The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe

The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like that it appears to switch from horror to mystery.

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The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The dark delight in this one comes from my love of the cat and hate of the man.

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The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What happens when a mild asshole befriends a murderous sociopath? Detailed and bizarre horror.

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The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A house with a haunted atmosphere works its negative influence on the inhabitants. A study in how location and company can affect your mental state.

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The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I decided to read this because my funny and wise husband posted this tweet on Monday: "The external world could take care of itself... It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends.” 

This is the perfect short story to read right now though it may not currently have its intended emotional effect.

The whole story is available for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1064

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Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Definitely fun but unnecessarily rapey in parts. Lots of great distinct characters, no plot holes, riveting throughout. Still, I would recommend it if you love apocalypse books (I do) but not otherwise.

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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the 8th Murakami book I've read and definitely in the top three for me along with Norwegian Wood and After Dark. The short of it is that Toru Okada is having some angst after leaving his legal job (I relate to that!) when things get very magically weird and his wife leaves him in mysterious circumstances. Interwoven with that is a bunch of truly horrific World War II stories from the perspective of Japanese soldiers in Mongolia, China, and Russia.

Beyond that, it's really difficult to explain what I think the book's deeper meaning is about. It's pretty complex; to give you a rough idea, it's very long and I can't actually think of any scenes that could have been cut. I pretty much always think editors should have slashed down long books. Unlike many Murakami novels, it actually mostly made sense even though it was full of literal magic. I wasn't prepared for such an in-depth exploration of violence, and I think this fantasy book also deserves a horror classification.


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Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Nutshell by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though the premise is somewhat silly in its device, this dark and humorous tale captivated me completely. I loved McEwan’s literary magic. In general, I try to avoid horror or even horror-tinged books, but this was grabbed me in slow increments and at the end I was so invested in the character of the baby that I wanted to know how the rest of his life went. Time to reread Hamlet.

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The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Um... no. I think it was supposed to be scary, but it wasn't. The implications were gross I think? Or maybe nothing? I don't know, but I could have, maybe should have, skipped this.

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Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the beginning and the end, but the middle was a bit of slog. I enjoyed the epistolary format and how it allowed for the viewpoint of various characters.

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Light by M. John Harrison

Light by M. John Harrison
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was not good. Neil Gaiman recommended this, and I'm not going to trust his recommendations going forward.

Imagine if Stephen King wrote A Wrinkle In Time but you didn't even know what was going on until close to the end? That's this novel.

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Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It just wasn't my favorite classic. There are some good sentences, and I did feel for the loneliness and heartbreak of the monster, but he really overreacted, so it was hard to feel for him too much. And the whole thing about learning language was really offputting. Fun to learn, after all these years that Frankenstein was the creator, not the monster.

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Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo

Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Perhaps I am the wrong audience for this book as I don’t particularly enjoy horror-thrillers, but even more than being the wrong audience I thought the almost-ending was bad. It’s a trilogy though so I am a bit tempted to continue since I’ve already invested this much.

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Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fun YA-fantasy-horror book. More consistently good than the first one of the Wayward Children series. The main thing I find problematic with both in the series is the inexplicable way otherwise fairly normal people turn to murder without much compunction. That doesn't seem realistic to me. I get that the whole thing isn't realistic because it's a fantasy novel but I do still expect the characters to behave like actual people.

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Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My last read for the spring Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon. A perfect children's book that's exciting and fun for adults too. It's about bravery, loyalty, family, and love. A classic! Can't wait until James (and then Miranda) is old enough to read it and appreciate it.

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Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, I have a lot of thoughts and I'm going to let them settle for a long time. I cried a few times here. Saunders captured personal grief as well as it can be captured.

I didn't find it as difficult to follow as some reviewers said but it did take a while to get the hang of the structure.

At the same time, this novel was deeply weird. This is what you might expect to happen if Tim Burton and Claudia Rankine did a production of Our Town.

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Nine Minutes by Beth Flynn

Nine Minutes by Beth Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I decided to read this because it was free to download on Amazon and some reviewers on Goodreads were going crazy for it. If you want to read something very different, go for it. It reads like a memoir. It has romance, but it's not successful in that genre. It is good at horror, and I kept mentally screaming GET OUT!!! GET OUT!!! I think it's mostly about Stockholm's Syndrome while denying to be about Stockholm's Syndrome.

The ending is just weird enough that I'm a little tempted to read the sequel. Again, the book is definitely different.

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Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The order of the chapters is a total disaster especially if you're a little OCD. The idea is that there are two timelines. The future one is in order, and the past one is progressing backwards. I got so frustrated with the whole order that about halfway through, I decided to read it "chronologically" but it still wasn't really in order. And there were some parts that still didn't make a ton of sense. But I liked reading about the characters and there's an interesting (disturbing) ending.

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The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this one better than Consider Phlebas, and I'm going to read the third Culture book, but oh boy the evening stroll through Azad Empire contains a lot of descriptions I'd like to unread! And the plot shares a lot with another science fiction book I read but if I told you which one it would be a spoiler. My favorite parts were parts describing aspects of the Culture.

Also, this quote particularly resonated after the election, "He woke the next morning, and it was still the same universe; it had not been a nightmare and time had not gone backward. It had all still happened."

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The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic jam. My favorite part is that the young man sets up his own bad answers.

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