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Best Horror Books of January-June 2025

03/07/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

Is it just me or has it been an absolutely bumper year for horror already? From the big guns to the hot newcomers, from the standout slashers to the perfect paranormals to the exciting experiments, we have had our pick of great books across the genre in just the first six months of the year.

For my part, I’ve been making the most of this embarrassment of horrifying riches — I’ve already read 24 horror and horror-adjacent novels published in 2025 (plus two ARCs I read in 2024 that weren’t published until this year). And across the board, they’ve been pretty solid. There were one or two duds, sure, but more importantly there were several that I think will enter the canon of all-time horror greats.

Now, with so many good options, you might be wondering where to start. Obviously, I’ve got you covered; here are my favorite horror novels of 2025 (SO FAR!):

Buffalo Hunter Hunter and Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

My above comment about books that will come to be regarded as all-timers was specifically about this one. The novel is a double frame story: in the present day a researcher reads the diary of her Lutheran pastor ancestor; the pastor’s journal details his encounters with a Blackfeet man (although we quickly learn that “man” is not a fitting term for him anymore) named Good Stab, and much of Good Stab’s testimony is told in first-person confessional.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure why the first of these perspectives was included in the story; the researcher’s POV didn’t seem to add much to the conversation between Beaucarne and Good Stab. But of course, I should have known better, and everything is brought together by the end. The interplay of past and present, history and contemporary, is essential to the story, and the way SGJ melds time and place and the horror of both fiction and reality is masterful.

Stephen Graham Jones’ novels are not easy to read, not only because of their content (name an unsettling topic or horrific detail and this book probably has it) but because he is not an author who will hold your hand through his stories. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is no exception; the Pikuni words that Good Stab uses go unannotated, and the historical events referenced are in the context of the conversation between Beaucarne and Good Stab, as in both men are aware of their details whereas the reader may not be.

These writing choices make SGJ’s novels divisive to some horror readers; however, even if you have struggled with some of his previous work or if you’re not normally a fan, I urge you to give The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a try. It’s truly a masterpiece that is well worth the effort, and if I read a better horror novel this year, I’ll be surprised.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

Honestly, if I had gone in to this novel blind and you’d asked me when I’d finished it was written by a woman, a man, or none of the above, a dude would not have been my first guess. To not only write female characters so well, but in particular these female characters — pregnant teenagers sent to a home for unwed mothers in 1970s Florida who take up witchcraft in an attempt to exert some control over their manipulated lives — is an impressive feat, particularly so for a middle-aged guy who doesn’t have children.

To be clear, Grady Hendrix is well aware of this. He mentions it both in the acknowledgements and in all of the number of podcast interviews I’ve listened to about this book. He talks about how he was first inspired by the stories of two family members that only shared as adults that they had those personal experiences, and it’s clear that he wanted to put in the care and research necessary to do justice to this book in their honors.

And what a result. Yes, it’s a book about witchcraft, and yes, it’s a horror-genre cliché to say “humans were the real monsters” but it’s true that the real horror of this book is in the way the girls at its center are used and manipulated and neglected and traumatized by their conditions and their situations and everyone who surrounds them. By the witches, to an extent, but by everyone else far more so. A deal with the devil feels tame in comparison to what they’re going through at the home.

Every girl in this book felt so real, so alive. Their hopes, their desires, their pains, they were so vivid I could almost feel them myself. At first Fern felt like a blank page to me, a go-along-to-get-along type, but as she grew into herself I grew to love her as well. Zinnia and Rose, well, I loved them from the moment they arrived. Holly, sweet angel. Hagar and her quiet power. Cunning Miss Parcae. All of the characters in this novel felt fantastically realized, even down to the very minor ones.

Some of the negative reviews of this book have complained that the witchcraft element is secondary to the historical fiction side of the story, and I didn’t find that at all. In a fantasy setting — a magical school novel or a different world tale — then sure, okay, maybe you want everyone waving wands and brewing potions on every page. But in real life the mundane is as crucial as the magical, and to me this book felt like a fitting and genuine balance that still pulled in magical tradition and energy in ways both powerful and chilling.

And if you do feel like you’re lacking the true “scariness” that you expect from a horror novel, well, then you must have skipped over the birth scenes.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and Old Soul

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab

Using the “classic” monsters and tropes of horror – the vampires, the haunted houses, the possessions, the ghosts – is always a delicate balance between new and old. As readers we don’t want a stale rehash (and I assume authors equally aren’t endeavouring to write one), but at the same time we do still relish those nostalgic beats. While it’s possible to do something wholly different and still be successful, most of the time we want at least some semblance of the original. A werewolf who is unaffected by the full moon isn’t much of a werewolf.

V.E. Schwab’s latest novel, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, is a perfect example of how this melding of traditional elements and new ideas can successfully be achieved. The title may be a mouthful, but every word of this exquisite story is something to relish. The story follows three vampiric women across centuries as they live and die and feed and as their fates entwine.

Schwab in turns stays faithful to the classic elements – the thirst, the exile, the decadence and decay that permeate in equal measure – and then lays bare the themes that often simmer under the surface in vampire novels but traditionally were only subtext – the queerness, the feminine rage and desire – to create a modern classic of the genre.

It’s a character-driven book, with each of the three women’s voices distinct even as their desires converge, but there is still plenty of action across the course of the stories and timelines. Everyone is morally grey, in shades ranging from silvery pale to the darkness before a storm. Schwab’s prose is excellent as always, poetic and atmospheric and incredibly fitting for the novel.

Old Soul by Susan Barker

I was shook at the end of Old Soul. Unsettling from the jump, this novel begins with two people, Jake and Mariko, meeting by chance after both missing their flight. Thrown together by circumstance, they decide to have dinner although they think that they have nothing in common. That is, until they realize that they both have one chilling connection in that they both lost a loved one in an unusual and tragic way involving a strange and charismatic women.

There’s an old myth that someone taking your photo can steal your soul, and a similar horrifying concept serves as the conceit of this story: the mysterious woman photographs her intended victims, and shortly after they lose their minds and their lives. To what end: immortality? Or something even more sinister? 

Jake decides to investigate further, and his journey takes him to Germany, New Mexico, and more to learn about and search for the woman and the entity she serves. Shifting across time and place, the novel includes a series of testimonies of other loved ones of the woman’s victims, interspersed with a narrative in which the woman pursues her next victim.

With horror both intimate and cosmic, and writing that is as elegant as it is disturbing, Old Soul is a new favorite and one I’m already looking forward to rereading.

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

I only read J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a few years ago, and I can’t believe I hadn’t done so sooner. The 1870s vampire novella pre-dates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by several decades and is beloved for its enigmatic, seductive title character and her relationship to the young woman upon whose hospitality — and more — the vampire woman preys. Although Carmilla is not explicitly queer, understandable given its era, there is an undeniable sexual tension simmering just beneath the surface of her friendship with Laura, and therefore it is no surprise that Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is not the first overtly sapphic retelling of or novel inspired by the vampire classic. But, in my opinion, it belongs at the top of the list.

In Hungerstone, Laura is named Lenore, and she is not an innocent teenager living a solitary existence with her widower father, but the mistress of an estate purchased with her handsome businessman husband Henry. Something is rotten in the state of Nethershaw, however; Lenore is tasked with revitalizing the crumbling manor even as her marriage falls into a state of disrepair.

Theirs was a marriage of convenience, Lenore bringing to it a prestigious lineage but no wealth, Henry offering money but relying on his wife to build his reputation; of course, a heir is essential to solidify Henry’s new standing in society, and by a decade into their marriage it is clear that there will be no child added to their family. Resentful of and resented by her husband, and yet believing that she must endure her unfulfilled existence in order to exist at all, Lenore might have continued on in this unhappy marriage were it not for the arrival — via a startling carriage accident — of Carmilla Kernstein.

Beautiful, mysterious, uninhibited — Carmilla immediately shakes up life at Nethershaw. As Carmilla draws her under her spell, Lenore is forced to confront her secrets, her fears, and, most importantly, her desires. In some ways, Carmilla acts as the embodiment of Lenore’s inner self, saying the rude yet true things that Lenore will not dare to say, criticizing that which should be criticized, and goading Lenore into indulging in her cravings. This is the story of an awakening in more ways than one, not only of Lenore’s sexuality but also of her independence.

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” Lenore muses, as she begins to take her life into her own hands to secure her future. As the novel hurtles toward its horrifying, violent climax, the events going on at Nethershaw get more bizarre, more uncanny, Lenore begins to liberate herself from the expectations placed upon her and embrace the strangeness of the happenings, and the beguiling, dangerous woman who brought them there.

The writing in this novel is excellent, perfectly suited to its premise and setting. Sex, violence, and hunger form a triumvirate of themes, with so much overlap between how they are described, and that melding of fears and desires is so fantastically and unsettlingly on display here. From the eerie way Carmilla haunts Lenore in both thought and body, to the gory, brutal scenes of carnage, the novel is full of vivid imagery and visceral feelings.

I love that Hungerstone feels like both a fresh take on a classic story and genre, and like a suitable tribute to the same. Equal parts revulsion and seduction, this is a novel I won’t soon be able to cast out of my mind, much as Lenore couldn’t banish Carmilla from hers.

Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen

Where does one end and another begin? This is the question this novel asks repeatedly. Where does Lucy end and her twin sister Sarah begin? Where does Sarah end and the thing she has become begin? And where does love end, where does family end, where does duty and morality and desire and… where does the horror begin?

I went in expecting a Vampire story thanks to the Dracula epigraphs, the protagonist’s name, etc. and Blood on Her Tongue does certainly have vampiric elements. But it’s also much more, an intriguing blend of horror elements from the natural horror of death and decay to something decidedly supernatural. I loved the super evocative imagery, gruesome often to the point of grossness (the pen! the eyes!), and as someone who lives in rural Ireland I found it easy to call to mind the smell of the peat and the sucking thickness of the bogs, but I think even if you’re not familiar I think you would be able to imagine it based on van Veen’s writing.

Lucy is a fascinating protagonist. She’s not a nice person; she’s obsessive and greedy and haughty and her relationship with her sister is nothing short of toxic, and yet she’s so compelling. Sarah, too, is equally riveting. Even though so much of the action in the first half of the novel takes place around her, her presence is key and her perspective, as told through her letters and journal entries, rounds out the setting and the wonderfully creepy gothic atmosphere so well. And when she (or someone) starts to really take the stage, well. It takes talent to do a good exposition scene, and there’s one around halfway through this novel that’s particularly good, managing to build the tension while delivering a lot of information about the nature of the being that has gotten its grips into Sarah.

There are some great layers to the plot that also help to build the overall world of this 19th Century Dutch manor and its inhabitants. Early on, the men in the novel are quick to dismiss the sisters’ fears as mistakes or madness, and although the women’s violent actions in the latter half of the book certainly aren’t out of any sort of feminist intentions, Arthur’s and Michael’s paternalistic mindsets do bring an interesting element to the story, although as characters they are far less developed than Lucy, Sarah, or even some of the other minor characters such as Magda the serving woman.

Toxic codependence will always be a favourite horror trope of mine, especially when it leads to devastating consequences, and it’s so well executed here along with an exquisitely-crafted story that grows the creeping, unsettling tension to a truly disturbing climax. Van Veen has quickly been added to my list of the authors whose work I will eagerly devour (ha) as soon as I see it.

Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Marie Griffin

I closed out the first half of the year in horror (and, appropriately, Pride month), by reading Eat The Ones You Love, the latest novel by Irish author Sarah Marie Griffin. Shell (Michelle) is adrift after a breakup and a redundancy occur in quick succession. Reminders of her “old life” eat at her in the form of whatsapp notifications and a feeling of stagnation. By chance, in an increasingly derelict suburban Dublin shopping centre, Shell stumbles upon a flower shop with an attractive owner, Neve, and a “Help Needed” sign in the window.

Shell gets to know her colleague as well as the other mall workers, even as more and more storefronts are replaced by vape shops or simply empty spaces, and she is quickly welcomed into their little group. It feels like a stroke of good fortune after a hard time, but when a new, omniscient narrator creeps in alongside Shell, it turns out there’s more to the flower shop than roses and eucalyptus.

Little Shop of Horrors is the obvious comparison here, as we learn that the shop houses a sentient, murderous plant that Neve calls Baby, but the roots (ha) go deeper, more Lovecraftian in the mystery of Baby’s existence and power. I love the way the narrative reflects his presence, sliding in and out of Shell’s POV as smoothly as his vines and creating a dream-like sense of confusion.

I loved the setting, the way the liminality of the fading shopping mall reflects Shell’s loneliness, and the way it leads to the misfit cast of characters finding their little found family. Each character was so memorable, and even though I initially didn’t understand the point of Neve’s ex Jen’s email correspondence with fellow shop worker Bec, I grew to really like her as well and how her role came into the story.

While there are certainly disquieting moments and an unsettling atmosphere, with elements of body and eco horror, I think this would be a good novel for someone just starting to dip their toes into horror as it’s not over-the-top graphic or terrifying. But equally as a horror aficionado I loved it and found it to be a strong addition to what has been a stellar year for the genre so far. I’m seeing the audiobook highly recommended in other reviews so I’m definitely planning to check that out in the near future as well.

The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica

Dreamlike (nightmarelike), unsettling. Although we are told that this story takes place in a near-future dystopia in which the ravages of climate change have fundamentally shattered the social contract (similar to Bazterrica’s previous novel, the excellent and horrific Tender is the Flesh), the setting is so isolated and desolate that it feels like a world separate from — and out of — time. Here, the result of climate disaster is a doomsday cult of sorts that takes on the trappings of a religious convent, but one more interested in torture and violence than worship and prayer.

The unnamed protagonist narrates her story, putting her experience on the record with whatever implements she can get her hands on, including writing in her own blood. And that’s the least disturbing thing about her tales.

Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses) is fantastic at building tension and creating an atmosphere of horror and unease. While I don’t think this novel will stick with me the way Tender in the Flesh did (and has), I was definitely disquieted as I was reading and even now after finishing.

Victorian Psycho and The Starving Saints

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

There are so many great morally grey characters in the books above. Antiheroes and antiheroines, misunderstood monsters, and so on. But what if you want someone who’s just straight up evil? Winifred Notty is your gal! In this wild send-up of the classic Victorian plot, she arrives to the grand Ensor House to become governess and tutor to the Pounds children. There, she basically wreaks havoc, bringing the entire estate down with her.

You don’t want to be faint of heart (or weak of stomach) to read this one — it’s pretty extreme and very graphic as Winifred delights in mauling, maiming, and murdering pretty much everyone she meets in a variety of gruesome ways. But Feito’s writing is just so much fun you can’t help but enjoy it. A quick read, an unexpected delight, and a ridiculously good time.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

This novel feels like a fever dream in the best way. In a besieged medieval castle, supplies have run dangerously low and the castle’s inhabitants are on the verge of starvation. When a group of Saints arrive, bringing with them a bacchanal of festivities and, more importantly, feasting, the castle seems to have found salvation. But things are not what they seem and the Saints, too, are hungry.

If you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy ambiguity, then this novel absolutely won’t be for you. But for me, I found the way the castle and its occupants seem to exist in its own world – one that is like our world but not quite, and to what extent we are never fully told – to heighten the unease of this unsettling story.

The protagonists are fascinating and the antagonists are chilling. And while the novel does take a while to truly get going, it then careens like a boulder hurtling down a mountain, increasingly terrifying and appealingly unhinged.

There are already a plethora of July-December horror releases I’m eagerly anticipating (and there’s one book from my Jan-June TBR, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker, that I only just got my hands on, so I reserve the right to include it in my July-Dec roundup if it’s as good as it sounds). If the second half of the year is anything like the first six months this could be one of the best years for horror literature in a long time.

You can follow along with my horror reads and reviews on Goodreads, and please let me know if there are any great books I’ve missed!

Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2025, ranked and reviewed

04/06/202504/06/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

There’s only just over a week until this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction winner is revealed! My favourite literary prize every year, I always make an effort to read the shortlist before the prize announcement. Many years, I’ve already read one or two of the books before the shortlist is revealed, but this year all six were new to me. This was pretty exciting as I got the chance to add six books to my to-read list (which, according to goodreads, now sits at over 400 books… oops, but also, no regrets). Now I’ve read them all, so here are my thoughts:

All Fours by Miranda July

I, like probably everyone but especially probably women, feel equally excited by and terrified of aging. While the last ten years of my life have been exponentially better on almost every metric than the ten years that preceded them (on a personal level, clearly; on a global level… you know), which I feel bodes well for the next ten years ahead, I can’t help but fear the advent of my late thirties, then the apparently-dreaded “over the hill,” and then, what?

Nobody really talks about what comes after. I guess women just become invisible, even to ourselves. The most chatter I ever hear about menopause is when my early-50s female coworker brings it up to annoy our late-20s male coworker.

Maiden and mother get plenty of airplay, but what about crone? NOT, to be clear, that someone ten years older than me, as is the protagonist of All Fours, is a crone. And she certainly doesn’t act like one either. Rather than withering, she is blossoming — sometimes into heretofore undiscovered alien flora rather than regular flowers, but still!

The protagonist reminds me a little bit of Jane from Danzy Senna’s excellent Colored Television. While they differ in that she has the level of semi-fame and certainly the amount of wealth to which Jane only aspires, they are the same in that I spent their narratives feeling engagingly horrified at the bafflingly bad decisions they make one spiraling from another. In a fun way.

I love the juxtaposition of how much we learn about the protagonist’s interior self versus how little we learn about the daily details of her life. Unless I missed it, I believe there is only even one fleeting reference to her name.

We never learn exactly where her fame and wealth came from — we know she writes, because a line from her work is licensed by a whiskey company, leading to a windfall that drives some of her wildest decisions, and later in the novel she publishes a book. But is she a novelist? A blogger? And there are hints that she works across various mediums, but we aren’t told exactly what they are.

From reading Miranda July’s wikipedia’s “Personal Life” section and seeing the similarities between herself and the protagonist, I imagine she is meant to have created a blend of visual, performing, and written arts like July, but I enjoy the way I felt allowed to create my own exterior vision of her, to compare and contrast with her interiority.

The protagonist falls into one of my favorite categories of characters: difficult to like but easy to love. She is narcissistic, melodramatic, a little bit deranged at times, and would be absolutely exhausting to know. But I couldn’t help but love her.

No matter what you think of her actions, which I won’t even begin to try to recap here because they are both more and less insane in the context of the novel, she is not someone who will allow herself to become invisible, although it seems like she may have been on the precipice of it. And in the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery, she also discovers a dawning era that she has not contemplated, maybe because most of us don’t contemplate it except with trepidation until we are in it.

After the appointment I sat in my car and did a quick round of open-sourcing, sending a group text to all the older women I knew. What’s the best thing about life after bleeding? I asked them. Just let me know when you get a minute! But the first response, from Sam’s old kindergarten teacher, didn’t even take a minute

I’ve never read anything by Miranda July before, but the way she writes about the interconnecting themes in this book — pregnancy and motherhood and menopause, relationships and monogamy and non monogamy and romance and sex and partnership, womanhood and queerness and gender, and more — rewired my brain a little bit.

While some of the protagonist’s experiences are not ones I will or want to have (spending twenty grand to redecorate a motel room, literally everything regarding all of her romantic relationships, although I did love all of her friendships), others are pretty much inevitable for all women as we age, and July perfectly captures the fact that this is beautiful and terrifying and somehow very funny. My favourite of the shortlist, and I hope to see it win on June 12.

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

To be honest, in scrolling through the other reviews on goodreads, it seems like there are a lot of folks who really want this book to be something that it’s not. And I don’t mean that they think the book was trying to be something in particular and didn’t succeed; I mean that some reviewers seem to have made up a different book that they thought Fundamentally should be given the subject matter, and then got annoyed that it wasn’t trying to be.

Yes, it’s satirical, the tone is irreverent, and the protagonist makes a series of insane decisions. Those things are pretty obviously intentional on the author’s part. Have we strayed so far from media literacy’s light? With a decade in peacebuilding work on the deradicalisation of ISIS brides, author Nussaibah Younis could surely have written a serious and academic treatise, if that had been her aim.

For my part, I found the novel extremely successful, and extremely entertaining. For me, the incongruity of the subject (deradicalising ISIS brides) and the tone (more in line with a trashy beach read than a serious academic piece) brought such an interesting element to the novel.

In Fundamentally, protagonist Nadia agrees to take a role at an Iraqi refugee camp, spearheading a deradicalisation program for the UN. She quickly learns that, just as one of her primary motivations in the move was escaping the heartbreak of her girlfriend/flatmate/FWB dumping her, most of the other folks working there aren’t doing so with only the purest of motivations. Younis deftly skewers local and foreign governments and NGOs, aid workers and experts, including, I’m sure, herself.

Even the ISIS brides do not escape a bit of satire, although Younis offers a very empathetic narration here, looking at the complexities of their situations despite the choices that brought them to the refugee camp.

The star of the show is Sara, an English teenager of South Asian descent who had left to join the extremist movement at just 15 (in an obvious parallel to a real-life story). Nadia is immediately drawn to the young woman, seeing in Sara the endpoint of a path she herself could have gone down, had her circumstances been slightly different.

Her fixation drives the plot, and the depth of the two women’s similarities and differences bring a fascinating element to the story. When Sara finally opens up to Nadia around halfway through, it’s powerful and in some ways devastating; likewise when they have a heart-to-heart of sorts toward the end of the book.

Aside from Nadia and Sara’s, my favourite relationship in the book was between Nadia and her mother. Although it is a minor storyline, their rupture when Nadia came out as queer and has a crisis of faith and their gradual return to having each other in their lives felt both realistic and emotional.

The story throughout is about blinders, biases, and how they affect motivations and actions large and small, from top to bottom. The novel also forces us to confront our own preconceived notions, while still being entertaining, rather than lecturing.

My one complaint is that the part of the ending that concludes Sara’s storyline felt both slightly rushed and a too perfectly tied up. However, for me this was the second best of the Women’s Prize shortlist, and a shockingly fun novel and strong satire of a serious subject.

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

The Persians took me a little while to get into, but once I did I was hooked. This novel focused on a history and culture that I have to admit I know very little about.

The story is told from the perspective of women from several generations of a formerly-influential Iranian family, some of whom left Iran for the United States, and others who stayed. They no longer have their political power, but they still have their wealth. When one of the women finds herself in trouble with the law, the relatives are drawn together, and as they reconnect, for better or worse, their family history (and its secrets) are revealed.

The characters take some getting used to, being frequently over-the-top in their dramatics and often unlikeable. But Sanam Mahloudji does so beautifully with differentiating each of the women’s voices and offering their perspectives to the story that you come to understand each of them. The multiple POVs worked well for the structuring of the novel, and the later parts where the women spend more time together and interact solidified their distinct personalities and characters.

I feel like this would make a great miniseries, and it’s a strong addition to the Women’s Prize shortlist.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

“Isn’t that funny? No one ever knows anything in this country. No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where.”

I feel a bit torn about this book.

The writing was stunning, and each individual part of the book was very well plotted (aside from the sex scenes which I felt were, while also well-written, disproportionately long given the length of the novel without actually advancing the plot or revealing much about the participants’ characters, sex for sex’s sake that didn’t compare to the richness of the longing and metaphorical dance that came before).

The twist — I suppose you can call it a twist, although the way it reveals itself is not as a jump scare but as a realization that the horror has been lurking in the room throughout — is fantastic. The diary chapter is brilliant.

But the problem for me was that the “twist” and the shift in the narrative was so interesting that I ended up wondering why we had spent all of this time on the far less interesting narrative that had come before it.

And I found the ending frustrating. I felt that the ultimate resolution did not fully resolve the issue. Its success hinges on the stability of the characters’ relationships (saying what I can without spoilers) and I didn’t feel like that foundation was there, at least not to the level that would adequately lead to closure and happiness to the character who I felt most deserved it.

Whenever I read a debut novel I consider whether I’d read another by the author, even if I didn’t love the first, and in this case the writing was so good that I absolutely would. And as I said, I may return to reevaluate this one as well. But as it stands at the moment, I did feel like the book didn’t fully achieve its goals, but it did do what it could manage in a beautifully-written way.

Good Girl by Aria Aber

There are writers who can make stories about partying and doing drugs interesting and compelling, but there are also a lot of writers whose stories about doing drugs are interesting only to the participants, despite what they think. Unfortunately, this one is definitely the latter.

The element that is meant to save the novel from drowning in cliché is that the protagonist Nilab is the child of Afghan immigrants, but while the book’s only really moments of depth stems from this finding-identity-between-two-worlds narrative, they’re not enough to draw it out of the mire.

Despite being a woman author and even being shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize, and despite the protagonist obviously the protagonist also sharing much of her backstory with the author herself, if you’d told me that the author stand-in was not the protagonist but the douchey white American writerbro she’s in a boringly toxic relationship with, I’d nearly believe you.

There were some good lines in here, and again there were moments as Nilab grapples with her identity and with the expectations of her parents, her cultural background, and her life in an increasingly politicized and anti-immigrant Berlin that did strike me, but as a whole it mostly left me cold.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

This book is not last in my rankings, but separate. I find it hard to evaluate because I don’t think it was meant to be a reader’s first introduction to Elizabeth Strout, as it was for me.

I assumed that, because it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize (the reason I read it), it would be a standalone novel even if it took place in the same universe as the author’s other works (similar to Marilynne Robinson’s Home, which I had no trouble reading independently despite not having read Gilead, and which won the Women’s Prize in 2009).

While this may technically be true in that the novel is another story in an existing universe rather than a sequel that directly follows the events of a previous book, from the number of reviews exclaiming joyfully about catching up with favorite characters like Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton, and Bob Burgess as though they are old friends, it is clear that the novel is far more meaningful to those who have already spent time with them and their town of Crosby.

That said, even without the backstory, there were some things I really loved about the novel. The writing was warm and inviting, not too soft or twee but gentle and genuine. I liked that most of the characters were older, a nice change from most novels being populated by people in their 20s and 30s. I loved how rich in detail the setting and characters both were, obviously bolstered by Strout having written about them many times before. It felt like there was so much going on in the background and the little moments that made it feel like a real place in which real people live, and I can see why readers would be delighted to visit with them again and again.

Book Review: Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen

25/03/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

Happy publication day to Blood on Her Tongue! Johanna van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing was one of my favourite horror debuts I’ve read in a while — delightfully gothic and romantic and gruesome — so to say that I was excited about snagging an advance reader’s copy of Blood on Her Tongue may be an understatement. Thanks very much to the author, Netgalley, and Poisoned Pen Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Where does one end and another begin? This is the question this novel asks repeatedly. Where does Lucy end and her twin sister Sarah begin? Where does Sarah end and the thing she has become begin? And where does love end, where does family end, where does duty and morality and desire and… where does the horror begin?

I went in expecting a vampire story thanks to the Dracula epigraphs, the protagonist’s name, etc. and Blood on Her Tongue does certainly have vampiric elements. But it’s also much more, an intriguing blend of horror elements from the natural horror of death and decay to something decidedly supernatural. I loved the super evocative imagery, gruesome often to the point of grossness (the pen! the eyes!), and as someone who lives in rural Ireland I found it easy to call to mind the smell of the peat and the sucking thickness of the bogs, but I think even if you’re not familiar I think you would be able to imagine it based on van Veen’s writing.

Lucy is a fascinating protagonist. She’s not a nice person; she’s obsessive and greedy and haughty and her relationship with her sister is nothing short of toxic, and yet she’s so compelling. Sarah, too, is equally riveting. Even though so much of the action in the first half of the novel takes place around her, her presence is key and her perspective, as told through her letters and journal entries, rounds out the setting and the wonderfully creepy gothic atmosphere so well. And when she (or someone) starts to really take the stage, well. It takes talent to do a good exposition scene, and there’s one around halfway through this novel that’s particularly good, managing to build the tension while delivering a lot of information about the nature of the being that has gotten its grips into Sarah.

There are some great layers to the plot that also help to build the overall world of this 19th Century Dutch manor and its inhabitants. Early on, the men in the novel are quick to dismiss the sisters’ fears as mistakes or madness, and although the women’s violent actions in the latter half of the book certainly aren’t out of any sort of feminist intentions, Arthur’s and Michael’s paternalistic mindsets do bring an interesting element to the story, although as characters they are far less developed than Lucy, Sarah, or even some of the other minor characters such as Magda the serving woman.

Overall, I think I enjoyed this even more than My Darling Dreadful Thing (although I seriously loved that one as well). Toxic codependence will always be a favourite horror trope of mine, especially when it leads to devastating consequences, and it’s so well executed here along with an exquisitely-crafted story that grows the creeping, unsettling tension to a truly disturbing climax. Van Veen has quickly been added to my list of the authors whose work I will eagerly devour (ha) as soon as I see it.

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Book Review: Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

01/03/202527/02/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

I was thrilled to receive an ARC of Hungerstone by Kat Dunn back in January. It was published a few weeks ago and I strongly recommend picking up a copy at your favourite indie bookstore or local library!

“Who would I be if I was someone who wanted things?”

I only read J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a few years ago, and I can’t believe I hadn’t done so sooner. The 1870s vampire novella pre-dates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by several decades and is beloved for its enigmatic, seductive title character and her relationship to the young woman upon whose hospitality — and more — the vampire woman preys.

Although Carmilla is not explicitly queer, understandable given its era, there is an undeniable sexual tension simmering just beneath the surface of her friendship with Laura, and therefore it is no surprise that Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is not the first overtly sapphic retelling of or novel inspired by the vampire classic. But, in my opinion, it belongs at the top of the list.

In Hungerstone, Laura is named Lenore, and she is not an innocent teenager living a solitary existence with her widower father, but the mistress of an estate purchased with her handsome businessman husband Henry. Something is rotten in the state of Nethershaw, however; Lenore is tasked with revitalizing the crumbling manor even as her marriage falls into a state of disrepair.

Theirs was a marriage of convenience, Lenore bringing to it a prestigious lineage but no wealth, Henry offering money but relying on his wife to build his reputation; of course, a heir is essential to solidify Henry’s new standing in society, and by a decade into their marriage it is clear that there will be no child added to their family.

Resentful of and resented by her husband, and yet believing that she must endure her unfulfilled existence in order to exist at all, Lenore might have continued on in this unhappy marriage were it not for the arrival — via a startling carriage accident — of Carmilla Kernstein.

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” Lenore muses, as she begins to take her life into her own hands to secure her future. As the novel hurtles toward its horrifying, violent climax, the events going on at Nethershaw get more bizarre, more uncanny, Lenore begins to liberate herself from the expectations placed upon her and embrace the strangeness of the happenings, and the beguiling, dangerous woman who brought them there.

The writing in Hungerstone is excellent, perfectly suited to its premise and setting. Sex, violence, and hunger form a triumvirate of themes, with so much overlap between how they are described, and that melding of fears and desires is so fantastically and unsettlingly on display here. From the eerie way Carmilla haunts Lenore in both thought and body, to the gory, brutal scenes of carnage, the novel is full of vivid imagery and visceral feelings.

I love that Hungerstone feels like both a fresh take on a classic story and genre, and like a suitable tribute to the same. Equal parts revulsion and seduction, this is a novel I won’t soon be able to cast out of my mind, much as Lenore couldn’t banish Carmilla from hers.

Many, many thanks to Kat Dunn, Zando, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review; I feasted on this novel.

Final note: the line “I ate paprika on my tour, and I didn’t care for it” made me laugh. Despite their shared experiences in the company of vampires, Lenore definitely would not get along with my bestie Jonathan Harker.

Book Review: Sick Houses by Leila Taylor

14/02/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

Apparently all I want to do is write book reviews, but I’m just going to go ahead on keep on doing it. This is a book I received as an ARC late last year, but it was just published on Tuesday so I wanted to share my review here in case you’re looking for a solid non-fiction book to pick up this week. Support your favourite indie bookstore!

When a demon inhabits a body, it takes ownership of a person, a monster is temporarily housed inside of its victim, our body invaded, repossessed. The ghost does the same with s house: it breaks into it, takes possession of what is yours, and you can no longer trust the place you trusted the most. What’s more frightening than your own home turning against you?

A look at the haunted house in both fiction and non-fiction, Sick Houses by Leila Taylor is an interesting exploration of what happens when the place that, by definition, we feel most at home in becomes something Other, something not quite right. Each chapter looks at a different kind of house, from houses of witchcraft (real or alleged) to houses in miniature, dollhouses or dioramas that reflect or influence their life-size counterparts.

First of all, I appreciated the parameters that the author put on her subject. She says in the introduction that “I’m not talking about plantation houses because 1) fuck them, and 2) I don’t consider slave quarters homes,” and she avoids prisons and hotels as well. By offering a clear focus on homes and not just houses/buildings, it creates an immediate connection with the reader — we will of course consider our own homes, the feeling of safety and comfort we feel in them, and we will contemplate the horror we would feel if that sense of safety was pulled out from under us.

I was also very interested in her discussion of the contradictory nature of the ideals of the American Dream: “Manifest destiny told us to ‘go west, young man,’ but this part of the American ideology is in direct contradiction with the long-term mortgage that locks you not only to a city or state but to a specific property for decades.” This contrast relates to a tension that often appears in horror films — a family moves into a dream home and is loath to leave it even when the going gets bad, or a family moves into a home that turns out to be haunted, but they don’t necessarily have any other option other than to try to see it through — and the tying of classic horror movie tropes to broader societal concepts is always interesting, especially when laid out well and backed by solid examples, as is seen in this book.

Some chapters are more thorough than others — the Witch Houses chapter has many more references than the chapter on Brutalism, for example — but overall there is a good amount of evidence and a good balance between real-life and fictional examples. The chapter on houses in miniature was particularly interesting. The author writes about the dioramas in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and the way that the film’s sets were built to evoke the feeling that the actors, too, are moving (or, more accurately, being moved) within a diorama. On the real-life side of things, the discussion of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a diorama series of crime scenes used to improve forensic investigation, was fascinating.

I did have a few issues with the book. For one, the author spoils the ending of several films in instances where I don’t feel that it’s necessary to support her thesis. Obviously in some cases of books like this, you have to give away the major plot points of your examples in order for them to be relevant — if you’re discussing antagonistic father-son relationships you can’t really use Star Wars as an example unless you tell anyone in your audience who isn’t yet aware of the connection between Luke and Vader.

However, in this book, regarding films discussed like The Others and His House, I think that enough information about their plots could have been given to make the intended point while still leaving some mystery for those who haven’t seen them. I know that I often use this type of book as a way to add to my to-watch or to-read list, offering more examples of a trope I am interested in, so spoiling the endings of books or films I haven’t seen yet is frustrating.

It also felt in some places that more time was spent cataloguing the “contents” of the houses (i.e. the plots of the films set there or, in the case of the real life examples, the crimes committed there) than the houses themselves.

In particular, some of the examples focusing on true crime started to feel too tangental, straying away from the connection to the houses/homes and delving too much into the events themselves. For example, I understood what the author was going for in connecting the novel Room and the tragic real-life story of “feral child” Genie, but in the case of the latter there was little connection to the thesis of the book.

Furthermore, at the start of the book the authors understandably says she won’t include places like slave’s quarters because these were not “homes” to the enslaved people living there, but then it follows that surely a place of imprisonment for Genie (or, in fiction, for the kidnapped inhabitants of Room) was not a “home” to be discussed either.

From the second half of the subtitle, “the Architecture of Dread,” I was hoping for more on the design of houses themselves. While this aspect does certainly get coverage in some sections of the book, looking at architectural oddities on screen and in reality, the trope of architecture that is Not Quite Right — houses that are bigger on the inside, stairways that don’t lead where they’re supposed to — is one of my favorites and I would’ve liked a deeper dive into some of these given the supposed secondary premise of the book.

That said, the sections looking at strange and unusual architecture did have some good moments, most interestingly in dispelling myths about the Winchester Mystery House (no, Sarah Winchester wasn’t taking her orders from ghosts; she was just a hobby architect). On the fiction side of things, I enjoyed the brief foray into one of my favorite books of all time, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, as a particularly good example of both impossible architecture and a false home (although I found it odd that one of the other most well-known examples of these tropes, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, did not get a mention).

This book is a catalog of houses that have gone wrong and the ways our built environment can evoke terror and dread. But more so this is a book about the home, and the idea of home, and how horror perverts and manipulates one of the most personal and intimate experiences we have as human beings.

I think that Sick Houses will appeal mostly to readers who already have an interest in the topic. At points it feels as though the author has cornered you at a party and is explaining her research project to you. For me, that’s fine, as it’s a long-standing interest of mine as well. But it may not work as well for readers who aren’t already fascinated by architectural horror or the unheimlich feeling of a haunted house.

But if the above quote draws you in, then this is definitely one to keep an eye out for. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Also, if this sort of book is right up your alley, you might also enjoy Feeding the Monster by Anna Bogutskaya (link to my review), American Scary by Jeremy Dauber (link to my review on Goodreads), and of course Danse Macabre by Stephen King.

Book Review: We Do Not Part by Han Kang

03/02/2025 Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”

We Do Not Part will probably be a lot of folks’ introduction to Han Kang, being that it is her first new release in translation since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. And I think that this haunting novel is a perfectly fitting place to start.

We Do Not Part encapsulates all of the things I have come to expect from Han’s writing — gorgeously poetic prose (this time translated from Korean by Emily Yah Won and Paige Aniyah Morris rather than her usual translator Deborah Smith), eeriness bordering on (and sometimes tipping over) the edge of horror, and unflinching references to the darkest parts of Korean history (in this case the 1948-49 Jeju massacre).

I didn’t realize until reading the lecture that Han Kang gave as part of the Nobel prize ceremony how often she incorporates elements of her own life in her work. I know very little about her personal life, and apparently few others do either — her husband, a literary critic, was referenced in a number of biographical articles of the author around the time of her Nobel win, but she then revealed that they have actually been divorced for many years.

Of course you don’t need to know much about an author to enjoy their work, and in particular it’s not necessarily any of our business how much of themselves an author does or does not put into their stories (and I’ve written before how frustrating it is that people often assume women’s novels are autobiographical in a way that they never do for men).

However, in this case it does seem that there are key elements of some of Han’s stories that were inspired by real moments in her life. In her Nobel lecture, she says that, like the unnamed narrator of the stunning The White Book, she too had an older sister who lived for only a few hours after birth. As in Human Acts, she happened on a book with photos of the Gwangju massacre that inspired her writing the novel.

And the dream in We Do Not Part, the dream of black tree stumps that served as markers for a mass grave by the sea, that dream was shared by the author and her protagonist (and the protagonist, like the author, is a novelist who wrote a 2014 novel about Gwangju in an effort to shake its hold on her, only to find herself further haunted).

While of course many authors have similar moments of inspiration that they draw from their own lives and insert, overtly or covertly, into their writing, in Han’s case these elements serve to further blend reality and unreality in a way that she does masterfully across her work.

In We Do Not Part, the protagonist Kyungha is called on by her friend and artistic partner Inseon to travel to Jeju and look after her pet bird while she is in hospital. What begins as a straightforward journey turns surreal when Kyungha finds herself in the midst of a snowstorm as she attempts to reach Inseon’s home.

And in the second half of the novel, as dreams permeate the waking hours, as ghosts visit the living, as past and present meld, the story gains further depth both in plot and in emotion. While the specific atrocity of the Jeju massacre is the main focus, broader themes of mourning and memory fill the pages.

In her Nobel lecture, Han Kang says:

I think the questions I was asking were these: To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?

I feel that these questions are present not only in We Do Not Part but across all of Han Kang’s work, and that there is no more adept writer to ask and attempt to answer them. Her Nobel is extremely well deserved, and if this is the book by which new audiences are introduced to her work, then I think it is a poetic, poignant choice.