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Another year in the books means another chunk taken out of my TBR pile. I won't rank them in any order as I believe that's a very arbitrary way to look at something as nuanced and layered as reading, but I will talk about the ten books I enjoyed the most this past year. I'll also link the pages to each image if you'd like to learn more.
And I'll start off by cheating.
BY THE LIGHT OF DEAD STARS and TIDES OF DARKNESS by Andrew Van Wey
Ok, so these are two books. However, they are the beginning and continuation of the same story. Andrew Van Wey's LOST COAST series enraptured me. From the opening pages, I was intrigued by these characters and the worlds that they inhabited. As I continued on, I fell in absolute love with them.
The story concerns a man named Mark Fitzsimmons who finds himself to sudden and reluctant guardian of his niece Zelda following her parents death. The two are drawn to a community called Greywood Bay on Northern California's lost coast. What they don't know is that Greywood Bay is home to something dark, something malevolent, and soon the bonds between Mark and Zelda will be tested by forces beyond the scope of the sane.
The books are lengthy, but never feel like it. They move like a freight train, propelled forward page by page. The story is deep and layered, and the supporting cast shines in their time on the page. These books make up parts 1 and 2 of the trilogy, and I can't wait to conclude this amazing story when the final book drops.
LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP by Megan Stockton
This one hit me like a truck. It's short, it's far from sweet, and it has a beating, black heart poured out by an immense talent.
The story concerns Six-Mile Island, a small island off the East Coast which every year prepares for a bad storm by evaculating to the mainland. Only a few residents stay behind to brave the storm. That turns out to be a huge mistake as a missing child kicks off a chain of unexplainable and macabre events that pull these tormented character into the horrific orbit of something dark waiting to emerge from the sea..
I love an emotional story, and Stockton delivers one that is equal parts disquieting, unnerving, tender, and heartbreaking. Above all else, this is a story of loss and acceptance, and these ideas shine through each and every page.
THESE THINGS LINGER by Dan Franklin
Continuing in our "books that depress you in a good way" is this bad boy.
Following the death of his uncle, Alex Wilson returns to his childhood home, a place of hard memories and harder regrets, and tries to reconcile with memory of the man who raised him. While there, he makes an attempt to contact his deceased uncle, a choice that turns disastrous as something follows him back home.
Franklin knows how to pull heartsrings in a meaningful way. It never feels forced, and it always comes across authetnically. There is a soul to this story, a rich blood flowing through carefully constructed veins of an engaging and resonant story. At one point, I had to put the book down and take a break from it. That is a monumental compliment coming from me.
ALL THE FIENDS OF HELL by Adam Nevill
Of course Nevill's newest was going to find a way on this list.
Following the Red Night of Bells, Europe is plunged into an apocalyptic nightmare of almost biblical proportions. A man named Karl survives the first night and finds himself in the care of two orphaned children, pushed to the brink of a dying landscape haunted by horrific creatures from a world beyond our own.
Nevill has been on an absolute roll as of late. His Ritual Limited books have been phenomenal and FIENDS is no different. The way he uses sensory imagery, color, smells, sounds, to paint a horrid picture in the reader's head is unmatched. One scene in particular reminded me so much of the old friends of his previous novel LAST DAYS (aka, the scariest novel ever written) and yet someone made it even creepier. Nevill is a modern master, a storyteller who understands what makes readers. tick and takes his sweet time ticking away.
STOLEN TONGUES by Felix Blackwell
I'm super late on this one, but after finally reading the book I've heard so very much about, I can safely say it was worth the wait.
High up on the windswept cliffs of Pale Peak, Faye and Felix celebrate their new engagement. But soon, a chorus of ghastly noises erupts from the nearby the screams of animals, the cries of children, and the mad babble of a hundred mournful voices. A dark figure looms near the windows in the dead of night, whispering to Faye. As the weather turns deadly, Felix discovers that his terrified fiancée isn’t just mumbling in her sleep – she’s whispering back.
Strangely enough, I wasn’t a fan for the first 50 pages or so. I thought it was genuinely creepy but the structure seemed off to me. Kinda repetitive. But then the story kept going, and I realized that the structure had a purpose. By establishing a consistent set of expectations, Blackwell is able to up the fear factor by subtly changing little things here and there for maximum effect. In essence, the same thing is somehow always different in some terrible way. Not to mention that it turned the story into this engine that pumped at a consistent, malevolent pace. What began as a possible disappointment ended up being a 3 day read that was always lurking in my thoughts even when I wasn’t reading it. And yes, it is truly creepy. Whether it’s “scary” will certainly depend on your definition of the word. But no one can deny the skin crawling creepiness of this bad boy.
OUR FATHERS' BURDEN by William F. Gray
I was lucky enough to read this one prior to its publication. I read the entire thing in two days.
Harry decides to carry out his late father’s final to meet up with some of his old friends whose fathers had been best friends with his own - for a traditional camping trip their fathers had taken annually in years passed. But what they find up there in the Appalachian Mountains, and the mysterious circumstances that sent them there, reveal that their fathers had kept a terrible, deadly secret. And now that burden is theirs, and they must pay the price.
This thing is lean and mean. A story that utlizes both metaphorical and physical terrors to tell a tight and streamlined story of generational burdens and all the baggage that comes along with them. And it does all of this with the familiar yet shockingly entertaining structure of a creature feature. Characters effectively put on the page as complicated figures living in the shadows of those who've come before, each weighed with their own burdens as the world crumbles around them. This all moves along at a relentless pace that wastes no time or space, providing a sleek and effective structure to tell a story of burden and redemption.
SLASHTAG by Jon Cohn
While most of my list has been hyper emotional horror, I found myself enraptured by one particular piece of what I would call horror satire.
A group of celebrities are invited to haunted hotel with a morbid past to compete in a horror-themed game show called Slashtag, only to find that the game is far from a show and the ghosts of the hotel aren't done telling their stories just yet.
This one is SHARP. Cohn effortlessly deconstructs celebrity culture while skewering social media and the influencer culture we've unfotunately devolved into. All the while, he tells a wildly fun horror story that is just so freaking hard to put down.
THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE by Stephen Graham Jones
While I wasn;t the biggest fan of the first book in Jones's slasher adoration trilogy MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW, I was intrigued enough to move into the second book DON'T FEAR THE REAPER. After thoroughly enjoying that one, I was curious to see how Jones ended it all.
Soiler Alert. He knocked it out of the freaking park.
It’s been four years since Jade Daniels last set foot in Proofrock, Idaho. Since then, her reputation, and everything around Indian Lake, has changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of the savage history of Proofrock, Idaho, no one’s got the mettle to confront – no one except a final girl, making her last stand, this time for everything.
Jones has a tendency to be a "love him or hate him" author. I don't see him as quite that binary. He has a very unique voice and style that can take some time to get used to, but there is no doubt that passion and soul that goes into every story. Your mileage will vary on this one, its the final part of a trilogy after all, but for my money this was his best work since THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS.
WE'VE ALREADY GONE TOO FAR by MJ Mars
For my final book, let me throw a bone to a collection of short fiction. MJ Mars exploded onto the scene with her 2023 novel THE SUFFERING, and her newest offering is collection of short stories that cement her as an absolute must read.
A father takes his son on a camping trip but isn’t sure who he brings home. When passengers begin to disappear from her flight, a cabin crew member faces the childhood fears she thought she’d long overcome. At his mother’s funeral, a magician contemplates a family curse. Two graduates listen to a retired soldier talking about his participation in a death-defying experiment, and a punk band trying to be polite at a high-brow art installation step up when monsters attack
Batshit crazy in the absolute best possible way. Wide ranging in its subjects, Mars is easily able to shift tonally and structurally to create one of the most varied collections I've read. An absolute blast.