Spooky Season! My October reading.

Posted on by eabrenner

I thought I might post individual reviews throughout the month, get back into the swing of things, but after I hate-reviewed Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories at the beginning of the month, I was too busy reading nine other things to stop and write about them.

So, here it is. I finally sat down and forced my (often very emotional) thoughts into coherence. Here’s my reviews of my spooky season reading:

Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I laughed out loud, I cried a little, I cheered, I loved it. I was not prepared for this series to be over, and this book is both wonderful and not nearly enough. (I will never get over Matthew asking Bryde if he’d ever read about clinical depression; Declan trying so hard to hold it together and making the worst, most reactionary choices because he’s just at the end of his rope; Adam confessing to Ronan that he felt like he’d killed so many other versions of himself to become the version who went to Harvard and then found it all lacking; Ronan remaining fundamentally the same while fundamentally changing as he discovers his truest self and comes to terms with it.) What deeply drawn, deeply felt, deeply satisfyingly, gloriously messy and messed up and tragic and hopeful people these characters are. I will miss them and enjoy visiting them again and again.

Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome by Stephen Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Picked this up for authors I already knew I liked (Tanith Lee, Angela Slatter, Garth Nix). Didn’t really find any new-to-me writers that had me adding things to my to-read list. Enjoyed the interstitial Grimm originals and several of the adaptations and interpretations, but only found it somewhat memorable on the whole. Am already forgetting most of the stories and will certainly have lost most of this anthology within another month. Rated 4 stars because the stories I did like, I really liked.

The Dark Magazine, Issue 71: April 2021 by Sean Wallace

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Only read “Forward, Victoria” because I’m a big fan of Carlie St. George’s short fiction. Gym listen. Brought to mind Seanan McGuire’s Ghost Roads books with the exploration of how legends change over time and ghosts are bound by rules. Was drawn in by the relentlessness of Victoria’s attention to revenge, for petty slights or serious sins.

Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Great fun from Cherie Priest, introducing a not-very-impressive psychic and a non-skeptical detective. Good balance between the murder case and the characters’ personal lives and concerns. I would go to a bar to watch Leda sing Klairvoyant Karaoke, and I am looking forward to seeing more of Grady and his daughter in future books.

The Sandman: Act II by Dirk Maggs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


More little stand-alone stories, less meta-plot than Act One, but still 100% delightful, even when it’s awful and disturbing and you remember this is a horror story. The quality of this as an audio drama is stellar.

Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’ll admit, I didn’t fall in love with Jade in book one. I liked her, I felt for her, I rooted for her, but I don’t remember loving her. I only remember loving that last image, that last moment.

This book made me love her. The first thing Jade does when she returns to Proofrock, a town full of people who turned their backs on her, is embrace a traumatized young woman. The identity explorations, switcheroos, mother-daughter parallels, and connections between unlikely people had me cheering and guessing and crying and wanting. I was as desperate as Jade for things to work out in her favor, for the people she cared for to survive and care for her back. I wanted to cry when Jade made a sacrifice play at the end, again, but I’m glad she’ll be back. The slasher references came thick and fast, and I haven’t watched enough of the genre to follow it very well, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Stephen Graham Jones redefines “compulsively readable” prose for me. This is a banger of a novel.

Thanks to Gallery/Saga Press and Netgalley for the ARC!

Slow Burn by Laura Blackwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Picked this up because I enjoyed a shorter piece by Blackwell in Nightmare Magazine. Loved the quiet horror, the weird and creeping dread and sense of wrongness, loved the unlikeable-ness of Anne, but didn’t love the whole of the story. I wish there’d been less of an explanation at the end. Rather than leave me with a sense of future dread or larger horror, it deflated the story for me. Oh well. Might be someone else’s perfect read.

Revenge by Yōko Ogawa

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Not at all what I was expecting from the cover and title, but I loved it. Sparse, elegant prose. Not a word out of place or overwritten. Hit all the quiet horror and gothic buttons, and linked all the stories together. I was in heaven.

Everything is slightly off. Circumstances have characters questioning their own perception of reality. People behave strangely in ways that can be dismissed until they can’t. Ogawa moves us so slowly from the mundane to the bizarre to the murderous we don’t feel the transition until we’re in the middle of something deeply and overtly disturbing. Brings to mind Daphne du Maurier.

Great Ghost Stories by John Grafton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Utter whiplash to read this on the heels of Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. Too many over-written stories by men, only one by a woman. Almost noped out when Bram Stoker named his character Malcolm Malcolmson in “The Judge’s House.” (Not gonna lie, I skipped that one.) Things improved a little bit with Ambrose Bierce and the other early-20th century writers, but only to the point that it was a tolerable read. I just lost all patience for 18th and 19th century prose, it seems, and I was so worn out by it by the time I got to the 20th century, it soured the whole book for me. No great loss: I picked it up at the beginning of the month at a used book sale and left it in a little free library earlier today for someone else to enjoy.



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Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (edited by M.R. James)

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Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Reading this reminded me that I don’t like mid-nineteenth century fiction. It uses too many words, rambles in the wrong places, and I don’t care for the repetitious framework of addressing the listener, or reader, and the excessive time spent setting up the story as “something I’ll do my best to commit to paper” and ending it with “that’s all I have to say about that.” In his introduction, M.R. James says that he placed the best stories first and put the earlier and lesser stories at the end, but I prefer the stories in the second half (with the exception of the last story, “Stories of Lough Guir” which petered off into nothing). The small “chapters” save Le Fanu laboring over transitions with too many boring words that don’t add anything to the story. And his use of colloquial dialogue to convey an accented voice isn’t as overwhelming and distracting in the back half as in the leading stories of the collection.

I did tweak to some repeated imagery, but don’t get too excited; it’s of the mundane sort. Le Fanu really liked those large black and white houses. He used the same setting multiple times: the countryside of Munster, the Murroa woods, Lisnavoura. Perhaps M.R. James chose some of these stories because they were linked by these elements. He doesn’t say anything about that in his introduction, so I can’t know, and I don’t want to read any more of Le Fanu’s work to find out how common these elements are. I want these tales to be linked the way Angela Slatter’s Sourdough stories are all linked, but none of these tales reference each other or have characters in common. Le Fanu doesn’t build a shared world or mythos across stories.

I like the ghosts, spirits, and spectral encounters in the stories, but I also find myself wanting to re-write a lot of them, sometimes from other people’s point of view, almost always from a closer perspective instead of the distance of time or second-hand narrator. I have to disagree with James’s assertion in the introduction that a ghost story “needs some deliberateness in the telling: we listen to it the more readily if the narrator poses as elderly , or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.'” I am too modern in my tastes. I want the visceral immediacy of contemporary fiction. I want narrators of all ages telling their own stories, or for the third-person or omniscient narrator to get the hell out of the way. I do not “regard the leisureliness of [Le Fanu’s] style as a merit.”




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The Sun Down Motel by Simone St James

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The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A damn good gothic. Superb unsettling details (the smoking man, the flickering lights, the child running by the pool), a twisty plot, an actual good use of two time periods, and excellent characters that did things because of their personalities and motivations and not because the plot required them to. Made all the other gothics I read (or tried reading) throughout the spooky season pale by comparison.




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Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

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Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Surprised me at every turn. Thought I was in for a snarky, millennial wish-fulfillment in which the older generation are internet buffoons and the younger generation savvy and slick. Instead I got some very real social and political takedowns both within the story and metaphorically for what the story represents. Also did not expect all the feels between our anti-hero protagonist and the supervillain. Despite the length, this was a fast and fun read.



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Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga) by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Finally reading the Vorkosigan Saga! Worth the wait, lives up to the hype.

Delicious tension between our unlikely and surprised lovers Cordelia and Aral, who make a series of increasingly dramatic choices dictated by their honor that serve to not only keep them apart but work against each other, until the things to which they dedicate their honor begin to change. All the while they are also working desperately and often secretly to keep each other safe through hostile environments, space battles, personal attacks, government intrigues, and the well-meaning misconceptions of other people. The results are both harrowing and wryly and slyly comedic. My one criticism is that because the story is somewhat episodic, it felt like it had multiple endings, but I enjoyed it so much I didn’t really mind.



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