{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Three Black Lantern Publishing Novels by Caitlin Starling by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review:

Three Black Lantern Publishing Novels by Caitlin Starling

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Beware spoilers!

 

In the past, I've reviewed several other offerings from Caitlin Starling on this blog. Do a search of her name to find them, if you're interested. My reviews of this author's work tend to run the gamut in terms of whether I enjoy the material or not. This particular review of three separate books highlights the same situation.

 

Starling's last big release was The Graceview Patient in late 2025, so I went looking for anything new from her. I discovered she has a brand new horror coming out from St. Martin's Press in October 2026 called Milkteeth about a vampire broodmother, which should be interesting. This upcoming book is touted on the author's website, as well as the publisher's, and it's already available for preorder in multiple formats on distributor websites. In the process of discovering this welcome news, I stumbled upon several "new" books with Starling's name on them that are all published by Black Lantern Publishing instead of the big publisher(s) most of her other publicized books are released by.

 

I spent far too much time trying to find out more about Black Lantern Publishing (not to be confused with Black Lantern Books, which is a completely different thing) and Starling's association with them. All I could dig up was that Black Lantern Publishing is/was(?) an online art and literary journal which publishes macabre offerings--a perfect fit for Starling. In any case, they're listed as the publisher for three Starling books I came upon that I'd never heard of before and that are only published as ebooks (that I've been able to ascertain anyway) and not reliably available. For instance, one of them isn't for sale at all from Amazon, for a reason I couldn't locate. I guess the background behind these three books will remain a mystery because the author hasn't put any of them on her personal website (as of this writing in June 2026). Maybe they're old books that her current, big publisher has allowed to be published or reissued by a small press as long as she doesn't put or promote them with her other sanctioned work released by them. I don't know. But it's frustrating not to be able to find more about the origin of these particular stories. Anyway, given that, in general, I'm a fan of this author, I bought all three at once.

 

 

The first one I read, Beneath Winter Lake, was purchased from Apple Media Services. In this horror novel released December 2025, a climatologist is studying Winter Lake in Hawthorn's Rest when the lake suddenly freezes solid and the settlement that drowned more than a century ago rises to the surface. The dead from the village start taking the current townsfolk that share its ancestry. Apparently, this situation reoccurs every 40 years.

 

There was nothing particularly wrong with this book--technically it was decently written yet somehow everything about it felt generic to me. Nothing resonated with me, not characters, plot, nor setting. I also didn't find it scary.

 

 

The second, The Deadlight Motel, is an "eldritch horror" novel and was also published in December 2025 by Black Lantern Publishing. I got it from Amazon as a Kindle ebook (I don't think print or audio editions are available for it). In this (again, not at all frightening) story, a motel that's treated almost like it's human appears only to those who hide guilty secrets and it feeds on them.

 

I had the same problem with this story as the first. I call these "eh" books--not badly written but essentially generic. As with Beneath Winter Lake, my emotional involvement in the story never really kicked in.

 

Both Beneath Winter Lake and The Deadlight Motel did have what could be considered a mutual saving grace (that didn't actually make them easier to read for me, but hey) that is a Caitlin Starling trademark: Both stories were told with a unique twist. However, the problem for me is that every story I read by this author has a unique twist, and I went into reading both of these expecting that right from the beginning so, in truth, I guessed what each twist would be almost exactly from the very first chapters. Readers who haven't read Starling's work before probably wouldn't have guessed the endings right from the start so there's a potential for more enjoyment than I experienced with either of them.

 

 

The third, The Uncrowned, was a political fantasy novel and was published in April 2026 by Black Lantern Publishing. I got it from Amazon as a Kindle ebook (again, I couldn't find a print or audio edition anywhere). This story had an intriguing premise: On the day of his coronation, the crown prince refuses the throne because he's discovered that, within the empire, an entire group of people and their way of life have essentially been erased from history. He intends to right that wrong. But he quickly learns that there's much, much more that he doesn't know and the betrayal and deception go deeper than he originally believed--and when the truth resurfaces, the empire will never again be the same.

 

I was anticipating the worst, based on my previous two experiences. However, I was gratefully rewarded with the promise of intrigue and the seeds of compelling settings, plot, and characters that could have been a little better drawn. For instance, instead of three-dimensional, Prince Aldric Vane and his aunt were both two-dimensional and, weirdly, in exactly the same way. (I think anyone who reads this story will understand what I mean by that, since the two characters are like gender-opposite reflections of each other.) The secondary characters were, at best, one-dimensional.

 

As for setting and plot, both were oddly two-dimensional in that readers were given the starkest bare bones of the land the tale is set in, and the conflict that prompted the story had no more and no less than what was required to convey the story. At no point were readers allowed to discover what incited the empire's actions in essentially wiping out the Telvari community the way it did. The characters themselves didn't show the slightest curiosity about that either, which struck me as wrong and unrealistic. It seemed as if they accepted the situation, like it was a done deal, yet here they were single-mindedly involved in a legal battle to correct something that couldn't really ever be made right. Readers were never given the reasons behind all this, nor were the characters' motivations adequately portrayed. They had a goal and those actions took the place of their feelings entirely. Again, this gave them a flat quality that could have instead been heart-rending if only they'd been developed to the fullest.

 

My biggest problem with the story was that the author wrote it so leanly that every aspect became ravenous for fleshing out. Why would Starling do it this way? I can't fathom. Every single path was a thin, straight line with just a little detail pointing behind to the past, scant focus ahead to consequences, and the present story hogging the whole of the focus. As a result, countless opportunities for richness and depth were squandered. As a reader, I would have given anything for more information and to have gotten the entire tale developed three-dimensionally. It might have been a saga that couldn't be put down. It might have spanned ages in a world so vibrant, readers could see, taste, and smell it all as if they were really there. The plots might have carried much more weight and complexity that would have given them the gravitas they deserved. Fully-fleshed out characters could easily have vied for wider attention from the audience, allowing readers to truly root for them and share every tear shed and every bit of joy in comingled triumph. All of these elements hung there, strangled, just waiting for the breath of life to fulfill them. Instead, we got razor-sharp, cardboard quality. I longed for so much more. Yet the author could still expand into sequels in so many different directions--if she and her publisher were willing.

 

As is, The Uncrowned is compelling, but I'm ultimately saddened by the loss of something that was so close to moving and capturing me wholly. That said, the ending was nevertheless satisfying for me (despite that I wanted loads more) and I enjoyed the unusual take. It was almost like an early John Grisham novel, only in a fantasy world setting. Every aspect of this story was written as if it was a lawyerly account, with all the behind-the-scenes and courtroom drama you could ever want. In other words, it was cold-blooded and logical, with no room for human frailty or fragility. That worked well here, even given the wasted opportunities for growth beyond the immediate scenario. Maybe some readers would have been put off by that, but I found the moral of the story was told perfectly from that unique, distanced perspective. I also think it was brilliant of the author to remove almost completely the "real life" that you and I know from the setting so the account could be less about comparing it to our world events and history and instead about seeing it on its own, with all the texture, ramifications and consequences that the subject material demanded. I would actually love to revisit these characters and the world they're set in, but I suspect that's not an option--directly due to the "mystery" I mentioned in the third paragraph of this review.

 

You might want to give the first two books reviewed here a pass unless you're new to the author. Honestly, though, all of them were $3, so under $10 for three ebooks is worthwhile. The Uncrowned was a steal at that price, lack of true depth notwithstanding. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

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

Vampire Retro-Review: They Thirst

When I first read THEY THIRST (1981), by Robert McCammon, I thought, “Oh, this is just a pastiche of ‘SALEM’S LOT on a wider scale, transplanted to California.” In each book, an ancient vampire leaves the Old World to seek new blood in an unsuspecting American community. Where Stephen King’s vampire lord takes over an isolated town in Maine, McCammon’s Prince Conrad Vulkan creates an undead army to overrun Los Angeles. Decades later, I have to acknowledge that the geographically vaster scope of McCammon’s novel creates a different tone from King’s. Just as King vividly portrays the ambiance of small-town Maine, McCammon immerses the reader in his Southern California setting. A cast of multi-ethnic heroes and villains joins in combat. The inner circle of vampire hunters includes a Hispanic priest and a Hungarian American whose family fled the old country after a vampire attack. Vulkan establishes his lair in a castle built by a fabulously rich film celebrity. The story climaxes with an earthquake, a storm, and a tidal wave. King’s master vampire just wants to turn ‘Salem’s Lot into a safe haven for his kind. Vulkan’s ambition seems to have no limit. He has a few intelligent henchmen to support his campaign, as opposed to the solitary nature of King’s Barlow, who, aside from his human assistant, commands a horde of nearly mindless spawn.

One big difference between the two novels is that we learn much more about Vulkan’s background than King reveals about his vampire. Also, McCammon gives us numerous scenes from the viewpoint of Vulkan and some of the other undead. Between this expansion of viewpoints and the sprawling Los Angeles setting, McCammon’s novel does have an epic feel in contrast to King’s intimate, almost claustrophobic story, even though the two books run to similar length (McCammon’s over 500 pages in the paperback original). If you want to read an old-fashioned vampire story of good versus evil in a contemporary milieu on a large scale, THEY THIRST is the book for you.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} From Below by Darcy Coates by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

From Below by Darcy Coates

by Karen S. Wiesner 

  Beware spoilers! 

From Below is an aquatic horror novel by Australian author Darcy Coates, published in 2022. I'm fond of all fictional tales, regardless of how far-fetched, concerning the Loch Ness monster and kraken and other supernatural deep-ocean creatures, submarines, diving, underwater caves, and spelunking in general. What's not to love? I've ravenously consumed stories similar to this and consistently wanted to find more like it. I didn't actually realize that there was a full-on, named genre around the theme of "aquatic horror" until I read this one, though, and I eagerly went searching for more like it. 

From Below has got a plot that's been done often before, in which a ship has mysteriously sunk and disappeared, almost always taking countless human lives with it. Decades later, someone gets the idea of finding it and trying to puzzle out what happened. From Below is no different. In this particular take on the same-old, same-old, it's the SS Arcadia that disappeared sixty years before. It was touted as an unsinkable ship (seriously, shipbuilders really need to stop calling their creations unsinkable). The wreckage is discovered by submarines more than three-hundred miles from its intended route. A documentary filmmaker, Cove Waimarie, puts together a team of divers. A historian provides insight into the sunken ship. The goal is to film what's found and maybe, in the process, uncover the mystery behind the ship's unexplained disappearance. In addition to Cove as leader, the diving team members include those who'll operate the camera, a diving expert, and a biologist. Naturally, everyone involved has dirty little secrets they'd rather not have anyone else unearth, but good luck with that. Merging with each subsequent deep-dive, descent to the wreckage of the ship, the story of the original 1928 crew is woven. The tension is heightened in the intermingling as the unearthly horrors are unveiled and come out to play in their murderous manner in the claustrophobic environment. The time clock of limited air during dives and what will happen if divers surface too quickly really added to the escalating (sorry for the pun) suspense. 

So I've read a handful of Darcy Coates books now. By all rights, I should adore them. She consistently doles out supernatural tales that lean toward a horror edge, which is my favorite type of fiction. She's also an undisputedly competent author. I have no complaints about her writing skills. All that said, I've just never read anything by her that screams "unique take" on a frequently done story. Instead, all the offerings I've read by her are everything you'd expect from a book of that type, but not in a way (that I feel) is particularly compelling. In all honestly, I'm not sure if From Below is actually any better than other aquatic horror stories either. I just know I enjoyed it a lot, perhaps in large part because I'm a fanatic fan of deep-diving, underwater horror in my fiction. See my previous reviews for Caitlin Starling's The Luminous Dead and "Caver, Continue" and Michael Crichton's Sphere, all of which feature some of the most unique aquatic horror fiction telling I've encountered thus far.

The subject matter in From Below is what convinced me to try it. It came up as an audiobook on one of my library apps, so I borrowed it and listened to it compulsively for a week or so. Interestingly, the narrator of the audiobook was Abby Craden, who's a versatile voice artist in a variety of mediums. The strange/cool part was that at the time I was just randomly replaying one of my favorite videogames, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning Fatesworn Edition. Abby Craden is the voice of Alyn Shir in that game. I didn't know this at first, but, while listening to the audiobook of From Below, I kept feeling like I knew that voice somehow. That's when I checked it out and discovered the connection. Craden does a fantastic job reading From Below. I even turned the speed down from 1.75 (which is what I almost always listen to audiobooks at because otherwise it's too long and drawn out; I usually have no trouble understanding fast-talking and following the story this way) to 1.50 to better savor it. 

However, the one problem I had with the audiobook version of this story is that I was overwhelmed with too many characters to keep track of and I wanted to get them sorted out to better enjoy the complexity. For that reason, I decided to purchase a mass-market paperback copy of the book (which was dirt-cheap) so I could "re-read" it and catch all the things I missed out on with the audiobook reading. 

While it could certainly be true that I just love this genre so much that I'd like any story in it, I thought Coates provided a well-rounded take on a frequently done plot. All the characters were fully-fleshed out, and the entities that overtook the SS Arcadia were convincing. The melding of past and present filled the book with nail-biting tension. Are there other and better variations on this theme? Sure, probably. But this one ticked all the boxes for me. I'm certain you'll see more reviews by me in this genre in the future. In the meantime, I recommend From Below as a good one in a sea of cleverly reimagined aquatic horror tales. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

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

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Silent Tongues and The Church Beneath the Roots by Felix Blackwell by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Silent Tongues and The Church Beneath the Roots

by Felix Blackwell

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Beware spoilers! 

I'm always on the lookout for interesting audiobooks to listen to when I'm doing other things. I stumbled upon Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell in my library app. It was released in 2017. A newly engaged couple, Felix and Faye, head up the remote, windswept cliffs of Pale Peak to her parents' cabin and, naturally, in a horror novel, instead of romance, they encounter a menacing, supernatural being and creepy voices. Before long, a winter storm inadvertently cooperates with bad medicine and refuses to allow them to leave. It quickly becomes clear to Felix that the creature stalking them is familiar to Faye, a sleepwalker who begins whispering back to the shadows. The dark entity is trying to communicate with her. She claims she doesn't remember it, but her subconscious mind has blocked out the truth in more ways than one. "The Hollow One" is searching desperately for Faye's answer to the question, What makes five? 

This 320-page self-published novel was originally, as the author tells it, a contest-winning story on Reddit's NoSleep community of horror lovers. How the subject matter dealt with Native American culture, folklore, and the corresponding mythology was the most interesting part to me, though I found it a bit odd that the author named the book's main character after himself, almost as if he was making it an autobiography. Incidentally, the author is not of Native American descent, if anyone's wondering. 

The main characters in Stolen Tongues were drawn well enough. The most compelling of them was a guy with the last name of Lopez (more about him later) from the nearby Cold Valley Indian Reservation. Apparently the book has been optioned for a movie, which I believe would make the most of the material. The audiobook version I listened to was, unfortunately for me, narrated by J.S. Arquin, author (A.C. Arquin), voice actor, and audiobook narrator among wearing other hats. I admit, I had trouble with his halting way of speaking, though I think other listeners wouldn't have minded it. He reminded me of Mordin Solus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordin_Solus from the Mass Effect franchise. This character within the videogames is a favorite of mine, known for his fast-talking, halting manner and irresistibly unique dialogue. Frequently, the main character in the game has the option of cutting Mordin off because, once he gets going, he becomes almost unlistenable. While this was so creative and fun in that world, to have to listen to it over the course of 300+ pages got to be a bit much for me. 

That said, Stolen Tongues did hold my interest just enough to get through it. My favorite line was, "I suppose that if you speak long enough into the void, someone is bound to start listening." I will note, however, that the posing of the question "What makes five?" fairly early in the story was the kiss of death for me, as a writer. I guessed the entire plot just based on three little words, so everything that came afterward lacked suspense and true impact. 

 

When I went searching for more in this world, I found that the author had written a prequel that included Lopez (or his dad)* from Stolen Tongues and set long before the events of the previous story. The Church Beneath the Roots, released in 2024, is nearly 350 pages and is touted as "Silent Tongues, Book 2", though it's more accurately dubbed Part .5. 

*Note that I'm going to 'fess up here and tell you that I don't generally listen carefully while reading audiobooks unless they're really, really good (and if they're really, really good, I tend to run out and buy the version of the book that has actual words in it even before I finish the audiobook of it). Audiobooks are background noise to me. They fill space during a time I'm doing something else more important. If I continue listening all the way to the end, I consider it a win despite that I miss a lot. I'm okay with missing things if it's not a book that grabs hold of me and demands rapt attention. That said, this is becoming a growing annoyance of mine concerning audiobooks--there are too many shortcomings. In particular, the inability to look at the words, to flip back and find sections easily to review and verify I'm absorbing details and plot angles correctly. 

Between these two books, the author provided presumably authentic Native American names for his tribal members. Shortsightedly, though, he chose to name two of his characters with designations too similar. Onwé (verified spelling) is pronounced "On-way" and Twé (no idea how to spell it) is pronounced "Tee-way". I believe the author explained something about either of those names in Silent Tongues--though it went by too fast, and I'll never find that section of the audiobook now to verify it. Anyway, in The Church Beneath the Roots, I believe Onwé was the father of Twé, who was a character in Silent Tongues. Or vice versa. I've lost all track of this and, because it's an audiobook, the only option to correct the problem would be to 1) try to track down a book version of it with words in it, 2) to listen to both audiobooks all over again (and that ain't happenin'!) , or 3) just be confused. 

Conclusion: So I chose to be confused and never find out the truth of which was the son and which was the dad. I should probably consider not using audiobooks for my reading because this is becoming a serious problem for me. In any case, for the remainder of this review, I'll use both names because I don't really know anymore whether it was Onwé and Twé in either book. I accept the blame for this situation because I wasn't listening as closely as I should have been, but a chunk of the problem is actually the medium. 

Seeing his people abandon the Old Way by flocking to the local church, Onwé (or Twé) finds himself struggling, especially when a plane crash brings an unexpected stranger to the rez with horror stories to tell. Decades ago, Onwé's (or Twé's) childhood friend vanished. An ancient creature lurks in the night, terrorizing the tribe. Nearby caves bring terrifying whispers. Onwé (or Twé) finds himself lured there with the promise of having everyone he's lost returned to him. The origin of "The Hollow One" is explored in this horror tale. 

As I did its predecessor, I listened to the audiobook, this one narrated ably by Gary Tiedemann. What I enjoyed most was how the author pulled together the tragic reality of history with different indigenous tribes, forced to dwell together in a mishmash on a reservation, where freedom of religion is allowed only if the lawmakers get to choose the faith, into a tale of horrifying folklore. It's not easy to reconcile the unfairness of life on a day to day basis but, add an ancient evil into the mix, and you've really got something provoking and entertaining. 

If you're looking for diverting tales of supernatural myth, this pair of surprisingly well-written, self-published books should satisfy, but I highly recommend reading the ebook or paperback versions instead of audiobooks to avoid any confusion caused by the characters' names. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

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

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey

by Karen S. Wiesner

  

Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey was published in 2018. This collection of 14 very weird stories is unlike almost anything I've ever read before. By the way, Guignol is a French hand puppet. In fiction, the word has come to be associated with a sensational, gruesome tale. 

It would be difficult to describe this anthology of stories individually because they're so short and strange, so, although I liked more than a few of them (very odd for me when it comes to a short story collection!), I can't really go in-depth about any one of them without giving away too much. 

In the general sense, these tales are all what I would consider very small vignettes. What you'll get is a slice of a life: Nothing came before that isn't told rather than shown, and, in some cases, there's little by way of follow-up or indication where it might go from there. It is nothing more, nothing less than what you see in the here and now--that's all you get. For that reason, there is very little depth to them. You'll never get to know the characters, settings, or situations any more than what's included in these few words. It's like you get a glimpse of something and then you're thrust out; you walk away because there's nothing else you can do. Whether a memory of what you've witnessed lingers on after that point is moot. I suspect the author would enjoy at least part of that description of his work very much. Honestly, none of this is an insult. It's more of a heads up of what to expect and an invitation, no RSVP necessary. You really do have to experience this set of stories yourself to get the full impact.

Contained within Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales were more than a few stories that harkened back to H. P. Lovecraft (complete with the tell-you-the-outcome-before-the-event format). I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure offering "A Circle That Ever Returnth In". "Haruspicate or Scry" was another standout. In that particular account, there's a hilarious reference to college students picking apart a story by a professor, praising his imagery and drawing parallels, to which the teacher responds (like he's impatiently embarrassed by the attention), "I was just writing about a damn pear." I've said similar things myself dozens of times while debating allegory in fiction with those who seem to enjoy reading into everything--just never with Orrin's simple but evocative hilarity.

If you like horror, fantasy, and the strange in your stories, this anthology is definitely one to gobble up in a single sitting. The author has several other fiction collections to choose from as well, so you don't have to stop at just one. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

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

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Review of Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher Paired With Karen Wiesner's Botanical Artwork by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Review of Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Paired With Karen Wiesner's Botanical Artwork

by Karen S. Wiesner 

  Beware: May contain unintended spoilers! 

T. Kingfisher (the pen name of Ursula Vernon) is a versatile author, illustrator, and artist. Her novel Wolf Worm, published in March 2026, is exactly the kind of gothic fiction I love--you know, without the needy, pretty--according to her own assessment--damsel in distress who gets sucked into a life-threatening situation that seems supernatural on the surface (but, like every episode of Scooby Doo, isn't). Oh, and she makes everything worse with her stupidly romantic nature and need to be rescued by a big, strong man. 

A little background about this tangent I'm going off on: A few months ago, I was looking for a new audiobook to get interested in and stumbled across the 1966-1972 Dark Shadows book series, credited to Marilyn Ross (one pseudonym of W. E. D. Ross, an actor, playwright, and author of more than three-hundred novels!). The thirty-three books in this series were gothic romances (that dealt with an actual vampire and other monsters), but not what I consider particularly good ones. In any case, the first volume, Dark Shadows, was flat-out painful to listen to. This obviously male author didn't understand the first thing about women, and it showed. I can't tell you how many times we were given a physical description of the female lead somewhere along these slightly exaggerated lines: "Victoria brushed aside her thick, luscious locks of perfectly-coiffed hair surrounding her hauntingly beautiful, heart-shaped face." Give me a break. Every man in the vicinity was attracted to this goddess, but she had eyes only for the psycho-villain-or-dashing-hero? widower of the piece. Nothing could convince her to save herself. Alas, this was just the tip of the iceberg on the type the gothic fiction I despise. 

In subtle contrast, the basic formula of a really good gothic romance is a strong, smart woman (who's probably passably attractive but the reader isn't beat over the head with descriptions of her world-stopping, leave-no-male-unaffected beauty) who finds herself in unfortunate circumstances. She's forced to go to an isolated property where something sinister is going on and usually has been for decades. While she might ultimately fall in love with the main suspect, the romance is secondary to the creepy setting and mysterious events that have usually been unsolved and that she has to investigate and resolve before dire harm comes to her. This is a worthy heroine who saves not only herself but the others around her as well as the day. 

That's exactly what T. Kingfisher has brilliantly given us in Wolf Worm, set in 1899. Sonia Wilson is a thirtysomething botanical illustrator. Kingfisher is herself an extremely talented artist, and, given my own love of rendering plants in art form, I just soaked up everything creative she offered in this tale. The easy knowledge of the author made her main character so authentic and compelling. Sonia's father was a renowned scientist, something she aspires to, but, after he died, she was left to make her own living in whatever way she could, as most orphaned "spinsters" were forced to in that time period. Eventually, she's offered the job of illustrating Dr. Halder's insect collection on his reclusive manor property in the woods of North Carolina. Other characters are the lovable housekeeper, Rose, and her significant other, Jackson, who also works on the estate. The preacher also inserts himself into Sonia's life after her arrival. A local healer called "Ma" something also helps Sonia when oddball things begin to happen. 

Woodland animals are acting very strangely, doing impossible things that normal animals just can't do, the household chicken coop is being robbed every night, and Dr. Halder is sneaking around in the forest after dark. There are local whispers of "blood thieves" compounded by the unsolved mystery of Halder's wife's fate. She'd cheated on him, and Halder supposedly dispatched the homewrecker--justifiably, according to some members of the local population, who "don't brook with no infidelity". The real horror in this story is Dr. Halder's life's work--parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh. I'm not a person who likes even thinking about things like this. My whole body revolts and feels like it's been invaded by horrible things that I can't even see. Long, hot, rubbed-raw showers ensue and endless hours are wasted on feeling like I'm going insane with the itching dread. (Let's face it, it's scientific fact that we do have things crawling all over us that we'd prefer not to consider let alone believe are there.) Ugh! Don't think about it. Do not start thinking about it. Whatever you do, donotthinkaboutthisplease! 

Yeah, so Kingfisher forces us to not only think about it but to watch the horror happening in Wolf Worm in slow motion. 

I have to admit, more than once, I had to go back to the audiobook I was listening to of Wolf Worm and make sure it was, in fact, T. Kingfisher, not Caitlin Starling, who'd written this. Everything about this book reminded me of Starling's work, especially The Death of Jane Lawrence (highly recommended--do a search for my review of it on this blog). Starling loves body horror fiction with strong heroines that are also slightly vulnerable, a lot broken, and far too willing to go where no sane woman might. I loved the atmosphere, the creepiness, the compelling secondary characters that really rounded out this story and made it something I couldn't stop listening to in the course of just a couple days. 

I will also add that I really would have preferred to read the book version of Wolf Worm (hard copy, though ebook would have been okay, too), but, as I'd asked to be notified of the release of any version of this book on my library app, I was glad to practically be the first in line when it became available. I liked the way the narrator made the voices fit the locale the story is set in. I do want to read a copy of the book at some point, though, because I've definitely noticed that I miss a lot with an audiobook versus reading the book myself. I'd also like to own the hard cover of Wolf Worm. It's absolutely worthy to join my collection of other T. Kingfisher print editions. 

In summary, run, don't walk, to get a copy of this book as soon as possible. If this is your kind of gothic fiction, you won't regret it. 

And, just because, here's a couple of my own fledgling botanical illustrations, both with and without color, which I'm certain are nowhere near as wonderful as anything Sonia and/or Kingfisher would produce. Looking at them again puts me in mind of the coming spring and summer growing season and the plants I'm hoping to photograph, sketch, and/or color this year. 

  Rosebud in Vase Sketch @ Karen Wiesner 

  Leaf & Twig Texture in Colored Pencil @ Karen Wiesner

  Scarlet Poppies and Summer Berries in Colored Pencil @ Karen Wiesner 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

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

Vampire Retro-Review: Under the Fang

UNDER THE FANG (1991), edited by bestselling horror writer Robert R. McCammon, was the first of several anthologies published under the auspices of the Horror Writers Association (when it was still called “Horror Writers of America”). It’s a shared world anthology, sort of. Unified by the premise of a world ruled by vampires, the book apparently didn’t have a “bible” to impose consistency among the stories. Each author creates his or her vision of what such a world would look like. The volume includes distinguished authors such as McCammon himself (who, in addition to his story, contributes an introductory overview in the form of a “testament” by a human survivor in hiding from the conquering undead), Nancy Collins, Charles de Lint, and Richard Laymon, among others. My favorite story teams up the creators of two of my favorite vampires of all time. Suzy McKee Charnas and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, in “Advocates,” portray Yarbro’s Count Saint-Germain defending Dr. Weyland, central character in Charnas’s THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, against the charge of murdering other vampires. Weyland, guilty and disdaining to pretend otherwise, may be spared execution if Saint-Germain can make a case for mercy. I love the clash between two very different types of vampires.

Some other scenarios explored in these tales include a Gypsy who accepts the predators’ protection and finds the bargain a poor one (“We Are Dead Together,” by Charles de Lint); an experimental treatment to reduce vampires’ need for blood that has had the opposite result, and a man who arranges his wife’s transformation to save her from death by cancer, again with an outcome different from what he plans (“Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” by Chet Williamson); the viewpoint of a collaborator who supplies blood for the vampires (“Juice,” by Lisa W. Cantrell); an annual festival at which a vampire storyteller and teacher passes on their history and lore to the young (“Red Eve,” by Al Sarrantonio); a human resistance group attacking a train that transports captive blood donors (“Does the Blood Line Run on Time?” by Sidney Williams and Robert Petitt); a resistance base in the Arctic, with a sympathetic portrayal of both the human protagonist and a vampire military officer who’s tired of the killing (“Midnight Sun,” by Brian Hodge). This anthology has unfortunately been allowed to go out of print, but cheap used copies are readily available.

Highly recommended for the wide variety of innovative approaches to its theme.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List}

Review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

by Karen S. Wiesner 

  Beware: May contain unintended spoilers! 

I was looking for a new audiobook to listen to on my library apps, and it came down to whatever seemed mildly interesting that was immediately available. I've learned from my experience in the last year with checking out ebooks and audiobooks from the virtual library that it tends to be very difficult to actually get anything you really want to read or listen to on these apps because they either don't have what I'm looking for (especially subsequent books in a series) and/or it takes weeks or months of waiting to get hold of the literature most desired. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (author of The Haunting on Hill House, which I've read) was released in 1962 and happens to be her final work. The genre category I was informed this novel falls into is mystery, which I can kind of see, but I would more aptly describe it as a psychological thriller with a touch of Gothic flavor. 

In this story, a girl (who's 18, something I don't remember being said in the audiobook--unfortunately, it's very easy to miss a lot while listening to something as opposed to reading the book myself) nicknamed Merricat lives with her agoraphobic older sister Constance and uncle Julian on the Blackwood estate, which is isolated and closed away from the nearby village. She's gone into town to run errands, getting groceries and library books. That sounds pretty mild and non-threatening, but in the mind of this person I assumed was a 10-year-old child (or thereabouts), it's anything but. While in town, she feels the danger all around her based on the small-minded community's reactions to her. Most of it comes down to negative energy directed her way in attitudes and looks at her, but, at the café she stops in for coffee, she's actually bullied by a couple of the townsfolk. She does finally escape, but her home is just as strange and confusing as all that came before. Later on, a cousin named Charles arrives and penetrates their seclusion. Merricat realizes he's looking for the fortune rumored to be buried all around their "castle". Unable to drive him away with the magic she believes she possesses, she becomes desperate. 

In the sinister background of this story looms an incident that happened six years before and isn't told straight out but is instead doled out in bits and pieces. Constance and Merricat's parents, their aunt, and younger brother died of poisoning. Julian was also poisoned, though he survived. Constance was arrested for the murders and was later acquitted. The town has reacted to this by ostracizing the remaining family members. What really happened? 

I soon learned that this story was written in the "unreliable narrator" style. In other words, the point-of-view character's perspective is not to be trusted. Bernadette Dunne narrated the audiobook version of this and did a really good job of capturing the eeriness of the tale and the unnaturalness of Merricat herself. The creepiness sneaks up on you again and again, in large part because the town's bullying is so over-the-top, the reader is utterly helpless not to sympathize with this family just on principle. It's hard to blame people for their behavior if they've been driven to such extremes to protect themselves from cruel people. Because of the unreliable editor perspective, it was hard to know for sure, but I suspect it was a chicken-and-the-egg thing: The bullying led to the desperate acts that led to the bullying that led to… 

Both a stage play and a movie (with Crispin Glover) were made from this book. I'd actually be interested in how We Have Always Lived in the Castle was translated in such a visual medium. If you're looking for a story that's fairly short that will hover on your mind long after you've finished it, this will more than fit the bill. 

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

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

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Review for Alex Hunter Series by Greig Beck by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List}

Review for Alex Hunter Series by Greig Beck

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

In 2011, I was looking for supernatural horror books to read that took place in Antarctica (a trio of categories that were and are favorites of mine). Beneath the Dark Ice by Greig Beck came up during my search. In this series, a superhuman takes on supermonsters in life-threatening settings. I absolutely devoured it and the next and the next. I followed it for the next several years as more and more books featuring Captain Alex Hunter aka The Arcadian were released. The first two books were published by St. Martin's Press in very affordable mass market paperbacks. After that, another company took over the series and eventually republished all the books in trade paperback and electronic formats. After Book 5, I found the books far too expensive (in part because they were all so large) to continue purchasing. I bought the prequel, Book #5.5 and #6 as ebooks, but even those were surprisingly expensive (that can happen when publishers don't seem to understand that intangible ebooks which don't take up physical space should be priced lower). I haven't been able to find any of Greig Beck's books on my library apps in any format, other than the first two which were originally published by a mainstream (aka, not small press) publisher. As Beck is an Australia author, I'm sure that's part of why I haven't been able to locate them through libraries. 

Below is a list of the publication order (along with reading order) for what's currently available in the series:

.5 Arcadian Genesis, a prequel (2012)

#1 Beneath the Dark Ice (2009)

#2 Dark Rising (2010)

#3 This Green Hell (2011)

#4 Black Mountain (2012)

#5 Gorgon (2014)

#5.5 Hammer of God (2015)

#6 Kraken Rising (2015)

#7 The Void (2018)

#8 From Hell (2019)

#9 The Dark Side (2021)

#10 The Well of Hell (2022)

#11 The Silurian Bridge (2024)

As I said, the gist of the Alex Hunter Series is that a soldier sustains an injury that should have killed him, yet it, impossibly, made him a super-soldier, unstoppable, a danger to monsters, loved ones, and himself instead. This is a little bit unrealistic, but not outside the realm of believability. Because of his all but inhuman abilities, he and his team are always the ones called in for highest-possible-risk, one-way missions that no one else could survive. They do, time and time again. While the exact situations, settings, and hellish monsters are vastly different, they're all thoroughly researched and unquestionably plausible. This author writes as though he knows about all these things firsthand. Every book in this series that I've read has this basic scenario, yet they're all so unique and flawlessly compelling. 

While Greig Beck is still an author I follow, I've gotten behind with this series. Additionally, because I continue to follow him, I discovered several years after I could no longer afford his books that he started a spinoff series with a character from the first (and 10th) Alex Hunter book: Matt Kerns, the linguist, archaeologist and wary explorer. There are four books available in the Matt Kerns Adventures, the first having been published in 2013 so maybe (but I'm not sure) this new series might take place during Alex Hunter #4 and #5. I also swear that Cate Granger first appeared in one of the Alex Hunter books, and now she has her own series (Cate Granger, currently three novels available, the first published in 2018). I'll have to reread the Alex Hunter books again to find out for sure so don't quote me. It's so frustrating when authors don't include connections between their series titles on their own website, if nowhere else. This kind of thing sells books! 

The ebooks have now come down in price considerably, so I do plan to someday purchase the ones I haven't read yet, and I'd also like to read the spinoffs. Pretty much every one of Beck's offerings sounds fantastic, right up my alley, and I've found him to be a very reliable author, so I go into every purchase certain I'll like what I get. You can find out more about them on his website https://greigbeck.com/. If you're looking for nail-biting horror with a supernatural twist, you'll find Alex Hunter Books all but impossible to pass up, let alone put down once you've started them. 

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

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

RavenCon 2026

This past weekend, my husband and I attended RavenCon, held in Richmond, Virginia. The hotel comprises a complex of three buildings in a lovely setting, which is slightly inconvenient when the weather is atypically chilly for April, as it was this time. Also, it rained off and on, but I brought an umbrella. They had nice buffets for all breakfasts and two dinners. On Friday, though, the only food venue for dinner was the bar, same as last year. Fortunately, at least this time we didn't have to sit for almost an hour waiting to get fed.

My husband appeared on four panels, I on three. First I had horror and the supernatural in ancient literature, in practice meaning Greek, Roman, and Norse with a bit of Celtic. The moderator and both panelists had more in-depth knowledge of the field than I do, but I managed to find enough to say, seldom a problem for me anyhow :). My Saturday panels were on cozy fantasy, very well attended and lively, and vampires, my specialty. The former discussion focused largely on trying to decide precisely how to define the emergent subgenre -- what do we mean by "cozy"? The vampire session ranged widely over folklore and fiction, past and recent, print and film media.

Of my husband's panels, the ones that interested me most were "The Ethics of Colonizing Other Worlds" and "Intergalactic Villainy" (should probably be "interstellar," sigh), about science-fiction villains and antagonists, specifically in stories set in space. The latter spent much more time on film media than novels. It considered, among other questions, what makes a character a villain and why villains fascinate us.

I didn't get to watch the costume contest because it occurred opposite my vampire panel. However, I did get a look at the participants as they were lining up.

Some sessions I particularly enjoyed: Two panels on research, "Down the Rabbit Hole" and "But I've Never Ridden a Horse." Monstrous insects in SF and horror films. Writing in other authors' worlds. The role of history in fantasy and science fiction. A slide show on dangerous plants and fungi with some discussion of that theme in fiction and film.

It was dismaying to learn they're shifting the date of future RavenCons from late April (which I like because of the weather, which is normally much nicer than this year) to late October, with a greater chance of chilly days. Of course, we'll still attend.

You can read all about the convention here:

RavenCon

Margaret L. Carter

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

A House with Good Bones

This novel by T. Kingfisher, a Southern Gothic incongruously set in a suburban tract house, features a theme of return and/or reunion to find unsettling or outright shocking changes, similarly to THE TWISTED ONES and WHAT MOVES THE DEAD. Also, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES shares with THE TWISTED ONES the motif of a malignant grandmother. “There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house.” How could any fan of dark fantasy resist an opening line such as that? Narrator Samantha (Sam) receives a message from her brother that their mother seems “off.” Since Sam has been temporarily furloughed from her job as an archaeoentomologist (a scientist who studies insects in archeological digs), she travels to North Carolina to check out the situation. Her mother owns the house where she and her two children spent an impoverished period during Sam’s childhood, living with the late grandmother, Gran Mae. Upon arrival, Sam finds the usual cheerfully eclectic, cluttered décor replaced by a “sterile” ambience more reminiscent of her grandmother’s taste. The walls have even been repainted off-white. Her mother acts nervous, as if she feels watched or overheard.

Sam sees the environment in terms of ecology in general and, of course, arthropods in particular. In the house’s monoculture rose garden, she immediately notices the absence of insects aside from ladybugs. This phenomenon and the flock of vultures roosting in a neighbor’s tree, however, constitute the least of the strangeness. For instance, a swarm of ladybugs invades Sam’s bedroom at night. We gradually learn about her childhood and her grandmother’s peculiarities, including strictness verging on abuse, while Sam unearths buried family secrets -- literally, in one case. It takes a while to reassure herself that her mother isn’t sinking into senility, but the alternative is almost worse. Sam discovers her great-grandfather, Gran Mae’s father, practiced dark magic. No wonder Gran Mae was obsessed with “nice and normal.” Furthermore, the “underground children” she warned her grandchildren about turn out to be real, not imaginary boogeymen. And the rose bushes are sentient.

For me the climax, when the house collapses into a sinkhole, besieged by the underground children, required some suspension of disbelief, but I enjoyed it anyway. Gran Mae’s sort-of return, on the other hand, struck me as believably, deeply disturbing. Sam’s witty narrative voice, the vulture lady and local benevolent “witch” Gail, and the friendly gardener Phil, who grounds the whole story in the mundane milieu of a “cookie-cutter” housing development, irresistibly draw the reader into the experience. Kingfisher has an enviable talent, through Sam’s chatty yet sometimes sardonic tone, to feed backstory to the reader with never a sense of info-dumping. Amid the mainly happy ending, Sam’s unease with the idea that she might have inherited her grandmother’s magic causes the supernatural danger to linger in the reader’s mind after the final page. In Kingfisher’s afterword, she mentions her own battles with roses and the fact that this is her second novel to portray rose bushes as evil, the first being her “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, BRYONY AND ROSES. The section headings (labeled “First Day,” “Second Day,” etc.) enhance the theme with a brief description of a different rose variety for each one. Between the insects and the roses, this novel, like many of Kingfisher's works, displays her characteristic fondness for odd, fascinating scientific facts.

Margaret L. Carter

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

The Hollow Places

Although I didn’t find this novel as mind-blowing as Kingfisher’s THE TWISTED ONES, it’s a captivating tale I've reread more than once. Like THE TWISTED ONES, it derives from a classic horror story, giving the source material Kingfisher's unique spin. THE HOLLOW PLACES combines a peculiar house with one of my favorite motifs, portal fantasy. Like the earlier novel, this one features a female first-person narrator with an irresistibly witty voice. But unlike the heroine of THE TWISTED ONES, who reluctantly returns to her late grandmother’s grim house to clear out mounds of hoarded junk, newly divorced Kara finds a welcome refuge in her eccentric uncle’s Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, where she often hung out while growing up. Although other people, including her ex-husband, might consider the bizarre collection creepy, she thinks of the displays, artifacts, and stuffed animals as old friends. She gladly accepts an invitation to live at the museum, in a back bedroom adorned by her favorite taxidermy piece, an elk’s head she named “Prince” in childhood. In return, she waits on tourists and begins the monumental project of creating a digital catalog of the collection.

Soon after the arrival of a box of miscellany that includes a “corpse-otter” carving from the Danube, her uncle is hospitalized, leaving Kara in charge on her own. Almost immediately, she discovers a hole in a wall, which turns out to be much more than it initially appears. At first assuming a visitor did the damage and left without mentioning it, Kara enlists Simon, who works at the coffee shop next door, to help with the repair. Simon is one of Kingfisher's typical quirky secondary characters, a middle-aged, gay man who proves to be a brave and loyal friend, sticking to Kara throughout the harrowing adventure that follows. Probing behind the wall, they find more space than the building could reasonably hold. They soon run out of plausible explanations for the anomaly and come upon a mysterious door.

It leads to a realm of water and fog, dotted with small islands overgrown by willow trees. Each one, it turns out, probably harbors a portal to a different realm, like the Wood Between the Worlds in C. S. Lewis’s THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW. The comparison doesn’t escape Kara, who eventually begins to think of the place as an anti-Narnia. Though eerie and desolate, the landscape doesn’t seem outright scary at first. Exploring it, however, Kara and Simon stumble upon horrors both human and inhuman. Graffiti that warn “They can hear you thinking” and “Pray They are hungry” are just the beginning. An encounter with a trapped explorer from another world is particularly gruesome. They manage to escape and get home, just barely, but Kara soon learns that walling up the hole doesn’t end the danger. The final revelation of what caused the crack between dimensions came as a surprise to me, poignant as well as terrifying, and it pulls together all the baffling elements of the story. My first thought when Kara and Simon entered the fog-shrouded island landscape was of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Sure enough, the concluding Author’s Note reveals that she was inspired by Blackwood’s classic story. This novel is a can’t-miss read for fans of numinous horror with a subtly Lovecraftian feel.

Margaret L. Carter

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

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.

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/