Down We Go & Other Strange Tales (hereafter abbreviated as “Down We Go”) was a recommendation from my Kindle for reading flash fiction (1200 words or less) and horror anthologies. The Kindle algorithm must have put two and two together and recommended this. Once I read the blurb, I bought […]
Common Ground is a ranch romance set in Michigan between the unlikely pair of city girl Melody Weston and senior ranch worker Jason Cole. The ranch hands think the great-niece of the owner is coming to take over and sell the ranch from the old man. Jason thinks he should […]
When an author creates a fantastic debut novel, it’s unfair to compare the sophomore effort to the first. Not making comparisons is hard when they are both mysteries, both historical, both unusual, and the first novel is The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. After reading Hardcastle, I […]
I had heard of Amor Towles’ novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, years ago and wondered why I would read about a Russian gentleman trapped in a hotel after the Bolshevik revolution. On the surface, the novel doesn’t sound interesting and seems out of touch with today’s popular romances and speculative […]
G. Mikki Hayden’s novel Re-Live is the second in the Rebirth series centered around a group of people who are live in New York City and attend the same dojo. Each entry in the series has a different protagonist. In Re-Live, it’s Steven, a psychotherapist who uses unconventional methods to […]
The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a murder mystery by Stuart Turton. Or is it? Is it actually a science fiction story set in the past where a murder has occurred? Or is it a race against time to reveal all the deceit and lies underpinning […]
Let’s all say it together. “The second in a trilogy is the hardest.” The second in a trilogy must contend with the success of the first, build upon it, twist it a new way, all without ticking off its readers. The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather Part 2 are […]
The Stars Will Fall is a collection of speculative fiction short stories by Brian Reindel. One eye-catching element of this book is the number of stories included, a whopping thirty-four. Not only do you have the staples of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, you also have sub-genres of fable, apocalyptic, […]
A group of masked children appear before a green-colored flame and tell scary stories. Each story reflects both the creepiness of the autumnal season as well as the preference of the narrators. Meanwhile, the identity of these storytellers and their purpose starts to crystalize. Welcome to Christopher Robertson’s The October […]
Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest has all the familiar trappings of a Halloween horror story. Each year, an unnamed American town has a visit from a pumpkin-headed monster with a butcher’s knife on Halloween. In this novel, it’s 1963. If the kids stop the creature, they will receive their fill of […]