GRIEF EATER, female rage, childhood betrayal, homophobic idiocy revenged upon

GRIEF EATER
EMMA OSBORNE
Interstellar Flight Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you’ve never read before.

When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry—for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed?

A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.

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

My Review: I don't read many zombie stories, so I can't say "this is really different from all the others in the genre" with any confidence or authority. I can say I don't think anyone I've run across discusses the way the zombies are resonating with their readers on the level of emotional impact, of exploring how grief is a deadly contagion.

Katrina is one of the interesting-to-me abuse archetypes: someone who was offhandedly neglected, occasionally brutalized by unkindness from, it seems, earliest life; someone who is benumbed by her absence of caring for her as a person as well as damaged by the indifference to her actual fleshly person's caretaking. It is not uncommon for queer, odd, Othered kids to suffer this fate.

Ask me how I know. (Not a serious invitation...don't, please.)

So Kristina's brutalization by those with a duty of care towards her is resonant with me, and with many millions of us around the world. I don't...can't bear to...say "billions" though I suspect it's the literal truth. Katrina awakens to her afterlife as a zombie because her life as a human ended gorily and as a result of abandonment. It's weirdly liberating, this alteration. It's permission to drop her human life's expectations for the raw, vicious reality of revenge...of bringing into meatspace the consuming hatred of those who ignored and dismissed Katrina when she most needed their care: "I know now why we look so mindless, so insatiable to the living. There is beauty in letting your body glut itself with rich fat and small bones."

As a novella, this horror story is finely judged to the point where it felt to me, as I came to its end, there was not lingering sense that this or that was in need of more room to develop. The SFnal background was deftly handled in that it is left as a background. It isn't the point of the storytelling, so let it be the story's matrix. I often wish horror/near-future SF would choose this deliberate backgrounding in place of half-hearted worldbuilding that is more or less an infodump. Better in my mind, for my reading taste, to offer fewer details but place them with care and forethought in place of a wodge of stodge that's plopped before you and assumed to be part of your mental furniture henceforth. My example of this technique at its most irritating is how Asimov treated us in Foundation. My example of how my preferred method of establish and reinforce lightly but effectively is Orwell's clock striking thirteen in the very first line of 1984.

It's a rare feat to tell me a story about a subject I'm not interested in...zombies in this case...and come away with my admiring compliment: this is a close-to-perfect example of its format and its subject matter.

THE NIGHT GUEST, deeply unnerving psychological domestic horror novella centers misogyny

THE NIGHT GUEST
HILDUR KNÚTADÓTTIR (tr. Mary Robinette Kowal)
Tor Nightfire (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hildur Knutsdottir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that’s sure to keep you awake at night.

Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.

When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same ― have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.

Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . .

What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?

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

My Review: I'm always down for a psychological horror read. This one has a strong message about misogyny at its core. I think that is what powered me past my disappointing reading experience.

Iðunn's world is a very familiar, quotidian one of tedious work, unfulfilling relationships, and family pressures that might or might not be external. Like so many, maybe every, female of my acquaintance, she's a poor sleeper. This has multiple negative effects on a person's life. Iðunn tries to make changes in her sleeping deficits with a fancy new kind of wearable multiple-axes tracking device.

The promised data on her sleeping patterns tells a story that does not make sleep come any easier. If anything the data scares her more; and the device itself seems to be making her life, not only her sleep deficit, much worse.

Iðunn's sense of crushing responsibility for every single thing in her life is not unfamiliar to me. It's just not something I think is always an external pressure as Iðunn thinks it is. No matter; her responses to the world are the story, so putting aside my sense of her emotional immaturity, I travel down the unhappy trail with her. Why is she, for want of another term, sleepwalking? Why does her body acquire wounds during her unconsciousness? If it isn't sleep, what is this state and why is it part of her nightly experience that is unavailable to her daylight mind?

I was ready to quit the read when animal harm entered the chat. I was perfectly happy to follow the deteriorating sense of control over her body and mind; it seems to me to be an excellent metaphor for being a woman in a misogyny-drenched world. I'm very much not down with harming creatures that can not adequately defend themselves, when it's done for cruelty's sake most especially. In this case it did nit feel to me to be more than an intensifying trope; it did not come from something within Iðunn that was just bursting out of her in a horrible way...see The Wasp Factory for an example of what I mean by that.

I decided to trust the eminent Mary Robinette Kowal, a personal favorite creative talent, whose translation of the text felt very smooth and organic and unlike I was reading a story at an extra remove. That often happens to me, even in excellent translations. This story isn't ever going to be a five-star read to me, thought I, but it's way better than average.

Then...the ending.

Three and a half stars. No more, no less.

ULTRAMARINE, translated novella that punches way above its weight in impact

ULTRAMARINE
MARIETTE NAVARRO (tr. Eve Hill-Agnus)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

One of Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025!

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of Ultramarine has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she now manages a crew of twenty men and helms her own vessel. Uncharacteristically, one day, she allows her crew to cut the engines and swim in the deep open water. Returning from this moment of leisure, the crew of mariners no longer totals twenty men: now, they are twenty-one.

Sparse and psychological, Ultramarine grips the reader in a tussle with reality, its rhythmic language mimicking the rocking of the boat. As instruments fail, weather reports contradict the senses, and the ship’s navigation mechanisms break down, Navarro “lulls her readers into accepting the unacceptable” (Asymptote) through deft, lyrical prose and pared-down dialogue. In Eve Hill-Agnus's poetic translation, Mariette Navarro emerges as an exciting, mature voice in French literature.

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

My Review: Men led by a woman...really, that right there is subversive enough for one book, isn't it...get an unexpected, uncharacteristic concession to play from Authority. This is odd, but it's nothing compared to what's on the way in this novella.

I'm calling it psychological horror, not suspense, because the point isn't to solve some riddle before A Bad Thing happens; it's about what unsettling things happening around, and to, you as a group, can elicit from the members of the group. I've labeled it "magical realism" as well because the odd things that happen aren't explained, aren't the point, and are very much not of this consensus reality.

The title is a real pleasure. "Ultramarin" in French means the shade of blue, as well as the French colonial possessions that the ship's heading out over the bright blue tropical sea to. It's the role of a cargo ship to serve capitalism's need to get people things to buy. In her sudden subversion of the great Goddess Capitalism's need for Things to arrive so Commerce may eventuate, what is the captain thinking? The market is not being centered in her actions! The men are, wisely, unsettled and even unnerved despite their request for the halt being honored. They have their swim in the blueness of the sea, turning slightly blue with the heat-leaching nature of oceans.

Then, as is usual when unsanctioned fun is had, the price comes due...the extra crewman who just...appears, the end of some perfectly calm weather that enabled their swim, the unraveling of their social order as they contend with the mounting pressures...there is a serious amonut of unease traveling among all the ship's company. In a very odd way they become a "company" in the non-commercial sense only when they are guilty of not serving the company they're employed by; and the captain, a true seafarer in her very bones, for the first time feels herself of the ship's company as the weirdness unfolds.

Fantastical, unsettling, and very very beautiful. Subversively reminds the characters and the reader that. as powerful a religion as Capitalism may be, it is less than nothing set against the power of the sea.

I recommend this very short read to all y'all. It would've gotten the full five had we not, in under 150pp, still had too many points of view and not all of them resolved.

IN EXCESS OF DARK, new horror novella that does it all right

IN EXCESS OF DARK
RED LAGOE
DarkLit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What if every terrible thing imagined came true? Every fleeting, nightmarish thought a reality?

For grief-stricken Karina, her newfound ability to turn her worst daydreams into palpable truths has sent her into a downward spiral of depression and guilt. Coupled with the appearance of an enigmatic shadow figure and visions of her dead family, she grapples to maintain her sanity while desperately attempting to harness her abilities and reunite with her loved ones.

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

My Review: Red Lagoe was introduced to me by Well Read Beard a couple years back. As I bought her books with my very own United States dollars, they went unreviewed...though not unenjoyed. This is not the first book-bullet the Beard has clipped me with, this author and her wild, fearless pursuit of story-logic's final destination (note horror-movie play on words, please), no matter how deeply grim it may be are now part of my regular rotation. I was very pleased to get this as a DRC.

I am not a chirpy soul. I genuinely believe the worst will happen because that is what the evil xian gawd, who clearly does rule the universe, wants for her victims. So as I read along in this book, I kept thinking, is Karina really just me? I tested my hypothesis by handing the Kindle to my Young Gentleman Caller on a flying visit he paid without telling him why I wanted him to read the book. Two hours later he handed it back and commented, "when did you meet this Red person, and Red had better be a she." So yeah...I related to Karina's nightmarish sense of deja vu as the horrors she is experiencing tie right in to her worst, darkest imaginings.

The worst things that can happen to a parent will spiral any one of us into deepest, most depressed misery. Not all of us see dark shapes that can mimic our lost ones. As a reader, I wavered between being sure this was a bad case of delusional grieving, and Karina's toxic mother's low-key emotional manipulations...and a little, uneasy sense that maybe, juuust maaaybe....

And by the ending, I was *still* not sure. To be clear, the ending has a full and satisfying reason for the events of the book...but I was still in that uncertain space until the very end of the read. That is quite a feat for an author to manage, as I started reading before young Author Lagoe was even born...I have seen every trick and ridden every trope before, and she still made me change my mind about what was happening multiple times.

I recommend this short, intense read to anyone whose life has included loss at an extremely deep level and who is willing and ready to process the darker side of it, as well as to those who think religious and supernatural "horror" are really quite silly. This book plays with those notions in a very unsettling, yet more grounded in reality, way that is very believable.

Karina and her disintegration are genuinely unnerving and upsetting, but for all the darkness on parade here, this is in the end a strong woman's discovery of her truest, most powerful self.

At 99¢, this is a great value. Look into it, and Red Lagoe, and I think you will come away glad to buy her work when you need a little challenging reading.

RING SHOUT, the best damn Halloween story to scare yourself leaky with that's come out yet

< > RING SHOUT
P. DJÈLÍ CLARK
Tor.com Publishing
$9.99 eBook editions, available now

WINNER, BEST NOVELLA: 2020 NEBULA AWARDS!

FINALIST, WORLD FANTASY AWARD: BEST NOVELLA, 2021! Winners to be announced 7 November 2021.

4 OCTOBER 2021 NEWS ON KINDLESALE FOR $2.99!

DECEMBER 2020 UPDATE A TV SERIES IS ON THE WAY!! Starring the ineffably beautiful KiKiLayne ...and produced by SkyDanceTV, the people behind the Foundation adaptation on the half-bit fruit peoples' streamer, Grace and Frankie (seriously, does anyone not love that show?), and Altered Carbon (the first season was great, shut up)!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns with Ring Shout, a dark fantasy historical novella that gives a supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror.

D. W. Griffith is a sorcerer, and The Birth of a Nation is a spell that drew upon the darkest thoughts and wishes from the heart of America. Now, rising in power and prominence, the Klan has a plot to unleash Hell on Earth.

Luckily, Maryse Boudreaux has a magic sword and a head full of tales. When she's not running bootleg whiskey through Prohibition Georgia, she's fighting monsters she calls "Ku Kluxes." She's damn good at it, too. But to confront this ongoing evil, she must journey between worlds to face nightmares made flesh—and her own demons. Together with a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter, Maryse sets out to save a world from the hate that would consume it.

I RECIEVED A REVIEW DRC OF THIS TITLE VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Seriously, this would've been a full five-star read had it not been for nine, maybe ten, w-bombs dropped like seagull shit on a picnic.

The Birth of a Nation came from a book. Two books really—The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots, by a man named Thomas Dixon. Dixon's father was a South Carolina slaveowner in the Confederacy. And a sorceror.
–and–
Sadie got it into her head that the Warren G. Harding government knows about Ku Kluxes. Say she pieced it together from the tabloids. That Woodrow Wilson was in on {D.W.} Griffith's plan, but it got out of hand. And now there's secret departments come about since the war, who go round studying Ku Kluxes. Girl got some imagination.

That's where we start, mes vieux, that's all in the first thirty or so pages! You are in medias res, and no doubt in your mind that you're not gettin' the full burden of the lyric. To help you along, our generous cicerone Author Clark offers us, in the voice of a crossdressing Harlem Hellfighter, this perfect summation of how Griffith's sorcerous manipulation of the US took such easy hold:

"Oh, I disagree," Chef {the Hellfighter} retorts. "White folk earn something from that hate. Might not be wages. But knowing we on the bottom and they set above us—just as good, maybe better.

Still works today. 45's vile "basket of deplorables" full up on that kind of scumbag. Hating people is as old as humanity, and the ones that're least like your sacred itty self are the easiest to get in the habit of downin' on. (I'm sure not innocent of this: I hate the Deplorables with a cold, contemptuous superiority. "Me? Like that no-class lowbrow hillbilly? I don't think so, and fuck you for thinking it.")

And then there's the delight, once you've figured out the Klans are people and the Ku Kluxes are actual, terrible monsters, of trying to get your head around why that should be, how that came about in our horrible-but-not-supernaturally-haunted time/space nexus. Author Clark got you covered:

"Thought you was a godless atheist{," Sadie smirked.}

"I am. But who's to say our universe is alone? Maybe there's others stacked beside us like sheets of paper. And those Ku Kluxes crossed over from somewhere else."

"They was conjured," Chef reminds.

"'Conjuring' is just a way to open a door. Explains why their anatomy is so different, and the extreme reactions to our elements."

"Why they like drinking water so," Sadie adds.

She right on that. Can tell a Ku Klux straight away by all the water they drink. Colored folk who lived through the first Klans say they'd empty whole buckets, claiming they was the ghosts of soldiers from Shiloh. More water, they'd demand. Just come from hell, and plenty dry.

Can't be clearer than that...this isn't quite your (great-)grandmother's 1922. And yet has all the problems...none of the help.

Our story winds through Nana Jean, an old Gullah root woman, who sets up a team to fight the Ku Kluxes. She, and our narrator Maryse, are guided by three spirit-world women analogous to the Norns and other Triune Goddesses whose purpose is to maintain balance in their worlds. Maryse, Chef, and Sadie, all uniquely damaged and so able to access their existential rage, are the action arm of Nana Jean's ring-shout circle. Now, this is deep and old stuff, and there is not one single chance any of y'all reading this review have got the background in Vodoun, hoodoo, and all the other African and African-inflected spiritual practices to get every reference. I could link every third word in here, and that's just to the few little references I got. But don't feel too left out, twenty-first centurians, Author Clark uses a lot of literary references, too. Sethe, for example: a scientific type, aiding the group's scientist Molly, and proficient with a weapon. Honoring, I suppose I should say, Toni Morrison's immortal mother who loved her child so hard she made a haint of her. And haints there are in this story, plenty of them, their many, many songs of fear and betrayal and suffering powering Maryse's unique weapon of cleansing and destruction of evil and wrongness.

I have deliberately not reproduced Nana Jean's Gullah dialect. I consider it disrespectful for me to do so. You'll know when you see it whether you agree with me or not.

You're thinking that all this is going somewhere, but where...well, several places including through a forest of bottle trees, to an Angel Oak, into a place where there are Night Doctors of the *most*horrifying*sort* and whose lust for humanity's pain is unquenchable, and finally to a screening of The Birth of a Nation that is beyond your or my ability to conjure. It is a beautiful thing to be frightened by the capacity of people to hate. This book is a prayer to whatever force(s) rule the Simulation to open up our eyes.

There's a reason the last words spoken in the story are, "'Bout damn time!"

LAST DAYS, two linked horror novellas from Brian Evenson

LAST DAYS
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: four horrified, repulsed, goosepimply stars of five

The Publisher Says: Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

Coffee House Press blurb: When Kline is kidnapped by a dark sect that believes amputation brings you closer to God, he's tasked with uncovering who murdered their leader. Will he uncover the truth in time to save himself, take on the mantle of prophet, or destroy all he sees with a rain of biblical violence?

My Review: Kline is a PI who doesn't need clients to hire him so he can live. This is because he stole money from a man who was trying to murder him. To make sure the man couldn't murder him, Kline bought time by lopping off his own hand before killing the murder-minded malefactor.

All of this takes place before we meet Kline, and is the very least awful, least repulsive, and most understandable stuff that happens in the entire 201pp of this book. Still interested? Then on we go.

The book is two connected novellas, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” and “Last Days,” comprising the adventures of Kline in the weirdest subculture that christian imagination has yet to throw up: the mutilates. These are two sects of people who amputate parts of their bodies to align themselves with scripture:

“And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...” Mark 9:47

(First and smallest of my anti-xian rants here commenceth: Srsly y'all can any sane person in possession of even modest decoding skills think this crap is meant literally? And if so, how can that morally defective person claim this horrifying religion is a force for love and peace after reading just this one passage?)

Back to the book. Borchert, leader of the mutilates and a twelve (number of body parts amputated), has Kline kidnapped and forces him to investigate the death of Aline, the leader and founder of the mutilates (a seventeen, as we horrifyingly and disgustingly learn later in the story), despite handicapping Kline by refusing to let him, a mere one (the hand that's gone), meet with any witnesses or ask any questions or see any evidence. Now old hands in the groves of noir know that this is a set-up so classic that one wonders if those blinking neon signs are visible from the parkway. Kline certainly knows the danger he's in, and has in fact been boringly repetitious in his demands to be let go, let out, left alone. And then evil, evil Borchert gives Kline just enough to compel him, as a PI, to address the itch of curiousness. (Bonus points for following that reference back to its origin.)

All ends in tears, as Kline oversteps the rope he's been given to hang himself in a nefarious plot to rid the world of a bad “holy” man; the body count mounts; and Kline doesn't escape without losing yet more body parts to the Brotherhood of Mutilation. Escape, however, he does; and then we launch into “Last Days.”

Oh my heck. Kline wakes up in the hospital, missing an entire arm now, to find a blond man with no right hand (go look that Biblical quotation up again) determined to kidnap him again, this time taking him to meet Paul, leader of a schismatic amputee group called “The Pauls” because they're all blond men with amputated right hands. Paul, the leader, wants Kline to go finish the job he thought was done, ie killing the unholy holy man.

Which, not to belabor the point, Kline doesn't want to do but does, in the process meeting an old friend, killing an old enemy, and causing a degree of mayhem only describable as Biblical. Kline is seen as the Mutilate Messiah, the burning brand that will cleanse the filth and degradation of error from the mutilate community.

I have to stop now, or I will vomit.

It took me three weeks to read this book because I couldn't do much at a time. It is grim, grisly, and gruesome; it is horrifying and horrible; it is strong, strong stuff for even seasoned veterans of de Sade's revolting works.

Brian Evenson was raised as a Mormon; he was told by the Mormon Church that he would have to stop writing if he wanted to continue being a Mormon. I don't know what happened after that, but I know there are more books by Evenson to be read. And, I cannot believe I'm typing this sentence, I will be reading them.

One day.

Evenson's vicious critique of christian religion is spot-on with my observations of the religion's effects on the world over the past two millennia. A more potent force for evil has never been unleashed. From the christian thugs burning the Library of Alexandria to the Westboro Baptist thugs condemning fags to burn in hell because their narrow-minded bigot of a gawd hates them, this religion should, in a properly run world, be closely monitored as a hate group and membership in it should deny a person all civil rights.

Only recommended for the reader who seeks out the dark side.