Hecky Thump

I am seventy two. I have been typing accurately for fifty three years. Pittman trained, if that still means anything to anyone.

Suddenly, I type "Board" and it becomes "Bard" without any notice to me that a substitution has been made. I type "repair" and it becomes "rear".

Am I obsessed with Shakespeare's bottom? No. It has never crossed my mind. I can only conclude that some aspects of Artificial Intelligence are not ready for prime time.

I am also a Cantabrigiensis major in studies of the so-called (or formerly called)  "modern depressives", which includes almost all of the works of George Orwell, and therefore, I am inclined to suppose that the hijacking of the written word is not an accident.

Some online news sites are plagued by word glitches, where commenters of a certain political bent appear to be routinely sabotaged (by A.I.). 

Delightfully, there is a meme: "Autocorrect is my worst enema."

Meanwhile, a political beggar wrote this to me: "I only trust you with this." Ponder word order. The quoted sentence seems to imply that he would not trust me with anything else. Alternatives would be, "I trust you only with this", which is worse but more honest, or "I trust only you with this", which is an obvious fib given that it was a mass blast email.

Isn't parsing fun?

Word order matters, as does punctuation and word choice. A.I. does not replace a good education, partly because AI is only as good as the education of the persons putting in the input.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Trapped by Michael Northrop by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Trapped by Michael Northrop

by Karen S. Wiesner 

  Beware unintended spoilers! 

In the past year, I've been trying to incorporate a lot more audiobooks into my reading. Listening to them fills up time I'm doing mundane daily chores with something productive, and the two library apps I've been using offered them free. This allows me to experience books and authors I'd probably never try otherwise, especially if I have to pay for them. In the process, I might find some hidden gems. 

In January 2026, two things happened: 1) My favorite library app became blocked because of a virtual traffic jam and 2) winter has become very confused. In the first instance, I had to finally email the library to find out why I kept getting an error message that essentially meant I couldn't check out books (e- or audio-). Apparently, libraries have always or just recently started enforcing (I don't know which; only know that I'd never had it happen prior to 2026) a "daily lending budget". What that means is that the library has to control spending and budgetary needs and, therefore, after a certain time of day, they shut off the ability for anyone to borrow books the rest of that day. The suggestion from the library was that I try to check out books as early as possible after the ban lifts each day--in my case, the time for reset is midnight! In other words, I have to be awake at or just after midnight so I can scramble to check out a book while I'm half-asleep. This is not good. When did it become normal for libraries to, you know, stop lending books? Isn't that their primary function? A sad world indeed when it's become too costly for both readers and libraries alike to get books. Say it ain't so, Joe! Update: Last night I woke up just after 2 a.m. and groggily fumbled around on my nightstand for my iPad. I logged onto the library app and located the book I hoped to check out. Luckily, there was no one to see me in my pjs with disheveled hair, blurry-eyed and dazed, scratching my bum (okay, maybe not) as I waited to see if I was one of the lucky few allowed to check out a book that early, early morning (or dead of night, whichever you prefer). Yes, I was lucky. It worked. And now this is what I have to look forward to when it comes to checking out books from this library app from here on out. Well, chin up! I still consider it worth it. 

The second thing that happened was the weather didn't know what in the world it wanted to do in Wisconsin (and I believe for most other states in the country as well). For three days in a row, we were getting dumped on with snow galore. The initial mountains on my lawn became veritable peaks. This was followed by spring for a day, maybe a week, circling back to more snow, or rain (which melted the mountains, at least), ushering in perilous icy conditions, or a combination of all those things at the same time. At one point, a beautiful spring day in our town led us to decide it was a great time to travel, but, after barely an hour on the road, we drove into a blizzard. Seriously, sigh. 

At the convergence of these two January 2026 tricks-or-treats, I had no choice but to utilize my least favorite library app (which has hardly any selection) in order to get my audiobook fix. I happened upon a fitting young adult suspense novel, Trapped by Michael Northrop (published February 2011), in which a winter blizzard traps a bunch of high school kids inside the aging education building for more than a week while the rest of the town scrambles to survive, too. I don't think I've ever read anything by this author before, though he's won a bunch of awards. I liked the cover that displayed how I felt, and, for once, it was nice to hear a story about a bunch of teenagers who weren't foul in speech and deed. Lately, when I check out YA audiobook material, I get a bunch of kids who substitute swear words for any hint of intelligence and who are only thinking about their next lay in between being absolutely obsessed with their cell phones and social media. I mean, maybe this is realistic view of the world we live in, but it's more than a little disheartening to think this might be the direction our future is heading. That last bit could be the winter blues talking… 

Anyway, in Trapped, we get basically nice, decent kids for a change, none of whom are particularly bright or preppy (i.e., superficial as all get out). I actually kind of liked that. Instead of D&D nerds, Mensa level, top-of-their-classer Chalamets and Swifties, we have Scotty, a jock who gets average grades and pimples here and there, his two friends Pete and Jason, Krista and Julie, and Les and Elijah, a couple of misunderstoods. Although school had let out early because of the storm, they'd stayed behind for various reasons and no one knew they were there, leaving them trapped--and seriously screwed as a result. None of them seemed smart enough to figure out how to save themselves, though they did figure out how to get enough to eat and stay warm. It isn't until someone decides to venture out to make sure someone in town knows there are kids trapped at the school that everything changed. While I did find the conclusion very abrupt and mildly unsatisfying, this atmospheric little gem fit perfectly into my January blahs and woes with the right story with the right amount of tension at the right time.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

The Twisted Ones

I consider THE TWISTED ONES, by T. Kingfisher, the best horror novel I’ve read in many years and possibly the only one I’ve found really scary since the original publication of PET SEMATARY. While Karen was unimpressed by it, for me it was the book that turned me on to Kingfisher's work, making her one of my favorite authors. The narrator, Melissa, nicknamed Mouse, receives a call from her elderly father about clearing out his recently deceased mother’s house. The house has been locked and uninhabited for the past two years, since his mother went into a home for the aged. He warns Mouse the place could be “bad,” but she accepts the task, since there’s nobody else to do it. If it turns out to be too much for her, he assures her he’d be okay with having the house razed instead of sold. Even with only vague hints from the blurb about the prospective horrors, I was captivated by this beginning. Mouse’s narrative voice makes the most mundane decisions and chores interesting. She grabbed me on page two with this description of her job, especially since I worked as a proofreader/editor for many years: “I’m a freelance editor. I turn decent books into decently readable books and hopeless books into hopeless books with better grammar.”

She and her rescue hound, Bongo, dutifully head for her grandmother’s house in rural North Carolina. Her grandmother was a hateful person who turns out also to have been a hoarder. “Bad” doesn’t begin to describe the house. At least, however, there’s no rotting food inside, and the water, electricity, and stove work. Mouse finds one bedroom untouched by the piles of accumulated junk (including a room stuffed with creepy dolls). It had belonged to her step-grandfather, Frederick Cotgrave, an immigrant from Wales whom she recalls only as a colorless, silent man constantly browbeaten by his wife. She does have one fond memory of his teaching her to draw the “Kilroy” cartoon popular in World War II, which becomes vitally important later in the story. She finds a journal written by Cotgrave and later a hidden manuscript referenced in the journal. At first she thinks the weird experiences he narrated prove the old man suffered from dementia and paranoia. On the other hand, the petty persecution he mentioned would have been totally in character for her grandmother.

What about the things Cotgrave claimed to have seen in the woods? When Mouse and her dog come across a strange cluster of stones with grotesque carvings on them, in a spot that should not exist in the local geography, she begins to suspect Cotgrave wasn’t losing his mind after all. By the time she discovers his hidden manuscript, she’s inclined to believe the dark things it hints at. It reconstructs as much as he could recall of another journal, the “Green Book,” written by a young girl who’d had sinister encounters with what she called the “white people.” Are the horrors that nineteenth-century girl witnessed being duplicated in North Carolina? Do similar things lurk in secret places all over the world? In the midst of her struggle with the house, Mouse glimpses what appear to be effigies made of sticks, bones, and miscellaneous debris topped by deer skulls. Moreover, she reluctantly entertains the possibility that they are animated. She makes friends with three middle-aged “hippies” on a nearby property, and they acknowledge that all the locals know there are vague but dangerous “things” in the woods.

I can’t be more specific because I don’t want to give away spoilers. As the plot accelerates, unexpected, terrifying events come at every turn. Yet even in the tensest moments, Mouse’s narrative interjects wry humor. (Unlike Karen, I don't feel this feature undercuts the horror. This aspect of Kingfisher's style is one of my favorite elements in all her books.) Mouse labors on the house to a background of the local NPR station’s Pledge Break week, another detail that pays off in the end. This novel includes an abundance of my favorite horror trope, the unearthing of dark secrets from the past. It was also a thrill to recognize this story as essentially a sequel to Arthur Machen’s classic story “The White People,” as the author explains in her afterword. She, of course, puts a different spin on his plot elements. The dog, Bongo, is a character in his own right but not unrealistically sapient. As Mouse frequently notes, he’s as dumb as a box of rocks aside from his almost preternatural tracking ability. Unlike too many horror-fiction characters, Mouse has sound motives for sticking around despite the frightful incidents and, later, for venturing deeper into the forest. Another feature of the novel I admire is that she has a credible reason for writing down her experience -- to sort out the traumatic events in her own mind -- and that, unlike some horror protagonists, she doesn’t blithely move on with her life unscathed after escaping the monsters. Furthermore, Cotgrave’s manuscript sounds believably uncertain at points, not (as Kingfisher discusses in the afterword) as if he had a photographic memory. I’ve rambled on long enough, so I can only urge horror fans to read this fantastic -- in both senses -- story.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Now You Tell Me....

"Now you tell me?" is a gag line, or TV trope, where someone is given a warning, but the warning is too late to be useful. It is not to be confused with a sentence beginning, "Now, you tell me..."

Today, I am not writing about commas, but about tax law as relates to overly-generous authors who go to extraordinary lengths with their marketing, such as by holding sweepstakes, lotteries, contests and the like.

Have you ever awarded a prize worth $600? Have you ever won a prize worth $600 from an author or publisher?

Apparently, if you won such a prize last year (or in a previous year) the organizer of the contest ought to have asked you to fill out a W9 form, and --before January 31st-- they ought to have sent you a Form 1099-MISC so you could declare your $600 winnings and pay taxes. Also, they would file the 1099-MISC covered with a 1096, with the IRS, by the end of February (2026). 

Lovely. Who knew? (Now you tell me?)

Well, the law has changed, and for the better. Now, you may give or receive a contest prize worth up to $1,999:00 without having to fill out forms and pay taxes.

For more details on the new prize tax rules, you could see the article written by legal bloggers

Melissa Landau Steinman, Christopher N. Moran, and Eden Caliendo of Venable LLP.

https://www.allaboutadvertisinglaw.com/2026/01/new-prize-tax-rules-raise-the-1099-threshold-for-sweepstakes-and-contests.html#page=1

Apparently, contest winners have been surprised to learn that they have to provide their social security numbers to the contest organizer.

Therefore --just a thought-- it might be a good idea for any author running a contest to include in the complete published set of Rules that any and all prizes (from the same organizer) with a value of $2,000 in total or in aggregate are contingent on the winner submitting a Form W-9.

Legal bloggers Kristin Lia and Ivana Petani of  Sideman & Bancroft have a very good article from 2024 which summarizes Sweepstakes and Contests 101, what contest organizers need to know in order to stay within the law.

https://www.sideman.com/contests-and-sweepstakes-101/

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

https://www.spacesnark.com/ 

https://www.rowenacherry.com

Valentine's Day: Passion, Peace, and Purpose An Original Article with Artwork by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Valentine's Day: Passion, Peace, and Purpose

by Karen S. Wiesner

Copyright @ Karen Wiesner 

Clematis Vine on Trellis Sketch Rendered in B&W with Minimal Colored Pencil 

  

It's hard to celebrate Valentine's Day when you consider the fractured state of the world. When you look around, you don't have to search to find the bad. It's always there, everywhere your eyes land. It calls attention to itself. It vies for our attention like a proud toddler parading around his newly completed artwork. Negativity wants to steal every part of our focus and schemes to infect and bring us down, preventing positive change from taking root and spreading hope. Bad news will find you every second of every minute of every single day. It's everywhere, determined to suffocate you and steal all the joy out of your life. This is the case, without fail, and forever. You don't have to take a single step to find negativity or bad news because it will find you first. You can't hide from it, no matter how much you might want to. 

The good stuff, the good news, exists in this world, but it's much harder to see, let alone find. You actually have to go looking for it and even then it wouldn't be easy to locate. It's rare you'll ever find it. You have to make a dedicated effort to seek for it, long and hard and with everything in your being. Often, it's like cutting against the grain to even make this effort.

Here's the truly amazing part, though: You don't have to go searching far and wide for the good in life and things that feed your passion. In life's often times' contradictory and ironic serendipity, the things that bring true, inner peace and purpose are already inside you.  These things are made up of who you are and what you already love. 

Sometimes we feel so lost, we don't know how to tap into our passion, peace, and purpose, in part because they require you to look within instead of without (infinitely harder for most people), and they demand your devotion--both your time and your energy, which can be in short supply when there are so many other things vying for both. It'll take strong will, but if you can free up for yourself just fifteen (even five, if that's all you can spare) minutes of every day to draw out the passion that gives you joy and imparts, alongside it, peace and purpose, you'll see the entire world from a different perspective. Don't let anything distract you for those five to fifteen minutes. Shut out the world. Analyze yourself and the things you love, the things you're drawn to, the passions that bring out the very best of you. 

You probably won't need money to bring out that passion because, always, these kinds of things come from within. (I believe they're instilled inside us at conception.) I can't imagine you won't recognize it because you'll come to life and light up from within when you identify your passion--it's the missing piece that is you. This is your happy place, and here you belong; here (together with this piece/peace), you become what you're meant to be. 

Be aware that what you're searching for probably isn't larger-than life, nor is it an ethereal or even an ephemeral thing that wins you fame and fortune. It may not even be a single thing. It could be and probably is more than one, each fitting together and allowing you to find peace in a chaotic world and giving you the motivation to pursue it each and every day. It's the quiet passion deep within your soul that says, "This is where I want to be. Where I'm me. Where I'm happiest. Where I'm whole. Where I can do the most good for myself and others." For some, that's immersing the self in nature and the quieter, more solitary aspects of the earth. For others, it's in books or art or learning. Still others only find peace when they empty the self and give to those in need. 

Whatever your passion is, that's where your main focus should be. Think about this: If you spend your entire life fixated on the sad state of the world, all the negativity and bad in it, and on a volatile future churning out doom and gloom left and right, the present will pass you by and you'll miss everything that could have been worthwhile. Cut out what brings you down wherever and whenever you can without isolating yourself completely from it. (Hermits rarely make the world better for themselves or anyone else.) 

It requires willpower to live in the present and make something good out whatever's before you in the place you're occupying, in this time you're given. If you find the things that feed your passion, you'll experience both peace and a sense of purpose. You'll be doing something that gives you hope and roots and a place to exist that feels safer than anything the world can ever provide. When those things occupy your time and energy, you can let go of all the things that you have no control over in this world. You'll find both a will and a way to reconcile with them because you're doing your part in bringing something worthwhile into being.

Your life and the way you live it can bring inspiration, illumination, and motivation to everyone around you--even without you doing anything except pursuing what you love, and spending your energy and focus on them instead of on all the negative stuff. Trust me, the world does not need or even care about your attention, as hard as it clamors to steal every ounce of it, nor will it ever reward you the way inner passion, peace, and purpose do and will--without restraint and perpetually if you remain dedicated to cultivating it. 

In truth, I don't think most of us even need to hunt for our passion, peace, and purpose. You know what yours are. What you may lack and are probably looking for is the time to immerse yourself in them. By committing yourself to just five to fifteen minutes of every day without distraction to pursue at least one of these things, you live in the present and invest in the future. Don't let anyone or anything take those minutes away from you. If you've only just started on a passion you've wanted to devote more time and energy to, what small goals can you set to see it come to fruition? Take a lesson from a gardener: Most of the work happens in advance of the season we're looking forward to. We plant bulbs in the fall in hopes they'll come up and bloom in the spring or summer. If we didn't plant and prepare in the present, nothing can happen in the future. 

This Valentine's Day, think about your passions and how they can bring you peace and purpose today and throughout your lifetime. Start in the present, planting seeds for the future. If, as I have been for the past few years, you're aching for a return to things that motivate you to be your best self instead of leeching the life out of you, sit down and draw up a table of your passions. What three things most define who you are and what you love to do? Below each passion, include how those passions present themselves in your favored activities. My own trinity of passions looks something like this: 

Passion #1:  Writing	Passion #2:  Art	Passion #3:  Music
Devotionals	Sketching and illustrating (colored pencils, painting, etc.)	Listening to
Articles/essays	Gardening	Playing piano and singing
Reviews	Simple living, going back to the basics, and making everything homemade--including food, decorations, greeting cards, and gifts for loved ones	Songwriting and composing

I want to do so much more of all of these things in the future. While I'm retiring from writing fiction (as soon as I can manage it--other than children's stories), I will never stop writing. I feel like I've just started with the last two--these little seedlings are just sprouting. There are so many angles to pursue, my days and energy are bursting with them. All of it makes me eager for the future when I can hopefully see them bloom and blossom. 

Once you've established a routine, let your passion grow. Take more time for these things and give them the majority of your focus because they're the important things in life, the tasks that you'll feel good about in the end because they'll shape you and touch the lives of everyone around you. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Living Without Brains

An immature sea squirt is mobile and has a brain of sorts, but when it grows to maturity, it attaches itself to a rock and settles down for the rest of its life. With no further need for a higher nervous system -- the adult stage consists of "not much more than a mouth (branchial siphon), a stomach, and an exit tube (atrial siphon)" and "is a hermaphrodite, with one testis and one ovary" -- it eats, or more accurately absorbs, its "notochord, tail, sense organs and nervous system":

Why the Sea Squirt Eats Its Brains Out

Scientists tell us evolution has no "goal." Evolutionary "success" equals how many copies of itself a gene can generate. In the words of Heinlein's Lazarus Long, a zygote is a gamete's device for making more gametes (an update of the homespun saying, "A hen is an egg's way of making more eggs").

And if evolution had a goal, it wouldn't be brains. Those organs require a lot of energy to produce and maintain. Why bother growing one, especially a large one, if you don't need it?

Because of our relatively huge brains and the things we've used them to create, Homo sapiens tends to regard ourselves as Earth's dominant species. Alien explorers studying our planet, though, might decide it's ruled by bacteria, which vastly outnumber us and have existed a lot longer. In fact, there are slightly more bacterial cells than human cells in our bodies. The alien biologists might think we function mainly as hosts for microbial life.

Limiting observation to multicellular organisms, extraterrestrial observers could make a case for Earth's being ruled by grass. According to an AI answer to my question about grasslands, they occupy "roughly 15.8 to 21.6 million square miles, covering about 31% to 43% of the Earth's land surface." Moreover, grasses obviously keep human beings as slaves. We feed them, encourage them to reproduce, and protect them from predators. Millions of miles of grasses such as wheat exist and thrive thanks to our labors.

Why would a species need a brain when it can entice us big-brained, mobile, technology-using creatures to serve it?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Anthropomorphism In Advertising

Have you noticed that some advertisers use words without apparently knowing the meaning of the words?

"A beast lurks..." they say. Then, they show the "one ton rowdy ribeye" smashing drywall, scattering paperwork, bucking and kicking, and altogether acting like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

"Lurking" means lying in wait, in ambush, barely discernible.

"Noggins" rhymes with Goggins, but it should not mean both the head and the mind in the same paragraph. The etymological origin of "noggin" is a small cup, so it is more likely to refer to the brain pan (the container of the brain) than to the grey matter. 

Where "noggin" might refer to brains, it would be synecdoche, where a part represents the whole, such as, if one were to say that a person is "fond of the bottle", one actually means the person is fond of the alcoholic contents of the bottle; or, if one wants "all hands on deck", one does not want an Addams Family  "Thing" (the disembodied hand), one wants all crew members with all their parts and faculties.

Can a weed be "relentless"? If plants can relent, or not relent, that would imply that plants are sentient, having free will and rationality. In which case, is it moral to kill or vilify weeds?

The "Like A Relentless Weed.." advert was probably written by someone in a hurry. In my humble opinion, pharmaceutical companies are particularly prone to employ literary saboteurs to pen their adverts.

Another purveyor of pills warns patients to tell their doctors if they find themselves suicidal before undergoing surgery with anesthesia. Possibly, a patient should advise their doctor if they feel suicidal, regardless of whether or not surgery is imminent.

There is a bit difference between "insuring" something and "ensuring" something. With the latter, one makes sure something happens. With insuring something, you provide for financial restitution if something bad happens.

Some newsrooms are not much better educated.

You cannot "perpetuate" a murder.... unless it is a symbolic one, celebrated every Sunday. On the other hand, you can perpetrate a murder, or a fraud, or any other abomination.

"Your dog deserves healthy food like you." This is my favorite. The addition of "do", as in "like you do" would have transformed the sentence. 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Reviews: Three Fantasy Horror Selections by T. Kingfisher by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Reviews: Three Fantasy Horror Selections by T. Kingfisher

by Karen S. Wiesner 

Beware potential spoilers! 

I read a tremendous amount of T. Kingfisher (who also writes and illustrates under her real name Ursula Vernon) books in 2025, and I've been reviewing them for my Friday column here on the blog for much of that time. Because there are so many, I've been trying to do combined evaluations of her works according to series, genre, and/or theme. This week, I'm grouping three of her stories under the category of adult fantasy horror. 

Before I start, I have to lament about the fact that library apps tend to be insufficient when it comes to following prolific authors. I have two different library apps (Libby and Hoopla) and cards from two different physical libraries, yet I find that, even with all of that, I can't get everything I'd like in order to read/listen to everything by Ursula Vernon and her alter ego T. Kingfisher. Libraries should really commit to an author--all or nothing. If I like something by an author, I want to read her entire body of work. I think most true readers feel the same. In the case of this particular author, I wasn't able to get everything via the library apps or at the actual locations themselves. I ended up purchasing new trade paperbacks of each because I couldn't get them from the library. Of Kingfisher's body of work, these are probably my least favorites. Sigh! 

After reading so many of her eclectic selections, I've deduced that this author is uniquely her own--whether she's writing adult or kids' fiction, whatever the genre she writes in. She has her own style that flouts all conventional definition, and these are no exception. I like that, but it can also be an issue when you're reading a lot of her titles at once. In some ways, it's like the fact that Julia Roberts is always Julia Roberts in all her films. As an actress, her own personality bleeds into her work so it leads to her being typecast. She's tried to get out of that by doing different genres, including several unflattering roles, but the end result, unfortunately, is that Julia Roberts is always Julia Roberts. If you like her and think she's a great actress, as I do, then that's fantastic for you and her. If you don't, then probably not so much. In the same way, T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon seems to me to be, basically, the main character in anything she writes. Most of the time, that works for her; rarely, it doesn't quite make it. 

Note that I'm reviewing these selections in the order I read them, not the order they were published in.  

The Hollow Places is an adult fantasy horror novel published in 2020. Kara is the main character. Newly divorced, she's invited by her uncle to live at his unusual museum featuring weird "natural wonders" while she gets her bearings. While she's there, wanting to keep busy and avoid the melancholy of her situation, she stumbles upon a mysterious portal. She and her old friend Simon from next door enter it and become trapped in a nightmare, alternate universe. 

By all definitions, this one sounds like everything I'd love in a book. Yet I didn't. The protagonist and her companion didn't seem as well fleshed out as the characters in the previous stories I'd read of this author's. Additionally, it reminded me a lot of Alice in Wonderland and Gaiman's Nevermore, both of which I want to love but ultimately just don't. Too many insane events take place in stories like these, and, in my opinion, simply don't form a cohesive whole that I can connect with. It all just strikes me as random, unappealing crazy- or silliness. For fans of Wonderland and Nevermore, I imagine this one could be an amazing, upside-down adventure. 

A House With Good Bones (clever title) is an adult horror novel with a touch of modern gothic thrown into it. It was published in 2023. The heroine Sam takes an extended vacation from work as an archaeoentomologist (she studies insects and arthropods recovered from archaeological sites) because her brother is worried about their mother. Sam quickly realizes he was right to be concerned. Her mother seems different. While investigating why, sometimes with the help of her mother's handyman, Sam stumbles onto a lot of family secrets and peculiarities within the house and outside, in the rose garden. As usual in these kinds of stories, sometimes it's better to leave the past buried. After all, curiosity always tries to kill the cat. 

I expended tremendous effort trying to get into this story. I read a plodding chapter, took a break for a few weeks, read another slow chapter, went on to something else for a very long while. At that point, I knew I was going to have to buckle down and work really hard to force myself to read it. I'd purchased the trade paperback, brand new, so I didn't want it to be for nothing. 

There were a lot of interesting parts to the story. Sam is a well-constructed character with Kingfisher's typical big personality chock full of unique humor. My problem with all of Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher's work is that her main characters are constantly uttering little "asides" in introspection that can take over so they're no longer amusing injections but annoying blockades to plot development. There are so many of them, it became like I was reading someone's stream of consciousness journals! Each one is a detour from the main story, and that can get boring and overwhelming when trying to get into a particular story. 

Combine that problem with the fact that this story was such a slow burner. Having read The Hollow Places first, I got an inkling of where the faults in this particular genre were for the author, but here I was really slapped in the face. My crux issue is that the author seems to have a problem developing horror. Every time things got scary, it was as if she herself jumped onto the page and jarred us out of the story with off-putting and off-piste commentary that detracted from the action. It really broke up the tension and left me deflated and disappointed. I read horror because I want to be scared out of my pants. I want to chew my nails. Why would an author pop that balloon of rising terror when it's the whole purpose? 

As contradictory as this is going to sound, I did end up liking A House With Good Bones. You know, despite itself. It was an unusual story with creepy roses and bugs and a compelling twist on the obvious villain. In general, I liked the main character, but the over-excess of personality did get overwhelming sometimes. I wish it hadn't been so hard to get into, such a challenge to make it all the way through. But I was glad to have read it despite its slow and uneven pacing and the author self-sabotaging when it came to developing the horror. If you can stick with it, as I forcefully did, I think you'll be glad you did. 

The Twisted Ones is an adult horror novel published in 2019. While between editing jobs, Melissa, aka Mouse, accompanied by her loyal, sweet but dopey coon dog Bongo, ends up clearing out her so-not-beloved grandmother's house crammed with everything imaginable hoarded over the course of a lifetime. Early on, she finds her step-grandfather's journal and begins to be pulled into the crazy world he lived in in his final years. Local folklore combined with the old man's rantings about incoherent dreams of the woods and its bizarre, creepy creatures mingled with her own intrigue with the journal could lead her down a path there can be no return from. The local neighbors are certainly colorful and full of not-quite helpful information and support.

As in the previous two stories, we have what I believe is T. Kingfisher's fictional counterpart playing the starring role with the specific details like job, friends, and names, etc. being slightly changed up. Again, we have a male "protector" who doesn't quite live up to the role of hero, doesn't become a love interest, doesn't actually feel all that necessary to the story one way or the other. Instead, a new friend takes on the role--foolishly and unbelievably--of accompanying the heroine when she has to go against all sense and reason to confront the evil stalking her. Once more, there are way too many asides distracting from the plot, and the author defuses all the tension every single time before it really comes to a head. 

It was so hard to get into the story in the first place, and sticking with it was a daily struggle. The Twisted Ones wanted to be scary but it wasn't. Instead, it was just weird--probably as weird as her inspiration for it (mentioned in the Author's Note), apparently an Arthur Machen found manuscript called "The White People" that was published in 1904. I haven't even heard of it. While I'm glad I finished it because the core story was worthy, I didn't love the execution of this tale any more than I did the previous two. 

I hate to say something like this, but these three books seemed disturbingly similar as I read them. It was almost as if they were one book and the author just swapped out miscellaneous technicalities to make them slightly different. A House With Good Bones and The Twisted Ones, in particular, felt way too much alike. At least initially, the "Scooby Doo" lovable dog made this one much easier to read because at least the main character wasn't just talking to herself. Now she was directing her nervous tension onto her pet, which made everything a lot more palatable. I also wasn't a huge fan of the "past story told in journal entries" plot advancement. I won't lie to you--those were extremely hard to get through. In my opinion, it was a lazy way to tell the backstory, almost like those cabbagehead-isms from Star Trek, where characters are wont to say, "As you know…" before launching into important information about the plot that the viewer needs to know. 

~*~

I was looking for pee-my-pants chills from these three books, but I got novelty weirdness instead. Alas, I expect a lot of readers who like freaky, strange tales rather than true horror might like these three vastly more than I did. In general, I'd say the core narrative of each was good and pushing through to get to it was, at minimum, rewarding. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website and blog here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog and her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Vampire as Alien: Tanith Lee's Vampires

Renowned fantasy author Tanith Lee has written numerous vampire stories, taking different approaches to the myth in each work. To mention only a few: Her short work "Red as Blood," one of the best fairy tale retellings I've ever read, presents Snow White as a hereditary vampire and her stepmother, the queen, as a white witch trying to save the kingdom from the young princess's unnatural appetite. Lee's twisted Gothic romance DARK DANCE (1992), first novel in the Scarabae trilogy, centers on a woman victimized by a family from a blood-drinking species. The hyper-sexual hero, a parody of the dark, Byronic vampire aristocrat, wants her only as a breeding vessel. "Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu" portrays a very different kind of love story set in a world where a tribe of winged vampires besieges a castle, and every facet of the inhabitants' lives is shaped by fear of the monsters. The captured and imprisoned vampire, although apparently intelligent, can't speak, and he looks and acts so inhuman as to be more like an exotic animal than a person. Yet a serving maid in the castle becomes fascinated by him, helps him escape, and runs away with him She sees him through the lens of the courtly love romances she has heard, while he thinks of her as a sort of pet.

Lee creates another kind of alien vampire in the science fiction novel SABELLA OR THE BLOOD STONE (1980). (Warning: Major spoilers.) The narrator grows up thinking herself human but aberrant. As a Terran child living on an Earth-colonized world, Nova Mars, she stumbles onto ruins left by the original inhabitants. Her vampiric behavior dates from her discovery of a red jewel in the ruins. After years of drinking blood and sometimes killing, she meets a man she cannot and does not need to kill. Jace, brother of one of her victims, reveals to Sabella that she is actually an alien who, years in the past, took over the dying child Sabella's body and memories. Yet, because all the girl's thoughts and feelings live in this new form, the vampire, in a sense, is also truly Sabella. Jace reassures her that, while neither alien nor human, she is in some way both. Thanks to him, she learns to live without killing and to accept her past without self-destructive guilt. Jace reveals that he, too, found the ruins in childhood and became absorbed into an alien being. He alone can safely nourish her, for they evolved that relationship in their former life as members of the extinct species. Sabella speculates on how this relationship might have worked in the ancient past, when Nova Mars was an inhabited but dying planet: "Of the little water and little food there was, one would eat and drink, and when he was strong, the other would take from him the vital element which food and drink had made -- his blood....A system that requires a careful pairing, a creation of partners, who could permit in love what could never be permitted in hate or greed." Learning this symbiotic relationship, learning to share in love rather than seize in greed, Sabella avoids succumbing to despair.

Her solution to the quandary of being a bloodsucking monster depends on her union with Jace, the one living person who can serve as her symbiont. Also, their relationship requires her to let Jace dominate her, at least temporarily, until with his help she will learn "a discipline beyond myself." This male dominance isn't meant to be permanent, though. By way of balance, Sabella foresees a future in which she will decide when and where to procreate the children who will revive their species. She also conceives an ecological vision of a new era when her offspring may revitalize, even resurrect the desert planet. She grows into one of many fictional vampires who discover the value of symbiosis rather than destruction of their prey.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

February 9th Deadline

For published, pirated authors who may be a class member in the Anthropic Copyright Settlement, February 9th, 2026, is a new, court-extended deadline.

The revised deadlines are:

• February 9, 2026 – Opt out of the Settlement or file an objection
• March 9, 2026 – Request re-inclusion (if you previously opted out)
• March 30, 2026 – Submit a claim for payment

There is no deadline for the fourth option, which is to do nothing.

Moreover, if you already submitted a claim or an opt-out request, you don’t need to resubmit it. If you are relying on a publisher to submit a claim on your work (and later share the payout with you), or if you are relying on a defunct publisher to NOT submit a claim on your work you should check out the settlement website.

The Settlement website is: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

The Authors Guild website on the matter is https://authorsguild.org/news/anthropic-ai-class-action-important-information-for-authors/

A final approval hearing was set for April 23rd, 2026, but this deadline is likely to be revised.

Useful phone numbers are 1-877-206-2314 for the settlement administrator; 1-800-254-2660 for class counsel Rachel Geman and Daniel Hutchinson, and 1-310-789-3100 for Justin Nelson and Rohit Nath.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry