Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Posted on January 17, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house one day with no idea who or where he is. A note instructs him to see a Dr. Randle immediately, who informs him that he is undergoing yet another episode of acute memory loss that is a symptom of his severe dissociative disorder. Eric’s been in Dr. Randle’s care for two years — since the tragic death of his great love, Clio, while the two vacationed in the Greek islands.

But there may be more to the story, or it may be a different story altogether. As Eric begins to examine letters and papers left in the house by “the first Eric Sanderson,” a staggeringly different explanation for what is happening to Eric emerges, and he and the reader embark on a quest to recover the truth and escape the remorseless predatory forces that threatens to devour him.

The Raw Shark Texts is a kaleidoscopic novel about the magnitude of love and the devastating effect of losing that love. It will dazzle you, it will move you, and will leave an indelible imprint like nothing you have read in a long time.

Review:

The Raw Shark Texts is my favorite type of novel, one that people have really strong feelings about. I would always rather read a novel with an average Goodreads score of 3, with half of the reviews being one star and half of the reviews being five stars, than read a book with an average score of 3 stars with all of the reviews being three stars. These polarizing books usually end up becoming some of my absolute favorites. There are enough poor, one star reviews of The Raw Shark Texts that I knew I would probably like it. This is not a typical book, a typical structure, or a novel that gives all of the answers. 

Each of the four parts of the novel are distinctive from the last. The first part is a man, Eric Sanderson, waking up and not having any memory. He spends his time trying to get his bearings of who he is and his memory. He is getting letters, but he does not open any of them, just throws them into a kitchen cabinet and ignores them. The second part is about the shark that starts to stalk him, attracted to him because is attracted to his words, his language, his life, and the history that he does not completely remember. He starts to open the letters from the previous version of Eric Sanderson, and there are a few things that help him remember who he used to be, but most of the letters are about how to protect himself. Part three is about trying to find help with getting rid of this stalking shark because he is not going to live in peace as long as a shark is stalking him in his periphery, a road adventure leading to new characters that might help him or get him killed, and part four is pretty much a rewrite of the climatic scenes in the original Jaws, the small group of people going on a shark hunt. There are also many elements that make this feel like a loose retelling of The Wizard of Oz, with Sanderson convinced that if he finds the Wizard, Dr. Fidorous, he will have all of the answers to help defeat the text shark and get him home. And of course there is the mysterious girl who shows up in the middle of the adventure to guide him to Dr. Fidorous and a love who had died in an accident, Clio, the two girls possibly being the same person. There are many aspects to this novel that mosaic together the entire story, and in the end, in the last few pages, there is another light bulb that is turned on that will make you rethink everything that you have read. 

I enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts and found many of the puzzles, directions, misdirections, and creativity impressive and entertaining. Many people talk about this book in the same conversation as House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, but The Raw Shark Texts is nowhere near as dense and opaque, a much more accessible version of this type of novel. There are some things that are purposefully left up to question and interpretation. Considering The Raw Shark Texts is also a pun of the Rorschach Tests, a psychological test where inkblots are shown to a person and they are to give their interpretation of what they see, it makes complete sense that The Raw Shark Texts is open to the reader’s interpretation of what they see. This is a strange novel, with a weird, incredibly creative plot, but it is also one of those books that if someone is new to reading abstract and challenging literature, it would be the first novel that I recommend because it is also very easy to read and enjoy. I do also recommend a physical version of this novel, because how else are you going to get the text shark flip book animation? This also proves my theory that I should always read books with polarizing views because I tend to really enjoy them.

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Review: I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner

Posted on January 15, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

An epic novel that brings together a motley crew of characters, including porn stars in love, celebrity chore-whores, plotting dermatologists, masseurs, and shrinks, among many others cast in the debauchery of Hollywood.

I’m Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences. A masterfully told story of decadence that examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone’s Children of Light and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.

Review:

There are two groups in America that are endlessly fascinating due to the depth of secrecy, depravity, and lack of moral compass they possess. The first is people in the government. The second is people in the entertainment industry. It can be argued that we pay closer attention to actors, directors, producers, and everyone connected to making film and TV more than government officials because we enjoy the art that people in Hollywood produce, and sometimes we develop an emotional attachment to TV shows and movies. Because of this we hope in the depths of our heart that the people who make us feel attached to a movie or television program are good people. (We also want this feeling about Hollywood people because we already know our fascination with the government officials is because there is no hope for them. They are all awful people, but we follow them because of the other emotions they invoke, sometimes good, but mostly bad.) Another difference between Hollywood and Washington is that there still seems to be an achievable dream about making a career in entertainment, TV shows, making movies, rubbing elbows with famous people, and being part of the industry. The reverse of this is true in the government. Common citizens have been locked out of the government, and there is no sense of having a career in politics because there is no positive side to the dream. The corruption in Hollywood and Washington has always existed and will always bring stories that are bizarre, unbelievable, and sometimes infuriating.

Bruce Wagner knows this. He has written many books about Hollywood and the system of film and television making. He also writes about how many of those behind the entertainment are terrible people. Terrible people in Hollywood have always existed, and as the times change, so do the depravities. Some very disturbing things are done between characters in this novel, and these things are not new to the entertainment industry. The more you read the history of Hollywood and the famous people (the Big Stars) or the rich people that keep the industry moving, you learn that there is something corrupted about a group of famous and rich people living together, almost like they have to outdo each other with their disgusting acts.

This is the backdrop of his novel I’m Losing You. He takes a set of stories from a group of characters associated with making movies and television, particularly producers, and wads their lives up into a huge tangled knot. There are many characters that are threaded throughout, including producers, assistants, a director of softcore pornography wanting to make a name for himself, writers trying to get their scripts noticed, drug pushing doctors, psychiatrists, and old TV stars that are shocked when people recognize them. The knot is huge, and the strings go in so many different directions, sometimes directions that you do not expect. At the center of this knot is the truth that in Wagner’s Hollywood, nobody gets what they expect or what they desire. Instead they settle for what they are given. And the worse you treat others, the worse your fate. I’m Losing You is filled with disappointment. Most of the novel’s characters start with optimism, but not a single one of them gets what they expect.  

Wagner’s writing reminds me of another writer who writes about Los Angeles, James Ellroy. Ellroy writes about the corrupt Los Angeles police. Wagner writes about the corrupt entertainment industry. I find the stories about Hollywood and Film and TV production more fascinating than the police, but I also know that Ellroy’s depiction of Los Angeles police is just as interesting as Wagner’s Hollywood. I’m Losing You is written in a similar style as an Ellroy novel, and it is sometimes difficult because there are so many characters and threads that are just one big knot, and the writing is stylized on top of it, sometimes with puns and metaphors, and sometimes with scenes that grow more and more abstract. I like the challenge of reading Bruce Wagner’s (and Ellroy’s) novels. After all of the ugliness that propels the people and the stories from page to page, Wagner does a good job in showing growth for many (not all but many) of the characters, and this to me makes I’m Losing You worth the effort. 

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Review: Detour by Jeff Rake and Rob Hart

Posted on January 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in this emotional, mind-bending thriller from the creator of the hit Netflix series Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

“If The Martian and The Twilight Zone had a baby, it would be Detour—a thriller that messes with your head as you scramble to piece together what’s really going on.”—Steve Netter, Best Thriller Books

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

Review:

Detour starts with the world falling apart and humanity trying to find a new place we can go that is inhabitable. The research says that Titan, the largest moon on Saturn, might be the best option. The first exploration is to drop a satellite and take pictures. The mission is manned with three well-seasoned and trained astronauts and three civilians, a researcher, the winner of a lottery to go into space, and a police officer who happened to be in the right place at the right time to save billionaire John Ward, the person also financing the trip. The trip takes two years, and when they return to Earth after the journey, they learn that things are different, radically different.

This is the first in a series of novels, and Detour is more about setting up the rest of the books than telling a complete story. The original idea was conceived by the creator of the television show Manifest and in the notes afterward, he says the original idea for Detour was a television series. The book reads like this; each chapter is an episode of a TV show, and it is all building to something bigger. A majority of the novel is the setup to them going to space, the training, the interpersonal conflicts, and the journey out to Titan and back. Only the last third is the story of the crew returning to Earth to see things are noticeably different. This definitely feels like a TV show, and if I were to watching it, I would probably enjoy it, maybe even recommend it to my friends, because it is an interesting concept and fun execution. The characters are varied enough to be engaging and keep my attention, and even though the science fiction is not so deep to not be appealing to a wide audience, the story does make sense. As a television series, it works pretty well, but as a novel, it is just okay. There is not a conclusion to the story, at least to a point where it will be okay if the second book does not get published. With novels, there has to be some satisfaction that the strings are tied together, even if loosely. What we get with Detour is a novel that is nothing but an introduction and a cliffhanger. This does not really work as well in books as it does on television. This is unfortunate because I would read the second book if I knew it was available. I like the story. I like the characters and their development, and I was engaged the entire way through. The writing is simple and appealing to a wide variety of readers, but there is something very unsatisfying about a novel that does not really have an end as much as a cliffhanger for the next book, especially in a series that has not been established as one that will continue. I would suggest reading it after a few books are published, especially if you are in a reading rut, because this is a fun and easy story to enjoy.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Posted on January 7, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.

Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning.

Wielding her signature sardonic wit and a penchant for the gorgeously macabre, Virginia Feito returns with a vengeance in Victorian Psycho.

Review:

Winifred Notty is the new governess for the Pound children, Andrew who is nine-years-old and his older sister Drusilla. They are to be taught their lessons, told stories, tucked into bed, and shown how to be children who are seen and not heard. The problem is that Mr. and Mrs. Pound do not know that they hired someone who plans to kill the whole family by Christmas morning. There are so many things that I enjoy about this book, and at a little under 200 pages, Victorian Psycho is a perfect story that really brings us to the Victorian era where the manor is cold and the people are colder. 

Victorian Psycho echoes the other great novel about a sociopath killer, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Both of the main characters, Miss Notty and Patrick Bateman feel invisible in a society that has more money than intelligence. Both characters say things under their breath and do things without raising suspicion, mostly because everyone they encounter is too busy with their own hopes of prestige and influence. So they are able to push the boundaries of the sick and the depraved imagination, and nobody really knows what is happening because they are too blinded by the their own life and how they are perceived by others. The difference between Bateman and Notty is that Notty has the other hired help in the house on her level, watching her, and seeing her doing the odd things that Notty thinks she is getting away with, and knowing she is dangerous. Living in Ensor House, the other house staff is watching her all of the time, so people know what she is doing and are frightened of her, but they do not have the authority to stop her. They have to watch her in horror. Bateman spends most of his story alone with his thoughts and his actions, killing people in his apartment and not getting caught, whereas Notty always has someone in the house with her, whether it be the children she is supposed to be teaching or the help who keep Ensor House running. 

Despite the atrociousness Winifred Notty, I enjoy her as a character. I like her depravity, her sheer unhappiness, and her disgust for society around her. And I like seeing society around her portrayed in a way that she is justified in her disgust. One of the best examples is when some houseguests mention needing to go home because there is a chimney sweep stuck in their chimney. The true history of chimney sweeps in Victorian times is horrible. They were young, scrawny boys because the chimneys were so small, some of them were as young as four and six years old. They climbed up the narrow chimneys, and they got stuck often. One of the things homeowners did when the young sweeps got stuck was light a fire in the hearth (also the origins the expression “light a fire under someone’s ass”). Many tried to scramble further up the chimney, got even more stuck and died. Sometimes the chimneys would have to be taken completely apart to get the dead kid out. The novel mentions this in passing, but it is because they finally made laws where chimney sweeps had to be at least twelve, so they got stuck more often, and this was seen as a terrible idea for the industry. The Victorian age was not nice to children, and those without money who grew up working all of their lives, who actually survived to adulthood had an understandable bitterness toward society. It is no wonder that Miss Winifred Notty ended up the way that she is, and the depiction of her and society that made her in Victorian Psycho is pitch perfect. 

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Review: Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

Posted on January 4, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

A must-have collector’s item for horror fans, comprised of two novellas, The Babysitter Lives and Killer on the Road, from the new master of horror Stephen Graham Jones.

The Babysitter Lives

When high school senior Charlotte agrees to babysit the Wilbanks twins, she plans to put the six-year-olds to bed early and spend a quiet night studying: the SATs are tomorrow, and checking the Native American/Alaskan Native box on all the forms won’t help if she chokes on test day. But tomorrow is also Halloween, and the twins are eager to show off their costumes.

Charlotte’s last babysitting gig almost ended in tragedy when her young charge sleepwalked unnoticed into the middle of the street, only to be found unharmed by Charlotte’s mother. Charlotte vows to be extra careful this time. But the house is filled with mysterious noises and secrets that only the twins understand, echoes of horrors that Charlotte gradually realizes took place in the house eleven years ago. Soon Charlotte has to admit that every babysitter’s worst nightmare has come true: they’re not alone in the house.

Killer on the Road

Eighteen-year-old Harper has decided to run away from home after she has another blow-out argument with her mother. However, her two best friends, little sister, and ex-boyfriend all stop her from hitchhiking her way up Route 80 in Wyoming by joining her on an intervention disguised as a road trip. What they don’t realize is that Harper has been marked by a very unique serial killer who’s been trolling the highway for the past three years, and now the killer is after all of them in this fast-paced and deadly chase novel that will have your heart racing well above the speed limit as the interstate becomes a graveyard.

Review:

Saga Press has started printed new double books, where you finish one story, flip it over, and start the other story. The first in their series is two novellas by Stephen Graham Jones, Killer on the Road and The Baby Sitter Lives. Both stories come with an element of a supernatural being stalking the main character, and both stories suffer from the same problems.

The Killer on the Road: The story takes place on Route 90 in Wyoming, where Harper is trying to hitch a ride to get away from her mother after a fight. Before too long, Harper is spotted by friends and an ex-boyfriend, and shortly after, her younger sister has found them and is tagging along. Also along this stretch of Route 90 is Bucketmouth, a shapeshifting killer who is having fun going from one body to the next while travelling crisscross across the country with no real intentions besides killing and having a good time doing it. He is currently travelling on Route 90 as well, and before too long, he and Harper are in a deadly game of cat and mouse. This game also involves semi-trucks travelling at breakneck speeds and becoming just as big of hazards to Harper and her friends as Bucketmouth. The beginning and the end of this novella are interesting to some degree, but the pages and pages of cat and mouse between Bucketmouth and Harper involving trucks, gas stations, and rest stops just seem to drag on and on, and sometimes the clarity of what is happening gets lost in the writing. Many times I find myself rereading parts and trying to figure out what is really happening in a story where the pages should be moving fast to keep the pace and the action exhilarating. 

The Babysitter Lives: Charlotte is babysitting the Wilbanks twins, hoping that they go to bed early enough for her to study for her SAT exam in the morning. When the twins show her that the house is funny and she can enter secret spaces that will make her show up in another section of the house (the laundry room transports her to a beanbag upstairs), she is quickly swept into the horrors that are also hiding in the secret spaces of the house. An entity, trapped there, is trying to get Charlotte’s body so that they can escape. I liked this a little more than The Killer on the Road, but there are moments when the story does not make any sense and instead of helping the reader figure it out quicker, Stephen Graham Jones continues forward, going toward the next scene without really any explanation or return to understand what might have happened.

Both stories have strong female main characters, and they could have been better reads if there was more editing for clarity, not for content. The stories are good and have interesting premises, but most of it gets lost in the convoluted way it is written. Stephen Graham Jones admits that he worked on finishing both of these novellas fast, and it fells like there were times when he thought, “This will get cleaned up later,” but it does not happen. I have read several of his novels, and there are some that I like better than others, but it feels like these two novellas are the worst written of any of the stories of his that I have read. It makes both stories hard and frustrating to read, and by the end I was glad to be done with them both. I will continue to read his books, but I would recommend any of his other books as a first read before recommending these two novellas. I will not be revisiting either of these stories anytime soon.

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Review: Honey by Imani Thompson

Posted on December 31, 2025 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

A wickedly funny, adrenaline-rush of a novel about a graduate student who murders bad men and justifies it in the name of feminism, by a bold new voice in fiction

Yrsa is in a funk. She’s bored of her PhD program, bored of her research on Afropessimism, bored of the entitled undergrads she has to cater to. But most of all, she’s bored of the men in her life—especially the bad ones.

When her best friend, Nina, confesses to having an affair with her professor, and that he’s stolen her research, Yrsa is mad. On the quad, Yrsa bumps into the professor and witnesses his an unfortunate incident involving his San Pellegrino and a bee allergy. What she sees that afternoon awakens something in a taste for murder.

Emboldened, Yrsa decides to chase that high, and soon, no sexist, misbehaving man within commuting distance is safe.

With each murder, Yrsa feels a greater sense of meaning and purpose—finally, her doctoral research feels useful. But how long can killing in the name of feminist and racial solidarity justify her actions? Will her rampage ever assuage her feelings of rage and revenge? And how long until her actions—and buried family secrets—come back to haunt her?

Review:

Afropessimism is a social critique that theorizes that Black people will always be seen in a civil society as enemies due to the racial structure of a society built on slavery, colonialism, and racism. Blackness is something that was born from enslavement and colonialism because of the way people of color were seen in society and this view has not changed nor will it change in the future. The only way that racism will end is if society ends. (I know there is more nuance to these ideas, but this is a very basic outline.) This is the backdrop of Yrsa’s thinking in Honey, the debut novel by Imani Thompson. Yrsa is studying at university and writing a paper on Afropessimism, and after a colleague steals her friend’s research and publishes it as his own, Yrsa starts to see that there is only one way to really deal with the frustration of being a black woman in society. Kill horrible men.

The story really makes sense in the simplest terms. Women are growing tired of terrible men, but most women do not do anything about it. Since Yrsa does not feel like she is in a society that accepts her anyway, she might as well try to change society in the small way that she can. When Yrsa confronts the research stealing colleague, they are talking about on a park bench. She sees a bee flying around his drink, and her intrusive thought to knock the bee into his drink win. Yrsa watches him die. This gives her a high that she has been craving, and the more that she looks around her, the more she sees that it is easy to point out terrible men who are successful while she is struggling. Horrible men are everywhere, and this makes it easy for her to start hunting for men who are sexist, misogynistic, and/or racist, and teach him a lesson.  

I like Yrsa for her bored mischievousness. She does seem like someone who is having an existential problem with not feeling like she belongs anywhere in the world, and she is overwhelmingly bored by it. The only thing that makes her feel important is getting rid of horrible men. She is someone who needs more help than society is willing to give her, and this also plays into her feelings on society due to her research on afropessimism. She feels like the social structure has let her and all women down, and there is no real redemption through the expected channels. She finds her own way to help herself, even if that has turned her into a monster. I enjoy thinking about the questions that this novel asks, and it makes me wonder how many women will read this novel and completely agree with Yrsa’s actions. Honey reminds me of American Psycho in a way that it is more about the commentary on society than it is about a clean resolution of the story. 

I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: King Sorrow by Joe Hill

Posted on December 14, 2025 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll—and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot—is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.

Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.

But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.

Review:

It has been almost a decade since Joe Hill’s last novel The Fireman, so the anticipation was very high for the release of King Shadow. When I brought the book home, I stared at it for awhile. At almost nine hundred pages, I had a lot of anxiety in committing to such a big novel and a lot of curiosity into if King Sorrow is going to be worth the wait. The final verdict is that Joe Hill has written a huge novel that feels like a short novel, and this is the best compliment any large tome can be given.

The story starts with five college age kids hanging out and being friends. They all represent a group, Arthur is the nerd, Colin is the rich kid, Donna and Donovan are the party twins, Allie is the quiet and more repressed kid, and Gwen is the person who comes into the circle as the granddaughter of the help on the estate where Colin lives. Arthur starts to get picked on by a family of lowlifes, two drug selling daughters of an inmate who is in prison for killing her mailman. Colin has figured out that they can solve Arthur’s problems by summoning a dragon from an old journal in his grandfather’s study. What they unleash is King Sorrow, a dragon that needs to kill someone every Easter for the rest of their lives. 

The book takes twists and turns, but mostly it is the journey of a group of people through a forty year span of dealing with a dragon. As the characters grow, so do their personalities and motives. Hill does not let any of the characters stay in the same place they were in when they were still in their teens, and while the years and decades pass, the group cannot help but stay connected over this yearly tradition. The killings by King Sorrow affects everyone differently as well. Some of them deal with their emotional trauma better than others, but the book feels like it takes its time to have all five (and a few new ones along the way) characters naturally progress in their lives and with their growing frustration at having to feed a dragon forty years after they summoned it as kids. 

I also find it beneficial that the novel skips years, and instead of going year by year and turning it into a kill list, Hill takes a few stories, fleshes them out, and makes these the most pivotal moments in the lives of the group. I like that there are many years that are not even mentioned, unless it is in passing as something that they thought about as a mistake, like considering Osama Bin Laden a few years before 2001 but choosing someone else. By structuring the novel this way, with gaps between the narrative, he also gets the opportunity to reintroduce the characters and what they are doing in their lives. This allows an inconsistency that keeps the novel interesting over a large page count because we are given a modified set of characters with each new part. It allows the characters to develop in ways that might have been contradictory to the same character from two decades before. Because people grow and change. I like the story, the construction of the scenes and the enjoyment of the book, but also find the structure of the novel fascinating because there is no way that a book this long should feel this short. Maybe these are tricks that he learned from writing comic books, but there is definitely some kind of magic involved.

I do not know if this is Joe Hill’s best novel, but I do know that it is compelling and every page brings new surprises and challenges to the story. I also know that it really has some great instructions on how to structure a very long book and not allow the story to grow stale. Hill promises at the end of the book that his next novel will not take as long to write, and I hope that he is correct. I don’t want to wait this long for another Joe Hill novel.  

Bonus: I love this very funny interview with Joe Hill on Last Podcast on the Left:

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Review: United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas

Posted on December 11, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan’s conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons – a shadowy group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest subversive tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead.

Captain Beniko Ishimura’s job is to censor video games, and he’s working with Agent Akiko Tsukino of the secret police to get to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But Ishimura’s hiding something… He’s slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated than it seems, and the subversive videogame’s origins are even more controversial and dangerous than either of them originally suspected.

Part detective story, part brutal alternate history, United States of Japan is a stunning successor to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Review:

I am old enough to finally find myself interested in World War II, and one of the things I have always thought too much about is what life would be like if the Allies did not win. There are a few novels about a German occupation of America, particularly The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick and The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth, but I had not seen any novels about Japan claiming the United States as their land. This is exactly what happens in United States of Japan, and Peter Tieryas builds a United States that is vastly different and incredibly dangerous for anyone who dares to resist total allegiance to the Emperor. 

The timeline of the story goes in several different directions, but the main story is set in July 1988, forty years after the end of the war. A new video game, called United States of America, can be played with the player being the Americans winning the war against Japan. This video game is illegal, and the Japanese Secret Police has sent Agent Akiko Tsukino to find the secret developer of the game. This leads her to Captain Beniko Ishimura, a member of the video game censorship board because if anyone knows how the game USA was created and distributed, it is him. The two of them go on a mission to find the culprit while also trying to stay alive as they navigate the underground groups, making them angry by poking their noses where they do not belong. The story is interesting enough, but their actual journey through a California filled with secret societies living the best life that they can under Japanese rule makes for so many dangerous situations that the book moves fast. 


The novel is very enjoyable, and the development of Ben Ishimura is interesting and fun. He is one of those characters that does not seem like he knows what he is doing, but he always has a plan. He knows people that are willing to help him through the journey to find the developer of USA, and the actual hindrance to his progress is his partner. Akiko, starts the novel with complete devotion to the Empire, but while she goes on this adventure, she learns that not everything is as simple as she wants it to be. She finds herself with many moral conflicts, and in the end she has to learn to grow under the threat of gunfire, torture, and death. The entire novel moves pretty quickly, and I am actually looking forward to reading the next two volumes of the trilogy. Peter Tieryas does a great job of world building and tells a great war/espionage sci-fi story with clear language and no real heroes.

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Review: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

Posted on December 9, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Review:

The latest novel by Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, is one of those late career novels that people will not read very much. When fans of Pynchon recommend his work, they will suggest the accessibility of The Crying of Lot 49 or the magnitude of Gravity’s Rainbow, or even Vineland or Inherent Vice due to their movie adaptations. Shadow Ticket is really a novel that only the fans can love and will not be one to recruit anyone to become a fan of Thomas Pynchon.

The story centers around Hicks McTaggart, a private investigator with a checkered past working in Milwaukee. He is hired to find a missing heiress to a cheese empire because he has met her before. The story follows Hicks as he looks around Milwaukee until he is eventually drugged and thrown on a steamship to Europe, where he looks around some more. It seems like Hicks is a character that does not really understand much of what’s going on around him. He was a hired as a strikebreaker to beat up people without any questions before he became a investigator, and he did not think much about how dangerous that could be. He is still this way with being an private investigator. He spends the entire book almost clueless to the peril he is in from several different side. He is more lucky than skilled when it comes to getting out of trouble, mostly because he is ignorant to how much trouble he is in. The novel slugs along, and it feels like once it makes the transition from the United States to Europe, the story slows down even more because at least Hicks knew what he was doing next when he was in the United States, who he can see for information, and how the case might be solved with what little skill he possesses. When he gets to Europe, he does not have any resources besides his blind, dumb luck. 

This novel is definitely style over substance. Some of the sentences could be an entire novel in their own right, and there are a few moments of really weird things happening that feel much more interesting than the main story about a guy who is just mucking around, trying to say something funny in every conversation, and looking to stumble into the solution. A few sentences and paragraphs are really rough, like they needed a bit of editing and cleaning up because the words are too intertwined within themselves to be unknotted easily. This makes Shadow Ticket difficult to read sometimes, and it took much longer to get through this 300 page book than most other books simply because I had to reread so much to figure out exactly what is trying to be explained. For most of his career, Pynchon has been worth this effort, but by the final pages of Shadow Ticket, the only thing I wanted the book to do was end so I could read anything else.   

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Review: Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Posted on December 1, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner, Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him every night, wears the cute outfits he orders for her, and adjusts her libido to suit his moods. True, she’s not the greatest at keeping Doug’s place spotless, but she’s trying to please him. She’s trying hard.

She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie’s relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?

Review:

I read Annie Bot quite some time ago, and my opinion of the story has evolved over time. At the crux of the story, Annie Bot is an android that is learning about being a better partner through artificial intelligence, learning to be the partner that Doug wants her to be. The truth is that this novel is not about Annie Bot as much as a character study in the way that Doug treats women and behaves in relationships. When she is brought home, Annie Bot is someone who is there to clean and help around the house. Doug decides to switch her to the companion mode, to becomes his romantic partner, and from there, Doug tries to mold her into who he wants her to be. He purchases Annie Bot as a response to the break up of his marriage, and the truth is that through the novel, we discover that he has not learned a thing about the dissolution of his previous relationships and that there are plenty of reasons why his previous relationship did not work. Annie Bot is the perfect companion for him because anyone with their own opinions and personality is not going to tolerate his behavior. 

There are more and more novels that have artificial intelligence as an aspect of the story, and many of center on an android that is learning about life and the things surrounding them. Many of these stories present a healthy fear of AI because the truth is that we do not want machines that can outwit us. Maybe it comes back to watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. The AI can be smarter than us, know more facts and what the weather is like outside at any time, but the moment that they can manipulate the situation and defeat us is the moment that we fear. We are okay with AI helping make life a little easier, but we do not want to be replaced, and we do not want Artificial Intelligence to be favored over the difficult work that we do simply because it is easier and cheaper. The truth is that regardless of how great an artificial intelligence program can be, it cannot replace a person or a relationship. In Annie Bot, Doug uses Annie Bot not only to grieve but to try to replace something that he is missing. This type of relationship between person and machine will never be satisfying in the same way that a real personal relationship would be, and Doug knows this but he ignores it. Instead he keeps trying and digging deeper into a hole that an artificial program cannot fill.


In the end, Annie Bot spends less time on the science and technology aspect of the story and more time on the way that the relationship unfolds. This is more of an exploration of several different ways that we interact with technology, sometimes using it to help, sometimes abusing it for fun, sometimes ignoring it all together. The final truth is that technology, no matter how advanced or enticing, will never be an adequate replacement for a human relationship.

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