

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

I often talk about the first line of the books I read, because first impressions are important, and I’m here to tell you that the first sentence of Daniel Kraus’ “Angel Down,” is particularly memorable, as it’s also the last, and even then is incomplete, not unfinished or forgotten, but never-ending, 

and, let me tell you, 45 seconds into trying to write even this one review as a continuous sentence (some completely unnecessary and self-flagellating homage) that what Kraus has done is quite the feat, and I’m aware you’d perhaps like to know what the damn thing is about, or the themes, and that will come later (albeit with significant grammatical difficulty) but what you really need to know right now is that “Angel Down,” is the most literarily ambitious, beautiful, biblical, wholly unholy, horrifying torrent of cosmos and violence and militarised trauma that I’ve ever had the simultaneous joy and horror of laying my eyeballs on, and that they nearly melted in my sockets, impressive doesn’t cut it, and if you are looking for something new and different and truly repulsive, but so full of introspection, “Angel Down,” is indeed the book for you- it’s out July 29th from Titan in the UK (thank you for my ARC) and Atria Books in the US, and it’s a poetic obliteration that you should surrender yourself to,

and yes I’m really keeping going with this, so buckle in, we follow Private Civil Bagger during The First World War, who along with rest of the dregs of his division, are sent to stop the mysterious shriek coming from no-mans-land, and what they find is beyond comprehension- not the wounded soldier or flaming goner that they anticipated, but a fallen angel, and of course the group’s first priority is to transport her to safety (rather than the decidedly more straightforward bullet through the head or slit throat they anticipated) and yet despite this seemly good-natured act, each of the men also has an unwavering need, a real selfishness, vying for the creature’s attention and adoration and possession, perhaps even going insane for it, and not one of them is ready to meet God, especially in the mud, 

and of course war and conflict is a perennial stain ripe for critique, yet “Angel Down,” does not care for military manoeuvres or eradicating the Nazis so much as it does for human nature more broadly- it’s less about the conflict itself and more about the people in it, their inherently flawed nature, their cowardice, their selfishness, their utter scumbaggery,

and really with all this in mind, is it any wonder that despite the atrocities of The First World War, that we proceeded to get ourselves into another only twenty years down the line, a vicious cycle of bloodshed and loss and trauma that the novel reflects grammatically and structurally too, the seemingly endless nature of human conflict reflected in the single looping sentence that is “Angel Down,” in its entirety, 

and yet that rather pessimistic but well-earned view of human nature is perhaps offset slightly by the quiet faith Kraus seems to have, not in humanity at large, but in you, the reader, the person holding the book, a belief in the intelligence, open-mindedness and perseverance of those who pick up this novel, because whilst I hate to assume (it makes an ass of u and me) I feel pretty comfortable telling you that this isn’t a reading experience you’ll have had before, and it may take you a moment to adjust to- I know it did me, but once you manage to sync yourself with it, and you will, you’re swept into something truly magical, that transcends the traditional reading experience entirely, with prose to die for, some truly, jarringly visceral imagery, blood, wings, mud, fire and that propulsive, polyphonic structure, that single breath that carries you from the first page to the last,

and I suppose before I take myself off to wallow in the inevitable, impending bookish hangover, I should implore you to not be deterred by my rambling stream of consciousness, this ridiculous, delirious string of words I’ve decided to spew onto the internet on a Thursday afternoon, because Kraus’ “Angel Down,” is not only more coherent and deliberate, but it has also unmade me in a way that words can’t express, it just about razed me: scorched a hole in my centre and left something humming there- it’s quite the revelation.

In 2008, a serial killer known as the Cajun Cannibal brutally murders and consumes the flesh of eight people in a small Louisiana parish. With law enforcement closing in on him, he takes his own life before he can face the inside of a courtroom.

Ten years later, when forensic psychiatrist Dr. Vincent Blackburn discovers he and the Cajun Cannibal are more closely connected than he realized, he begins a case study into the sociopathy behind the killer’s grisly deeds, only to find a torrent of small town politics, interracial family dynamics, and whispers of the supernatural muddying once clear waters. 

When copycat killings start anew, Vincent is thrust into the center of it all, putting his life, his family, and his own sanity at risk. As monsters—both figurative and literal—begin to manifest, Vincent discovers that untangling the truth from the lies is only the beginning of his nightmare.

A southern-fried, speculative sensation, N.L Lavin and Hunter Burke’s “Of Flesh and Blood,” is a well-seasoned slab of Cajun horror, simmered low and slow in the Louisiana heat. This horrifying gumbo of small town politics, local folklore and Acadian culture is of course, essential reading irrespective of whether you’re down on the bayou, or, like yours truly, a completely oblivious and woefully under-qualified Brit nearly 5000 miles away, whose point of reference is seafood boil and hot sauce. A novel that reads like true crime “Of Flesh and Blood,” is brooding and blistering and who’d have guessed, bloody. Complete with a complex cast of characters, and more twists than a bowl of fusilli in a tornado, this sinewy triumph (along with the Cajun Cannibal, so watch yourself) is out June 10th from Titan in the UK (thank you for my ARC) and Crooked Lane Books in the US.

We follow Dr. Vincent Blackburn, a psychiatrist studying the murders of the infamous Henri Judice, better known to the public and tabloids as the Cajun Cannibal, in 2008, 10 years down the line. His research raises a whole host of pressing questions. How was Judice able to kill so many, for so long? How were so many signs missed by the local sheriff’s department? In fact, the more Blackburn looks into it, the flimsier concrete answers become. Unclear motives. Muddled timings. Tampered evidence. No longer believing the narrative that Judice was a psychopath, Blackburn’s own mental (and physical) health is put in jeopardy. Was he really a cold-blooded monster? Or just a convenient one? Could it really be that the world is wrong about the identity of the Cajun Cannibal… or is blood thicker than water?

“Of Flesh and Blood,” drags the reader boots first into this tangle between academia and ancestry. It’s a situation that can only be described as awkward. Blackburn initially approaches the case of the Cajun Cannibal with a textbook detachment, the way one might examine a specimen under glass, having been trained to reduce trauma to neat conclusions and thesis topics. Theory quickly crumbles under the weight of blood however, and what he finds is not easily filed away. It’s this that makes “Of Flesh and Blood,” so much more than a piece of crime fiction with horror trappings. An autopsy of not just the mind of an *alleged* killer, but the place he grew up in and the family that raised him, Lavin and Burke discuss small town trauma, politics and memory, and various other flaws beneath that Southern charm.

The road that Burke and Lavin veer down is not simply unexpected but unpaved, unlit and flanked by dense South Louisianan woodland. What starts as a tightly wound, procedurally uneasy thriller, gradually unfurls into something far stranger and older. There’s a central piece of regional folklore I wasn’t familiar with, and am now deeply obsessed with. This element is expertly deployed, not with a crash of thunder but a subtlety and restraint that makes it less of a shocking revelation and more of a slow, inevitable unearthing- despite its fantastical nature. And the ending? “Of Flesh and Blood,” will leave you pacing, and channelling your inner True Detective. Masterfully done. 

If you like a calm, tidy reading experience, in which every thread is neatly tied and no blood gets on the carpet, “Of Flesh and Blood,” is simply not the book for you. If however you prefer your fiction fried dark, seasoned heavy and served with a side of the paranormal, you’re in for one hell of a treat. A narrative that writhes and twists and bites, and offers not one single easy answer, if you come armed with a corkboard, some red string and a strong stomach, you’re guaranteed to have a wonderful time. Compulsive, confounding and completely unforgettable, it’s safe to say that the weekend (I couldn’t help but binge-read) I spent in the bayou was one well spent.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

“The Devil All The Time,” by Donald Ray Pollock is, perhaps tied with “Paradais,” by Fernanda Melchor, for my bleakest read of 2025 so far. Like a gritty and nihilistic “Love Actually,” “The Devil All the Time,” follows a web of interconnected lives. The similarities stop there. Rather than being full of festivity and redemption, “The Devil All The Time,” offers only an unapologetic and uniquely American brand of roadhouse violence and misery. The narrative is made up of a series of bloody strands that are knotted by Pollock into a coalescing snarl of misfortune- a tangle that is tightened with each chapter that passes. A truly horrible chain of events, the jigsaw pieces Pollock carefully slides the reader, do not form a pretty picture. By the time he hands us the final piece to click into place, we (futilely I’m afraid to say) pray that it doesn’t fit. 

Carl and Sandy travel the South picking up hitch-hikers, before brutalising them and snapping photos for their mounting collection. Roy and Theodore are a pair of “pastors,” who perform sermons not quite like anyone else. Encouraged by Theodore, Roy, believing that he is able to bring people back from the dead, murders his wife, and upon realising this was misguided, runs, abandoning his baby girl. Willard Russell is a hyper-religious Vietnam war veteran who following the cancer diagnosis of his beautiful wife Charlotte turns to sacrificing animals and dousing his “prayer log,” in blood. Leo Bodecker is a recovering alcoholic determined to survive the next election and stay sheriff, despite what people say about him. Reverend Sykes refuses to admit that he is dying, but is certainly mighty ill, and takes a leave of absence, leaving his nephew Preston Teagardin, who is a man of God in name only, in charge of his flock. What do all of these things have in common? Well, they’re connected by Arvin Eugene Russell, who we watch grow from a troubled child to a troubled man. It’s like “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” for adults. 

To varying extents, although none of them mild, every character in this book is really, deeply, irreparably not okay. From pedophilia to greed to sadism to religious fervor to just pure mania, this is a cast that covers the seven deadly sins and beyond. Toward the beginning of the novel, the series of separate, miserable lives, flickering across Ohio and West Virginia, could very well be a short story collection, with overlapping themes of small towns and religion and a shared stale-smoke, bourbon-soaked, bible-thumping back-drop. It doesn’t take long though, for their paths to cross (as we know they must) in a cruel kind of predestination that I would call doom rather than fate. 

I hate to sound condescending or derogatory, as someone who read this book and is writing this review outside of the US, but ultimately, the American (Mid-western) Gothic here is not romantic, or even, symbolic, but infrastructural. Towns like “Meade,” and “Knockemstiff,” read like caricatures, yet disturbingly… are not. The horror stems from the characters, and their attitudes undeniably stem (to a degree) from the economy and the environment- the roads, the air, hell, even the name “Knockemstiff.” Whether it’s Carl and Sandy returning home after a bloody vacation, or Arvin who is passed around between the two towns, but doesn’t venture beyond, just about everyone wants to escape from the urban, sulphur-smelling, apathetic appalachia they find themselves in, and most don’t manage it. Those that do, find more of the same. So what is it that unites such a sprawling cast of murderers, zealots, and grifters? Yearning perhaps. Transcendence, absolution, a half-decent mattress? The characters have the same American pathology, the idea that suffering means something, and righteousness can be proven through spectacle. Everything about the place is ugly. It’s unsurprising that the characters within it are too. 

A slow-moving back-water apocalypse, like most utterly devastating novels do, “The Devil All The Time,” pulls us into its riptide, and allows us to thrash and claw and cry out in vain, before spitting us out shivering and feeling rather sorry for ourselves. The sun is out- here in the UK at least- and if you need a reminder that happiness is fleeting, and the world is in reality, not a sunny place, this one has exactly that effect. Enjoy!

Synopsis:

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.

Review:

Tender is the Flesh hit English readers like hammer to the head when it arrived in 2020. The incredibly divisive story of a world turned to industrial cannibalism offers none of the prurient thrills one might expect from a “cannibal” novel, instead delivering a slow burn existentialist drama that builds to a devastating conclusion.

The Unworthy is built on more familiar ground.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world of climate collapse apparently exacerbated by AI tyranny, it’s a setting familiar from everything from The Road, MaddAddam, The Road Warrior, Station Eleven, and a hundred survival video games. At least, on the outside it’s familiar.

For the most part, the characters of The Unworthy are protected from any Mad Max goings on, as we’re tucked safely behind the protective walls of the convent of the Sacred Sisterhood. Sure, their food is mostly cricket flour and water, but there’s something like a stable society.

Well, maybe not so stable.

Life in the convent is essentially fascistic, a recurring theme for Bazterrica, with a rigid hierarchy that looks something like a religiously ordained class system that leads up to an unseen Him at the peak, a voice from behind a screen that may as well be God. But it’s God’s instrument, the Superior Sister who is the dangerous one, running the convent with an iron hand and a literal whip: Nurse Ratched in a wimple. Contrary to what one might initially think of when considering a convent, it does not appear to be a place that allows much interiority.

But our unnamed protagonist has, Winston Smith-like, secreted away some writing paper and ink (sometimes blood) with which to break free of the convent’s absolute rule. It’s here that we learn of the goings on in the convent, but also of her back story, emerging in fits and starts, as a child navigating the wreckage of a lost civilization.

This would be little more than a portrait if not for the fact that a stranger comes to town, or rather, a strange woman makes it over the convent wall. Luciá is magnetic, wolf-like, and powerful, attracting our narrator emotionally and sexually, but also exhibiting the qualities that could mark her out as one of the Enlightened, one of the upper caste within the covent.

As the two women navigate this dichotomy, they begin to uncover an even more unseemly side of the convent, introducing a rather slight mystery element to the mix. It’s not much of a mystery, of course, because the reader can spot a fascist religious cult from the first pages, yet the fragmented first person point of view makes our narrator’s awakening still poignant and powerful.

Plot-wise, The Unworthy doesn’t offer many surprises. There’s no gut-punch moment as at the conclusion of Tender is the Flesh, and part of that is by design. There’s a kind of dramatic irony in watching our narrator come to realize what is painfully obvious to the reader, but it’s also not quite enough. The relationships are so distanced by the journal style that it’s hard to take individual deaths and sacrifices as deeply meaningful. But, as in Tender is the Flesh, one of the most moving relationships is with an animal, underlining–along with the novel’s overt ecological concern–that it is the human connection to the natural world that might well be the trick of this thing called living.

There’s also a kind of telegraphed message that writing, art itself, is an essential human activity, but this gets rather buried beneath the petty (and not so petty) horrors of the convent.

All in all, The Unworthy makes for, well, a worthy entry in Bazterrica’s translated catalogue, though it doesn’t quite land with all the hoped for power, which is a bit of a disappointment consider our current historical moment, with its multi-pronged attacks of environmental collapse, AI slop, and the disintegration of civil liberties, could be well served by a book ready to hold up that particular mirror. The Unworthy‘s mirror might just be a bit too narrow to take that all in.

When Come Knocking came to Los Angeles, the interactive theater production that took over six floors of an abandoned building was met with raves, lines for tickets, and reviews calling it the “must-see experience of a generation.” But after dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured on a bloody night of chaos during the show’s run, the nation was captured by one inescapable question: How could this happen?

As the dust settles, investigative reporter Adam Jakes is tasked with uncovering the truth behind the massacre. Through a series of gripping interviews with survivors, cast members, and witnesses, Jakes pieces together the chilling reality behind what was supposed to be the ultimate theatrical experience.

I was, and really continue to be, an insufferable theatre kid, and now that I’m an insufferable horror reader as well, when I was asked if I cared to read “Come Knocking,” which is essentially about the theatre experience from hell, I practically bit the publisher’s hand off. Thank you Skyhorse, I hope it grows back. With horrors that rival flying popcorn buckets, the price of a bag of Jelly Tots on the West End, and even the general public singing along to “Defying Gravity,” (seriously, don’t do that by the way) “Come Knocking,” was simmering with tension and begging to be read. An epistolary novel, that like Bockoven’s debut “Fantasticland,” (which I am determined to read soon) is told entirely through interviews, “Come Knocking,” is a story of escalation, tragedy and interactive theatre that comments on vanity, blame, and just how dangerous inaction can be. Thanks again Skyhorse for the preview (if you will) “Come Knocking,” opens July 1st, and you’ll want a front row seat. 

As opposed to any one character, we follow “Come Knocking,” an interactive theatre experience that spans six floors. It’s a raging success in New York, until it’s not, and then in Los Angeles… until it’s not. Known for its jaw-dropping technical effects, unparallelled set design, and (often full-frontal) choreo, the show is controversial for various reasons. The rules are simple, keep your mask on, don’t touch the actors and they won’t touch you… beyond that, theatrical anarchy. The show runs in its entirety every hour, with the audience invited to stay for three. The story, should you choose to follow it, is about a knight who makes his way through a Canterbury Tales/ Dante’s Inferno fever dream, although often members of the audience get side-tracked, occasionally dragged into “one-on-ones.” It’s divisive, and breeds two kinds of responses. Some “Get it,” and many are determined to experience it in its entirety, returning time and time again, taking different routes, watching and rewatching. Slightly more troublesome though are the cult-adjacent “Who’s There,” group that eventually crop up. Those who, for whatever reason, be it religious or personal, are intent on closing the curtain for good.

Adam Jakes is an investigative journalist who, in lieu of the raging success of his work on “Fantasticland,” (a fun little detail huh?) is looking into the carnage of “Come Knocking.” The book is made up of his interviews with audience members, stage crew, security, and the cast. With Jakes’ input limited to an author’s note and epilogue, and such a massive cast of characters, some appear twice, most just once, “Come Knocking,” itself becomes the de-facto protagonist. With the perspective of so many involved in breathing life into the show, you can’t help but appreciate how it functions (smoothly, at first) as an organism. Whether you think you’d “get it,” or not, you have to appreciate the production value. I digress. With each interview spanning what, 10-15 pages, there’s little room for character ARCs, and beyond fleetingly feeling pity or anger, we don’t get attached or form bonds. The way that it’s formatted means that you won’t weep for anyone, and you’re not meant to. Fine by me, as long as I’m gripped, I’m good, and “Come Knocking,” has white knuckles, so tight was its hold on me.

From Adam Jakes’ authors note, we know that “Come Knocking,” goes terribly wrong. Furthermore we know that things go terribly wrong on March 14th. It’s only a few pages later we’re able to piece together the parties involved too. There’s not a whole bunch of mystery to this book, yet it’s an absolute masterclass in building suspense and tension. It’s not a who-dunnit, but a we-know-exactly-who-did-it-and-when-they-did-it-and-why-and-now-we’re-gonna… watch-them-do-it. See, I was stressed from start to finish, not because I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but because I kind of did. I was forced to read about emotions running and tensions rising high, to the altitude that I knew from the get-go that they would, and no matter how firmly I planted my feet on the ground, rise they did. 

A searing reminder that doing nothing is still a choice, “Come Knocking,” condemns being a bystander, yet holds its audience captive and makes voyeurs of us all. I’m going to find time for “Fantasicland,” very soon, and I’m hoping that I’m in for more of the same, but for now, “Come Knocking,” is not quite like anything I’ve ever read before. The scariest bit of theatre horror since James Cordon in “Cats,” “Come Knocking,” is by no means a family-friendly show… I demand an encore. 

Synopsis:

On an almost uninhabitable rocky island off the coast of Maine, a Hotel looms over the shore, an ever-present gray lady that stands strong like a guard, keeping watch. For many who come here, this island is a sanctuary and a betrayal.

This is a place where memories linger like ghosts, and the ephemeral nature of time begins to peel away …like the sanity of all who have been unlucky enough to step foot on its shore.

In the late spring of 1873, Isabelle gave birth to her son Oscar, he cried for three startling minutes, and then went silent. During the months that follow, Isabelle is drugged and lulled into an almost hallucinatory world of grief and fear. Her life begins to feel as though it exists in a terrifying new reality separated from those around her …

When her grieving begins to make her husband, Henry, uncomfortable, he and his mother conspire to send Isabelle away to a Summer Hotel on Dagger Island, where she can rest and heal. While they are adamant that the hotel is not an asylum and that Isabelle will be able to return eventually to her home, Isabelle understands in her heart that it is all a lie. That perhaps, everything about being a woman in this time, may have always been a lie.

Her family has lied to her, and she has lied to herself.

The Hotel, of course, is not what it seems, and the foreboding Dagger Island begins to feel more like a prison than a retreat. Isabelle hears relentless sounds coming from the attic above her room, and the ever-present cries of small children scream in her head almost constantly. Are they hallucinations, or are they connected to the small cemetery she found, filled with the fresh dirt of little graves, the brokenhearted reminders of people that no one believes ever existed?

She meets a fellow guest at the Hotel, a young, enigmatic, and deeply damaged priest, named Francis.

Together they teeter on the edges of reality and try desperately to become free from the fates that their pasts have bound them to.

Review:

From Daylight to Madness is the story of Isabelle, a woman trapped in her life, burdened by societal expectations, and unable to truly take control of her future.

The book begins in the minutes after she gives birth to a son who dies almost immediately; he was premature, and in 1873, there was little that could have been done to save him. But she was never allowed to touch the baby, and in the aftermath of that loss, she’s expected to simply bounce back. To be what she was before. But she can’t. Much of the story is her struggle with a form of depression, and the callous way she is treated by her husband and mother-in-law. She is sent to “the hotel,” a bland name for a temporary asylum, to “rest” (see: to be fixed.)

The horror element was entirely psychological. The reader is subjected to Isabelle’s inner torment throughout the duration of the book, and left to wonder if what she’s experiencing is the result of her depression or the “tea” she is given to “calm” her. (It was laced with laudanum, which was used commonly in that era, and it’s an opioid, so either scenario is possible.)

In many ways, From Daylight to Madness reminded me of a darker version of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which was written around the same time period as this book takes place, and also has similar themes (and a similar ending.) If you aren’t familiar with The Awakening, it was first published in 1899 and is considered a feminist novel of the time, featuring an unhappy woman who is married to someone she doesn’t want to be with, and in time she learns to take some control over her life. But in the end, she believes she’s only left with one option, and it’s not a happy one. I’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers.

This was not the first book I’ve read by Jennifer Anne Gordon. A couple years ago, I read Pretty/Ugly, which I really enjoyed, but From Daylight to Madness lacked the same polish. There were many typographical issues throughout the ebook edition (missing punctuation, missing words, some homophone confusions), and that detracted from my enjoyment. The story was good; I just wish it had gone through more proofreading before it was published.

All in all, this was a solid story with a gothic-horror feel, so check it out if that’s your thing.

A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, Alex Gonzalez’s rekt traces a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.

> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man

Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.

Then a car accident changed everything.

Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.

The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself . . .

“Rekt,” is not an easy book to read. It is a nasty, gritty reminder of just how irredeemably grim a place the internet can be. It is a jagged, glitching scream into the digital void. It is a “feel-bad,” vile, depraved time that repulsed me further with each development. I wanted to factory reset my brain, “digitally detox,” and not just touch grass, but roll around on my lawn until I forgot all about it. I didn’t do that, I suffer from hayfever, so I had no choice but to keep reading- and I did so in the same way I might scoff a box of chocolates, or aptly, doom-scroll the internet. Compulsively. “Rekt,” is an honest novel that compels and disturbs in equal measure, one that feels shaped by strange forums, anonymous users and the second page of Google. The irony of hearing about “Rekt,” on the internet (and being gently bullied into reading it), writing about reading it… on the internet, and then subsequently promoting it… on the internet is not lost on me, but that is what makes “Rekt,” so relevant, so tangible, and thus, so scary. It’s not speculative fiction, it’s just an average Monday afternoon. 

We follow Sammy Dominguez who lost his girlfriend Ellery in a devastating car accident. When he was younger, and lost his Uncle Ted, he turned to a murky website, in which he wrote pastas about “The Wax Man,” and once again struck by grief -grief with teeth- he logs back in. He finds the website changed, and most of his stories archived or deleted, but there is a message. On that message is a link. That link leads to Chinsky. He clicks it and watches his girlfriend die. Many times over. And others too. People who are still alive. There are firecrackers and slit wrists and overdoses, and Sammy finds a strange catharsis from watching. A twisted kind of peace. Consuming instead of grieving. 

The book gets its hands dirty with the unmoderated underside of the web: fringe forums, strange video links, anonymous users. With “Rekt,” Gonzalez poses the question, can you truly click away from something once it’s inside you? Often we talk about the internet like it’s a place. “I’m going online,” “I was raised on the internet,” “She lives on instagram.” Gonzalez makes that metaphor literal. The internet here is weaponized. The web isn’t sleek and clinical; it’s sticky. It’s gritty. It tangles. It seduces. It becomes a wacky funhouse mirror of grief and voyeurism. A huge chunk of the book’s genius though is that we are unable to look away from Sammy and his reprehensible behaviour. Are we not consuming his downward spiral like content? Doom-scrolling his downfall with glazed-eyes? Was my morbid, chocolate-scoffing style fascination with this book, and the vile things that happen within it really any better than the morbid fascination Sammy had with Chinsky? At first, perhaps not? It’s food for thought. 

Of course, Sammy Dominguez is no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s, if you’re feeling generous, a lost, grief-stricken student who’s in way over his head. If you’re not, he’s a self-destructive pervert. But, Gonzalez writes him so compellingly, that from the get-go we are hoping he does better, and gets better. Maybe it’s because his spiral begins not with malice, but mourning. Instead of community, ritual, or therapy though, Sammy finds catharsis through snuff and gore and all things dark web. “Rekt,” is a good reminder that trauma doesn’t always make people noble. Sometimes it just breaks them. It explores grief at its most dangerous, a version that festers, scabs over and calcifies into something rotten.

“Rekt /ɹεkt- an online spelling of “wrecked,” usually describing someone being hurt or defeated or even killed in a snuff film.” 

Alex Gonzalez’s debut is nothing short of stellar, it is shocking, subversive, and skin-crawlingly smart. But let’s be clear: “Rekt,” is not fun. It’s not the kind of book you curl up with and sigh contentedly over. It sits in your chest like malware. It installs itself quietly in the background and runs in the dark, taking up memory, distorting perception: you won’t close this book so much as crash out of it, dazed and blinking.

ive high school friends, bonded by an oath to protect each other no matter what.

On a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere

One friend walks up – but never comes back down.

Now twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared, and the friends return to find the lost boy – and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods…

There’s a reliably unsettling formula in horror that continues to delight me. You take an estranged group of friends, bound together by some shared trauma, preferably by way of some inexplicable terror (killer clowns, missing kids, so on and so forth) and get the band back together decades later. Stephen King does it in “It,” Ronald Malfi does it in “Small Town Horror,” Shaun Hamill does it with “The Dissonance, and now, Chuck Wendig does it with “The Staircase in The Woods.” I don’t want you to think for a second though that Wendig’s latest is pastiche or homage by any definition. He adds into the equation: mythic Americana folk horror, unsettling domestic surrealism, and one of the most expansive, impressive and hungry haunted houses I’ve ever had the deep displeasure of reading about. “House of Leaves,” meets “Monsters Inc,” meets creepypasta in this high-octane, big-concept story of friendship, guilt and trauma, which simultaneously reads like a whispered camp-fire tale and modern gothic epic. My utmost thanks to Del Rey UK for my ARC copy, you can enter the woods yourself from April 29th- just make sure you can find your way back out.

We begin in familiar yet fertile horror territory. We follow five teenage protagonists with teenage problems: Nick, Lauren (Lore), Hamish, Owen and Matty. The group have their cracks, love triangles, drink and drugs, and the usual suffocation of small towns, but are held together by the glue of the covenant, which was formed in the face of a group of bullies. Here’s where things get weird. The group wander into the woods one night, and come across the titular staircase. No ruins surround it, it’s just there… and Matty goes up it. When he reaches the top, he disappears. Things are a little more grave than the broken rib he may have sustained had he fallen off and landed on the other side, because he’s actually, literally vanished. And he doesn’t come back. Twenty six years on, the group aren’t friends so much as they are acquaintances, and some of the remaining four have moved on more than others. What’s for certain though is that each of them were there the night that Matty vanished, and none of them have quite come to terms with the staircase in the woods.

What makes the book so compelling, beyond its short, sharp chapters (I read the bulk of this book with the caveat it would be “Just one more chapter,”) and some genuinely pants-darkening horror, is its clear-eyed examination of trauma, and how it calcifies into character. How it seeps into our foundations and when unresolved can harden into something indistinguishable from identity. The covenant are not brought back together again on the basis of a noble rescue mission or selfless quest. We follow broken adults, lugging baggage of guilt and grief and shame, united not by camaraderie, or even friendship, but damage. Wendig grounds even the most supernatural horror in very human stakes: Can people really change? 

The staircase itself may be a gorgeous and eerie centrepiece, but in my opinion the characters, and the messy tangle of emotions they bring with them are the stars of the show. The stale romance, bitter jealousy, the sharp edges of resentment that are only slightly dulled by time, amidst rekindling friendship, moments of nostalgia that are both soft and comforting and sharp and painful. It’s authentic. 

A book packed with horror, but with heart to match, “The Staircase In The Woods,” is Wendig’s darkest yet. A story about broken people, splintered friendships, and, well, a staircase in the woods, my nightmare tank is fully refuelled, and the child who used to scroll r/nosleep under the covers is nourished.