It’s hard to believe there are only ten days left in the year. Right now I’m reading ahead to 2025, frantically trying to fulfill various blurb requests, even as I try to catch up on all the wonderful things that came out in 2024. As always, I know I’m only scratching the surface, but out of the novels I did manage to read this year, here are some that I loved.
A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock has a wonderful voice, capturing the feel of classic horror-science fiction like Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Set against the backdrop of science gone too far, there are charming relationships, especially the odd couple pairing of Gregor and Simon, embodying the stuffy, reserved, grumpy one who loves the slightly cheeky and playful one trope. But there’s also tension between them, rooted in Gregor’s all consuming passions and obsessions; like the best “mad scientists” he’s far more interested in whether a thing can be done than whether it should. Medlock offers up the perfect balance and blend of genres – Gothic, classic science fiction, and horror, while also telling a story about found family. The descriptions are lush, the world sumptuous, and there are some pleasantly creepy moments as well. Overall, it’s a book I would highly recommend.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell has received a great deal of praise, popping up on various best of the year lists with good cause. It embodies what Wiswell does so well – write horror that is also kind. Wiswell captures a great voice, and blends gore with humor and sweet characters who listen to each other, care for each other, and try to see the world through each other’s eyes. Shesheshen may be a semi-gelatinous being who uses the bones of the humans she eats to construct a human-like appearance to move through the world, but that doesn’t mean she’s solely monstrous, or stop a beautiful relationship from growing between her and Homily. There are several twists and turns along the way that complicate the characters’ lives, occasionally forcing them to face heartbreaking decisions, but at the end of the day, the novel centers compassion and choosing the person or monster you want to be in the world rather than letting your nature, family, or circumstances define you.
The Book of Love by Kelly Link is the author’s debut novel, and she absolutely goes all out in her move from short stories, with over 600 pages. There’s a subtle eeriness throughout, a sense of the uncanny, and a sense that there’s even more left off the page – a whole world beneath the surface of the one readers get to see. Laura, Daniel, and Mo return from the dead a year after their disappearance. They don’t remember the circumstances of their deaths, or understand why they’ve returned, and no one in their lives seems to recall them being dead at all. They’re tasked with learning magic by a man they believed to be one of their teachers, who in reality appears to be an ancient being, caught up in his own very complicated relationship with another ancient being who has plans of his own for Mo, Laura, and Daniel. The novel is gorgeously written, exploring complicated relationships, magic, the balance of power, and cyclical stories that come back again and again in different forms.
The Garden of Delights by Amal Singh has a similarly epic feel to the Book of Love, with a sense of a world that extends beyond what appears on the page. The writing is gorgeous, again delving into cyclical stories and struggles for power that recur across the ages. Singh uses a fantastical lens to look at colonization and the erasure of cultures and ways of life through the stories and histories that are taught, repeated, and officially sanctioned. The novel touches on the politics of cities, and again like Link’s book, the balance of power, both among humans and immortal beings. The novel is soaked in magic, but the world also feels real and lived in and the characters grounded. Overall, it’s a wonderful read.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay contains so many of the things I crave in horror fiction that it feels like it could have been written just for me: a character revisiting past horrors, a cult classic film that exists only in fragments, a story that blurs the line between reality and fiction with doubt threaded expertly throughout. It’s the kind of thing that Tremblay is supremely good at – is anything supernatural happening or is reality simply horrifying? Or can both be true? The novel is perfectly paced, revealing bits of potential truths over time, dealing with a possibly unreliable narrator, while also playing with the question of how we frame stories in order to cement truths and create legends. The story explores monstrousness and human cruelty, and again blurs the line between what is inherent and what is external. Do we create monsters, or merely react to them by becoming monstrous ourselves? It’s beautifully done and a very satisfying read.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is another novel that has received a good deal of well-deserved praise. Like Tremblay’s novel, it plays with doubt, potentially unreliable narrators, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. A group of siblings grapple with their understanding of the world and their place within it after the death of their father dictates that the eldest son must dig a wife up from the bog, marrying this supernatural creature according to tradition and carrying on the family line. The novel is soaked in atmosphere, the setting of the crumbling house isolated in the bog being a character in its own right. Chronister plays with Gothic tropes, both leaning into them and upending them in interesting ways. There’s a distinct Shirley Jackson vibe at play, and yet the voice and the story are unique.
I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones delves back into slasher mythology – a subject the author has explored over multiple works – this time, centering on the killer. It’s not an easy feat to pull off, writing a book from the point of view of a killer and having that killer be sympathetic without making apologies or excuses for their killings or letting them off the hook. Especially in a world where the media routinely excuses actual killers – painting them as misunderstood lone wolves, quiet, polite boys who wouldn’t have killed anyone at all if only a girl had been nice to them that one time – instead of having conversations about systemic racism, sensible gun control, and mental health. But I digress. That isn’t what Stephen Graham Jones is doing here. Instead, he’s once again interrogating the rules of the slasher genre and looking at the human impact of that particular brand of horror. If we accept slashers as inevitable, a force of nature, the universe creating its own kind of balance, what does that mean for someone who finds himself infected and becoming a slasher against his will? Can he bend the rules to stop himself from killing? Is there any recourse, or is he doomed to repeat the familiar narrative? Amidst the horror, there’s a beautiful story of friendship, and the novel doesn’t forgive its slasher, but it still manages to keep his humanity at its core.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo is absolutely gorgeously written, full of evocative imagery and lush prose. Like the Book of Love and the Garden of Delights, it suggests a larger world. It’s a relatively slim novel, but one that unfolds a deep and rich history, tracing through the various ages of the city of Azril as seen through the eyes of the demon that knows and loves it best. The vignettes and glimpses of the city’s history and its people weave together to give the sense of a place that feels lived-in and alive, and the slow-burning relationship between the angel and the demon, the city’s destroyer and it’s savior, is beautifully done. Taking the long view of history and the long view of the angel and demon’s relationship, and letting both play out over centuries works extremely well and each adds depth to the other.
Model Home by Rivers Solomon uses the tropes of the haunted house genre to tell a brutal story about broken family relationships, racism, and abuse. Like Tremblay and Chronister, Solomon plays with doubt and the way we frame stories in order to make sense of our worlds. Following the apparent suicide of their parents, Ezri returns to the haunted house where they grew up. Their family was the only Black family living in a gated white community, and as a result, their mother was almost fanatical about their right to belong and that nothing would drive them out of their home, no matter how bad things got. Now Ezri and their sisters are forced to unravel their shared past, trying to understand what happened to them as children – were they really being haunted, or do the fragments they remember of a Faceless Woman tormenting them point to something far worse? At the same time, Ezri’s daughter is facing horrors of her own. The novel is painful, and like much of Solomon’s work, it isn’t an easy read, but it’s well worth it all the same.
The September House by Carissa Orlando also takes on the haunted house genre, but from a completely different angle. Margaret is an older protagonist, and more or less the opposite of the typical resident in a haunted house. Haunted houses often seem to prey on newly-weds and young families who have poured their life savings into buying their dream home and can’t easily afford to move. Margaret and her husband, however, bought their perfect house after their daughter was grown; they could have left if they chose, but Margaret is determined to stay and find a way to make peace with the haunting. As long as she follows the rules, everything will be fine. And it seems like it will be, until her daughter shows up, looking into the mysterious disappearance of her father, Margaret’s husband, despite them being largely estranged. The ghosts are creepy and effective, the complicated family relationships well done, and the doubt woven throughout the novel adds an extra dimension. All in all, a very satisfying horror novel.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is for the most part more subtle in its horrors. Cordelia lives alone with her mother, a sorceress who has managed to keep her true nature hidden from the rest of the world. Evangeline isolates Cordelia and wields her power to control her body, making her Obedient whenever it suits her. Evangeline’s overriding desire is to move up in the world, marrying a rich man so that Cordelia can marry a rich man of her own in turn, and she will stop at nothing to achieve her goal. She sets her sights on the Squire, a lifelong bachelor, moving herself and Cordelia into his life, while poor Cordelia tries to keep her head down and avoid her mother’s wrath. Luckily, the Squire’s sister, Hester, sees through Evangeline’s facade, becoming an ally as Cordelia sets out to stop her mother from hurting anyone else despite her own fear. The book is full of wonderful descriptions, characters, friendships, and relationships. And of course, since it’s T. Kingfisher, there’s also a deeply unsettling and unnatural horse thrown into the mix too.
