reading-to-be-again

[reading-to-be-again]

review - i was a teenage slasher

THIS is my favorite Stephen Graham Jones book. I Was A Teenage Slasher has all of the things I look for in a SGJ novel: heart, blood and guts, info-dumping about the slasher genre, and humor.

I read The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a week or so before I read I Was a Teenage Slasher and thought to myself that I may have already found my favorite read of the year.

In the acknowledgments of Hunter, SGJ shouted out one of my other favorites -- Paul Tremblay -- and his book Horror Movie, which was my favorite read of 2024. I was so excited to know that SGJ had been reading Horror Movie when the idea for Hunter was born, because the two books feel almost like they're in conversation with each other.

The two books are extremely different, don't get me wrong, but both are experimental and self-aware. Horror Movie isn't about revenge, but, like Hunter, it is about becoming monstrous. I loved both of them so much.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is definitely still one of my top reads of the years so far. But goddamn, Slasher is the perfect book for me.

I Was A Teenage Slasher feels like a love story. Maybe not in the romantic sense (though a case can certainly be made for that too), but in the sense that grief means that there was love in there somewhere. Love and grief change us, save us, wreck us.

My favorite books are always about love as an anomaly. I think Slasher fits into that for me. In Slasher, love inspires both life and death, and it's sweet and wholesome and gory and disgusting.

I loved this book. It's on my wish list. I know I'll read it again and again once I have my own copy. I hope the next person who picks it up from the library loves it too.

[reading-to-be-again]

review - the keeper of lonely spirits

I loved this book. This one hit incredibly close to home for me. It's a book about love and grief and how those things are pretty much inseparable. Peter, the groundskeeper, is an immortal ghost hunter who lives life without planting roots.

He follows an offhand story of a ghost to a small town in Ohio in search of his next hunt. He finds a thoroughly haunted cemetery and more friends than he's had in a hundred years.

I fell in love with every character I met in these pages: Nevaeh, the cemetery director; Samira and Sayid, the troublemaker and her responsible elder brother; Yafa and Khalid, the children's loving parents; and David, the local museum director who's recently lost his husband. This community's kindness and warmth welcomes the groundskeeper with open arms, and challenges his notion that it's better for everyone if he moves on quickly.

For some readers, this book will be cozy and comforting even when it breaks your heart. I'm that kind of reader. For others, this may be a bit too heavy to really be cozy, and I think if you're sensitive to themes of depression, anxiety, death, grief, loss, or ptsd -- you may want to pass on this one.

My first friends when I was little were the elderly people my family took care of at the end of their lives. And this book felt like home to me, in a good way. Loss has always been present in my life, and I've had moments where I could process that loss well and others when I couldn't. I think this is a book I'll return to in either of those instances, but especially when a loss threatens to overwhelm me.

Because this book is about the love that comes before a loss, and how it's worth it even after it's gone. I know that to be true, though sometimes the pain is too much to remember it in the moment.

I felt comforted by this book. I'm so glad I got to read it.

[reading-to-be-again]

6 Horror Books I Love

Horror Movie - Paul Tremblay

Tremblay is one of my favorite authors and this is by far my favorite of his novels. It's official publish date was my birthday last year, and I read it 3 times that month alone. I love the mixed media aspect of it and the uneasiness that I get every time I read it.

Model Home - Rivers Solomon

This book left a major impact scar in my chest. I think that Solomon writes about trauma in a uniquely straight forward way even when it's obscured. Model Home felt too familiar in ways that distressed me from start to finish, but the catharsis was something I needed.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones

Another one of my favorite authors! I finished this book last week and it was so good that I felt at a loss on what to read next (everything else sounded dull in comparison). Jones re-made vampires into something terrifying. I couldn't stop reading. I also think that, for a revenge story, this book is strangely compassionate. SGJ is a masterful writer.

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer

This was the first Eco-horror book I ever read and it has stuck with me for years. VanderMeer is so wonderfully weird, and I think if you like strangeness in your science fiction, he's a great author to read.

Mister Magic - Kiersten White

As someone who has deep-rooted religious trauma, this book was a lot. I'd never been confronted with fiction so close to my own history before I read this. I'm grateful. It was horrifying and healing. I know a lot of folks didn't care for this one or find it scary, so it may not be objectively a great read. But I think if you grew up in an evangelical home, you may really vibe with this one too.

The Hollow Places - T. Kingfisher

My favorite T. Kingfisher horror! I loved The Magician's Nephew when I was a kid, and this is like a scarier successor to that, I think. There are portals, and body horror, and weirdly charming and annoying characters.