My horror reads in 2025

Posted on By caracabe

Out of the 68 books I read in 2025 (that I logged), 27 of them were horror-related. Going by the page counts listed on StoryGraph, that’s a total of 7,314 pages of horror, but that’s almost certainly an overestimate. 19 of them were fiction (including 4 graphic books), 5 were nonfiction, 2 were poetry, 1 was an anthology with both fiction and poetry.

The list, roughly in the order I read them:

  1. Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes
  2. Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli
  3. Uncanny: The Origins of Fear, by Junji Ito, trans. Jocelyne Allen
  4. Supernatural Detectives 4, by Jessica Douglas Kerruish and Ella M Scrymsour
  5. The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due
  6. Familiar, by Jeremy C. Shipp
  7. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
  8. Flowers of Mold, by Ha Seong-nan, trans. Janet Hong
  9. Monstrilio, by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
  10. The Deviant Vol. 1, by Joshua Hixson, James Tynion IV
  11. Antifa Splatterpunk, edited by Eric Raglin
  12. From the Belly, by Emmett Nahil
  13. Moonflow, by Bitter Karella
  14. Tono Monogatari, by Shigeru Mizuki, trans. Zack Davisson
  15. No Trouble at All, edited by Alexis DuBon and Eric Raglin
  16. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare and Gareth Hinds
  17. Strange Stones, by Edward Lee and Mary Sangiovanni
  18. The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw
  19. Feral & Hysterical: Mother Horror’s Ultimate Reading Guide to Dark and Disturbing Fiction by Women, by Sadie Hartmann
  20. Mourning Jewelry, by Stephanie M. Wytovich
  21. It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel, by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink
  22. Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford
  23. Seven Legendary Monsters, by Clara Elena Garcia
  24. Vivia, by Tanith Lee
  25. All Your Friends are Here, by M. Shaw
  26. Capitalism: A Horror Story, by Jon Greenaway
  27. Tomie, by Junji Ito, trans. Naomi Kokubo
Reading

Recently Read: Macbeth, graphic novel by Gareth Hinds

Posted on By caracabe

Macbeth, by Gareth Hinds and William Shakespeare. Candlewick Press, 2015.

I might start seeking out graphic novel versions of Macbeth. I’ve read a bad one. Now, with the Gareth Hinds adaptation, I’ve read a good one. This book brings Shakespeare’s play to life, and makes me feel things. I appreciate the notes at the end, where Hinds talks about his historical research and explains some of his artistic and editorial decisions. If someone were asking for a graphic novelization of Macbeth, I’d gladly point them to this. However… I feel like there must be bolder interpretations out there.

Reading

Recently Read: Moonflow, by Bitter Karella

Posted on By caracabe

Moonflow, by Bitter Karella (Run For It, 2025)

A psychedelic/cult/folk/spatterpunk horror novel, full of mushrooms and blood and horniness. Every character is some degree of broken, and every character is at least a little relatable. (Every human character, that is.) Grower and purveyor of psychedelic mushrooms Sarah sets out to hunt for the legendary King’s Breakfast so she can keep a roof over the head of Herman, her needy cat. Too bad that bad trips and a violent sapphic cult and manipulative nature spirits and a mansplaining park ranger get in the way. Entertaining chapter epigraphs from a fictional mushroom guide and the diary of a failed entrepreneur. Profusely inventive. A trippy ride.

Uncategorized

Recently watched: Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Posted on By caracabe

Let’s see, we have the widowed father, a corporate lawyer so busy providing for his daughter that he’s lost touch with who she is as a person. We have the daughter, with her two-colored hair and nose ring, cartoonishly progressive, but the only character whose moral compass is working. (At least in the early part of the movie, but we wonder: will the father’s slumbering conscience be reawakened? Who can say? It defies prediction!) We have the dying business tycoon who wants someone beside his bumbling family to carry on his legacy. We have the tycoon’s wife, who just got off the phone with the foundation, and good news about the refugees, we’re relocating them! — Or are we vaccinating them? We have the rich couple’s spoiled son, jack of all hobbies and master of none, who surely will not turn out to be a greedy, manipulative person. We have the rich couple’s servants, who seem to be former special ops. And we have two of the tycoon’s scientists (Asian, naturally), who for some reason work out of his home.

Despite the presence of cell phones and the internet, this movie feels like it was made in the 1980s. Anti-oligarch, but that’s not enough to make it a good movie. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega are wasted on flat characters in a story with few surprises. A couple of amusing moments. Would not recommend.

Watching

Recently read: From the Belly, by Emmett Nahil

Posted on By caracabe
front cover, showing the shoulders and head of a submerged person, their eyes and above obscured, barnacles on their skin

From the Belly, by Emmett Nahil; Tenebrous Press, 2024.

Moby-Dick in an alternate world, but the whalers are the ones being hunted. Body horror, eroticism, mutiny, nature taking revenge, gods of the deep, capitalism at its most brutal, a main character with a secret (and then another, and another), body count and sense of dread both logarithmically increasing—this book has it all. Interior illustrations by Megan Llewellyn. (I love the pictures, I just wish there were more of them.)

Reading

Recently devoured horror

Posted on By caracabe

Recently read

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones. This unusual vampire tale takes the form of a story within a story within a story. The embedded narratives span more than a century, but they are all one story, beautifully told. (I noticed one period vocabulary slip-up, but it’s something only a pedant like me would care about.) The characters are complex, and the dueling vampires might not be the most evil among them, not even when they feed on children. Jones creates his own vampire lore, similar to what we know from Stoker and Hollywood but also alien. The Blackfeet terms were challenging for me to keep track of, but that’s not a bad thing. Blackfeet history and culture are central to the story. A tense, eerie, tragic novel, not without wit and humor.

Recently viewed

Tomie (1998 movie, directed by Ataru Oikawa). I haven’t read the manga series this is adapted from, but if I didn’t know it was Junji Ito, I would have known it was Junji Ito. Being friends with Tomie is like being friends with Hannibal Lecter: you don’t know why you’ve been singled out, and you might not want to eat everything you’re served. But Lecter probably won’t manipulate you into killing him, and if you do kill him he’ll stay dead. This movie does an excellent job of maintaining tension and mystery throughout.

Reading, Watching

Recently read: The Reformatory, Tananarive Due

Posted on By caracabe

To be honest, I was reluctant to start The Reformatory. I’d read so many good things about it, I was afraid it would fall short of its reputation. But Tananarive Due has never disappointed me yet. Characters to care about, in a suspenseful and heartbreaking story. Just to complicate things for the main characters, who already are dealing with angry ghosts, a psychopathic warden, and the Klan, they also have to manage well-meaning allies who don’t believe in spirits or who do believe in the fairness of the justice system. This book kept me up late at night turning pages.

Reading

Recently viewed: Longlegs (2024)

Posted on By caracabe

Longlegs (2024), directed and written by Osgood Perkins.

Nicolas Cage gives the kind of high-amplitude performance you hire Nic Cage for. The movie is visually unsettling, and the script has intriguing elements. But the big twists are obvious ahead of time, and Longlegs doesn’t commit to its craziness. It tries to make sense, when it should embrace the nightmarish irrationality at its heart. If it did that, I might accept Carrie Anne’s odd dialect without wondering why she’s adding all those S’s to words. Entertaining enough to watch once, but not to rewatch.

Watching

Recent reading, Feb 5 2025

Posted on By caracabe

Queer Little Nightmares

Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli; Arsenal Pulp Press, 3rd printing, 2024.

This is what small presses are for! Queer Little Nightmares is a collection of stories and poems for the monsters in all of us (especially the queer ones). Diverse in style and content, these works are both deliciously weird and grounded in emotional truth. Standouts for me include the stories “The Vetala’s Song” by Anuja Varghese and “Strange Case” by Eddy Boudel Tan, and the poems “Godzilla, Silhouette Against City” by Ryan Dzelzkalns and “Cryptid Cruising” by Avra Margariti. But they’re all worth reading.

Horror: A Literary History

Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes; The British Library, 2020.

This collection of essays surveys the horror genre in English and American literature from the 18th century to today. Sometimes the style is ridiculously academic, but the content is interesting throughout. Every chapter ends with a list of references and a “What to Read Next” section, making it a useful book to keep on hand.

Blog, Reading