This book announces itself as “a vampire opera in verse.” It’s not an opera (not dramatic in structure, more exposition than dialogue), but the story of a romance between a vampire nobleman and a young woman from a family of vampire hunters is operatic. Most modern novels in poetry opt for free verse, but The Night Library of Sternendach uses the onegin stanza, and mostly uses it well. There are spots where a word or phrase is obviously dictated by rhyme, but those are few and minor. More often, the verbal music enhances the story, and sometimes the rhymes remind me of Byron.
Recent reading: Issues with Authority, by Nadia Bulkin
Issues with Authority, Nadia Bulkin; Ghoulish Books, 2025.
Issues with Authority is a collection of three stories by Nadia Bulkin.
The first story, “Cop Car,” is a fascinating but flawed tale of sociopathy, cultism, covert ops, and a doomed attempt to build a family. One of the plot elements is “a hat on a hat” — leaving it out wouldn’t change the story much, but included, it’s an additional implausibility to swallow. The prose is beautiful and the characters wonderfully drawn.
“Your Next Best American Girl” is a scorching fantastic satire built on body horror. It reminds me of Bulgakov, whom I’ve recently read, and also of The Beauty, which I’ve been watching. Bulkin cuts deeper than the TV series, though.
This collection saves the best for last with “Red Skies in the Morning.” The premise is similar to the movie The Ring, but the approach is original, mixing family drama, serial killer thriller and police (or at least government) procedural. It’s the most moving of the three stories, and I’d love to see it adapted for television.
(I wasn’t paid for this review, and don’t get any kind of affiliate compensation.)
My horror reads in 2025
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:
- Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes
- Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry, edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli
- Uncanny: The Origins of Fear, by Junji Ito, trans. Jocelyne Allen
- Supernatural Detectives 4, by Jessica Douglas Kerruish and Ella M Scrymsour
- The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due
- Familiar, by Jeremy C. Shipp
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
- Flowers of Mold, by Ha Seong-nan, trans. Janet Hong
- Monstrilio, by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- The Deviant Vol. 1, by Joshua Hixson, James Tynion IV
- Antifa Splatterpunk, edited by Eric Raglin
- From the Belly, by Emmett Nahil
- Moonflow, by Bitter Karella
- Tono Monogatari, by Shigeru Mizuki, trans. Zack Davisson
- No Trouble at All, edited by Alexis DuBon and Eric Raglin
- Macbeth, by William Shakespeare and Gareth Hinds
- Strange Stones, by Edward Lee and Mary Sangiovanni
- The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw
- Feral & Hysterical: Mother Horror’s Ultimate Reading Guide to Dark and Disturbing Fiction by Women, by Sadie Hartmann
- Mourning Jewelry, by Stephanie M. Wytovich
- It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel, by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink
- Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford
- Seven Legendary Monsters, by Clara Elena Garcia
- Vivia, by Tanith Lee
- All Your Friends are Here, by M. Shaw
- Capitalism: A Horror Story, by Jon Greenaway
- Tomie, by Junji Ito, trans. Naomi Kokubo
Recently Read: Macbeth, graphic novel by Gareth Hinds
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.
Recently Read: Moonflow, by Bitter Karella
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.
Recently watched: Death of a Unicorn (2025)
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.
Recently read: From the Belly, by Emmett Nahil
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.)
Recently devoured horror
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.
Recently read: Familiar, Jeremy C. Shipp
Familiar, by Jeremy C. Shipp, Ghoulish Press, 2024
This could best be described, I think, as cozy cosmic horror. I’m continually amazed by Jeremy C. Shipp’s imagination. Hard to review without spoilers, but if you find yourself transfixed by a desiccated eyeball in someone’s hand, you probably brought it on yourself.
Recently read: The Reformatory, Tananarive Due
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.