#tor forge

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

"The dead don't walk. Except, sometimes, when they do."

Year Read: 2022, 2026

Rating: 5/5

About: When sworn soldier Alex Easton receives word that kan childhood friend, Madeline Usher, is dying, ka rushes to Ruravia and the crumbling Usher manor to attend her and her brother, Roderick, who is unraveling under the strain of his sister's illness. There, Easton finds a stout-hearted British mycologist, a bewildered American doctor, possessed wildlife, and a tarn that pulses with an eerie glow. The secret to Maddy's illness is deeply rooted in the Usher home, but it may be too late to save any of them. [Note: Easton uses the pronouns ka/kan, reserved specifically for soldiers in kan culture, so my review will likewise reflect those.] I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warnings: character death, animal death, body horror, some gore, broken bones, severe illness.

Thoughts: I commented in my review of The Hollow Places that the narrators of that novel and The Twisted Ones sounded almost interchangeable, so it's nice to see Kingfisher mixing it up in What Moves the Dead. Easton's voice caught me immediately, and I found myself underlining so many of kan lines. Ka is observant and funny, confident in kan skills but self-deprecating in other ways. It was fascinating to read about Easton's experiences as a soldier and the little bits of Gallacian culture, which enriches the story without overwhelming the current plot. I didn't have strong feelings about anyone else besides the redoubtable Miss Potter, queen of mycology, whom I loved, but as it's a rather short book, there isn't really time to develop anyone else.

If I had a complaint about this novella, it's exactly that: it's too short. While everything is well-fleshed out in under two hundred pages, all plot threads neatly wrapped up, I wanted more time to sink into these characters and this world and Easton's charming narrative voice. That being said, it is adapted from a short story, so it's a wonder Kingfisher managed to do even this much with it. It's an imaginative take on the original story, with some delightfully creepy moments with Madeline and the hares, and a fascinatingly original explanation for what may have happened at Usher. It's less gory than the previous novels and, like the original, gets its horror mainly from its well-crafted atmosphere. Although it's more streamlined and far less flowery, fans of Mexican Gothic should find a lot to appreciate about it. I really loved this, and I can't wait to have a copy on my shelf.

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

"That's why we're called the Luminaries, Winnie: we are lanterns the forest can never snuff out."

Year Read: 2022

Rating: 3/5

About: All her life, Winnie Wednesday has dreamed of joining the ranks of the hunters in the Luminaries, a secret society of magical hunters and researchers in Hemlock Falls. Since her father was exposed as a witch, Winnie and her family have been outcasts, but she's determined to change that by passing her first hunter trial on her sixteenth birthday. All she has to do is kill a nightmare in the woods at night before it can kill her. What she discovers that night in the woods is a monster no one in Hemlock Falls has heard of before-- and no one believes is real. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warnings: severe injury, body horror, blood/gore, bug horror, violence, bullying.

Thoughts: This was a weird instance of enjoying the world-building but not so much the characters or the plot, when usually it's the opposite for me. Generally, I get bogged down in fantasy novels with too much world-building, but in this case I was fascinated by the different kinds of monsters and wanted to know more. (Obviously, there's your answer-- put monsters in it, and you have my attention.) Unfortunately, I was way less interested in the structure of the Luminaries' secret hunter society, and every moment we didn't spend in the woods while Winnie got her ass kicked by some creature, I was bored.

More unfortunately, there's almost no plot to be seen. The novel does exactly what it says on the tin and takes Winnie through her three trials, and literally nothing else happens. There are no twists or turns and no surprises other than the fact that she manages to survive increasingly unlikely numbers of monsters despite being hopelessly undertrained. I felt like I should be interested in the sudden switch between her outsiderness and her reacceptance, but it all felt very repetitive. Winnie goes over the same things in her head in every chapter, and the clan mottos are beaten to death.

Little Eve by Catriona Ward

"'Right and wrong--they are just words. When we are standing in the dark, holding a flaming poker, there is only one thing to consider and that is ourselves. Can we hold such an act within us, without being irrevocably changed?'"

Year Read: 2022

Rating: 2/5

About: Eve has been raised on the island of Altnaharra, her Uncle the Adder in a cultish religion that predicts the end of the world by giant serpent. For Eve and her family, it's very real, and Eve would do anything to inherit the Adder's power. When Chief Inspector Black arrives to investigate a murder in the nearby town, he puts doubt in Eve's heart for the first time. When their sacred ceremony goes badly wrong, her sister Dinah is the only one left standing to tell the story. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warnings: character/family death, drowning, rape, pedophilia, child abuse/abusive households (graphic, on-page), cults, eye horror, body horror, starvation, severe injury, violence, drugging, manipulation, snakes, sexism, guilt, strong religious themes.

Thoughts: I realized a while back that I was hardly ever making use of two stars in my reviews, instead lumping most books into three stars for various reasons, so I decided to change my strategy a little. When I finish a book, I ask myself the simple question, "Did you enjoy it?" If the answer is "No," then it's not a three-star book, no matter how well-written it might be. I didn't enjoy this book. It is well-written. My rating is a reflection of my enjoyment, not necessarily its goodness, so take that with a grain of salt.

Ward is excellent at layering mysteries so that we think we know what's going on, only for her to pull the rug out from under us at the end and show us what we should have been looking at all along. The answers were there, but with a little sleight of hand, she managed to misdirect us into looking somewhere else. I enjoyed that aspect of the novel and, indeed, the mystery of what happened and how it happened was one of few things that kept me going throughout the novel. The discrepancies in the past and present accounts were an itch in my brain. I had to know who was lying.

But goddamn, is it hard to read. I don't enjoy historical novels, and I don't enjoy novels about cults, and Little Eve is both. The thing about cults is that they only make sense from the inside, so any outsider (like the reader) is going to look at it and go: that is batshit crazy, why are you staying? And since I'm on the outside, I could never shake that question as I was reading. It's not that Ward doesn't do a good job of putting us in Eve's mindset, because she does. It's completely understandable why she thinks and acts the way she does, having such limited experience with the outside world.

Black Tide K.C. Jones

"Maybe that's another difference between reality and fantasy: In real life, sometimes there are no heroes. In life, sometimes everybody loses and darkness swallows the world."

Year Read: 2022

Rating: 2/5

About: Beth is a young house-sitter who's trying to get her life together, and Mike is a former film producer contemplating suicide and battling his grief over his wife leaving. The two meet by chance and spend one night together before the world ends. When a meteor shower brings in a host of hostile alien creatures, the two find themselves stuck on the beach and fighting for their lives. I received an invitation to read a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warnings: character death (on-page), parent/spouse/animal death, suicide attempts/ideation, drowning, blood/gore, body horror, severe injury, fire, guns, dementia. NSFW content.

Thoughts: For some reason I thought I was going into a water horror novel in the style of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) or even Sweetheart (2019). Instead, I got a discount alien sci-fi novel that flounders around in its overly-complicated mythology with a couple of main characters I prayed would get eaten. The first chapter was a shock when I realized the narrator was supposed to be a 20-something woman. I don't know how to explain the difference, but the narration came off utterly male, which I quickly corrected to female-written-by-a-male. She sleeps with a guy who's much older in the first chapters, which frankly comes off like old-man wish fulfilment. ‘Human car wreck’ isn't a personality, and it's never clear exactly how Beth has managed to ruin everything she's ever touched. I hate that I find Mike more sympathetic, but there's a lot more attention to his sad history and emotional recovery than there is to Beth's.

Sundial by Catriona Ward

"When people say something is 'unthinkable,' what they usually mean is that they don't want to think it. They are resistant to an idea. But that is not what unthinkable means. I understand that, now. It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shape in your mind. It is poison and madness flowering behind your eyes."

Year Read: 2021

Rating: 3/5

About: On the outside, Rob's life looks perfectly normal. She has a husband, two daughters Callie and Annie, and a beautiful house in the suburbs. The truth is that her husband is cheating on her with the woman next door, and Callie collects bones, talks to imaginary friends, and may have just tried to poison her sister. Disturbed and willing to do whatever it takes to protect Annie, Rob takes Callie out to her abandoned family home in the desert for some bonding time. Sundial is full of death and secrets, and Callie worries her mother might not be completely stable. She worries only one of them will leave Sundial alive. Spoilers are under the cut. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warning: death (graphic, on page), child/sibling/parent death, human trafficking, domestic violence, child abuse, animal death/abuse, addiction/drug use, poisoning, dog attacks, severe injury, miscarriage, guns, violence, threats, illness, vomiting, infidelity, grief, mental illness.

Thoughts: I was really invested in the first few chapters of this book, and had it taken place more in the present timeline, I think I would have liked it more. I was interested in Rob's family dynamics and her creepy children, but this turns out to be more of a framing story for the past events at Sundial. More than half the book takes place in Rob's memories of her sister, Jack, their weird parents, and the commune-like desert home that conducts unusual experiments on feral dogs.

There's nothing particularly wrong with that story. I just wasn't that interested in it. I didn't care about past-Rob, Jack, and their parents as much as I cared about present-Rob and her kids, and while the mysteries in that timeline are dark and convoluted, they never quite live up to their promise. Objectively, I think it's well-plotted with a couple of surprises, but personally, I never felt any particular way about it. There are also some excerpts of the book Rob is writing that end up feeling fairly pointless.

I was always happier when the perspective circled back to the present, particularly in Callie’s chapters where she appears to be talking to dead things. Seeing the same events from Rob's perspective and again, slightly different, from Callie's lets us know that neither is the most reliable narrator, and I enjoyed the tense conclusion to that timeline. However, be warned that it's not a book that wraps everything up neatly for us, and I still had some questions at the end. For once, I think I like having theories more than answers. More on that in the spoilers!

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

"'There's a monster inside each of us,' he says. 'If you let yours out, Ted, it might not eat you.'"

Year Read: 2021

Rating: 4/5

About: At the end of a street in a quiet neighborhood, there is a house where Ted Bannerman lives with his daughter and his cat. Many years ago, children went missing in this town, and one of those investigations led to the house on Needless Street. That's why Dee has taken up watch in the abandoned house next door, convinced that Bannerman had something to do with her sister's disappearance. It might be true. It might be worse than she thinks, and what's buried in the woods behind the house might change Dee and Ted forever. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warning: character death, parent/child death, animal death, abuse/abusive households, torture, stitches/needles, broken bones, violence, some gore/blood, severe injury, hospitals. (Note: I'm skipping a couple trigger warnings because they're spoilery. I'll include them under the cut with the rest of my spoilers. Feel free to ask about specific ones!)

Thoughts: An approximation of my experience reading this book:

50%: I have no idea what's going on. 55%: OMG I KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON AND IT'S SO MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. 😱😭 100%, at my past self: Lol girl you didn't know shit.

In short, The Last House on Needless Street is a mindfuck from beginning to end, and I'm so here for it. This is pretty much everything I ask for out of a horror novel, plus some things that the genre usually doesn't come through on. I'll explain in detail after the spoilers, but I actually recommend that you don't read them if there's ever a chance of you reading this novel. I had a hard time even describing it without giving things away, and it's 100% one of those stories where it's better to go in cold. Don't ruin this book for yourself. It's so much better to just experience it.

This is one of the best examples of unreliable narrator that I've ever read. From the beginning, we know that we can't fully trust Ted's point of view, since he tells us right from the start that he has trouble knowing when something is happening. ("I don't always get tenses right. Everything always feels like it's happening now and sometimes I forget it actually happened then.") The other most common narrator is Ted's cat, Olivia, who for some reason seems far more reliable than Ted despite the fact that she's not human, but it also becomes clear over time that Olivia, as a cat, doesn't understand everything she sees. She's limited to her experiences in the house, and we very rarely see what's strange about our everyday lives.

And that's one of my favorite things about this book. There are so many strange little details, most of them not all that noticeable at first, but the more they pile up, the more we get the sense that there is something terribly, terribly wrong in Ted's house. Why do things that are broken keep turning up unbroken? Is the timeline not linear? Is the rug by the door orange or blue? Dee's is the only perspective outside the house, but rather than provide clarity, it only further muddies the waters. (Possibly the one thing I don't like about the book is the rather abrupt ending to her chapters; for all the closure we get for the other characters, there's almost none for her.) All of it adds to the sense of confusion and unreality that permeates the book, but Ward is expertly weaving together the layers of the mystery, dropping hints that won't make sense until suddenly they do, and the picture is so much more horrifying than I'd guessed. It's the kind of book I wanted to start over again immediately to see what I'd missed, and I'm already looking forward to reading it again (and again). I liked the beginning and middle, but it took the end to push it into love. Be prepared to hear me screaming about this one for a while.