I’ve been dealing with eye strain and general tiredness for a few months now, which is part of the reason my posting has slowed down a bit lately.
So I’m taking a two-week break from screens. Unfortunately, I can’t avoid them at work, but outside of that I’m putting the tablet down completely. No social media, no games, no email, nothing that tempts me to pick it up.
Because of that, I won’t be doing any blogging during those two weeks.
I’ll see y’all in a couple of weeks.
In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?
Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapists in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynette's worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart, piece by piece.
But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.
The very first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Dawn of the Dead. My mom loved it, so when it was rereleased years later, she took me along. I saw Creepshow at the drive-in, but had to turn around and watch The Sword in the Stone on another screen during one particular scene that will remain unspoken.
I grew up on horror: Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. These weren’t just movies, they were lessons in survival, in what it means to be the one who makes it out. One of the first movies I saw on my own was Bad Dreams, and that giant fan scene has lived rent-free in my brain ever since, a moment I still haven’t quite shaken.
I’m laying all of this out so you understand exactly where I’m coming from. I loved The Final Girl Support Group.
This book reads like the twisted sequel to every slasher I’ve ever seen — not the movies themselves, but what happens after the credits roll. The five women at its center survived everything the genre throws at you: summer camp massacres, sorority house bloodbaths, a home invasion that wiped out an entire family, miles of road turned into a moving nightmare. And then there’s Lynette — the book’s version of Laurie Strode — a woman shaped by a killer who tore through her town and left her to live in the aftermath. If you’ve seen the recent Halloween trilogy, you already understand what that kind of survival does to a person.
In the wrong hands, this could have been a straightforward slasher novel, something predictable, something easy to put down. In the hands of Grady Hendrix, it becomes something sharper and more deliberate. He shifts the focus from the violence itself to what lingers after it, memory, damage, and the way the past refuses to stay buried.
Because if horror teaches you anything, it’s that the past is never really dead.
Challenges: Cloak and Dagger
After the terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themselves heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia.
In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell something is not quite right in their home...or in their dreams.
Let me tell you a story, and if it gets too long, you can skip it. Promise. One of the few places my mom stopped long enough, as we moved more times than I can count — pre-carnival years — was Salem, OR. We lived there for at least a full year before moving further north, but that’s not the story. The house we lived in is.
It was a yellowish beige house on the corner of State St. and some random street I don’t remember the name of. It dead-ended at a railroad track, if that helps anyone place it. Salem wasn’t the safest area to live in the mid-1980s, and our neighborhood was pretty rough… but that’s not really the point.
This little, unassuming house was odd from the start. I had never sleepwalked before, but I started within the first week of living there. The attic opened into the garage, and if you threw a rock up there, it came back down a few minutes later. My mom kept our dog in the garage — not the attic — and it would go absolutely insane, barking up at the attic like its soul was in jeopardy.
One night, some kids from the neighborhood were spending the night, camped out in the living room, when we all heard what sounded like a power saw starting up in the attic. There wasn’t a kid there who didn’t bolt for home. Then there’s the time I watched a crutch travel across a wall in my mom’s bedroom. That one stuck with me.
Needless to say, my mom did a little digging, and while I won’t go into the details, that house had every right to be haunted.
I’m not here to convince you that ghosts are real or that haunted houses exist. I’m just telling you all of that so you understand why I love haunted house stories as much as I do. You’d think an experience like that would’ve sent me running in the opposite direction, but it did the exact opposite. I can’t get enough of them — especially when they lean more Gothic, like What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher.
When I realized the sequel to What Moves the Dead was set in a haunted hunting lodge, I was basically screaming in delight like a six-year-old at a My Little Pony birthday party.
I loved What Moves the Dead so much that, despite all that excitement, I was a little hesitant going into this one. I was worried a second outing with Alex — which still somehow doesn’t involve us sitting down for tea — wouldn’t live up to my probably overinflated expectations.
Thankfully, Kingfisher didn’t let me down. I enjoyed the hell out of this.
I tore through this in one sitting, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get under my skin a little. There’s a slow, suffocating dread here that just keeps building until you realize you’ve been holding your breath right along with Alex. That dread comes through most in how the haunting itself plays out.
The way she crafts this haunting genuinely got under my skin. Alex is attacked by a vengeful spirit that literally steals their breath as they sleep, slowly wearing down their already fever-racked body. And as if that isn’t bad enough, they’re trapped in a nightmarish dreamscape that forces them to relive the worst atrocities they experienced during the war — along with all the guilt and regret that comes with it. To fight back, Alex has to work through those memories head-on instead of avoiding them, which makes this feel more personal.
Maybe that’s why this worked so well for me. That house in Salem never really left me — that feeling that something is there, just out of sight, but very real. This book taps into that same kind of quiet, creeping dread.
Some haunted houses try to scare you.
This one feels a little too much like home.
Trust is essential to the foundation of America’s democracy, asserts Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and South Bend mayor. Yet, in a century warped by terrorism, financial collapse, Trumpist populism, systemic racism, and now a global pandemic, trust has been squandered, sacrificed, abused, stolen, or never properly built in the first place. And now, more so than ever before, Americans must work side by side to reckon with the monumental challenges posed by our present moment.
Interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir, Buttigieg explores the strong relationship between measures of prosperity and levels of social trust. He provides an impassioned account of a threefold crisis of trust: in our institutions, in each other, and in the American project itself. Today, these perilous patterns of distrust have wreaked havoc on nearly every sector of society, as Americans increasingly resent the very government that needs to be part of the solution. With the internet and partisan television networks acting as accelerants, Americans jettison any sense of shared reality, lose confidence in experts and scientists, and cope with the grim national tragedy of a pandemic that has only further exemplified the lethality of distrust.
Buttigieg contends that our success, or failure, at confronting the greatest challenges of the decade―racial and economic justice, pandemic resilience, and climate action―will rest on whether we can effectively cultivate, deepen, and, where necessary, repair the networks of trust that are now endangered, or for so many, have never even existed.
I’ve admired Pete Buttigieg for quite a while now, and reading Trust only deepened that admiration. During his presidential campaign, he and his husband Chasten carried themselves with a level of dignity and respect that often feels rare in modern politics. Even in a very intense national spotlight, they remained gracious, grounded, and consistently decent. As a gay man, that meant a lot to me then, and it still does now.
What stands out most in Trust is how clearly Buttigieg explains the growing crisis of mistrust in our institutions — and how complicated the reasons for that mistrust actually are. He writes about the erosion of confidence in government, the news media, and other institutions that shape our public life, and he does so thoughtfully rather than defensively. If I’m being honest, it’s one of the most balanced discussions of the issue I’ve read, and that approach really resonated with me.
He is also careful to acknowledge that mistrust didn’t simply appear out of nowhere. In many cases it was earned — particularly among marginalized communities that have historically been excluded, ignored, or even harmed by the very institutions now asking for their trust. At the same time, he addresses the rise of purposeful misinformation and how it has deepened existing fractures. In many ways, that deliberate misinformation feels like pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
When I finished Trust, I felt that the problem he describes is serious but not hopeless. Buttigieg clearly believes our democratic institutions are worth repairing, and I appreciated his willingness to engage the issue directly. The country could use more leaders willing to do that — and honestly, I’m begging him to run for president again someday.
When the American wife of a wealthy London-based financier starts receiving frightening phone calls, she believes her life is in danger, but when she protests to her family following a near-fatal accident, they and the police doubt her claims and even her sanity.
I'm not sure when I first watched Midnight Lace, but the scene with Doris Day in a fog-filled park while an invisible stalker whispers death threats stayed with me for years. It's one of those scenes that sends chills up your spine, and Doris Day absolutely sold me on her fear and panic as her life was being threatened.
As a kid, I grew up on the Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, so I wasn't expecting her performance as a woman whose life is slowly unraveling to be so captivating, as I had prejudged the type of actress she was based on my limited knowledge of her. She was mesmerizing — just staying this side of paranoid madness.
Colonel and Mrs. Bantry are shocked when they wake up one morning to find the dead body of a young platinum blonde on the floor of their library. Nobody in the village of St. Mary Mead seems to know who she is, but everyone has a theory about the crime. The ensuing investigation follows a twisted trail from the quiet village to an upscale hotel in the nearby town of Danemouth, where the victim worked as a ballroom dancer and bridge hostess. As the local inspectors sift through emerging clues to identify a suspect, Miss Jane Marple, St. Mary Meade's resident sleuth, always seems to be one step ahead of them.
First of all, forgive the slightly askew book cover — I love this edition far too much not to use it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manage to take a perfectly lined-up photo of it, and eventually I decided close was good enough.
If I’m remembering correctly, I haven’t reread The Body in the Library in ten or twenty years, so it’s been a while since I’ve spent time with this convoluted caper. It had been long enough that I found myself genuinely surprised by the fiendish little scheme Miss Marple exposed. While I remembered the mastermind behind the murder, I had completely forgotten how it was accomplished, so I took great delight in letting Miss Marple fill in the blanks for me all over again.
Agatha Christie had a mind like no other. She gives you every clue you need and then buries them in just enough distraction to make you doubt your own intelligence. Somehow, when the final reveal arrives, you don’t feel tricked — you feel outmatched. That balance is precisely why she has been my favorite author since I was given two of her books for Christmas in the fifth grade.
I do wish Miss Marple were a little more at the forefront in this one. Too much of the story belongs to the professional inspectors and not quite enough to her quiet deductions. But that’s a normal reaction for me — I almost always want more Miss Marple in her books and less Hercule Poirot in his. I suppose I’ve always enjoyed the old lady with a knitting basket more than a man who refers to himself in the third person.
Challenges: Cloak and Dagger, Mount TBR
Living in two worlds is exhausting, and no one knows this better than sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston. His working-class, diverse neighborhood is a far cry from the world of St. Clair Prep where he is one of the only Black students, constantly at the mercy of racist teachers and peers who don't understand him. But when his neighbor—a survivor of a grisly school shooting—is murdered and the bloody initials of the now-dead shooter, Sawyer Doom, are left on the entryway wall of Jake's home. Jake is forced to confront another world he wishes he could escape—the world of the dead.
As a medium, Jake sees ghosts around him all the time. Most are harmless. Stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they rarely interact with people. And while for most of his life Jake has avoided them, this time there is no running away. Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he's a powerful, vengeful ghost, and he has plans for his afterlife—plans thay include Jake. When Sawyer begins stalking him, high school becomes a different kind of survival game—one Jake is not sure he can win.
I’ve hemmed and hawed for far longer than I should have — I’m talking months — over how I wanted to start this review. Even now, as I’m typing, I feel like someone flipping through every streaming app they own, unable to settle on something to watch. I guess I’m just going to start typing and see what comes out. If I need to clean it up later, I will. It’s not like y’all will be able to tell the difference.
I absolutely love this book and think everyone who is even a little into YA should read it — if you’re comfortable with the themes it explores. The Taking of Jake Livingston ventures into very dark territory, and I’m not exaggerating when I say certain aspects of the narrative have stayed with me far longer than usual. That lingering weight is part of the reason I’ve had such a damned hard time writing this review. I think it’s impossible to talk about this book without discussing the gut punch that is Sawyer Doom, so I hope you’ll stick with me.
When I reviewed Come Knocking by Mike Bockoven, I discussed how the author had to strike a balance between showing us why the killer felt justified in doing something so barbaric and horrifying, without actually excusing or agreeing with him. That same balance had to be struck in The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass, and I think he handled it brilliantly — though perhaps with a bit more detail than I was expecting.
Instead of giving us a “manifesto” at the end of the book, Douglass lets us into Sawyer’s head throughout the story, as he relives the relentless abuse and bullying he endured for years. Those sections are not comfortable to read. I felt for this young man — no one should have to live through what he did. I can’t imagine the pain and anger that must have flowed through that boy’s veins. Where Douglass surpasses Bockoven, in my opinion, is that by allowing us into Sawyer’s head — the head of an evil, vengeful ghost — he removes any ambiguity. Whatever sympathy we might begin with hardens into horror and hatred as Sawyer torments Jake. Douglass does not shy away from making him as hate-filled and monstrous as any character I’ve read in a long time. By the end of this book, you will loathe Sawyer as much as you adore Jake.
I dare anyone to read this novel and not take an instant liking to Jake. He faces his own bullying, and while it makes him withdrawn and awkward at times, he never turns that pain outward onto others. He’s too busy trying to survive his day-to-day life. How anyone could cope with that — on top of the ability to see dead people — is beyond me. The inner strength that would require is admirable, and I’m not sure I could handle it half as well as Jake does.
Though he’s forced to confront Sawyer, Jake — with the emotional support of his family and friends, including a possible new boyfriend — faces it head-on. He doesn’t come out unscathed, but he may have just found a new version of himself in the process.
At its heart, this is a story built on contrast — two young men faced with unimaginable pain. Both are bullied. Both are isolated. Both are shaped by cruelty. But only one chooses to rise above it. Only one chooses to protect rather than harm.
And it’s in that contrast that this story has stayed with me, lingering far longer than I ever expected.
Years ago, bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw compiled a list of the genre’s most unsolvable murders—which he titled “Eight Perfect Murders”—chosen from among the best of the best, including Agatha Christie’s A. B. C. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and Ira Levin’s Death Trap.
But no one is more surprised than Mal, now the owner of the Old Devils Bookstore in Boston, when an FBI agent comes knocking on his door one snowy day in February. She’s looking for information about a series of unsolved murders that look eerily similar to the killings on Mal’s old list. And the agent isn’t the only one interested in this bookseller who spends almost every night at home reading. The killer is out there, watching his every move—a diabolical threat who knows way too much about Mal’s personal history, especially the secrets he’s never told anyone, even his recently deceased wife.
To protect himself, Mal begins looking into possible suspects . . . and sees a killer in everyone around him. But Mal doesn’t count on the investigation leaving a trail of death in its wake. Suddenly, a series of shocking twists leaves more victims dead—and the noose around Mal’s neck grows so tight he might never escape.
Malcolm is another of those characters I relish spending time with. This was my third visit to the Old Devils Bookstore, and like the first two times, I found myself wanting to settle into a comfortable chair with one of my favorite mysteries, the shop cat Nero purring away in my lap, and spend the day visiting with Mal as he works between customers. He has an aura about him that I find oddly comforting, and I can easily imagine us becoming fast friends. The fact that he’s about as unreliable as any narrator can be just makes me love him more.
I’m a sucker for unreliable narrators, and Mal does not disappoint. Spending extended time with him lets you know the man has secrets. You may not know what those secrets are — or just how painful they might be — but it’s clear that everything is not right in his world.
I’m not sure how much of my love for this book comes from my genuine fondness for Mal or from the way Peter Swanson weaves a deep love and respect for the Golden Age of classic mysteries into a tale of faulty memories, buried secrets, and a few “perfect” murders thrown in for good measure. Either way, it’s a story anchored by a character I thoroughly enjoy — one I’m sure I’ll be visiting again and again in the years to come.
Challenges: Calendar of Crime, Cloak and Dagger
For the lucky among us, life is what you make of it, but for Dixie Wheeler, the theme music for her story was chosen by another long ago, on the day her father butchered her mother and brothers and then slashed a knife across his own throat. Only one-year-old Dixie was left alive, infamously known as Baby Blue for the song left playing in the aftermath of the slaughter.
Twenty-five years later, Dixie is still desperate for a connection to the family she can’t remember, so when her childhood home goes up for sale, Dixie sets aside all reason and moves in. But as the ghosts of her family seemingly begin to take up residence in the home that was once theirs, Dixie starts to question her own sanity and wonders if the evil force menacing her is that of her father, or a demon of her own making.
In order to make sense of her present, Dixie becomes determined to unravel the truth of her past and seeks out the detective who originally investigated the murders. But the more she learns, the more she opens up the uncomfortable possibility that the sins of her father may belong to another. As bodies begin to pile up around her, Dixie must find a way to expose the lunacy behind her family’s massacre in order to save her few loved ones who are still alive—and whatever scrap of sanity she has left.
How could anyone read that synopsis and not want to dive right in? Granted, it’s one of those synopses that might be just a tad long, but no matter how many times I read it, I can’t decide which lines I would cut. It’s a synopsis designed to make you want to read the book — and read it I did.
Dixie is one of those characters who, no matter how much she annoyed me at times, I still found myself caring for. I think it’s fair to say she makes horrible decisions. I mean, who moves into the house where their family was slaughtered? Well, Trevor did it in Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, one of my favorite books of all time — but that’s literally another story, so pretend I didn’t say anything about it. Dixie not only moves into this house, she ends her relationship to do it, and then starts decorating the house to make it look the way it did when her family was butchered. I think sanity is the least of her worries.
Dixie’s descent into an almost fugue-like state of madness is so gorgeously written that at no point was I able to look away or pretend that what I was reading was anything other than the story of a woman slowly coming apart, obsessing over her family’s horrific deaths. She was so lost in the minutiae of what happened that she — like me — didn’t really see the truth before it slammed into her face. I can only hope that now that she’s discovered the truth and faced it head-on, she’ll truly heal and be able to put the past, and her family, behind her.
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother, Roderick, is consumed by a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
Apparently, despite my intentions to read more of the bazillion unread stories that have been languishing on my shelves, some for years, I’ve been more inclined to pick up old favorites. Visiting old friends, spending time in their company, has a soothing effect, and with all the chaos engulfing us right now, I need the comfort those old friends can provide.
Alex is one of those characters I can see myself being friends with. I can imagine the two of us in a darkened home library, the fireplace roaring as Alex regales me with tales of their past exploits. There would be a table set with tea, and we would talk late into the night. I just wouldn’t want that library to be in the Ushers’ ancestral home.
What Moves the Dead is a story that burrowed under my skin, flooding my system with its miasmatic spores until I felt as if my lungs were filled with a wiggling fungal infection, one that threatened to turn me into that nightmarish hare on the cover. It’s a story so steeped in mycological nightmares that once I walked through those doors, I felt just as doomed as Madeline and Roderick. Kingfisher’s prose is as enthralling as it is horrific. She weaves a tale I never wanted to end—even if I desperately wanted Alex and their friends out of it.
