It’s really quite hilarious, and also rude, how many NetGalley arcs I’ve read and not reviewed. Or not read at all. But we’re not going to talk about those ones right now…
Reviews in this post:
- The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert
- Dark House (Detective Lucy Harwin, #1) by Helen Phifer
- The Summer We Buried by Jody Gehrman
- Off the Air by Christina Estes
- The Redemption of Morgan Bright by Chris Panatier
*All books were provided to me in exchange for a review.
🔪The Nightmare Man
J.H. MARKERT
★★★
Crooked Lane Books | 2023
Filed Under: More is more.
In some ways, this has some Basic Instinct vibes, but without any of the things that make Basic Instinct fun. Including, but not limited to, Sharon Stone doing literally anything and Michael Douglas’ angry fucking. Really, name me one actor who does angry fucking better than 90s Michael Douglas. You can’t!
Really, the only thing this novel has in common with the classic erotic thriller is that someone is killing people in the same way murders are depicted in an author’s upcoming novel. Victims are slaughtered and then encased in handmade cocoons of corn husks, hung up. Dubbed the Scarecrow Crimes, the murders are lifted right out of Ben Bookman’s newest novel, The Scarecrow, even though it hasn’t even been released yet. So, how could anyone know the plot to duplicate the murders in real life? Obvi, Bookman becomes the main suspect. And then things get really weird.
This was like two different stories in one to me. It starts out one way — with the murders and the detectives and the mystery of Bookman’s lost weekend when he wrote the novel seemingly overnight — and ends in such a way that I wasn’t entirely sure I understood what was going on. Like, I don’t even know how to explain it? There was a house and rooms and little girls and what was up with that guy? The whole thing was bizarre and graphic, but also convoluted.
Not gonna lie, this was kind of disappointing. The execution feels off. It reads like it wanted to be a supernatural horror epic, but just couldn’t figure out how to do it in a way that wasn’t confusing.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Dark House (Detective Lucy Harwin, #1)
HELEN PHIFER
★★★
Bookouture | 2017
Filed Under: The propulsion is a sputter.
It’s Detective Lucy Harwin’s first day back on the job after medical leave, and she’s hitting the ground running — called to the scene of a dead man strapped to an old gurney inside the abandoned Moore Asylum, with an ice pick in his fucking eye.
Lobotomy, anyone? I mean, at this point in our ongoing unprecedented times, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted one. (Like, at some point, we have to have a discussion on whether we can keep calling things “unprecedented” when they just keep happening?)
In the 70s, the Moore Asylum was home to the local mentally ill, abandoned, unwanted and unruly children until a scandal involving horrendous experiments and the buried bodies of dead children forced the building to close forever. The scenes set during this period, following 9-year-old baby killer, Lizzie, were truly the best part of the book. They were chilling and disturbing. But the rest of it… meh.
The MC, Lucy, was one of the more unlikeable female leads I’ve ever read in this subgenre. The investigation work was pretty dull. The secondary characters were shallow, and it’s so fucking obvious from the very beginning what is happening that the mystery isn’t exactly what I’d call “propulsive.”
This was a pretty pedestrian UK police procedural, but I am such a sucker for an asylum setting, so points for that. Overall, this is nothing special in the wide ocean of UK crime novels, so I probably won’t be following up with the sequel.
The vibe for this one:
🔪The Summer We Buried
JODY GEHRMAN
★★★½
Crooked Lane Books | 2022
Filed Under: Ride or die, but it’s blackmail.
This is one of those novels where the characters do so many stupid things, one right after the other, consecutively in a row, that eventually, as a reader, you either go along with it because you’re in too deep or you DNF. I went along with it.
Twenty years ago, Tansy and Selene, BFFs 4 Eva, got into some deep shit that ended with them covering up a murder. Present day, Selene and Tansy are back together and up to their old wacky, criminal hijinks, even though Tansy wants nothing to do with it. But she ends up having quite a lot to do with it.
Selene’s daughter, Jupiter, attends the same college where Tansy is a councillor. Convinced Jupiter’s boyfriend is abusive and isolating her daughter, derailing her future, Selene begs Tansy to violate her professional ethics by intervening on the sly. What follows is a friendship so toxic and baffling as to how it ever existed in the first place, that I found Tansy’s desperate, unexamined need for Selene’s approval and attention to be endlessly annoying. And I didn’t find The Big Secret so explosive that it would have compelled me to do anything that Tansy did.
This is a slow burn that moved at a glacial pace, with an unnecessary sex scene and histrionic drama filled to the fucking brim. But there’s something about Gehrman’s writing that kept me turning the pages.
Was I disappointed overall? Kind of. Was I entertained enough to stick it out to the end? Apparently. The ending was such a massive cheesefest, though.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Off the Air
CHRISTINA ESTES
★★
Minotaur Books | 2024
Filed Under: If you vote Republican, fuck you.
A TV reporter in Phoenix, Arizona is trying to break out of her “newborn giraffe at the zoo” assignments, when she gets a tip about the death of a right-wing talk show host at a neighbouring station — who, if real, would be partially to blame for the downfall of American democracy which we are currently witnessing in real time.
The problem with this book is that it gave me no reason to give a shit. Reading over 300 pages about a hateful conservative personality and his bullshit circle of friends and peers, was the fucking worst. Oh noooo who killed him? I don’t fucking care. Good riddance, Rush!
The characters were flat and unexplored, the relationships and interactions were dull, the mystery was boring and unsympathetic — not to mention all crammed into the last 20% of the story — and the only real focus of the plot was on how a reporter gets a story. Jesus, all the texts and meetings and phone calls and running from this spot to the next just to ask someone questions they have boring answers to. Like, the MC in this didn’t even lead the charge on the investigation. She was always two steps behind and fucking up.
I just don’t even know what the point of this was. I could not have cared any less about anything that happened in this and I hope all the characters get hit by a Trump bus.
The vibe for this one:
🔪The Redemption of Morgan Bright
CHRIS PANATIER
★★★½
Angry Robot | 2024
Filed Under: Stop hitting yourself.
Talk about a mindfuck.
Hadleigh Keene died at Hollyhock Asylum, and no one knows why. A year after her death, her younger sister and perpetual fuckup, Morgan, creates a false identity — that of a trouble housewife — and checks herself into Hollyhock. What she discovers inside is a twisted acid trip of weird pregnancy shit and gooey things and mental fractures and body horror. I couldn’t even begin to explain it to you, honestly.
This is not what I expected this novel to be, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. My rating comes down to the fact that I’m not sure if I totally understood what was happening about 45% of the time. I feel like I say that a lot in reviews lately. Might be all the weed. Anyway…
There’s something important here about a woman’s bodily autonomy and having control to make her own choices, all wrapped up in a horror asylum setting. But the middle is slow, the pacing is uneven, and the supernatural elements are unexpected and too vague for me. I was expecting more mystery, less super weird shit…
But whatever, it was still (mostly) entertaining. This is bizarre feminist horror that can be unsettling, and it’s definitely a prescient horror read for our current social climate, where women’s rights are under attack from every conceivable corner.
VOTE.
The vibe for this one:
heresthefuckingtwist.com 