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The Poorly Made and Other Things by Sam Rebelein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was sent this book for review by the publisher much earlier in the year just as I was heading to visit my parents. It got lost in a drawer there and I just found it when I came back for the holidays. Ooops and my apologies. I have not read the novel Edenville or was familiar with the Renfield universe but after this I'd like to read the novel. As the blurb says, this is an anthology all set in that verse with a cool through line of a sister trying to contact her estranged brother about 'the stain' which links all the other stories together.

The Stain was left behind by a family annihilator who in three minutes killed his entire family and was trying to 'transform' into something better by sacrificing to 'the giant in the barn.' The detective on the case became obsessed and over the decades the house, its contents and all the barn wood were pulled apart and reused or kept as trophies. That is the stain, everyone who has something from the murder site ends up cursed.

The reality of this anthology is rather obvious that these were short stories written for other anthologies (or at least some of them which is noted in the notes later) and Rebelein wanted to reuse for his own universe and as such there isn't that much connection between any of them. It would have been nice if when they were reedited that something clearly from the murder scene was in there. That said, it's just a minor quibble and much of it is addressed by the sister, Rachel as she keeps emailing/texting her brother.

The stories are well written, nicely paced for the most part and most were interesting to me. As with any anthology you have a variety in quality. I liked several, especially the one at the diner. There is a tendency toward body horror so if that's not your thing don't read this. I suppose content warnings should be given: body horror, eyeball horror, blood and violence.

I thought Rachel's desperation to reach her brother and how she gives out little dollops of what was going on in their lives was very well done. This is definitely a solid horror anthology worth the read.



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Spell-Bound by Mike Ghere

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Jamie, a young drifter, finds himself in rural Stiversville WV with a broken down motorcycle and a local cop being a giant bully until Gina intervenes. She runs the local diner which is steps away from being bought up by the cop's uncle, the richest guy in town.

Gina and he jump into bed fairly instantly and she takes him home to her aunt Eleanor, a witch. She discovers Jamie's mother had magically bound him up and no one knows why, least of all Jamie who has lost many of his childhood memories.

It becomes a battle between Rich Uncle and Gina and Eleanor with Jamie stuck in the middle. And if it was just about their magical battle and whatever it is that haunts the mine that claimed Gina's little sister years ago, this would have been a better read.

But a choice was made and that choice was to link magic with sex and therefore Jamie needs to sleep with just about every woman 'for the magic'. Which I could live with if Gina didn't constantly blow hot and cold about it and have tantrums over it. She ended up annoying me entirely. Or the whole I'm in Love in under 48 hours thing (Sorry, I'm not an insta-love person) and at the end of day, this just read like male sexual fantasy and mucked up what could have been a good gothic horror.



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What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is not just an amazing retelling of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, it creates a lush Ruritanian country of both Gallacia (where our narrator, Alex Easton, is from) and Ruravia where Roderick and Madeline Usher live. Gallacia especially has its culture developed in the sworn soldier thing with their gender neutral pronouns and all that (there is also a hint of sapphic interest in Madeline), in how their language is, their military etc. A lot of thought when into this.

Ruravia is more or less British and there are real world settings and events as well as Ruritanian. The Usher's doctor, Denton, is American and one of the first characters we meet, Miss Potter, is British and from meeting this frustrated would-be mycologist (science of the 1890s has no room for women, much of this feels very true based on my own research), I knew exactly where this story was going to go. I still loved the journey obviously (points to star rating) and I have an advantage (I'm a doctor and I teach about fungus and parasites and medicine with an interest in the history so this book was tailor made for me)

Easton is shocked to find their friends in a) such a god awful place b) in such god awful shape. Kingfisher does an amazing job of describing how rotted, how wrong this whole area is. You can feel the creeping dread. Madeline looks near death. Roderick is barely better. Both seem half mad and neither will leave their crumbling, rotting, ancestral home even though neither actually like it.

Denton is also well drawn and he's baffled by Madeline's illness, though as he says he was drafted as a cut-bone field surgeon in America's Civil War, and isn't well trained. The Ushers won't go to Paris (one of the bastions of medicine at the time).

Easton with their valet, Angus, along with the delightful Miss Potter trying to work out with Denton what is going on in this cursed land and try to save the Ushers. The hares, the oh so strange hares in this are super creepy and such a good way of introducing later ideas.

Even in a retelling, you might imagine, we won't move too far from the source material and we don't. The ending, however, is really well thought out and incredibly creepy. Loved Easton and this whole story. Well worth reading this novella.



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A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mazzy and Nora are best friends and pagan magic users in Cape Cod, along with their mutual friend, Elliot (who Mazzy now has a crush on, in their senior year of high school) Mazzy is the cautious witch, researching everything (which helps her anxiety) and Nora is the risk taker finding spells online, like the one she insists they do at the beach under the full moon, a spell to uncover things.

They uncover a dead woman washed up on the beach. And then another one. It seems like they're now hooked into the Hand of Nepthys a group of magic users twisting Egyptian mythos, working to resurrect the dead (while making many dead of their own)

Detective Huld of the police seems to think they know more than they're saying. The kids think it's possible she's part of the Hand. Things go bad from worse as the dead woman's spirit attaches herself to Nora both amping up her powers but forcing to continue to find the dead.

Mazzy and Elliot have to solve the mystery of these women if they have any hope of saving Nora.

My biggest issues with this (and they were relatively minor) is we didn't really get to know Nora and Mazzy much before the spell. So as Nora starts changing we haven't even had a chance to connect with her. She just starts out annoying and gets worse. I did however like Mazzy and Elliot. There is some weirdness with the police that was hard to swallow but overall I enjoyed the story. It moved along well. The magic was cool and the red herrings worked. It's worth the read.





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Under This Red Rock by Mindy McGinnis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


CW: suicidal ideation, suicide, mental illness, date rape, murder

This was a very unusual book. Neely's family has a strange thread of mental illness running through it, marked by auditory and/or visual hallucinations. Neely's father disappeared, suffering with it. Her older brother, Lance was driven to suicide by the things in his head. Neely's mother is gone as well and she's being raised by her grandparents who are doing their best. What makes this schizophrenia-like mental illness unusual is that under the titular red rock (in this case a cave system in Ohio) the voices go silent. In the caverns Neely is at peace.

To her joy, her grandfather finds her a job with his friend John who owns the cavern and the canoe/ziplining adventure of the lake nearby. Neely takes to the cave tour guide job like a duck to water. She is almost earning some friends in fellow guides, Brian (her brother's friend), Mila (the girl she has a crush on) and Tabitha. Destiny (influencer/h.s. mean girl) and Josh (sexually aggressive jock type) round out the team.

The first two-thirds is setting up these friends, Neely's mental health issues and her falling in love with Mila. Also Brian helps her to get to know her brother a little better by showing her his online persona on a Reddit-like site allowing users to vent their violent thoughts in a 'harmless way.' This is naturally not easy for her to hear.

And here is where the blurb fails the reader. We know it's Mila who is going to die. I think we could have gotten tension just with 'one of Neely's new friends ends up murdered and....' But we have Neely believing one thing about the night of the employee lakeside party but sprinkled with hints of she can't remember, has some physical damage so we can have the doubt in our heads as to did she get those innocently or was she the one to hurt Mila.

And whoo boy, Mila's death is gruesome and on page (so that's your warning) The red herrings were good. Was it Josh who wanted her (and is known to do drugs) Was it Patrick (her ex who shared nonconsensual sex tapes online) Was it Neely (because she is crazy)?

It really felt like it could have gone one way but I was glad of how it did end. It was different and Neely is interesting.



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Trouble the Water by Wendy Vogel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is one I got from the author at Ohioana book festival and I found it engaging (which sounds better than I liked it because whoo boy the subject matter. Let me spool out a laundry list of content warning in no particular order. Religious cult, religious trauma, religious based misogyny, religious based homophobia, externalized and internalized homophobia, rape/murder of disabled children, domestic violence, other murders and there is probably some I'm forgetting.

Naomi has returned home to the farm where her father ran a cult, Jesus' Cleansing Waters after her abusive, alcoholic husband is killed in a car accident, bringing with her, her disabled daughter Leah (spina bifida). Her mother has sold off most of the farm, part to a chicken/turkey factory farm (and her father's second in command stole the money and ran off to KY) and part to a developer making McMansions with disregard as to how a factory farm stinks.

The only part of her father's legacy left is Aunt Betty (hands down my favorite side character), Naomi's mom and her brother Nathan. Naomi hopes to go back to college now that her husband is gone but in the meantime is working at Kroger running a cash register. Her brother is a long haul trucker (or was) and Leah is attending the Snowflake Academy for disabled children.

One of Leah's friends goes missing and she's not the first disabled girl to do so. One had gone missing last year. On top of this mystery Naomi starts dating a Kroger Chef who is huge into helping to man search parties and tip lines. As this relationship slowly creeps forward, Naomi tries to work through a lifetime of religious trauma, deal with the growing realization her mother is developing dementia and reconnecting with her old childhood friend JP.

Kudos to the one smart thing Naomi did. She not only sent her daughter to her other grandparents' home about 4 hours away and then asks them to keep Leah because it's not safe (by now a third child is gone) And smarter yet of the author to put a time line on this, the grandparents have a trip they can't get refunded on so we know that Leah will be back in time for the climax where she doubtless will be a target.

Also into this mix there's the faceless girl ghost wreathed in smoke who keeps visiting Naomi, 'Weebla' who leads her around to some clues as to who she is and what is happening.

If I'm honest there are only three real suspects in this and given how it ended I'd have almost rather the most obvious one was the killer. The ending is rushed and very awful subject matter wise (more so because if you watch enough ID Discovery you've heard of real cases like this). Overall I found it, as I said, engaging.



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Earthdivers, Vol. 1: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted to love this because I love Jones' work and the art was great but there were some world building issues for me that were hard to get past not to mention the convoluted time traveling story line (CW, lots of violence including child murder) So it's 2112 and the world is all but dead and much of humanity has taken off for the stars. Later its stated white people left but I see no African, Latinx, Asian etc people in this. It's a hundred percent indigenous people of varying groups, which okay Jones is Indigenous and he's dedicated to telling the stories of those peoples.

Somehow they know that this cave somewhere (we're not sure where) can time travel back to a certain destination if you bring something to represent that time period but otherwise have to go Terminator-style, i.e. naked. Their plan is to break up Sosha and Tad's marriage so they can send Tad back to do the titular action, kill Columbus so that America is never created and the world is saved. Sosha would have a much harder time being a woman given the restrains of women then and Tad has the cool bonus of being a polyglot. I very much liked that touch.

And this where I stumble hard. How do they know how this cave works? It seems like its a one way trip because the group left behind keep checking the ever changing history books to see if Tad manages it so I'm assuming he can't go back once he kills Columbus. Let's say they did the math or experiments or something and know what the cave does, the idea of killing one man to change the world seems naive. It's the whole 'Let's Kill Hitler' trope of alternative history stories (though I suppose killing him might have saved a whole lot of lives)

I don't buy into the idea that in killing Columbus, no one will ever interfere with the Indigenous people and America (or whatever it would be called) will be this happy egalitarian country and all of humanity won't be destroying the world with pollution and greed. For one the industrial revolution didn't start here but America sure embraced it and made it worse. Two, there are countries that pollute far worse than America (not many but they're out there) And three, for pete's sake Europeans were sailing all over the world. You kill Columbus and another European will take his place with most likely the results and I suppose you could argue they learned from Columbus (provided he got to America and was killed there) and killed any new foreigners, let's remember Columbus wasn't the first, just one of the worst. And the world isn't that small. Eventually America would be brought into the world stage no matter if we kill Columbus or not.

That is a big hurdle to get over so that's why I rated it three stars. That said, Tad and company are interesting. Tad's infiltration of Columbus' crew does not go as well as he'd like. People die. Lots of them. (same with what's going on in 2112) Tad is earnest. His descent into violence is interesting to watch. I did get a laugh when they were sure he was demonic because he didn't grow facial hair in the two weeks they had him locked up. Really? What about the fact that he went back to the past with one side of his head shaved and that never grows in....

I wanted more of the people in the past which I swore were all female at first (Emily being a transwoman) but might be wrong about the Blackfeet character, Yellow Kidney (we get some cringy are you Indigenous enough stuff with them) How did they meet? How did they learn about the cave? Why didn't they leave on the space ships (I think that might have made more sense if we changed one word about who left, the rich left, the poor were left behind)



I got this at the library. Would I read more? From the library yes.



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Carmilla Volume 2: The Last Vampire Hunter by Amy Chu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This takes place directly after the first volume and for me had a lot of the same pacing issues (again Chu might have her hands tied by what Dark Horse is willing to allow) but also there are some questionable story telling choices.

Athena, now that Carmilla is 'dead' has gone to San Francisco in search of her family and manages it in a shockingly short amount of time. Only what she finds is the truth about her grandfather Yeh Yeh and her 'big brother' who reminds me of Claudia, forever a child. Only Wing is the head of a gang of vampires and is pretty much psychotic.

Athena has a choice join her brother or destroy him. With the help of one of his men - the one who helped turn him - and the night clerk from her hostel (whom Athena has a mutual crush on), you can imagine which she choses.

So again, this is so rushed. Jess, the clerk, is barely developed nor is Wing really. Carmilla puts in an appearance which honestly doesn't do much other than set up the chance at volume three. Athena underreacts to just about everything around her and I really hope the ending had more of a time jump than it seemed to have in order to make it work.

What I did like a lot was the use of multiple non-eastern european vampire types. Almost every culture has some form of them and Chu uses multiples from Asian, naturally since this is a story, in part about Asian in America culture. I really liked that.

I also am a fan of what Chu was trying to do with Tak, her one ally in the vampire world. So much of the horrible things that were done to Asians in America is ignored by the history books. We know of course of the terrible things done to Africans, all the incredibly crappy things done to Native Americas; we learn about how the Irish and Italians 'need not apply' for jobs in the late 1800s early 1900s but how many of us learned that the only ethnic group to have official exclusion laws written about them like the Chinese had? So Chu's attempt to shine a light on this, especially given how the Chinese were exploited in the railroad and mining industries was welcome. I just wish both the story telling and the art were more even.



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Angels of Death, Vol. 1 by Kudan Naduka

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


More like a 2.5 read for me, I rounded up because I don't like video game to manga conversions because they so rarely work IMO. (I didn't know that when I bought this). The art is good and the story is well honestly weird.

Rachel is a 13 year old girl who wakes up in a chair in a clinic with vague memories of being brought there by her parents. As she tries to figure out what is going on and to find a way out, she's attacked. She manages to evade her attacker and ends up on another floor of the building where she meets her doctor.

He turns out to be an eye obsessed creep and he means her no good either. This is when Zack, the killer from the other floor, intervenes and Rachel learns this is some kind of sick escape room scenario where each floor has a killer on it and she has to escape them. Zack by leaving his floor is now in violation of the game and is also a target.

We see only a little of their partnership by the end where he acts over the top for several pages and she finds a few clues (Rachel is at least intelligent)

I think this was probably better as a game and I don't see me reading on.



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When the Bones Sing by Ginny Myers Sain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I received an arc from Netgalley. I loved this story. Set in a very small town, Lucifer Creek (named for the sulfurous stench it puts out), Dovie has a special matrilinear gift; she can hear/feel the bones singing. The sheriff has been putting this to good use in helping to recover lost hikers on a major hiking trail through the Ozarks. In the last three years over two dozen hikers have gone missing and the town is oddly quiet about it. Well, not so odd when one considers without the hikers bringing dollars into the town the town doesn't exist so they're hushing up a serial killer.

Dovie's best friend from her earliest days, Lo(wan) returns from wherever he ran off to still haunted and frantic. He claims the ghosts of the murdered and buried hikers are after him and he must solve the mystery of their deaths. Dovie doesn't believe in ghosts or religion or the Ozark Howler (in spite of her father a glass artist making a huge one for his friend's massive lodge (a very poor local boy made very good and generous to the town).

Also in the story are Dovie and Lo's grandmothers former friends who fell out after Lo's mother was drowned in Lucifer's Creek and Dovie's mother disappeared. And we also have the hell and brimstone preacher who is turning the town against the kids as witches and Xan a young man who I don't want to spoil.

I found Dovie and Lo captivating. While I did figure out most of the mystery I think the red herrings were deployed to great advantage in this. The stakes are high as more and more hikers are disappearing and waiting for Dovie to find them. Are her friends and family involved? What about their missing moms (something else I did figure out but again enjoyed the journey to the conclusions) There were twists I didn't predict which is always a delight and I found the end very satisfying. I thought the setting was rich. You could practically feel the heat, humidity and the bugs. I love it when an author takes a rich setting and makes it almost its own character. It brings something extra to the story.



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