Welcome to “Part 3” of NetGalley reviews that are long overdue! Will it be the last part? Will I stay on top of my NetGalley arcs? Who can say?
Oh, I’m supposed to say? Then probably not.
Reviews in this post:
- Love Betrayal Murder by Adam Mitzner
- This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham
- Dearest by Jacquie Walters
- Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
- A Fig For All the Devils by CS Fritz
- Lucy’s Coming For You by Ashley Beegan
*All books were provided to me in exchange for a review.
🔪Love Betrayal Murder
ADAM MITZNER
★★½
Blackstone Publishing
Filed Under: Arbitrate that ass
This is a decent legal thriller, if that is what you’re into. But you’ve probably read better. You can definitely tell the author knows his shit when it comes to moving about a courtroom, but there was just something about the treatment of the only predominant female in the plot that really irked me.
Matthew and Vanessa are attorneys at the same law firm. She’s married. He’s her boss. They totally do it while working on a case together, violating every rule about intercompany romance. When their affair is outed, they both lie and obfuscate, trying to cover their ass and save their careers, which eventually ends in murder.
Vanessa is not given a proper POV. The part she plays in everything that happens cannot be overstated, but she’s treated as nothing more than a required puzzle piece. If you take her away, the only thing you’re left with is a bunch of shitty men being annoying in a courtroom.
This had some of those juicy, satisfying legal moments you look for, but I found the plot to be overwrought and sometimes tedious. You go through the sequence of events with the characters, then rehash it all again and again as we move from law firm/HR meetings to a trial. And for the real kick-in-the-crotch, everything exciting and dark in the plot takes place off-page.
And that ending? Come on.
The vibe for this one:
🔪This Delicious Death
KAYLA COTTINGHAM
★★★½
Sourcebooks Fire
Filed Under: Fire Festival COVID Sandwich
This combines COVID, Coachella and zombies, giving you gory, campy horror that I didn’t hate reading.
I think the POVs were just a bit too young for me, so I found a lot of the dialogue unnatural, like checking boxes off a social progress to-do list, instead of genuine character-building. I love that we’re being diverse in our character casting, but I feel like there must have been a better way to talk about the trans character without the other girls saying things that were essentially, “You don’t have a vagina and can’t get a period! I’m sooooo jealous!”
With shit like that, this novel was 10% eye-rolling, 90% everything else.
Because of climate change, an ancient pathogen has thawed from the earth’s permafrost and infected people through the atmosphere. Those infected undergo a transformation called the Hollowing, which turns people into feral cannibals. Synthetic human meat is created in response, satisfying the hunger of the “ghouls” and letting them integrate into society again. But a new divide has been created — those who don’t eat people, and those who do. Ghouls are untrusted and ostracized. The bigots have a new target.
At the music festival, someone is drugging ghouls to turn them feral. You might call it a false flag operation. When a boy is killed and eaten, the festival goes on military lockdown. And four best friends, all ghouls on one last hurrah before college, stumble upon the ghoul-drugging conspiracy and will do whatever it takes to stop it, just as one of them starts to turn.
This reminded me a little of True Blood — exploring themes of bigotry and oppression using monsters and those scared of monsters – but it didn’t do it quite right. It’s a gory, completely unserious exploration of “other-ism.” The romance elements and personal drama seemed contrived and dragged the pacing down, and the plot suffered from an inconsistent focus. The author seemed trapped by their own timeline, constantly sending the girls back to their accommodations to take naps and wait for a different time of day to move the plot along. But the last 20% really hit the gas.
Overall, an uneven horror story, but I mostly had fun with it.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Dearest
JACQUIE WALTERS
★★★★½
Mulholland Books
Filed Under: This is why I’m not having kids
What can I say about this novel that isn’t “What the actual fuck?”
I’m really not sure, because, what the actual fuck?
This was some of the most intense body-horror that I’ve EVER read, and most of it revolves around pregnancy and being a new mother. I’ve experienced neither of those things, so the fact that I was so skeeved out and so totally enraptured, really is a testament to the writing and the story.
Flora is a new mother, her active-duty husband deployed. Flora is going through it — from sleep deprivation, breastfeeding issues, and loneliness, to falling asleep in the tub with her baby and hallucinating bugs. Is she experiencing postpartum psychosis, or is something truly evil happening in her house? Then Flora’s estranged, shady mother shows up out of the blue, and that’s when things start getting really weird.
This novel does not fuck around. It’s giving it to you so hard and strange that I read it in 24 hours. That is not typical for me, at all, but the pacing is so unrelenting that to stop reading was nearly impossible to do.
This takes all the fears of new motherhood and mixes it with supernatural suspense, resulting in one of my favourite reads of the year!
The vibe for this one:
🔪Motherthing
AINSLIE HOGARTH
★★★★½
Vintage
Filed Under: Chicken à la King
I am in therapy for childhood trauma, so maybe that’s why I’m loving all these horror novels about fucked up mom stuff. Either way, please read this immediately.
What a weird little novel! Truly fucked up. I loved it!
When Abby’s evil mother-in-law from hell, Laura, takes her own life, Laura haunts Abby and her husband, Ralph, in all the ways a person can be haunted. With her career, marriage and mental health flailing, Abby comes up with a drastic plan to break Laura’s hold on her life that will leave your jaw on the floor.
Laura was the fucking worst. I would have loved to throat-punch Ralph. And Abby was one of the most memorable MCs I’ve ever read.
This is a hilarious and dark look at a woman’s descent into madness, told from Abby’s POV in an unhinged stream-of-consciousness. It’s not a narrative choice I usually like, but here it works because Abby’s perspective on literally everything is so wild and unexpected, and that gives it a fascinating charm and compulsive readability.
Decidedly, this is not going to be for everyone. It is quirky and different, bold and bleak. It explores subject matter that is serious and sensitive in the most unhinged way, but with a snark that diffuses it and leaves you feeling so many things. This requires a reading audience who embrace the unconventional in horror novels and don’t mind having their opinions on jellied salmon challenged.
For the record, I have a wonderful mother-in-law.
The vibe for this one:
🔪A Fig For All the Devils
C.S. FRITZ
★★★★
Albatross Book Co.
Filed Under: Let’s talk about death, baby!
I honestly wasn’t expecting this to be as heartbreaking and profound as it was, but the ending was off despite an opening chapter that left me in pieces.
Impoverished, grief-stricken over the loss of his father, and detached from his mother and her abusive boyfriend, Sonny is visited by the Grim Reaper, a chain-smoking, junk food-loving, poetry-reading incarnation of Death. Death is on a search for the next Grim Reaper, the one who will take over his job for the next millennium.
Sonny and Death develop a strange, enlightening friendship at just the right time for Sonny, who feels like there is nothing left for him to live for. But as Sonny works through some intense training for the Grim Reaper position, he realizes that there might be more to life, more for him to strive for.
The plot is a beautiful mix of horror, emotion and humanity. It’s very intense, and because the page count is on the lower end of the spectrum, a lot of heavy themes are discussed without preamble — grief, poverty, abuse, our own mortality. It’s to the point, to the heart. The writing flows like poetry, pulsing like it has a heartbeat.
But on the other hand, the ending felt way out of place. The tone shifted and took on a cheesy quality that just didn’t work for me. It read like it was meant for a Hallmark, not Baba Yaga.
This will break your heart in the most heartwarming, horrific ways. It might not be for everyone, but it definitely captivated me.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Lucy’s Coming For You
ASHLEY BEEGAN
★½
Self-publshed
Filed Under: Three.. Four.. I’m throwing this book out the door
The execution of the plot, every scene and everything about the main character is just bad. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be mean because I realize it’s self-published, but girl, please.
There’s not a single emotional reaction or thought in this that feels genuine and human. Every moment is written as ridiculous for the sake of what I assume is supposed to be tension or suspense, but there is so little world and character building that it feels silly and empty and tone-deaf. The plot is full of victim blaming and a being more concerned with a potential false rape accusation over the actual, multiple sexual assaults – an adult sleeping with a teen girl is labelled an “affair.”
Summer, a mental health advocate working in patient assessment, meets a patient named Lucy. Hours later, another employee said there is no patient named Lucy. Summer becomes obsessed with proving Lucy is real when she starts seeing Lucy everywhere she goes. Is Summer hallucinating, or is Lucy stalking her?
Unfortunately for us all, Summer is really stupid. She wouldn’t have noticed a red flag even if it was a wacky-inflatable-tube-man waving around in her front yard. Even the villain thinks she’s an idiot and tells her multiple times in the evil monologue that takes up the entire ending.
I am struggling to find any redeeming qualities to this story at all. Lots of dropped story threads, a writing voice that reads like it’s coming from a teenager with no life experience, and a plot that is way too ham-fisted at every turn. And dialogue? Don’t know her! This is an exercise in how many times a character can ask a question over the phone and how many ways the person on the other end can avoid it because the answer iS bEtTeR sAiD iN pErSoN.
This was not it for me.
The vibe for this one:
heresthefuckingtwist.com 
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty was such a thrilling mystery with complex characters and plot twists that I didn’t see coming! Definitely worth reading! #MysteryBooks
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