Library of 🅱️🅰️❌⭕🅱️🆎

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March 24, 2026:

Imaginary friends were never meant to make it to adulthood. Luckily, you can hire the world's saddest man to take yours out-- he's the only one who can see them besides you.

The absurd premise lets this book get away with some truly horrible imagery. On one side, the rules for imaginary friends and their deaths are dreadful enough... but at the center of this story is a little girl whose imaginary friend (a youtube prankster) is steadily becoming more and more menacing and it's sooo uncomfortable.

The cartoon world this book conjures up is superb and leaves tons of room for imagination because the story itself is so small.

March 8, 2026:

A very long graphic novel about a young girl who, running from her family troubles, becomes trapped with a pair of feral, bewildered wildmen in their underground lair.

Every character in this story is deeply unwell. Maladaptive parent/child relationships are the least of it, except really if you think about it, they're the all of it.

March 5, 2026:

A handful of abandoned robots emancipate themselves from their human overlords and open a noodle shop, navigating both the law that refuses them rights and trauma from The War.

The word "cozy" has either lost a lot of meaning or wasn't clear to me to begin with, but if this isn't it, it's close. It's sweet and hopeful but not naive. It addresses the darkness in its premise.

You'll have no shortage of social parallels to identify with: analogues to immigrant status, to gender, to disability, to labor unions, to body autonomy, to survivorhood, to the examining of one's own privileges even while experiencing oppression & discrimination.

I can't tell if everyone's actually sick of "found family" now, or if that's just the cool contrarian opinion, but again either this is it or it's close. Lovable characters building a community around a small business, it's just like that coffeeshop book everyone likes.

February 28, 2026:

Oop, forgot to snap a picture.

So, yeah. A portable latrine technician discovers that the missing people from county fairs in the surrounding area are linked to portals inside evil portapotties. It's absurd cause there's poop in there.

I don't even know why I wanted to read this, to be honest. Major whiplash compared to The Redemption Of Morgan Bright and based on the title and cover art, I should have known that.

It's mystery style, with the main character on the hunt for his missing elderly mother though the dimensional toilet portals to a dark carnival of guts and gore. This book takes itself a bit too seriously for that sentence.

February 20, 2026:

This goofy high fantasy romance (fauxmantasy??) offers local himbo Sir Cameron, caught up in the prophecy that his death will finally defeat the Mad Sorcerer. Thing is, Sir Cameron is a coward so he offers himself as the Mad Sorcerer's hostage, ensuring their mutual survival. Horny doofus moves in with loner genius. Cue the hijinks.

Turns out a book character who spams "I seduce the _____" like a DnD player wielding a bard is still extremely funny when handled this well. The awkward sitcom-like situations had me cracking up. It's giving Roommates AU but I guess there's no A, only U.

There are times where it gets more serious as well, so don't get too cozy. And the ending had me astonished. Well done.

February 16, 2026:

A small town experiences a mass casualty and decides to leave the bodies where they lay as a grim memorial, hiring a closeted gay teenager and the father he cannot hope to understand to stand guard. You have three guesses to figure out why the body of an attractive young woman disappears from the scene (& who did it). Meanwhile, the suspects are being held extrajudiciously at some malicious torture-pervert's mansion.

So, that's a lot. I feel like I read this with a shroud over my mind because I found some of it hard to understand. Chiefly, the perpetrators of the tragedy do not have faces and I do not know what that represents. The town council is powerful to the point of putting me in a haze of unreality; for a setup so recognizably contemporary, there's no trace of the trappings of modernity (phones? forensics? rule of law??).

This is pretty extreme in its unsparing use of gross sex crimes, and overall the tone is dreary. In fact it begins with an author's note that this book can not and should not be enjoyed, and I'd say I just about succeeded in what the author intended. Maybe more books should start out with instructions haha

This is clearly the first of a series (Burnt Sparrow #1), but I don't think I'll be reading the rest of them. Just not that interested.

February 10, 2026:

A handful of shifty characters on the run all end up in the same unusual place: a ~free~ motel run by creepy twins who declare that they have until midnight to solve a murder or face hideous dimensional horror death.

The complex web of characters, who knows what, who's keeping secrets from whom, and how they lie their way out of getting caught up keeps the momentum simmering pleasantly. Meanwhile, the plot does its best to melt your brain with surprises, time loops, and déjà vu.

I had a pretty good time reading this, but not nearly as much fun as No Road Home. It was, however, more adventuresome and kept me guessing the whole time. The scary guy is satisfactorily unsettling and the mystery is pretty unique.

February 1, 2026:

A second-rate documentary crew jumps at the chance to record a rare ceremony performed by a reclusive, nearly uncontacted, tribe in the far Arctic. It doesn't go well for anybody.

I don't know how to feel about this one. Having an all-indigenous cast (including the doc crew, or at least 2 of the four, I forget) would point to a more pro-native slant, but the book is less anthropologically curious than I would have liked. And, spoiler-covered elephant in the room: the reliance on ritual human sacrifice & cannibalism, when those are harmful stereotypes levied against tribes that didn't practice them, is a... questionable choice. Maybe not indefensible, but questionable.

Gore lovers will relish the detailed descriptions of the act of consuming raw flesh (animal and otherwise), and the insane slasher style death scenes (which come with illustrations(?)!). Meanwhile, as an environmental dread lover, there wasn't enough danger from the cold, in my opinion. Which is crazy because it's all over this thing.

Also there are randomly words substituted for similar words, most memorably using "sapphic" when I'm pretty sure they meant "yonic." This is either a mistake on the author's part or a 5-D chess move characterization of the POV narrator, who can say?

This story still held surprises for me even after I thought I had clocked exactly where it was going. The very exciting extended chase scene was my favorite. They explain the unusual title kinda, but I still don't know what it means.

In all, it blends climate justice with native identity in a way I see a lot online and not a lot in horror novels.

January 27, 2026:

So, if your only problem with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was that it wasn't toxic yuri, that's pretty specific but congratulations!

A strong core of time-honored centuries of unbridled vampire hedonism, peppered with sexual abuse, coiled around a modern young lesbian stumbling through her new circumstances.

I really preferred the historical bits at first, but by the time the storylines caught up with each other, I was blazing through so fast I didn't have time to pick a favorite.

I don't know if this is a compliment or a criticism, but I simply cannot fathom the vampire metaphor here because it's too many disparate things. It would be easy to map it onto sexuality, but this book is way too complex for that. My explanation would just be a copy of the actual text itself.

January 14, 2026:

In the near future, a woman escaping a manipulative relationship shows up in a remote desert town to find that it's basically the plot of Animal Crossing. Fully unplugged, she finds herself becoming a part of a community. Also the roadrunner god starts harassing her romantically.

I can't believe it either, but the Ghost Husband narrative is not the important part here (it doesn't even start til about halfway). No, the key is the healing power of community and the reward of working for oneself rather than a paycheck.

The characters are easy to love: the main character has the major symptom of whatever mental illness / neurodivergence / trauma response you have, dear reader; her dog, of course a loyal animal sidekick; the sassy grandma next door, your spirit guide to the desert; the openminded priest, your mileage may vary; the chaotic radio DJ. Everyone's instantly way too nice but this is fantasy, baby! Roll with it. Bask in it, actually.

This feels like a love letter to the setting: the desert itself is practically a character. A friend of mine longs to return to this area, and I'm starting to wonder if that's a universal experience for desert-dwellers.

January 1, 2026:

A regular family is shocked to find that their regular couch has been replaced overnight.

It's an inescapably absurd premise, but understandably sinister: they can't seem to get rid of the new sofa and cannot find a replacement for the old one. Tensions in the home rise for no apparent reason. What is anyone expected to do in such a mundane yet surreal situation?

I thought it was mostly just fine. It kept me engaged for an afternoon and I didn't notice anything glaringly wrong with it. The best part was the guy who works literally everywhere.

December 28, 2025:

Sneaking in a rare nonfiction at the end here. The author speaks about his life-- with the important context that he has fused wrist bones and cannot rotate his hands-- in parallel with descriptions of classic horror movies, their monsters, and how the genre, as well as society at large, treats disabilities & the people who have them.

I have decided that memoirs are not my thing, but this remains an approachable read by drip-feeding you each narrative thread a paragraph at a time. In a single page you'll progress one noteworthy day in his childhood, one scene in a movie, one conversation with a love interest, one landmark protest.

This format makes it unique. It doesn't have the in-depth technical analysis or advocacy calls-to-action that would push it closer to an essay; it's a factual account of events that happened, feelings that were felt, movies that were made. But the Kuleshov Effect (or whatever its text equivalent is) is a powerful tool, letting the reader intuit what the hypothetical essay would have spelled out. The unflinching use of harsh and/or outdated language shocks the reader out of a polite, clinical mindset and into the author's frustration.

December 9, 2025:

A woman's husband is a real piece of shit, so her best friend hatches a scheme to "haunt" their house to make him go insane(??)

For such a wild premise, I was prepared for fun. Like that song from SNL, a funny "I'm in your walls" kind of way. And it... sorta was? For a minute we had elaborate traps and explosive freakouts.

...

I'm gonna level with you and fuck spoilers: this books' attitude towards its own happy ending completely ruins it. I'm not sure where I thought this story would go, obviously "Please let me haunt your shitty husband" is not an effective answer to the problem, but "Actually, you're the drunk driver if you hold it against him you're just as bad" is NOT IT EITHER.

Yeah so turns out there's also a real haunting and it shows this couple their future which is grim. They literally quote A Christmas Carol to ask if these are the things that may be only, etc etc, flash forward past all that personal growth stuff, and everything's all better now! Hooray!!

They really went with, "The only thing worse than an alcoholic abusive husband threatening to ruin you if you leave, is being a single parent with no husband at all!" Repulsive.

December 6, 2025:

A lonely woman with a severe (and fictional) autoimmune disorder signs up for a study that may be her last hope-- but the cure is so much worse than the disease.

This author's signature slowness is back, so this is not for those looking for a lot of big, scary action. This is the subtle dread of disorientation, of paranoia, of knowing your own senses cannot be trusted, but everyone else can be trusted even less.

Medical horror is really touchy for me, and many others. Sometimes I hate it (derogatory) and sometimes I hate it (complimentary). In this case, the physical stuff didn't hit me that hard, it was all the mind games this book plays with its main character.

Good call making up the specific disease for this book; you can come up with any symptoms and treatments you want without invalidating any real person's actual lived experience, even while there are clear parallels to known illnesses that make it relatable.

November 8, 2025:

Gay fiber artist's average trip to Hobby Lobby.

This is a really great slasher, and of course the radical fundamentalist overtones are plenty to rile you up before you even get to the really culty shit.

If you're into slightly over-the-top deaths and the inherent silliness of killing people with crafting supplies, in a book that otherwise takes itself fairly seriously, you can't go wrong with this pick.

Also I want to draw attention to the cover art: the author's note has an interesting story about it. It's not an illustration, that's a photo of a physical object! Very cool.

November 4, 2025:

We are achieving types of queer I've never encountered before, lovingly crafting fetishes I never thought possible. I can honestly say I've never been so allured by something I'm fully not into. The writing is just that good, it can temporarily bend you into a kink you don't have.

The core premise is a simple The Thing But Desert: research team finds a weird dead thing, everyone starts getting mysteriously sick, sick people aren't acting right. Textbook.

The unique qualities come from the spellbinding sexual energy, and the magnetic push-pull between disgust and arousal.