Tag Archives: Contemporary

November 6, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of For the Rest of Us

Book cover for For the Rest of Us - 13 Festive Holiday Stories to Celebrate All Seasons by Dahlia Adler. Image on cover shows the title in a pink font against a dark blue background. Around each letter are various symbols of many different holidays and religious like a menorah, a bundle of grass tied up with a red ribbon, a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates, a lantern, and a Dia de Los Muertos sugar skull. Title: For the Rest of Us – 13 Festive Holiday Stories to Celebrate All Seasons

Author: Dahlia Adler

Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Publication Date: September 2, 2025

Genres: Young Adult, LGBTQ+, Contemporary

Length: 327 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

Fourteen acclaimed authors showcase the beautiful and diverse ways holidays are observed in this festive anthology. Keep the celebrations going all year long with this captivating and joyful read!

From Lunar New Year to Solstice, Día de Los Muertos to Juneteenth, and all the incredible days in between, it’s clear that Americans don’t just have one holiday. Edited by the esteemed Dahlia Adler and authored by creators who have lived these festive experiences firsthand, this joyful collection of stories shows that there isn’t one way to experience a holiday.

With stories

Dahlia Adler, Sydney Taylor Honor winner of Going Bicoastal

Candace Buford, author of Good as Gold

A. R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy, authors of the Once & Future series

Preeti Chhibber, author of Payal Mehta’s Romance Revenge Plot

Natasha Díaz, award-winning author of Color Me In

Kelly Loy Gilbert, Stonewall Book Award winning author of Picture Us in the Light

Kosoko Jackson, USA Today bestselling author of The Forest Demands Its Due

Aditi Khorana, award-winning author of Mirror in the Sky

Katherine Locke, award-winning author of This Rebel Heart

Abdi Nazemian, Stonewall Book Award–winning author of Only This Beautiful Moment

Laura Pohl, New York Times bestselling author of The Grimrose Girls

Sonora Reyes, Pura Belpré Honor winner of The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School

Karuna Riazi, contributor to The Grimoire of Grim Fates

Content Warning: A few celebrations are set during the Covid era. Racism. Grief.

Review:

Traditions give the year meaning.

I was intrigued to explore Valentine’s Day through the perspective of an aromantic character in “PS. I (DON”T) LOVE YOU.” That was a clever choice that gave Elis plenty of opportunities to figure himself out and form opinions about this holiday. Getting to know him was rewarding, and I thought he was a well-written character. It’s difficult to go into detail here without sharing spoilers, so all I will say is that this tale had a satisfying ending that wrapped up the major conflicts while still leaving room for a possible sequel if the author ever chooses to write one.

In general, I found myself wishing for more character development in these tales. This criticism wasn’t limited to one or two instalments but instead was a thought that came to mind over and over again as I read. It’s easy to look up the meanings of words but not as simple to figure out why characters behave the way they do if the text doesn’t provide enough hints about what’s going on with them. As much as I wanted to give this collection a higher rating, this was something that prevented me from diving as deeply into it as I was hoping to.

Cora brought her friend and possible boyfriend Matty home to meet her family for Juneteenth in “Hill Country Heartbeat.” I enjoyed the nuances of their relationship as they atttempted to figure out if they were friends, romantic partners, or something else entirely. The subplots, which I can’t really go into here without sharing spoilers, also added depth to the characters and plot. It was interesting to see how Cora responded to things that she would normally oppose loudly.

For the Rest of Us – 13 Festive Holiday Stories to Celebrate All Seasons was a good read for anyone who celebrates anything other than Christmas or Thanksgiving or who would like to learn more about other cultures.

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October 30, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of I Found the Boogeyman Under My Brother’s Crib

Book cover for I Found the Boogeyman under My Brother’s Crib by Ben Farthing. Image on cover shows two glowing red eyes underneath a crib at night. It has a sinister vibe to it. Title: I Found the Boogeyman under My Brother’s Crib

Author: Ben Farthing

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: September 24, 2024

Genres: Horror, Contemporary

Length: 112 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 2 Stars

Blurb:

How do you protect your family from an urban legend?

Rachel hears a stranger laugh in her baby brother’s nursery.

She races in to see a dark figure slip beneath the crib, disappearing into an eerie reflection of her brother’s room.

Mom and Dad don’t believe her. They accuse Rachel of making excuses for breaking their strict rules about healthy sleep.

But Rachel knows what she saw.

The Boogeyman wants her baby brother.

The Boogeyman wants to drag him away into his eerie realm beneath the crib.

Rachel’s not going to let that happen.

I Found the Boogeyman Under My Brother’s Crib is a tale of urban legends, liminal spaces, and things that go bump in the night, from Ben Farthing, the “King of Creepy” (MJ Mars, author of The Suffering).

Content Warning: Kidnapping and child abuse.

Review:

Nobody can get away with being naughty forever.

The narrator captured the frustration of being a sixteen-year-old who doesn’t always feel like adults are listening to her well. While my parents were thankfully nothing like Rachel’s, just about every teenager at least occasionally has a conversation with their parents that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes you grow up and understand the adult perspective better, but not all parents make the sorts of decisions that are in their children’s best interests and that can be seen from another perspective in five, ten, or twenty years.

This novella would have benefited from more character and plot development. The premise was strong in the beginning but later scenes didn’t build on it in the ways I hoped they would. It petered out instead of explaining why the characters behaved the way they did and what the boogeyman was truly capable of which was disappointing to me. I had been anticipating this novella all autumn due to how much I enjoy this series in general and expected to give it a much higher rating than I ultimately did.

With that being said, I thought the ideas in this tale were interesting ones and could see how they may have been meant to fit together. It was interesting to learn the historical context of the boogeyman in this universe and what people hoped would happen when they talked about him. There was a twist involving this antagonist that was fun and would have encouraged me to go for a higher rating if it had been given more time to develop.

This is part of the I Found series that can be read in any order.

I Found the Boogeyman under My Brother’s Crib had a creative premise.

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October 23, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall

Book cover for I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall by Ben Farthing. Image on cover is a possibly AI-generated shot of a dimly-lit hallway in a mall that doesn’t have anyone walking around in it. The atmosphere is chilly and ominous due to the dull fluorescent lights and many dark spots between where the light can reach. Title: I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall

Author: Ben Farthing

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: June 18, 2024

Genres: Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary

Length: 162 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

Somewhere among the shuttered stores…

Lisa hears a call for help.

She finds her senile old coworker, Saswin, lost in an abandoned hallway. He’s talking to a circle of mannequins, their limbs twisted and fused in unnatural ways.

When Lisa looks away, she swears the mannequins have moved…

And that this abandoned hallway has grown longer.

After Saswin disappears down the impossible hallway, Lisa goes to find him, but she’s unprepared for the horrors that await her in the mall’s forgotten depths.

I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall has been compared to creepypastas like NoSleep stories or SCP entries. It’s a chilling tale of identity, liminal spaces, and the horror of leaving the past behind, from Ben Farthing, “The King of Creepy” (MJ Mars, author of The Suffering).

Each book in the I Found Horror series is a STANDALONE. They can be read in any order.

Content Warning: Disability from a stroke. Dementia. Emotional abuse.  Mannequins.

Review:

Everything declines eventually.

This was a good example of how the horror genre doesn’t have to include a single drop of blood in it in order to scare its audience. Dying  malls are eerie enough on their own if you ask me, and adding in mannequins that are anything but the inanimate objects they’re supposed to be only added an additional layer of dread to the setting. The explanation for why such innocuous things could suddenly become terrifying was well done, too, and made me wish for a prequel or a sequel as there was still plenty of space to explore how this dying mall transformed into something so unlike its formerly cheerful self.

Lisa’s illogical decisions were the only thing holding me back from giving this book a higher rating. My first impression of her was of an intelligent woman who used her wisdom to try to make the world a better place if or when she had the opportunity to nudge it in that direction, so it was confusing for me later on when she began making choices that put her and those around her in danger. This didn’t seem to match the dependable Lisa I’d already met and grown to like, and there was never quite enough character development for me to reconcile these different aspects of her personality.

With that being said, I loved the exploration of disability and aging in this piece. Lisa and Hank had reached a point in life where their physical health was beginning to slow them down in ways they could no longer explain away as a bad day. Adjusting to that wasn’t easy for them, especially when they began to face the small moments in life that would have been effortless a few years ago but not required some planning and energy management in order to accomplish.

I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall was thought provoking and makes me hope that Mr. Farthing will release some more stories soon.

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October 16, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Horsefly

Book cover for Horsefly by Mireille Gagné. Image on cover is a yellow and red drawing of a large horsefly whose body also looks like a gas mask depending on how you look at it. Title: Horsefly

Author: Mireille Gagné

Publisher: Coach House Books

Publication Date: May 20, 2025

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Historical

Length: 171 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

A terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.

In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they look for the perfect carrier for anthrax among the island’s many insects.

In 2024, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy and he impulsively kidnaps from the nursing home his grandfather Emeril, whose dementia has him living in the past during the Grosse Ile biological weapons experiments.

The horsefly, meanwhile, knows a few secrets…

Content Warning: Horseflies, brief references to the damage these bugs do to a body when they bite you, an insect-born pandemic, and dementia.

Review:

Anger is only the first step.

Poetic is just about the last word I’d associate with horseflies, so it was a wonderful surprise to discover just how beautifully the horsefly in this story described their life. Kudos to the author for writing these scenes so descriptively and smoothly. I genuinely felt as if I were exploring the world through the perspective of a creature that, while highly intelligent and certainly not what a real horsefly would sound like if they could talk, also experienced life in a radically different way than how a human would describe those same events. This sort of storytelling takes talent, and it makes me want to read everything else Ms. Gagné has written or will write in the future.

It would have been helpful to have more action scenes. So much time was spent talking about the characters’ thoughts and feelings that I sometimes grew a little restless as I was reading. There was plenty of space to explore topics like what else the government did in response to this project once they realized it had some horrifying side effects or how the sickness that caused uncontrollable rage was affecting human society. Even a little more attention to such things would have made it easy for me to choose a five star rating.

Don’t let the horror tag scare you off if this isn’t a genre you typically read. The frights in this story were real but mostly happened off-screen or developed slowly in my imagination as I pieced together what happened on that remote island to make horseflies suddenly so dangerous. I thought that was a refreshing way to approach topics like pandemics and how messing around too much with the natural world can go terribly wrong. Many storytellers write these these tales from the perspectives of innocent people who suddenly must confront something they don’t understand instead of sharing the origins of these diseases from the perspectives of the people  and the horseflies who created it or helped to spread it. When combined with the smooth writing style I complimented earlier, this made for a creative reading experience.

Horsefly was a thoughtful and deliciously scary piece of xenofiction.

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October 9, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of The Hunger We Pass Down

Book cover for The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. Image on cover is a dark watercolour painting of a young Asian woman who is looking over her shoulder at the audience with a serious and longing expression on her face. Her shoulders are slightly hunched as if she’s tired or maybe doesn’t have good posture. Title: The Hunger We Pass Down

Author: Jen Sookfong Lee

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Publication Date: September 9, 2025

Genres: Mystery, Fantasy, Paranormal, Contemporary, Historical

Length: 384 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

 

Jordan Peele’s Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother’s doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.

It’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they’ve helped, and Alice doesn’t remember staying up late. Someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her.

Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice’s great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.

Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.

Content Warning: Alcoholism, kidnapping, rape, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, mental health (depression and, depending on how one interprets certain scenes, delusions and hallucinations), domestic violence, car accident, cancer, murder, and demonic possession.  I will not be discussing these topics in my review. 

Review:

What does it mean to be a survivor?

This was a heavy read at times, but it was also an important one. It’s easy to sanitize the past but much more difficult to take a clear look at what previous generations endured and how their experiences can still affect even those descendants who were born decades after their deaths. I found it especially interesting to take note of the personalities of the various women in this family – as nearly all of the characters were women – and see how the same habits and mannerisms echoed through the generations with some individuals being able to express much healthier versions of these traits than their mothers or grandmothers did depending on what their lives were like and how much they’d been able to heal from their trauma. I must tip my cap to Ms. Sookfong Lee for all of the work she put into crafting their personalities and giving readers small hints of how everyone was similar to each other. 

The ending did feel a little rushed to me after spending 300+ pages building up tension and digging deeply into the secrets and mysteries of the Chow family. I was expecting the final confrontation to take up much more space in the storyline than it did, and so I was let down by how quickly things were resolved. If more time had been spent on those last few chapters, I would have happy chosen a full five-star rating as this novel was otherwise an excellent example of how the horror genre can be used to explore all sorts of serious, real-world topics that many families can be reticent to talk about.

My favorite scenes were the ones that invited the audience to think about the multitude of ways that intergenerational trauma can be passed down over and over again even if someone is aware of what is happening and knows their behaviour isn’t emotionally healthy. I loved the way the author left space for readers to interpret certain scenes from a wide variety of psychological and supernatural perspectives. Was the antagonist literally real, a vivid metaphor for how generations of unresolved trauma have metaphorically haunted this family, or some combination of these two possibilities? I have my own theories about that topic but don’t want to influence anyone else’s perspective before they’ve read this. What matters is that new readers think for themselves as they encounter new clues about what is going on and trace every thread of this story from 1939 to 2025.

The Hunger We Pass Down made me yearn for a sequel.

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September 18, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Loving Safoa

Title: Loving Safora Book cover for Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor. Image on cover shows a drawing of two black women embracing each other romantically with one of their hands lovingly placed on the other one’s cheek. The former is wearing a red hat and red dress.

Publisher: Liza Wemakor

Publication Date: February 6, 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Romance, LGBTQ+, Contemporary

Length: 103 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

When schoolteacher Cynthia gets a tattoo at a block party in 1991 Flatbush, she doesn’t realize she’s embarking on a life-changing romance with an immortal Ghanaian vampire. Cynthia’s affair with Safoa weaves together stories from nineteenth century Ghana, late twentieth century New York and a near future reality in Maryland that defies the utopian/dystopian binary.

Content Warning: References to racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Review:

Sometimes danger can be a little cozy.

This is a good example of how to blend romance into the horror and dark fantasy genres. Without Cynthia and Safoa’s relationship, none of the other storylines would have gelled together due to how important it was for these two particular characters to thrive together and explore their world as a team. While I can’t go into a lot of detail about why this is so without wandering into spoiler territory, pay attention to their early conversations in particular in order to understand why this is so. There were some wonderful moments of foreshadowing in those scenes that paid off beautifully later on.

I would have loved to see more world building in this novella. There were references to multiple unusual events in Safoa’s life that were either only briefly explained or not explained at all. While I’m not the sort of person who needs everything to be spelled out directly, there was so much more space here for plot and character development if those scenes had been given time to fully develop. The glimpses of the world building that were included were well done, and I would have happily chosen a much higher rating if this had not been an issue for me as a reader.

The ending resolved the most important conflicts nicely. I especially liked how it described the fate of a child who was introduced about three-quarters of the way through this piece as her dilemma had sparked my curiosity about what might happen to her next. Yes, I know that’s vague, but there were many things about this character that I was glad I didn’t have any advanced warning about. Being surprised can be a good thing!

Loving Safora was creative.

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September 11, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of The Last of What I Am

Book cover for The Last of What I Am: A Novel by Abigail Cutter. Image on cover shows a figure standing in the second story window of an old wooden farmhouse. There is a light on in that room that is illuminating everything and obscuring the figure’s features. It is dusk outside and you can see the last bit of light fading away as a few birds fly through the sky. Title: The Last of What I Am

Author: Abigail Cutter

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Publication Date: September 19, 2023

Genres: Paranormal, Historical, Contemporary

Length: 363 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

A haunting and beautifully written novel about a Confederate soldier whose own personal war follows him into the afterlife—until one fateful day when his encounters with a modern-day couple change everything.
A ghost in his deserted childhood home in Virginia, Tom Smiley can’t forget the bloody war and its meaningless losses, nor can he shed his revulsion for his role in the Confederate defense of slavery. But when a young couple moves in and makes his home their own in the early twenty-first century, trouble erupts—and Tom is forced not only to face his own terrible secret but also to come to grips with his family’s hidden wartime history. He finds an unexpected ally in the house’s new owner, Phoebe Hunter, whose discoveries will have momentous consequences for them both.

Content Warning: War, racism, slavery, death, and a prison camp. I will only mention the latter in my review.

Review:

Forgiveness is a process.

The settings was well developed. I could easily imagine what each scene looked like, including moments that described things that I’ve never personally experienced like being in a prison camp. It was especially helpful to have detailed descriptions of things like food or clothing as they were both quite different from what the average person in North America would expect to have access to today. These moments helped this world come alive in my imagination as I waited to find out whether Tom would ever forgive himself for the role he played in the Civil War.

I struggled with the changes in tone and theme.  It started off as a ghost story but soon veered firmly into the historical fiction genre as Tom described what it was like for a sheltered young man who didn’t really know what he was getting into to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. While knowing his background information was important for understanding why his spirit remained on Earth after death, so much space was spent on this topic that the blurb felt misleading to me as a reader. Readers who enjoy realistic historical fiction about war may be a great match for these chapters, but they never quite felt like they matched the tone of the first few chapters for me due to the drastic shift between the life of a moody ghost and the horrors he experienced as a young soldier when he was alive. I wanted to love this book, but this was an impediment for me to dive deeply into Tom’s life because of the many differences between the blurb and the text itself.

What I did find interesting about this book was it exploration of racism, intentions, and regret. Tom genuinely believed he was doing a good deed by signing up to fight for reasons that other readers should discover for themselves, but having good intentions doesn’t mean that a decision is justifiable. He was affected by the time and place he lived in, and I was intrigued by his character development as he realized what a colossal mistake he had made and how even someone who tries to do the right thing can still be veered off course through unconscious bias and a dangerous amount of ignorance on a subject. This is something every single of us can be fooled by, and it’s well worth reading and talking about

The Last of What I Am is a good pick for anyone who likes historical fiction that has some paranormal themes.

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July 24, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of The Occurrence at Boyd Boone’s House

Book cover for The Occurrence at Boyd Boone’s House by Nadi Abdi. Image on cover shows several illuminated skyscrapers glowing at night. These buildings are casting beautiful reflections in the calm lake water next to the downtown of this city. Title:  The Occurrence at Boyd Boone’s House (The Demon Cleanser, #0.5)

Author: Nadi Abdi

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: June 11, 2025

Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary

Length: 38 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

The magician may go to prison, but beefing with a superpower is forever!!! Set months before the events in Power of the People and a couple years after the arrest and conviction of Demon Commander Boyd Boone, Lillas and her demon-hunting Triumvirate are called to Boone’s house to investigate tales of strange noises and sightings of people inside. Police have also called in help from the local magician family, the Drays. Whatever Boone was into may have been unbelievable, but it wasn’t impossible.

Demon hunters, demon knights, vampires, and vampire-hunting magicians have gathered here today to make sure nothing goes wrong. But with a mix like that, how could anything go right? This is the tale of how Lillas was banned from Boyd’s house after going off on her own, then turning on her own with a power no one knew she had. In her defense, she didn’t know what she was doing. Also in her defense, Boyd was doing a lot of things he had no business doing. Note, the conviction. They may have found where (some of) the bodies were buried, but murder wasn’t the only thing going on in here.

Lillas is a powerful human, made to hunt demons and those to consort with them. Boyd was one of her most powerful opps, and one of those who consorts with demons. He wasn’t home, but the monster still was. Like his ghost was hanging around. Note: he was still very much alive. (Not her idea.) They did tell her not to snoop. But she was the daughter of a detective. What were her other options? All of that to say, what happened that day may not have been foreseen, but could have been avoided had they listened when she said, “I don’t wanna go to that man’s house!” but slightly more explicitly. Peer pressure. Not even once!

Review:

Normal is a relative term.

Some of the most memorable scenes were the ones that focused on how interpersonal politics affected everything from how magic was used to how information was collected. That is to say, who one knew in this world and how strong their relationships were with each other was often just as or even more important than what anyone’s special powers were. This is something that can range from helpful to frustrating in real life, but no matter how it affected the characters it added a layer of reality to their struggles that I don’t see enough of in the fantasy genre. It struck me as much closer to the truth of what our world would be like if we really did have magical beings running around.

I had trouble keeping track of all of the characters because of how quickly they were introduced. As interested as I was in the storyline itself, this did make reading it more challenging it than I wished it could have been. If the plot had focused on fewer people and saved the rest of them to be introduced in book one of the series, I would have happily given it a higher rating as there were so many other things I enjoyed about these adventures.

The world building was complex and fascinating. Sometimes only a sentence or two was used to describe something, but those brief moments gave me the impression that they were barely skimming the surface of what this series had to offer. I had enough information to understand what was going on while still knowing there was plenty of ground to cover if I were to dive deeper in this universe. It’s hard to strike that balance in a short story, so kudos to the author for pulling it off!

The Occurrence at Boyd Boone’s House was action-packed. 

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July 17, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Child of the Sea

Book cover for Child of the Sea by Elvira Dahl. Image on cover shows a young child with wet hair swimming in the ocean on an overcast day. The scene is grey and looks cold. Title: Child of the Sea

Author: Elvira Dahl

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: August 15, 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Contemporary

Length: 53 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

I’d had the dream for as long as I could remember: I’m standing on the edge of the jetty, under a steel gray sky, looking out over the inlet. Watching the waves crash against the shallow reef out in the bay. There’s a large, submerged rock in that spot, and in my dream, someone is standing out there, waist-deep in the water. A dark silhouette perfectly still among the waves. I know it’s watching me. It’s been watching me since I was a kid.” When Vendela arrives at her seaside childhood home to look after it while her mother’s away, she realizes that something’s not right – with the place, with her mom, even with herself. She makes a series of chilling discoveries that make her question everything. What do the recurring nightmares mean? Where has her mother gone? And who is the creature from the bay that’s haunted Vendela all her life? Child of the Sea is a dark fantasy/mystery story inspired by tales from nordic folklore.

Content Warning: Excema, drowning, and a brief reference to a possible rape. I will not go into detail about these topics in my review.

Review:

The ocean is full of mysteries.

I try to prioritize reviewing books that match the seasons, but that’s a little more difficult in the middle of summer given how much less common it is for the speculative fiction I typically read to be set on a warm, sunny day when the world often feels cheerful. There are exceptions, of course, and I was pleased to discover that this was one of them. While it isn’t set during summer, the beach is one of the most summer-friendly settings and the sound of crashing waves is something that makes just about any scene better in my opinion. The setting continued to surprise me as I kept reading, eager to find out exactly what it was about Vendela’s visit to her childhood home that was so unnerving for her.

It would have been helpful to have more context clues about which Nordic myth was being referenced in this tale. While I have a theory about which one it might have been, not knowing for sure was distracting and a little disappointing given how important this information was for understanding the cliffhanger ending that otherwise didn’t quite make sense for me as a reader. As much as i wanted to select a higher rating, this issue prevented me from doing so.

While there were definitely horror elements in the storyline, this was not at all gory or gross. Instead, it built up suspense and dread as Vendela discovered layer upon layer of things that weren’t quite right about her mother’s habits, life, and normally messy seaside cottage. This is the sort of horror I am drawn to because of how many parallels I can make between it and real life, say, when one visits a place they once knew intimately that has changed so much it feels slightly wrong even if you can’t necessarily put your finger on why you’re feeling that emotion at first. Maybe it’s too quiet, for example, or there are other details about it that are slightly but also jarringly different from previous memories of it.

Child of the Sea was intriguing.

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July 3, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Nude Descending the Stairs Forever

Book cover for Nude Descending the Stairs Forever by Shoyu Monsieur de la Défense Robotique:. Image on cover shows a white metal or plastic humanoid robot who has breasts bending over and dancing gracefully. Title: Nude Descending the Stairs Forever

Author:Shoyu Monsieur de la Défense Robotique

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: April 13, 2025

Genres: Science Fiction, Psychological Horror, Contemporary

Length: 9 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

When art historian Alix returns to a forgotten wing of the museum, she expects dust and silence—not the fractured echoes of herself or an AI installation gone strangely aware. Nude Descending a Staircase (Version 3.0) was once a dazzling tribute to motion and form. Now it glitches, watches, and beckons. As Alix is drawn deeper into the haunted corridors and corrupted code of the museum, she uncovers a terrifying truth: the installation isn’t just sentient—it’s a dam holding back the collapse of simulated realities. And it’s dying. To preserve the boundary between simulation and chaos, someone must take its place. A surreal blend of speculative horror, philosophical sci-fi, and aesthetic wonder, Nude Descending the Stairs Forever explores identity, recursion, and the high cost of consciousness.

Content Warning: Claustrophobia.

Review:

What is the purpose of art? Think carefully about your answer before reading this book or this review.

The question of whether there was genuine artificial intelligence at work in this piece kept my interest levels high. I normally do not feel interested in A.I. themes, especially if they’re used to described machines that can’t actually think for themselves, but this approach to the topic was well done and thought provoking. The questions it raised about how art can affect the viewer and what creators owe to their creations were complex and would require a book of their own to fully explore, but even a small taste of them was enough to keep me thinking as I wrote my review. That’s exactly the sort of reaction I hope for when I read science fiction!

I would have liked to see more time spent exploring why the installation was breaking down and how that may affect the characters in that work of art in the future. Knowing this information was important for plot reasons that I can’t go into a lot of detail here for spoiler reasons, but I never felt like I had quite enough information about how this was all supposed to work even though I loved the chilling descriptions of what was happening in the art gallery. Had this been explained better, I would have happily gone for a full five-star rating.

Alix made some decisions during the course of this tale that most people would find highly unusual, so I was thrilled to see how much effort was put into explaining her thought processes and the consequences of all of the choices available to her. I felt like I understood her perspective well and knew why she made the decisions that she did. Since that’s an important thing to have when reading about characters who make choices that cannot be undone, at least for me, I was satisfied by how it was all explained.

Nude Descending the Stairs Forever sent a tingle down my spine.

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