I loved this book so much that I lost sleep while reading it. Like the main character, Abe, I feel most at peace while I’m near water. Abe uses fishing to fill a void after his wife dies. I use it to cleanse my thoughts; it can get a bit busy in my head sometimes.
The book is about loss, healthy and unhealthy choices, friendship, betrayal, and scary monsters. It includes four of my favourite things: engaging characters, beautiful writing, water, and horror.
Horror is my comfort blanket, and this book is full to the brim with it; lots and lots of cosmic horror coupled with sorcery and monsters: some huge and others human, many dead and some alive.
In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's…
This is the only book of the three favourites of 2023 that isn’t horror. It’s another story of friendship and loss, but it is written from a more literary angle.
The main characters are both nerds. Their friendship was based on gaming; it was how they met, stuck in a hospital playing video games together, and how they reconnected after an argument that left both of them battered and bruised. They set up a gaming software company together, a very successful one, until tragedy strikes, but their friendship feels suffocating at times, obsessive and angry.
It spoke volumes to me about the difficulties of negotiating relationships, something I’ve often struggled with, and the ways in which some wounds (but not all) can be healed over time.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest, examining identity, creativity and our need to connect.
This is not a romance, but it is about love.
'I just love this book and I hope you love it too' JOHN GREEN, TikTok
Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Sadie is visiting her sister, Sam is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there, but playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition -- and a special friendship. Then all too soon that time is…
There is so much to love about this book. It contains 26 stories of LGBTQ horror from some of my favourite authors, including Paul Tremblay and Hailey Piper. Each story is unique, but all share themes that reflect the very real threat of homophobia and/or transphobia. I enjoyed all three of the Unspeakable Horror books, but this is the only one I read in 2023; it came out in June for Pride Month.
Hailey Piper’s “Bad with Secrets” is a wonderfully weird tale set in the 1950s that casts McCarthy (yes, THAT McCarthy) as an evil sorcerer. Honestly, I got chills reading it.
And Paul Tremblay’s story “If Dillon Believed in any Kind of Ghosts” is brilliant. Nana is an adorable side character. I love the way it mixes mundane family interactions with moments of shocking violence and terror.
This book definitely brightened Pride Month for me.
The third terrifying volume in the award-winning anthology series of original queer horror.
Like the final girl in a slasher film, the LGBTQIA community knows first-hand what it’s like to fight for its survival. Beaten and bloodied after an extended chase scene through modern-day politics and the courts, we think we’ve triumphed and conquered our oppressors. We breathe a little easier knowing our rainbow is ascending in the distance. But—like the indestructible slasher villain—our enemies rise up again and again, as if on a looping third-act jump scare. It’s a seemingly never-ending return to battle as the pendulum of progress…
