Tag: horror

  • Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

    Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

    Gonna regret letting this one into my house. The filmed versions are superior.

  • Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess

    Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess

    Even the author hated this book, but the movie is an all-time Canadian classic

  • The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld

    The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld

    A family’s unravelling after a tragedy as told through the eyes of a 10 year old girl — it’s one of the grimmest and darkest things I’ve ever read.

  • What Draws Us Near edited by Keith Cadieux and Adam Petrash

    What Draws Us Near edited by Keith Cadieux and Adam Petrash

    The first anthology from Little Ghosts Books — an independent, queer-owned horror bookstore and publisher based in Toronto. It’s good.

  • Black Paradox by Junji Ito

    Black Paradox by Junji Ito

    This ranks with his best. The grim and gory story of four friends who make a suicide pact that goes way, way wrong.  Ito and Stephen King have the same pattern: scary and simple premise, excellent atmosphere and tension building, and a complete whiff on the ending.  This is that. Some of the art in…

  • Mimi’s Tales of Terror by Junji Ito

    Junji Ito didn’t develop these ideas – they are adapted from a book of short stories based on urban legends. The result is very well-illustrated campfire stories that you’ve heard a version of before. The stories in the back half are better than the first few, but this is a book for Ito completists only.…

  • Windeye by Brian Evenson

    This short story was linked to in Lincoln Michel’s substack and it’s a fast, great read: a pair of siblings realize there’s one more window on the outside of their house than on the inside.

  • Rouge by Mona Awad

    I’m obviously not the target audience for this, but I really loved Bunny. This is sharp satire and truly original writing. The dreamlike storytelling and ever-increasing weirdness were absolute catnip to me. It was funny and clever. I absolutely devoured it. Until the spell broke at around the 2/3 mark. Suddenly the book felt tedious, and…

  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

    This was wild. It read like a fairy tale, and also like a waking nightmare. Each sentence was perfect, but as a whole the thing will scar you for life. It goes a lot deeper than it first appears to, chasing ideas of how scent works on a subconscious level. But also it is just…

  • Another 2001 by Yukito Ayatsuji

    I’m not the target audience for this — my kid told me to read it so I did. It’s a good story, kind of a Final Destination-style curse with a whole bunch of extra supernatural stuff. It’s a strangely complicated setup, and probably 100 pages longer than it needed to be. The writing is where I…