writer
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Unreliable narrator from hell, will give you the icky creepies, took me to a darker place than I personally wanted to go, but hey–it’s called HORROR MOVIE.
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I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One for the Great Lakes Gothic shelf! I CHEERFULLY REFUSE by Leif Enger spins a tale that imagines how our world might disintegrate or regenerate in the years just beyond our own horizon. The characters in this book are recognizable, for their flaws, their oversights, their confusions and convictions. Culture and circumstances change quickly, but perhaps people don’t, and in that reality lies a balancing act for morality when the chips are down. Enger’s book celebrates the stubborn and trusts Lake Superior as a rarely forgiving (but always honest) setting on which to prove oneself. An entrancing sail through the dark.
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There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Listen, there are only so many books out there that hit the very specific cross-section of devoted NBA fandom, the cravings of a poet, a fierce loyalty to the cities of the American midwest that largely get counted out, a need for sad songs, and an open-armed love for the world. THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR feels like meeting someone for the first time, who you see wearing a jersey from your favorite team and after a short affirming word somehow ends up accompanying you into the night as you whisper stories about your lives and suddenly see the future with fresh eyes. Left me in tears, which is my highest praise.
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Monsters We Have Made by Lindsay Starck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Graceful literary writing pervades Lindsay Starck’s monster story MONSTERS WE HAVE MADE. Part horror, part psychological thriller, this novel layers fact, fiction, and figment together into nuanced character study and a riveting pursuit for the truth.
P.s. Always excited to read a midwest author!
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Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What will we leave the world?
Also: will we leave the world?
–Two central questions at the heart of this boundary-pushing novella that imagines human history’s farthest-reaching future through its oldest written literary form. Unforgettable, weird, and wonderful stuff from Oliver K. Langmead.
We haven’t seen the end of epic heroes. History has more waiting for us. I think, in the end, that’s the idea that made this book so touching to me.
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Eye of a Needle by Jessica Lynn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
EYE OF A NEEDLE is a searing short form debut from author Jessica Lynn. It’s addictive to the point that you’ll blaze through it in one sitting. Tension on simmer and sumptuous prose explores religious trauma and the merits of gut instinct. Southern gothic meets supernatural in this tale drenched in dread, blood, and sticky summer heat.
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Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA broke me a little bit, but wow was it good. A tale as insidious as it is inventive, and as much surrealism as it is a life drawing, this story is a slow-burn time bomb. Anxiety, devotion, grief, and ghosts… sink into this one and expect to fall down further than you might be prepared to go. I adore the absurd, especially when it’s taken extremely seriously, and that’s exactly what this is.
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Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is truly remarkable–epic in scope, minute in detail, and so densely interwoven between adventure writing, cultural commentary, scientific discovery, mythology, and immediate sensation of place that it really transcends categorization. At heart, Macfarlane is an adventurer, but one who subverts the “physical challenge as personal journey” trope, pursing instead enlightenment on a cosmic level, uniting all of human history and all of earth’s time as perceived through his shamanlike experiences of the world’s beneath-places. The deeper you dig, the closer science and art become related, and Macfarlane takes us all the way down in UNDERLAND.
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Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Snatched IDAHO, a 2017 debut by Emily Ruskovich, out of a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. I was gently stunned by the author’s superhuman command of language and ability to break a heart with every sentence, binge reading it in one weekend. Ruskovich started with a haunted place she couldn’t explain and imagined decades of time and an entire community of characters that spring up around one hypothetical moment of tragedy. And it feels so brilliantly real, it’s almost impossible to describe. This book is agonizing in the greatest way. I don’t even know… speechless!
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
ORBITAL is one of so many, many books that I’ve read which are set in space. But it is the very first book I’ve read which, in the reading of it, feels like actually being in space. Dreamlike, cyclical, removed, focused, questing, massive and tiny, lost and tethered. More like a poem than a novel, it’s a view from above. A unique read that takes its own strange time to say what it has to say.
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