JESSICA FREEBURG & NATALIE FOWLER'S PAGE: GHOSTS OF THE WILD WEST; MONSTERS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST; MONSTERS OF THE SOUTH

MONSTERS OF THE SOUTH: Stories of Swamp Creatures, Aliens, and Other Legendary Beasts
JESSICA FREEBURG & NATALIE FOWLER
Adventure Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Read 26 chilling stories, from two paranormal investigators, about reportedly true encounters with monsters in the South and Southeast.

A mysterious winged creature descends upon a community, leaving behind a horrific disaster and whispers of a deadly omen. A family’s peaceful night becomes a nightmare when their home is attacked by otherworldly beings. In the dead of night, a man is visited by a monstrous half-dragon, half-bird beast. The South’s history includes several unimaginable encounters with legendary creatures. This collection of “ghost stories” presents the creepiest, most surprising tales of monsters in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Authors Jessica Freeburg and Natalie Fowler are active paranormal investigators with a shared fascination for things that go bump in the night. The professional writers spent countless hours combing the region for the strangest and scariest run-ins with the unexplained.

Horror fans and history buffs will delight in these 26 terrifying tales. They’re based on reportedly true accounts, proving that the Southern USA is the setting for some of the most unnerving monster tales ever told. The short stories are ideal for quick reading, and they are sure to captivate even the most reluctant of readers. Share them with friends around a campfire or try them alone at home—if you dare.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A great choice for your advanced eight-year-old cryptid fancier! Nothing in here will scare the ordinary ten-year-old or older. None of the vocabulary should present much of a problem after sixth-grade level. Any weird words are explained in the text.

It's a car/plane/travel book, one that's easy to put down and pick up. Best not to give it to the gulp-it-down reader, it gets repetitious.

I *love* this title!

I don't think anyone who isn't already into cryptids will get much joy. There's only the one alien story:

You're bound to know at least one kid who'll like this.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MONSTERS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: Stories About Bigfoot, Sea Serpents, and Other Legendary Creatures
JESSICA FREEBURG & NATALIE FOWLER
Adventure Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Read 22 chilling stories, written by two paranormal investigators, about reportedly true encounters with monsters in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

A pastor’s afternoon hike takes a horrifying turn when a creature follows him home and terrorizes his family. A woman’s routine drive becomes a heart-pounding encounter when a Sasquatch chases a deer into the path of her car. A child’s innocent night games go from sporty to sinister when a Wendigo stalks him from the shadows. The Pacific Northwest’s history includes several unimaginable encounters with legendary creatures. This collection of “ghost stories” presents the creepiest, most surprising tales of monsters in the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Authors Jessica Freeburg and Natalie Fowler are active paranormal investigators with a shared fascination for things that go bump in the night. The professional writers spent countless hours combing the region for the strangest and scariest run-ins with the unexplained.

Horror fans and history buffs will delight in these 22 terrifying tales. They’re based on reportedly true accounts, proving that the Pacific Northwest is the setting for some of the most unnerving monster tales ever told. The short stories are ideal for quick reading, and they are sure to captivate even the most reluctant of readers. Share them with friends around a campfire or try them alone at home—if you dare.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Exactly the same formula as the author duos other browsing or traveling books. Tales of cryptids, monsters, oddball stuff, designed to entertain anyone over a sixth-grade reading level. Challenging vocabulary is about the critters themselves, so is explained in the text.

Going to Seattle, Portland, Yakima, Vancouver? Give the kid this book for the trip.

It's not a huge investment, the series looks fine on a tablet or ereader, and who knows? Might keep kid plus siblings quiet!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

GHOSTS OF THE WILD WEST: Stories from Deadwood, Tombstone, and the Old Frontier
JESSICA FREEBURG & NATALIE FOWLER
Adventure Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Read 21 chilling ghost stories with ties to the Wild West, based on actual accounts, as told by two paranormal investigators.

Too many lawmen and bandits met their ends on the streets of Deadwood, and their ghostly whispers still remain. In Tombstone, the infamous Bird Cage Theatre is haunted by the shadows of gamblers and painted ladies from long ago. The Wild West produced some of America’s most legendary characters—whose spirits might still roam among us. This collection of ghost stories unearths the creepiest, most surprising tales about old cowboys, outlaws, sharpshooters, prospectors, and more!

Authors Jessica Freeburg and Natalie Fowler are active paranormal investigators with a shared fascination for things that go bump in the night. The professional writers spent countless hours combing the country for the strangest and scariest run-ins with unexplained phenomena connected to the Old Frontier.

Horror fans and history buffs will delight in these 21 terrifying tales. They’re based on reportedly true accounts, proving that the Wild West sparked some of the most notorious and compelling ghostly tales ever told. The short stories are paired with brief retellings of each figure’s deeds while among the living and are ideal for quick reading. They are sure to captivate anyone who enjoys a good scare. Share them with friends around a campfire or try them alone at home—if you dare.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nothing in here will scare anyone over thirteen, at least not of average maturity level. I'd give it happily to an advanced twelve-year-old for a long, dull car trip or flight.

Adults? If they like the ghost hunter shows, sure, but not just because. Someone without that interest won't much enjoy the read...plus, like all compendiums like this, don't gulp...sip.

What it looks like.

I though these were more interesting:

Utilitarian, made for a purpose and serves it.

SPEAK EZ, clever, endearingly endowed with dog energy, paranormal lesbian romantic suspense

SPEAK EZ
ELLE E. IRE
Bywater Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When a mysterious dog shows up during the renovation of the Big City Little Theatre, one woman falls in love with the victim of a century-old homicide who might not be as dead as she seems. And now it's a race against time to ensure she stays that way.


On New Year's Eve, in 1923, someone walked into Michelle "Mickey" McFadden's queer speakeasy hidden beneath the Big City Little Theater and shot her and her dog, EZ, dead. Or . . . sort of, mostly, kind of dead, maybe? Because instead of crossing over, they become trapped within the bar's cinderblock walls. And though EZ eventually manages to wriggle his way free, Mickey remains, her spirit frozen in time.

In 2022, employees of the Big City Little Theater begin encountering a stray dog sneaking in and around the premises. When Ciara, the theater's bookkeeper, saves the dog from being hit by a truck, she begins to suspect there's something odd about the mysterious canine and makes it her mission to catch him and either return him to his owners or keep him as her own.

That is until Ciara and her friends happen upon the sealed-up speakeasy in the theater's subbasement --and find the dog inside. But how did he get in there when the door was locked? And why are there bullet holes in the otherwise beautifully preserved bar? Their discovery launches them on the investigation of a lifetime, complete with an ancient murder to solve, strange occurrences to explain, and a missing person to find.

When Mickey's spirit, which has been trapped in the mysterious in-between for the past hundred years, begins to find her way out, she and Ciara finally come face-to-face. And it's more than the speakeasy's old wiring that makes sparks fly. Ciara's falling hard for Mickey and Mickey for her. Can they solve the murder and figure out how EZ returned to the world of the living before the clock strikes midnight on the next New Year's Eve?

Because if they don't, they're pretty certain Mickey's time will finally be up—this time for good.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: EZ the dog better be coming back. The women, well...if that's how I get EZ back, okay.

I had a lot of fun with this read because I'm all about ghostly love, and even lovin'. It's very clear these women would smoke up a train station with their chemistry. Any author who can get me to invest in the love of two women is an author whose chops as a storyteller are superior. Developing Mickey into someone I was interested in seeing get justice for her century-old murder took some doing. Her post-death time in the walled-up speakeasy in the basement of the theater where Ciara works isn't detailed...in fact the way Mickey's existence gets handled is mostly with believable "I don't know"s and much pondering without a lot of resolution, which is fine by me.

All the characters are fun to listen to. Mickey's not all that different from the others, something I'd usually frown over, but the four in the group are witty enough that I let it go. What counts in a crime novel is solving the crime, right? Not to me, though I'll admit the pleasure of reading a series mystery is a satisfying solution to the crime and the crew around the sleuth. I don't know the author's plans, but it seems to me that, after this story, she's likely to stop. As long as she brings back EZ somehow, okay by me.

So the murder does have a solution that we are given adequate means to think through. I won't talk about it because the Spoiler Stasi is ever-vigilant, but it makes sense and it works. It's also part of the reason I think this could be a satisfying standalone story. I like the idea of this story existing in and for itself, not needing to carry forward baggage.

What cost a half-star off perfect-fivedom was my sense that Ciara needed too little time to adjust to Mickey's...unorthodox...existence. How does Ciara just buy into this decidedly offbeat mode of being? No obvious anxiety around any of it, which I'm not really prepared to accept all the way; so a measly half-star off instead of a whole one, because once they get to bantering, well, it's just utterly clear why they love one another.

Very much a story to keep the #PrideMonth reader involved, entertained, amused, and invested.

RÍO MUERTO, 2025's first all-five read, though not for the fantasy-averse reader

RÍO MUERTO
RICARDO SILVA ROMERO (tr. Victor Meadowcroft)
World Editions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook editions, available tomorrow

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN Translation Prize! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: On the outskirts of Belén del Chamí, a town that has yet to appear on any map of Colombia, the mute Salomón Palacios is murdered a few steps away from his home. His widow, the courageous and foul-mouthed Hipólita Arenas, completely loses her sanity and confronts the paramilitaries and local politicians, challenging them to also kill her and her two fatherless sons. Yet as Hipólita faces her husband’s murderers on her desperate journey, she finds an unexpected calling to stay alive.

This poetic and hypnotizing novel, told from the perspective of Salomón’s ghost, denounces the brutal killings of innocent citizens and at the same time celebrates the invisible: imagination, memories, hope, and the connection to afterlife.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: South America's cultural impact is never more delightfully represented, to me at least, than when I read magical-realist works whether in translation or not. A novel narrated by a ghost definitely counts as "magical" in my book (!), so I was prepared for something to get me, to find the chinks in my emotional armor.

Not prepared enough.

That there's a civil war, a narcoterror regime, and immense unrest in Colombia was known to me. How pervasive it was didn't seem to me to be a reason to be surprised until I read the author's explanation that these events are fictionalized, not merely fiction...that "based on a true story" line we see so often hit home hard, because this is a friend's life skinned in fiction but boned by facts.

It's really down to this:

I am telling what I was told to me: that Salomón Palacios was gunned down only a few paces from his home and died and became a nameless thing in the gloom—the closing in—before returning from the dead. That he took an eternity in coming back, for the soul recovers memory in its own time, at its own rhythm, but that he must be out there now, and always will be, because death is the true present and because some murder victims do not depart.

Time passes subjectively, per Einstein; I'm not entirely ready to say velocity's the one governing factor until someone can really explain time fully. Maybe Death really does equal time; after reading this book, I have to be open to the possibility. For one of the few times in my reading life I find myself agreeing with a Pentecostal character: the apocalypse really has begun.

What makes Salomón such a great narrator is his ongoing physiological voicelessness. In life, in death, he makes no auditory impact. His existence as a ghost is in a powerfully evocative way a continuation of his voiceless, ineffectual life. Small gestures of kindness, his eking of a living by doing odd jobs, his very death carry the same burden of being a little guy living a little life that couldn't possibly threaten anyone who gets killed in spite of his death changing nothing.

Well, it unhinges his wife. She goes on a campaign to force his killers to kill her, and their sons, too. The sons have other ideas. Her plan to confront the boss who ordered Salomón's death to force him to martyr her, and her boys, in order to...what, exactly? no one in their town doubts who caused the thugs who did it to pull the triggers...or is she simply and selfishly out to commit suicide to avoid feeling grief for her genuinely loved with all his flaws husband? Insisting the sons she birthed join her in this spectacular suicide-by-provocation motivates Salomón in ghostly form to attempt to communicate love felt, love given to be received, to the maddened Hipólita to cause her to reinvest in life, to use her rage to pick up her boys and get the hell out of there. It would give his death, and his life, meaning.

How can a man voiceless in embodied life, in other words, find a voice now he's bodiless?

Author Silva Romero wrote a story I did not want to inhabit, but I did inhabit as fully as I have most stories I've read, because few kinds of story command my involvement more than grief, love, and power dynamics in emulsion. He chose a story I couldn't not get myself into. He chose a storytelling voice I could not avoid investing my empathy, sympathy, and tearducts into. Salomón loved deeply and mutely showed his love in practical simple deeds; he loved so much he was motivated to reach around the barrier of death. Author Silva Romero, ably served by his translator Victor Meadowcroft, did a fine job evoking a violent time's hideous human cost, as well as human beings' overpowering need to force the world to make those costs make sense.

It's impossible to do that, I say confidently, as I read the story of how it is done. All five stars.

OCTOBER'S OCEAN, charming romantic YA story with a strong young gay lead

OCTOBER'S OCEAN
DELAINE COPPOCK
Tuxtails Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Halloween on Jute Island is like a walking, talking costume parade. That's probably why Seth didn't notice her at first.

The old black dress, wild hair and accent didn't exactly stand out in October. But there is something about Peggy that draws Seth in. He hadn't felt anything but empty since Colin died, but suddenly he feels curious. And who is this new boy in town with ocean eyes that Seth can't look away from?

As the waves of loss threaten to pull Seth under, his love of music and his new friends might just lead him back to shore.

The Summer I Turned Pretty meets Outlander in this beautiful story of teenage love, loss and friendship.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think older people are either oblivious to, or too uncomfortable to deal with, the gigantic crisis of grief young men are going through. Our in/actions have landed these culturally disadvantaged people in the midst of a life-threatening lacuna in an already thin mental-health safety net for their group. Seth is grieving his lost Colin, and he's male, so doubly not encouraged to discuss this raw, ravaging grief.

I don't think the gay youth suicide epidemic goes unnoticed anymore, but I do think its precursor states like depression and loss go vastly undertreated. If you are, or are aware of, a young person in emotional need, The Trevor Project (link above) is a resource to tap as soon as possible. Doing nothing, not acknowledging the problem or thinking it could just go away, is not a wise choice of coping mechanism. Please reach out, for yourself or to learn more about how you can extend help to your own life's Seth. The rewards are real for those who take action and so are the risks for those who don't.

The story told here is one of gaining perspective and using it to forge a new relationship to life and living with loss. I am a sour old man, well past the perspectiveless, trackless desert that is queer adolescence, so read this story as definite outsider. I was so moved. I was so happy to feel the force of Author Coppock's story. If *I* get it, feel it, am charmed by it, I can see how and understand why a gay young man in a vulnerable state would find it very comforting. We do well to comfort before we make demands of these young men...they get so little of it. The lifelong consequences are more or less invisible, it seems to me at least, and we as adults should make more and better efforts to change this.

Start small. Give this charming story to the queer lad in your orbit.

I learned of this book from its agent/editor, Erik McManus, via his YouTube channel. I'm very glad that I did because I got to enjoy a charming slightly-supernatural romantic story to fill my spooky-season reading card, and found a story that I feel is rooted in an emotional reality underacknowledged in queer culture.

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU by COLBY WILKENS

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU
COLBY WILKENS
St. Martin's Griffin Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An enemies to lovers romance with a spooky twist where two feuding writers end up on a writers retreat together at a haunted castle in Scotland

It's been months since horror author Penelope Skinner threw a book at Neil Storm. But he was so infuriating, with his sparkling green eyes and his bestselling horror novels that claimed to break Native stereotypes. And now she’s a publishing pariah and hasn’t been able to write a word since. So when her friend invites her on a too-good-to-be-true writers retreat in a supposedly haunted Scottish castle, she seizes the opportunity. Of course, some things really are too good to be true.

Neil wants nothing less than to be trapped in a castle with the frustratingly adorable woman who threw a book at him. She drew blood! Worse still, she unleashed a serious case of self-doubt! Neil is terrified to write another bestselling “book without a soul,” as Pen called it. All Neil wants is to find inspiration, while completely avoiding her.

But as the retreat begins, Pen and Neil are stunned to find themselves trapped in a real-life ghost story. Even more horrifying, they’re stuck together and a truly shocking (extremely hot) almost-kiss has left them rethinking their feelings, and… maybe they shouldn’t have been enemies at all? But if they can’t stop the ghosts pursuing them, they may never have the chance to find out.

Full of spooky chills and even more sexy thrills, If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens is the funny, fast-paced romp romance readers have been waiting for!

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spooky castle...enemies forced into proximity...sparks flying left and right...bingo! #Deathtober read card filled.

One star off for heterosexualizing a perfectly good plot.

Author Wilkens does a fine job of entertaining her readers with a ghost story inside Gothic-novel trappings. Her domestic-violence opening...the woman throws a book at the man hard enough for the injury to bleed, and to leave a scar, and it's...somehow okay...? Like, a woman injuring a man isn't a problem but if he'd done the same to her the howling banshees would be all over it!


I was not thrilled by this.

I just barely got to a three-star rating because Author Wilkens made me chuckle many times *in*spite*of* my existing irritation. That is some serious talent! Causing an irked old curmudgeon to chuckle is a feat!

I really don't know what to tell you about the violence. You know your own tolerance for the abuse passed off as humor trope.

THE VILLA, subtle, fun, and in the end, more than it says on the tin

THE VILLA
RACHEL HAWKINS
St. Martin' s Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

NOW $2.99 on KINDLE

The Publisher Says: The bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs returns with a brilliant new gothic suspense set at an Italian villa with a dark history.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album—and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred—and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge—and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.

Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the Manson murders, and the infamous summer Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron at a Lake Geneva castle—the birthplace of Frankenstein—The Villa welcomes you into its deadly legacy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What fun it is to sit, or lie in bed, with a read leaning/sitting/suspended above you by your boytoy at your preferred angle, and just submerge into a story. It must needs be a hefty stew, a thick and savory amalgam of tastes powerful and subtle, to get through the fog of quotidian tedium we're all settling back into in the wintry northern hemisphere. Remember it for August reading, global southerners!

Rachel Hawkins delivers a big, full bowl of it all. The middle-escent quondam besties who, in the present, are surprising themselves when they decide to spend girl-time together at one of those fabulously gorgeous rentable family seats in gloriously scenic Italy. Each woman, trying to gin up something to fulfill a publishing contract, is finding that she just is not feeling the love for anything she's got at that moment. The mystery writer's cozy series is sour for her now that her soon-to-be-ex husband is suing her for a chunk of her future royalties because she, in a moment of candor, told an interviewer that her series' most beloved character was based on him. The self-help writer's having an existential crisis because she's been fleecing desperate people by ladling out craptastic nostrums knowing full well that a trip to the Hallmark card shop would give them the same level of help and insight into their problems.

Oh dear! Silly me, saying what I really think about things again. Strike that! Of course, she's simply seeking something to afford her fresh insights and, well, what better than a friend in the middle of a rancorous divorce? (I don't in all honesty see how that's better but I'm not here to judge.) (Well, only the story I'm being told, not the realities of publishing.)

Em and Chess, in the present day, are going through the middle-escent crisis of "is this it?" and need to make their eyes see past the same-old same-old surfaces. At their gorgeous holiday Villa Aestas, they learn to listen to themselves more carefully as the delicious herbal remedy of being in Italy brings up things neither was ever planning to work through, or even acknowledge...admit. That stew has tough cuts of meat that just about break your jaw muscles to chew....

Their motivation to do that tough work is the fifty-years-gone history of Villa Aestas. Golden-boy rocker, two teenaged girls in love with his fame and poetry, a Svengali older man...all of twenty-six!...who guides the group into a Byron-and-Shelley creative ferment that he uses to elicit full-body responses to the sexual tensions inevitable in this situation. Tell me how any writer of anything at all could resist poking this spiritual sore tooth! And the existence of a memoir-by-novel about it, telling a story so soppily romantic that you just know a teenager wrote it. Should they, and we, trust the story we're told here, the story in front of us? Emily, she of the murder-mystery instincts, doesn't seem to question Mari's published version of the 1974 events until present-day events make her think carefully for once in a long, foggy, unhappy time.

But writers, you know, writers aren't simple little souls ready to take dictation from their imaginary friends the voices. Writers (of murder mysteries, of books about changing your life) need to be ruthless and "kill their darlings." Success can breed jealousy as always, but so can a lifetime of coming up short when comparing yourself to someone else...and poets (as songwriters insist they are) are doubly susceptible to this. Add in a hefty libido and a sense of entitlement and, well....

What Author Hawkins does is not something unexpected. But what she accomplishes by bringing all the strands...the two parties visiting Villa Aestas and the book that Mari, the central voice in 1974's strands, writes...into one bundle is to scrape away the grease she's been applying to the ropes of the plot so they won't rub too hard together and weaken each other. The bare ropes of the meanings and emotions scrape and snarl and burn each other as they are suddenly and forcefully made to change the story's velocity and angle. No tangles, some fraying...I think Mari's book got just a hair (heh) more time in the spotlight than it merited...but supporting structure of the thriller parts of the story suspend their scenery and allow you to scrape your stew-bowl clean without feeling like you need to rush before it all comes crashing down. I heard some creaking from behind the scenes but, crucially, felt that this was not the ropes complaining as they got overworked in moving the parts. It was a quiet invitation from Author Hawkins to consider the thriller you've seen in its intended configuration and perspective.

And question if, just maybe, there had not been a last-minute change of plans, well laid to achieve one result, to achieve instead another result entirely.

This elevated a solid three-and-a-half stars entertainment to a four-star puzzle (despite some eye-rolling but period-appropriate homophobia). Definitely recommended to thriller fans and to the small corps of remaining lovers still thrilling to the wonderful Cary Grant did-he-or-didn't-he films of the 1940s.

NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH, Cassandra Khaw's eerie group-ghostie tale

NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH
CASSANDRA KHAW
Nightfire Books
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Nominated for the BEST NOVEL AWARD—2021 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS! Winner annunced on 29 October 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a gorgeously creepy haunted house tale, steeped in Japanese folklore and full of devastating twists.

A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.

It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one gets do-overs in life. The one thing Horror teaches us, firmly and finally, is that single adamantine truth...that final, fierce fact that trumps them all.

When privileged and pretty people want to play, they go mad. They have no reason to consider consequences and no desire to moderate their demands on the Universe's supply of goodwill. There's nothing to say that a destination/theme wedding, a haunted-house horror wedding for five, couldn't be just lovely.

Except, of course, common sense.

As the events of the day unfold, as the people whose lives were compressed into a block of being by the exigencies of education and privilege come unstuck, their masks reveal the real cracks in their faces. Then the masks fall off. Then the faces fall off. This is a horror novella about the awfulness of unslakable appetites, and the enduring pain of never, ever having Enough. Being enough. Finding enough.

Author Khaw has used the silences of screaming people to make this dread-soaked, foregone-conclusion-led, story into a fable for our use. You can find anything in it. You're going to try, so don't bother to front. Looking for a climate-change metaphor? The ancient house with the dead people in its walls. Looking for a religious metaphor? The Forces of Evil animating one of the young people to perform uncharacteristic acts. Revenge fantasy? Dude!

Slasher fans: You have a new talent to follow. Author Khaw understands why we love to see the world end in a welter of blood. Go down the dark alley leading up to the ancient haunted mansion with the moldy old books falling apart in its library.

Go on. You know you want to.

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, fifty-five years old and going strong

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS
JORGE AMADO (tr. Harriet de Onís)
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes–a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

My Review: I've explained on my profile over at LibraryThing that I was in a book circle in RL for many years. I posted our group reading list with my one-line assessments of the books. Most of those books I read long long long before I LT or GoodReads existed, and so I've either never reviewed them or reviewed them for the long-vanished book blog.

Whatthehell, I figured, I should go back and glance over the list of one-liners I put onto them, maybe write some reviews of those oldsters.

So that's what I'm a-gonna do.

BkC1) DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS by Jorge Amado: Adored it! Ghosts get horny, too, and why not?

I stand by the one-liner. It's a wonderful book, so it deserves a real appreciation. A marriage of opposites whose love just...happens:

The whole street took part in the serenade to Flor, Flor leaning against her high window, all ruffles and lace, drenched in moonlight. Down below Vadinho, her gallant knight, with the red rose in his hand, so red it was almost black, the rose of her love.

Flor and Vadinho are as happy as any two opposites can be in a marriage. Their relationship doesn't make sense to any of Flor's stuffy, social-climbing family (really, whose relationship makes sense to the family?), as Vadinho spends and cheats and generally makes a spectacle of himself in dreary 1940s Bahia (provincial Brazilian city, think Baltimore or Philadelphia). Especially the day he drops dead in a Carnival street dance.

Flor grieves for him, but life goes on, and the aforementioned stuffy family won't tolerate a single woman in her prime to be left in peace. So Flor marries Babbitt. Oh dear, I mean Teodoro (which is Brazilian for Babbitt). He's not a lot of fun, but he's thoughtful, and gentle, and considerate of her feelings, and a BIG FAT BORE especially in bed. Flor settles in for a life of having settled. So many people of both genders and all persuasions can relate to this.

"And why don't I have the right to contribute to buying us a house? Or don't you consider me your helpmate in everything? Am I only good to clean up, look after your clothes, cook your meals, and go to bed with you?" Dona Flor was in a temper. "Just a servant and a strumpet."

Then...then...Vadinho's horny ghost shows up! Moral crisis: Is it cheating on your husband to sleep with your dead husband? Is this a serious question? To Flor it is, and to be frank, I was so bought in at that point that I took it seriously too.

He took her as though she were a toy, a toy or a closed rosebud which he brought into bloom each night of pleasure. [She] began to lose her timidity, giving herself over to that lascivious union, growing in response, turning into a heartsome, spirited lover.

I mean! Could you say no to the returned ghost of a lover who could do that to you?! Written in 1966, this novel felt as fresh as yesterday to me when I read it in the 1990s. It is subtle and grotesque and sly and, in the end, it's the way a real person is: Conflicted. Is the story in Flor's mind, a desperately bored woman's attempt to recapture some small sense of joy in life, or is Vadinho real?

I don't exactly know, even yet. But you know what? Don't matter one little speck. I believe Flor. She woould never lie to me.

All this took place; let him who will believe. It took place in Bahia, where these and other acts of magic occur without startling anybody. If anyone has his doubts, let his ask Cardoso e Sa., and he will tell him whether or not it is the truth. He can be found on the planet Mars or on any poor corner of the city.

Amado was that good. Recommended, ESPECIALLY for married people of all persuasions.

THE UNINVITED GUESTS, an almost-good ghost story lushly described

THE UNINVITED GUESTS
SADIE JONES
HarperCollins
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

KINDLE EDITION IS $1.99 UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2022

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savory survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor—and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.

The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors is not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go according to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels.

Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant parlor game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.

The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from the critically acclaimed Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises—where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety—and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

SURPRISE TWIST ENDINGS ONLY WORK WHEN THEY LEAVE YOU BREATHLESS. TELL TOO MUCH, MAKE YOUR SURPRISE TWIST A SAD BID FOR APPROVAL.

My Review: Emerald Torrington turns twenty today. Her shabby-genteel mama Charlotte, bratty brother Clovis, and afterthought baby sister Smudge, née Imogen, are celebrating with a dinner party, to include Emerald's old friend Insignificance, née Patience, and her brother Ernest; and a last-minute addition, rich local businessman John Buchanan. Charlotte is hoping John will marry Emerald, who Does Not Fancy him and wastes no time letting him know this; he responds by laughing at her arrogance (go John!), yet he still gives her a beautiful cameo as a birthday gift, and still feels...well.

The the Railway wishes upon the family an entire carriage-load of strangers due to an accident which occurred on the branch line. Florence, the housekeeper tasked with keeping house and making a party with one maid who's time is in demand as a hairdresser-cum-lady's-maid for all the abovestairs women, fetches them tea and then the whole household, and invited guests, forget about them.

Except Charlie. Charlie, from First Class unlike the ragtag and bobtail who arrived before him, moves right on in to the birthday party, with surprising...shocking, in fact...results.

Some guests are more uninvited than others. Poor Emerald...such a decent sort trapped in that last moment of adolescent intolerability and intolerance. Well...not any more.

Three stars? Does that seem a bit mingy? It isn't. I'll tell you why.

What begins as a species of Edwardian-style Heyeresque silliness turns into The Turn of the Screw, and for no really good reason. It's nicely written, being a Sadie Jones novel, and it's plotted with some care, but the mash-up takes a lot of suspension of disbelief and it's not asked of one until too late in the game. I don't think of myself as an inattentive or oblivious reader. No adequate set-up was done for the surprise twist, and so instead of feeling excited and pleased, I felt slightly seasick at the sudden change of direction as the boat, previously making for a harbor I could see miles away, goes across the waves' direction towards a more distant island.

Surprise me, yes; do a hard one-eighty, and you risk making me feel duped instead of pleasantly surprised. And that is where The Uninvited Guests left me. Looking for clues as to why I ended up in Calais when my ticket says Southampton.

WHITE SILENCE, a suspenseful thriller to give your Disaster Magnet friend

WHITE SILENCE
JODI TAYLOR (Elizabeth Cage #1)
Headline Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am."

Elizabeth Cage is a child when she discovers that there are things in this world that only she can see. But she doesn’t want to see them and she definitely doesn’t want them to see her.

What is a curse to Elizabeth is a gift to others – a very valuable gift they want to control.

When her husband dies, Elizabeth’s world descends into a nightmare. But as she tries to piece her life back together, she discovers that not everything is as it seems.

Alone in a strange and frightening world, she’s a vulnerable target to forces beyond her control.

And she knows that she can’t trust anyone…

White Silence is a twisty supernatural thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat.

My Review: I cannot believe I did it voluntarily. I mean, I'm completely current in Author Taylor's The Chronicles of St Mary's series...eight novels, eleven novellas and stories released...so I can't plead ignorance of her vicious, violent, eviscerating cruelty. I have been reduced to a quivering heap of snot and tears by Author Taylor on more than one occasion. It's not like I didn't buy the book aware of what would happen to me.

In fact I was unable to read a part of the book around 16-17% because it triggered my personal issues around claustrophobia. I solved this by skipping ahead to the next chapter and inferring what happened from what was then going on. It was too much for my frail little fleur of a heart to live through Mrs Cage's horrid experience, and then in the chapter I skipped to there was an equally awful moment of encavmaphobia (google it) when I thought "oh right then, I'm going to close this file and quietly remove the book from my Kindle" but, at the end of the day, left it on there and just didn't read anymore.

Two months passed. I finished a romantic novel, last in a series I've been following despite the absurd and disgusting and overused winking trope that author insists on fouling her books with, when I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "never in all the history of personkind would Author Taylor have a character *shudder* wink at another character. You are safe, Self, so finish up White Silence at last."

I did. I am so glad. (There was no winking.)

While Elizabeth Cage doesn't have a smooth ride in this book, she does have a fascinating psionic power and the range to use it. She is clearly unmoored by her beloved husband's death. She forms an attachment to a damaged spy that came rather out of nowhere. Her life is turned upside down by several of Author Taylor's trademark dreadful, sadistic maulings of her readers' emotions. I mean characters' arcs, silly me.

There is so much that happens in this book that giving a book report is almost desirable, but I shall refrain because spoilers make people very angry. Suffice to say that each event in the book will have repercussions within seismic shifts atop temporal tsunamis. Absolutely nothing is as it seems, which we know from about the 90% mark on, though the full and devious range of Author Taylor's sadism hasn't come anywhere near to being tested or revealed.

*happy sigh*

So I tell you true, reader, the Disaster Magnet (aka Jodi Taylor follower via the Chronicles of St Mary's) that you love will adore this book. You will get so many bonus points with your Disaster Magnet that you could come out as a 45 supporter or Brexiteer and earn no more than a hurt look and some tutting. And it will guarantee several hours of dead silence as your beloved slurps it down in which you can watch sports or planetary explosion movies or even go out with your buds and get no more than a vague wave and distracted "take your mother with you."