Review: Marion by Leah Rowan

Posted on July 16, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A twist on Hitchcock’s iconic classic Psycho —where the leading lady doesn’t die, but instead turns the knife on Norm, kicking off a crime spree that turns the silver screen victim into a heroine for our times.

NORMAN WAS HER FIRST.

Marion is in deep. She’s stolen money from the Manhattan ad agency where she works in a desperate bid to help her sister escape an abusive marriage, but the bus breaks down before she can make it to Saratoga Springs. It’s late at night, and the only place with vacancies is an old set of cabins on the outskirts of town. She pays for a room in cash, and ends up chatting with Norm, the young innkeeper who’s handsome, charming and a touch hung-up on his elderly mother. Back in her room, she steps into the shower, scrubbing off the late-summer heat, when the curtain is pulled back…

Norm Billings is there with a knife. He raises his arm to strike, but before he does, Marion knees him in the balls, grabs the knife, and stabs the life out of him. Now, she’s covered in blood, and she’s a woman on the run—not just a thief, but a killer, too. Where will she go? How will she save both herself and her sister? And what mysteries will she uncover as she does?

In Psycho, Hitchcock shocked audiences when he killed off his protagonist. But what if the leading lady had fought back? Marion offers an alternate history of the most famous dead blonde to ever grace the silver screen. Only this time, the knife is in her hands—and she’s no victim.

Review:

Marion by Leah Rowan is billed as a novel that is the retelling of Psycho, the novel by Robert Bloch that arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular film. Without getting into too many spoilers, the original story is about Marion Crane who steals money from her boss, and while on the run, stays at the Bates Motel where Norman Bates is a psychopath and kills Marion. In this retelling, Marion follows this same pattern but fights off Norm and survives. Up until this moment in the novel, I really enjoy how this is a loose retelling of Psycho, with a modern twist. Both of the stories start to become police procedurals in the second half, but once Marion goes into the uncharted territories, it has to do new things to the story do not work very well.

The main character “Marion” (not her real name but one she writes in the ledger when she gets the Billings Motel) is an anonymous face for vengeance and anger toward men who underestimate women, particularly unassuming blonde women who are hardworking and smart but underestimated by men. The men she encounters throughout the story think they have the upper hand and can do whatever they want to her. She finds her internal female rage, names it “Marion” and allows it to become a driving force that makes her believe she will get away with anything she does. The problem with this is that “Marion” makes the situation worse as it goes along, like how she toggles the airplane mode on and off to check things on local Wi-fi, not knowing that regardless of what she does a phone is traceable, or instead of just leaving Norm in the motel after she kills him, she decides she needs to dispose of the body. This makes her stay around longer than she should, and the longer she hangs around, the more likely she is to get caught. Since she used a fake name to get the motel room and paid cash, she should have just left, went about her business. Instead she exposes herself to more problems, and as more problems arise, it becomes harder and harder for her to cover up her crimes. Even if all of the different people who die represent different ways that men mistreat women, whether it is the abuser, the arrogant coworker, or the psychopathic woman killer, each of these men fit into a simple category that make this more of an allegory about women sticking up for themselves and sticking together. 

The biggest element that really do not work for me is how much the story lies to the reader. From the beginning, there are twists, reveals, and red herrings, and the only character that seems to be telling the truth throughout and someone I would want to know in real life is Hannah, the ambitious private investigator who understands that police find the easiest explanation for things, and it is easy for them to go onto other cases when it involves strangers and serial killers. Hannah feels like everyone needs justice and closure, regardless, and she does sees the abuse women have suffered from authority forever. Even if she cannot always make a difference, Hannah does her best to ease her own mind. She works hard and her hard work is rewarded instead of seen as something to take advantage of, but of course her boss is a female who sees her value. Hannah is smart, observant, and someone who is definitely a good adversary to Marion in this novel. The real question is which side wins? Hard work and honesty or anger and vengeance? The truth written by Leah Rowan is that neither side wins because men are still in charge. 

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Review: Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney

Posted on June 30, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Think you know the person you married? Think again…

Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life. He can’t recognize friends or family, or even his own wife.

Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts – paper, cotton, pottery, tin – and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never lets him read. Until now. They both know this weekend will make or break their marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.

Ten years of marriage. Ten years of secrets. And an anniversary they will never forget.

Rock Paper Scissors is the latest exciting domestic thriller from the queen of the killer twist, New York Times bestselling author Alice Feeney.

Review:

The thriller by Alice Feeney Rock Paper Scissors starts with Adam and Amelia Wright going to an old chapel in Scotland for a weekend away that Amelia won through her work. Adam writes screenplays and Amelia works for a dog rescue, most of the time their life has been pretty decent but lately things in their marriage have been rough. Both of them have plans coming into this weekend (even though they are never clearly explained), but the feeling on both sides is that this is a last ditch effort to save their failing marriage. They arrive in the middle of a snowstorm to an abandoned church, and before too long they start to get suspicious that something about this entire situation is not right, not because of the ulterior motives of Adam or Amelia toward each other but someone else pulling the strings. 

While the story unfolds, I tried really hard to like this novel but there are a few things in the book that just brought me out of the whole thing, basic real life things that should have been researched or reevalutated by someone along the way. Some books have a way for bad information to be forgiven, but Rock Paper Scissors is so detail oriented that it is shocking that some of the details are so poorly chosen.

One of the details that holds me back from really liking this and getting engaged in the novel is about Amelia’s “asthma” and how she has attacks when she is scared or worried, and a few puffs of her inhaler helps with the attacks. Amelia is obviously a liar and s schemer from the beginning, but the asthma angle is really taken seriously. These moments when she needs the inhaler are not asthma attacks but panic attacks. Being scared does not trigger an attack. Environmental factors like smoke, pet dander, molds, and dust are things that will cause asthma issues, not being frightened or in a stressful situation. She does not need her inhaler at all except for a psychological reason, and it would have been prefectly fine if she would have said this, that she used her “asthma” as a distraction from when she needed to change the mood, maybe even having her mention that the inhaler was empty, had been empty for months and was just a prop. Instead it is taken seriously in the few scenes when it comes up (not during the final climax however.). This niggling detail does not have any bearing on the end of the story whatsoever except that this is a person who has never been told about her actual problems. 

Another thing that does not happen is bats in the wintertime. At one point the characters go to the bell tower where there are bats. Bats either migrate to a warmer climate or hibernate in a warmer place during the winter, especially during snowstorm weather. When Adam has an encounter with the bats, they are in the belltower, in the freezing, and they are ready to fly everywhere. The actual nature of bats is that they would be in a warmer, dark place if they don’t migrate, like in the chapel cellar or in a nearby cave. It makes absolutely no sense that something that took me two seconds to look up on the internet was not something worth the bother for Alice Feeney.

These things brought me almost completely out of the story, but I tried to stay focused. The story was somewhat interesting, even though there are many moments of that are a little too convenient. Some of the writing and turns of phrase are great. Some sentences are interesting enough to reread and think about for a second or two before continuing, but by the third act, I was ready for this all to be over. The mystery was not very deep and there was not really too much danger in any of it. Most of the actions that happens could have been prevented if people were just honest with one another. As it is, there seems to be a sense of thrill lacking in the novel, and this makes for a book that is well written but a mediocre story.

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Review: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Posted on June 15, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

The kaleidoscopic follow-up to the bestselling Detransition, Baby

In this collection of one novel and three stories, Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

Review:

At first glance, I thought Stag Dance had an interesting structure as it is a book with four distinct stories with the title story third in order. “Stag Dance” is the center piece, much longer than the other three stories, and some of the others have been published as stand alone publications, but I guess am used to the title story being the first story, not the penultimate. Or maybe it is something I have not noticed before now. Either way, this does not reflect on the quality of the stories, like how a writer sometimes leads and names a story collection after their best one, but it is a statement that with only two books published, Torrey Peters can already do whatever she wants.

The four stories vary so much that they could have been written by different authors and landed in four different collections. The first, “Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones,” is a post apocalyptic story about a transwoman who previously lived in Seattle, and how her ex, Lexi, is unpredictable, a little crazy, and decides she is going to infect everyone with a drug that will block the body’s hormone release so everyone will have to take pharmaceutical hormones. She decides the narrator, her ex-girlfriend who has good things going for her, will make a good patient to start this global gender transition. The story feels earnest with honest feelings about being transgender in society, and even though Lexi is a little unstable, there are reasons in her behavior, underlying feelings in her actions, and they make complete sense. 

The completely different second story, “The Chaser” is about two teenage boys who attend boarding school. When they are roommates, they learn about love and desires but also about their weaknesses. The sadness in the conflict and in both of these young men’s decisions is palpable. This is a story I did not want to end, even though everything about their lives knowing each other is difficult.

“Stag Dance,” is the longest story in the collection, and it it the story about Babe Bunyan, a large, strong, ugly man who cuts trees in an illegal timber camp and volunteers to be one of the female participants at a stag dance, where everyone will be drinking and dancing. The love triangle between Babe, a slight, beautiful man (his complete opposite), and the camp foreman develops. I found this interesting, with a tone much different from the first two stories. The voice in this story, narrated by Babe, with his insecurities of being a big man who wants to take the female role at the dance and the anger of everyone else making fun of him is completely believable. This feels like a queer version of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. 

The final story, “The Masker” is about a convention of crossdressers and transwomen in Las Vegas that is infiltrated by a “masker”, a man who is wearing a latex or silicone mask to look like a female doll. One of the other attendees, a trans ex-DEA agent befriends the narrator, wants to protect her, and also wants to get the masker arrested because to her, the masker is a dangerous fraud. This is another story with a different narrator, this time a person who is new to the crossdressing and trans scene outside of their apartment and the lure of the dangerous masker versus the overly protective friendship of the ex-cop puts them in a very tough situation.

The stories are distinctive in the material and in the writing. If someone told me this is four different stories by four different authors, I would believe it. Instead Torrey Peters really dives deep into these characters, so much so that it feels like these stories come from personal experience, that the narrators are people Peters has been in her life, even the one dealing with the gender apocalypse and the one working in a timber camp. These stories feel like they are written from a place of memory and not just story. I do not get this feeling very often with a writer (even in some of the memoirs I have read), and I find the writings as interesting as the plot. More than once while I was reading, I thought “How is she doing this? How is she writing like this?” Regardless of whether or not you like the stories or the subject matter of the stories, there is no doubt that the writing of each story in top notch. Again this is proof that Torrey Peters is a writer that can do whatever she wants. Her writing and stories are that good. 

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Review: Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth

Posted on June 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.

Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?

By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.

Review:

When I pick up any book by Deb Olin Unferth, I always know that I am in for a wonderfully weird and creative story. In her latest novel, Earth 7, the world has depopulated, and most of the people who survived have abandoned Earth. Those who have stayed are wanders, derelicts, and researchers trying to figure out how to recreate a new Earth by collecting a bank of DNA. Dylan’s mother is one of those researchers, and when she is a kid, they move to a living pod submerged in the ocean. Dylan grows up watching her mother do research and wanting nothing more than to escape the pod, go to the surface, and be away from her mother. When she is a teenager, Dylan’s mother arranges for her to be an intern at the research facility where she worked before they moved, and once at the research facility, Dylan does not know what do to with herself. The earth she is now exploring for the first tine is covered in sand, like a desert, and she decides she will spend all day outside, sweeping and researching sand, knowing that there are secrets in the sand that might open up the future.

At one point, the research facility pays for her to have a vacation. On this vacation she meets Melanie, a bartender who was a former contestant on a plastic surgery reality show. She has had so much surgery that she is now mistaken for an android. She could also possibly be immortal. The two of them find companionship in a world that is lonely and desolate, and dying more and more everyday. While this is happening, Dylan focuses most of her attention on research, which is the research her mother and her colleagues were doing long before her. This work is her way of trying to be immortal, but as they grow older, the population continues to decline and disappear, and all that is left is her efforts. The isolation these two characters feel, the turning of the earth back to a place before it was inhabited by humans is a slow process, but a process nonetheless. 

There are many broad ideas, things that are hinted toward but not always fully explored in Earth 7. Some of this is to leave the reader to think about the creeping death that the Earth faces, and when everything is covered in sand and life is either abandoned or rough enough to want to be abandoned, will we try to recreate what was already destroyed or going somewhere else to live. We have had many books about the decolonization of Earth for another planet that we can destroy, but the idea of Earth 7 is that is might be just as easy to recreate it. Neither options are very viable, but Dylan and the rest of the researchers feel like it is worth a try. This is a book that can get the reader thinking until they feel the serious depression and doom coming in the future. For a short novel with big questions, the writing seems to wane toward the final quarter. I struggled finishing this novel. The first 75% is entertaining, filled with interesting ideas, whimsy, and a human element to a place that no longer has much. The final section spans a vast amount of time, trying to answer the question that Unferth proposed, and while it is a noble effort and a way for some of the loose threads to be knotted up (threads that honestly are kind of forgotten by this point), there is a feeling that they might have been better left unanswered. The broad overstrokes of the last quarter is also a switch from the intimate, character driven story into a story about the huge ramifications of the end of civilization. And maybe it is because in my mind Deb Olin Unferth’s writing always has a sense of a quirkiness and fun so when it becomes more serious and introspective, I am waiting for the punchline. This did not come, so maybe my expectations is more at fault than the story. Either way I really enjoy Unferth’s work and her writing is compelling in a way that even though this is not her strongest novel, everything that she writes is worth reading because it is very funny, weird, creative, and enjoyable. 

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

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Review: Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on June 7, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.

The border cuts you in two.

When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.

Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.

She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.

How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?

Review:

The novel Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim starts with an intriguing premise. The idea is that when people cross a border, they split into two, one staying home and one going to their destination. Meeting and touching the other version of yourself is the way the two selves can merge back into one, but the idea is that most of the people do not do this. They become separate identities that sometimes even are close on the phone or over video chat. The two versions do not live in the same consciousness but there are things that are similar, like shared memories of before they split and like playing strategy games online as a team because they instinctively make the same decisions. While many of the people live far enough from each other to where touching again and remerging is something that does not accidentally happen, many still have plans to remerge later in life or not at all. This is where technology companies make wearable tech that allows the two instances of the same person to be close to each other and protect them in case they accidentally touch, as long as both buy and wear the tech that will prevent them from rejoining. 

With this as the landscape, the story starts as a family drama. Soyoung lives in South Korea. Rose, her instance, lives in New York. Both have separate lives, and they do not really talk much. When their grandfather dies, Rose travels back to South Korea to attend the funeral. At this time, she remembers her childhood, and seeing her instance in person starts a whole unraveling of who she is and the identity that she has curated for herself after the separation. The novel is constantly morphing from family drama to corporate thriller to romance to morality tale. Each part of this is interesting in it’s own way, but the best pieces are the history of this phenomenon, something that did not just start happening with the world changing and people travelling more but something that has been going on since the beginning of time. There are retellings of historical and religious events throughout the novel that not only explains that this has been happening forever but has changed the way that the whole world has been developed. Even the earliest literature, with Homer’s Odyssey and the story of Adam, Eve, and the fall of man, are rewritten with an instance in mind. Kim uses these stories as a parallel to the events of the novel, as if she is saying that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them, but she has to make sure that the old stories fit into this world and are told in the right way.  

The ideas in this novel are intriguing, and the way that she explains and uses these ideas are interesting. I do like the characters that she picks to tell a specific story with the the instances, and I really enjoy the beginning with Soyoung and Rose navigating the relationship that they have never built due to their separate lives. Unfortunately the entire novel does not rely on the strength of this unsteady relationship and switches focus on the bigger picture, specifically how corporations and the government can continue to use technology and money to find a way to control people who are continuing to split into two when crossing borders. I would not hate reading another novel set in this world, with some new characters navigating this global structure because it is the characters and the smaller stories that are more interesting than the government and the corporate response.

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

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Review: The Children by Melissa Albert

Posted on June 3, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family’s isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere’s childhood isn’t the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family’s legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she’s spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn’t seem so scary a moment ago. It’s a story for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

Review:

The Children is the story about Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe, two children with two unhappy parents. Their father Llewellyn was a brilliant stage actor who quit when he met their mother Edith. By the time the children are old enough to understand what is happening, the couple are running from troubles, looking for a place where they can settle down in a world where they find nothing but discomfort. They end up at a house in Vermont as a last ditch attempt to get their life together. This house is where everything changes but also stays the same. Their mother Edith becomes the writer of a famous series of books, using her two children as the basis of her characters. When this book series grows in popularity, the whole family becomes famous, and more artists start to show up to Vermont to get advice, to spend time on their craft, but most importantly to party. The parallel story is Guin and Ennis being grown and seen as the children they are in those book. They have not talked at all since the night that both parents died. Guin is getting ready to publish a memoir and Ennis is a controversial artist, including his next project, one randomly announced when Guin is on a talk show about her memoir, a secret instillation simply titled “Mother.” This and the memoir she is releasing causes her to go into a panic about her mother, all of the things that she saw in her childhood, and all of the things that have been kept a secret.

The story is interesting enough and the writing is very strong, but I did not feel very engaged in the story. I like the parts individually. I like the mystery about how the house changed the mother into a writer. I like the artist lifestyle, with people coming and going, with grownups being irresponsible toward their children due to their own artistic vision and focus. I like the idea of two children pretty much neglected to their own devices so they do whatever they want. I like the mystery behind why the Guin and Ennis are so close during childhood but suddenly have not talked to each other for decades. I even like the house itself because you know something strange is going on, not necessarily a ghost or a haunting but something that is not quite right. I like story about the pressures of living with fame simply because of the legacy of their mother. All of these things are interesting on their own, but the way the pieces are put together The Children does not live up to the potential. This is because all of the pieces are being constructed for a big reveal, but there are no significant little reveals. This is a story where many moments could be bigger than they are, but these moments are not written with enough significance to create a small climaxes. The only focus is the slow steady journey to the one big one. These small climax moments are there, but they are ignored. For example one of the writers wants an underaged Guin to sit on his lap. When her father sees, he hits the guy and the guy leaves immediately leaves the house. That’s the story. There is no real fallout besides him leaving, no fight between husband and wife who is allowing these strangers to come stay at the house without any sense of who they are, no conversation with Guin as to why she needs to stay away from the adults, that none of them can be trusted. Instead it is just a small incident with no repercussions, no family fallout, and no real change in behavior. This is just a story. This is one of many examples of what makes this novel one of those books that is beautiful to read but that needs more tension and more peaks and valleys in the plot. All of this could happen without showing any of the final big reveal. 

A story about family dynamics is one that I enjoy reading, especially when the parents are artists and trying to balance the fantasy world that they are living in with the art and the reality of the everyday care of their household. Unfortunately in The Children, we get the potential of some really good exploration in this balance and the results of being horrible at it. Instead we get a story that feels flat and static. At the end of the story, the reveal is not interesting enough to carry the hundreds of pages it took to lead up to the finale. 

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

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Review: Backstabbers by Eliza Jabore

Posted on May 31, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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Synopsis:

When three friends lose their way in a serial killer’s old hunting ground, they must fight to survive the threat in the woods—and each other—in this spiky, heart-pounding slasher.

Never turn your back on a friend.

Jade, Stef, and Zoe are hiking Washington’s Bones Hollow Trail, braving cougars, black bears, and the storms that roll in without warning. The friends’ paranoia isn’t helped by listening to a true crime podcast about the serial killer who once roamed this same forest.

Then when Stef twists her ankle—badly—there’s no one to hear them scream for help. The only sign of life for miles is a cabin that looks to be straight out of a horror movie, with a man who’s all too eager to invite them in.

As things take a chilling turn, the friends must find a way to stay alive together. After all, who can you trust when your back’s against the wall? But unfortunately for them, the only thing more twisted than this nightmare is their friendship . . .

Review:

I have been reading so many good books lately that it is expected that some will not live up to the quality of some of the other books still fresh in my mind. When I started reading Backstabbers, the debut horror novel by Eliza Jabore, I knew this was going to be the case. I was still going to do my best to make sure that reading a handful of books being released within the first two weeks of June did not make me start to compare them to one another. Unfortunately I could not get over the many irritating aspects of Backstabbers that makes this a novel I could not finish fast enough.

The story is about three friends, Jade, Stef, and Zoe. Jade is the first person narrator on the annual vacation the three friends take. These vacations are Zoe’s idea, basically her planning to get them into precarious situations and using her intuition to luck their way out of it. This year’s adventure is hiking in the Bone Hollow Trail, where the Bone Hollow Hunter has been killing single women in the woods, but they are safe because “there are three of them.” The Bone Hollow Hunter has also been capture according to the official story, but the podcasts and online forums are convinced this is an innocent man.This adventure is led by Zoe’s love for true crime podcasts and ambition to be a podcast star. Her driving motivation to have her own true crime podcast, and Backstabbers becomes yet another novel with a true crime podcast at the center. Backstabbers leans so heavily into it’s true crime podcast to move the plot forward that it turns into a horrible use of the trope, almost as horrible and ridiculous as the characters.

There has been an online debate about a woman walking through the woods and if they would rather meet a random man or a bear. Most women choose the bear because the dangers that the man imposes are much more unpredictable than a bears. In this case, the women in the woods are looking for the random man. When they meet him, they are the ones who are unpredictable, escalate the situation, go through the man’s belongings, try to distract him to explore the cabin where he is staying, taking pictures of things that lead them to be convinced that he is the killer they specifically came into the woods to find. Zoe wants the first guy they meet to be the Bone Hollow Hunter, even if another man has already been arrested for it, and she will not be convinced otherwise. In this case, the guy that the three women find is minding his own business until they knock on his door. These women want to catch a serial killer as their fun vacation. Around them, it is safer to be the bear than the random man.

This feeling is the biggest flaw of the entire novel. The justification these women feel in their adventure, in going into the woods without a second thought about how dangerous and stupid they are being, to hunt a serial killer. Zoe wants nothing except to get evidence to start her own podcast. She also has a stupid idea about how famous she is going to get from this story and how much money she will make from this podcast. Hypothetically, if she does catch the Bone Hollow Hunter, it is also just one story. To make a podcast, there will have to be continuous content. This short-sighted thinking is how Zoe lives her life, and she does not care about how much danger she puts herself and her friends in to get what she wants. This main character behavior is one that could be understood in teenagers, but these women are grown adults, close to thirty. However, not a single one of them has anything in their lives valuable enough to keep them out of trouble. None of them are motivated to stay alive by a partner or children or family or even other friends. The only real motivation is survival and fame.

I read this novel with the same interest as watching some old slasher movies, with a detachment from all of the characters and kind of rooting for the killer. We get no sense that any of these characters would be missed by anyone if they do not get through this situation. The narrator, Jade, seems to be the closest to the reader wanting someone to survive because she is not as insufferable as all of the other characters, but she is also dumb for continuing to be friends with Zoe and Stef. She tells many of the other stories she recounts from other vacations that the three took together, and it makes no sense why a grown woman would still be friends with them unless she likes the danger. This is not the first time that her life she has been put into terrible situations by her friends, but she continues to entertain them. In the end, this is the kind of horror story where some characters deserve what the get and other characters deserve worse

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

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Review: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.

In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.

With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

Review:

I decided to read Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage because I wanted to see if there is any insight into the real emotions of what happens to a partner when another partner abruptly leaves. Also considering this is a Covid memoir, I was curious about if the stresses of lockdown had anything to do with the dissolving of the marriage. The closeness of the environment of lockdown day after day caused many people to get pregnant but also made many partners realize their marriage was not working any more and that this forced closeness made these feelings explode. Lockdown not only gave some people true insight into their relationships but also allowed them the bravery to have the tough conversations. We get none of this in Strangers. Instead Belle Burden’s memoir is about her family quarantining at their home on Martha’s Vineyard when she discovers her husband is having an affair. The husband quickly decides it is best to not have any further discussions but just go back to New York. He become emotionally as well as physically divorced. I was hoping for some bigger themes in this memoir, but the truth is that Belle Burden does not dig too deep into what could have happened in the marriage. Instead of spending time with introspection, like what roles she played in their marriage and if there were any indicators that he was going to do these things, she goes forward with how the divorce is going to destroy her finances. Her husband does not get a pass in any of it. He does her dirty by using this moment as an excuse to escape from his wife and kids back to New York, to become so divorced from the whole family that his feelings toward his wife and children that during his first visit back to the house, he is more concerned about finding the prenuptial agreement in the boxes in their basement than spending time with his kids. This could be driven by some of the guilt because he does not want to face his children, but this is his new behavior as soon as he leave: that he is more interested in the money than in what is left of his family. For this, he is not a good person.

But marriages are also a two person endeavor and we only get Belle Burden’s side of the story. She is not at fault for her husband’s behavior, but there is still a question of why he is so easy to give up on everything he had built over twenty years because of a fling. Some of the last pages of the memoir brings some questions to light. Burden meets an old friend from before she got married, and the friend said that she (Burden) has turned back into the woman that she knew before Burden got married, that there was something about the marriage that stifled the person she used to be. I am curious to find out if her husband discovered the same thing about himself (that he had just lost the person he was before they met) just a little earlier than her. We do not get much about his personality except for surface things like he liked the osprey nest on their property and cleaning the yard, that his favorite band is Dinosaur Jr., and that his roommate was a guy named Mark who died of a drug overdose right before his debut novel was to come out. We get just as much emotional depth about him as we do about her. This still does not let him off the hook for abandoning his family in the way that he did. He should have been an adult and had real conversations with her instead of just leaving. Unless he did but this does not fit into the narrative that Burden wants to present. There is definitely a tone set in the memoir that does not deviate much, and things like a real conversation about their marriage between Burden and her ex-husband does not fit the idea that he is just a cold-hearted, money hungry jerk.

The most fascinating part about this entire story is who these people are. Belle Burden’s grandmother was Babe Paley, a New York fashionista and socialite who hung out with Truman Capote, until Capote wrote a thinly veiled story about her. Her father was an heir to the Vanderbilt family and her mother is the former director of New York Department of Public Planning. Her ex-husband is lawyer and hedge fund manager who did not come from money but definitely has made his share. The big fights in the memoir are about the properties in Tribeca and Martha’s Vineyard that Burden bought by cashing in her trust funds. She put her husband’s names on the deeds and this entitles him to half of their properties due to their prenuptial agreement. Their marriage did not dissolve because of lack of money, but money seems to be the only concern in the divorce. 

Memoirs work due to relatability. Many people can relate to a partner being a terrible person and walking out on a marriage. Not as many people can relate to fights over multiple properties and large sums of money. This second part seems to be the biggest focus of the memoir. I do not want to downplay Belle Burden or her family’s experience throughout this tough time because divorces are never easy, but I do feel like we are getting a very emotionally disconnected version of the story. There are a few pages where she does explain about the pain she is in after he leaves, but most of the focus is on their family history, the community response to their divorce, and the money. This makes me feel like there are so many more impactful and relatable divorce stories out there, and it makes me suspect that the big reason why Strangers is a book everyone is recommending is because of Belle Burden’s pedigree. 

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Review: Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller

Posted on May 20, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family.

But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It’s a decision that will haunt her for decades.

Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without.

From critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Claire Fuller, Hunger and Thirst is a compelling and chilling tale of loneliness and female friendship, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.

Review:

I received this novel as an ARC from Tin House in exchange for an honest review.

Many people do not like reading horror because they think horror is “beneath them”. Then a novel like Angel Down by Daniel Kraus wins the Pulitzer Prize, and people say, “But that’s a different type of horror. ” This is an excuse readers have used for decades when it comes to the type of horror they enjoy. The truth is that horror, like any other genre, has a wide spectrum of different authors doing completely different things with the same concepts yet making it their own. Fortunately the stigma of “horror” as not being artistic is growing less and less prevalent (as seen in Angel Down and by a vampire film like Sinners breaking the record for Academy Award nominations), but there are still readers and filmgoers who will consistently avoid anything that might be labelled as horror. As horror becomes more and more accepted in mainstream critical and art worlds, the argument against it will grow weaker, and the examples of the “different type of horror” that wins prestigious prizes will continue to grow. 

Claire Fuller has written a novel that fits firmly into the category of prize-winning literary horror. Hunger and Thirst is Ursula’s story, a sixteen-year old in 1987, living in a halfway house and working in the mailroom at an art college. Her coworkers at this college are all older than her, and even though they guide her through this period of her life, they are not role models. Sue is a friend who convinces Ursula to steal, who talks big plans, who wants to make a movie, who plans to move to America, and who wants to use Ursula’s help in this. Vince is another of Ursula’s coworkers, who is running from the expectations of his parents, only wants to work, get laid, do drugs, and live with Ursula in The Underwood, the empty house of a local family annihilation event. Vince and Ursula move in, and the story evolves from one about young people with more dreams than focus into a haunted house story where paranormal things are happening. Sue eventually disappears for good. There is a parallel story about Ursula thirty-six years later, a reclusive sculptor who has divorced herself from the things that happened to her teenage self. This past is starts to resurface with a documentary filmmaker who wants to know what exactly happened when Sue vanished and if it because Vince killed her. The truth is much worse. 

What makes this the “different type” of horror novel is the development of Ursula as a character. Told in first person, we quickly learn that Ursula does not see the danger she has walked into from spending time with these older coworkers. None of them have her best interests in mind. Ursula falls in with these people because she has spent most of her life moving from foster home to halfway house, being shuffled by through a system, and she is not only looking for something permanent in her life but is also looking for guidance. The underlying horror in Hunger and Thirst is that Ursula does not have anyone she can turn to when things get weird, and when she does try to explain what is happening in the house, she is dismissed, not only for being young but for being someone who does not deserve to be believed. Ursula is a powerful character whose behavior is clearly driven by the lack of role models in her life. She is just trying to fit in to survive. We are invested as readers into what is going to happen to her, but we cannot predict any of it.

The parallel story thirty-six years later, with the true-crime documentarian, Emma Zahini, investigating what happened at The Underwood is written perfectly. By a writer less talented than Claire Fuller, this could have been a clumsy device used to move the story from point to point, but she does not do this. Instead Fuller does what we have seen in countless true-crime documentaries. Many people in documentaries are introduced with a short moment of the interviewees settling into their seat for the upcoming interview, taking a drink from their water bottle or having their microphone pinned to their clothing. These are the scenes we get from the documentary until the end, Fuller introducing the characters thirty-six years later as people getting ready to be interviewed for the documentary. When the documentary does happen, when the story is revealed through the eyes and research of Zahini, the documentary becomes a natural story telling device that ties the past and the present, spending only a few pages to really transition from 1987 to 2023. It is so simple but so well done that the reader does not even realize it has happened until it is done. This shows one of the countless strengths of Clare Fuller’s storytelling.

Hunger and Thirst is not only a perfect example of a horror novel that is more “literary” because it focuses on characters before the story so the horrors seem believable, but it a horror novel that continues to break the barriers of the genre stigma. This is horror for those who read prize winning literature and think a haunted house story cannot possibly be moving, compelling, and completely believable. I would not be surprised if Hunger and Thirst becomes the next horror novel to win major awards.  

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Review: House of Margins by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Posted on May 12, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy Here:

Amazon Bookshop

Synopsis:

Serial  the podcast meets The Other Black Girl in a haunted house, as young African author disappears after being invited to an exclusive writing residency, and her sister is left only with a true crime podcast to help her uncover the truth about what really happened…

Anaya Sebeya is missing.

Before her disappearance, Anaya was a brilliant a rising star. Invited to a prestigious writing residency at Günter Huis, an eerie colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Anaya was supposed to craft the next great African literary masterpiece—and so were four other young, emerging writers, all competing for the grand prize. But Anaya never made it home.

When a sensationalized true crime podcast about Anaya emerges, claiming to reveal everything that happened at Günter Huis, her sister Ranewa is both skeptical and furious. But with each surreal episode, Ranewa begins to piece together a truth worse than she ever could have imagined…

At Günter Huis, Anaya’s nightmares consume her. Time slips away from her. Günter Huis inflicts distorted visions and terrible supernatural visitations, pushing Anaya to tell a story no one dares. But exorcising the house’s endless cycle of evil requires a sacrifice that neither Anaya nor her fellows are ready to make.

In House of Margins, award-winning Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase delivers a mesmerizing story of a young generation facing colonialism’s cultural legacy in Africa.

Review:

This could very possibly be my Book of the Year.

House of Margins is Tlotlo Tsamaase’s second novel. Her first novel Womb City is interesting but a story that feels as if she tries to add too many things into one novel. In the end it is good but a bit unfocused. With House of Margins, she tells a story of Anaya, a woman who goes to Günter Huis to compete for the Günter Prize for African Women’s Literature, a writing competition that she never returns from. Her sister, Renewa, is trying to get to the bottom of her sister’s disappearance and learns that another of the contestants from this competition is releasing a true crime podcast specifically about what might have happened to Anaya. The mystery unfolds through first person narrative from Rewena, Anaya’s story told in her voice through the podcast, and a few epistolary style moments of telling everything that happens at Günter Huis.

In the beginning, the novel seems like a normal novel of tropes. Girls in a cutthroat writing competition, narratives written using true crime podcasts, and a house that is haunted seems to be novels that I have read several times in the last few years, but another element is introduced that turns House of Margins from a run-of-the-mill haunted house story to one that explores the importance of ancestry, of history, of spiritual battles, and of the effort that white people spends to shape stories told throughout the world. Anaya’s story for the competition is about the history of the region where the Günter Huis sits, the way that many different tribes are invaded, raped, and killed by various groups of colonizers. It does not happen once but several times, to several tribes, and this manuscript that Anaya writes, which seems to be surrealism but is truthfully the narrative history of the house and land itself, is critiqued by the mentors and the prize committee as something too harsh to be published, that people do not like to think about colonization and what the invaders actually did to the native people of the region. She is told to tone it down, and this advice is because the prestigious prize, the Günter Prize for African Women’s Literature, is sponsored by the Günter family, a family of Germans who settled in Africa and who own the house. One of the definitions of the German word Günter is “battle,” and this seems to be what everyone in the house ends up doing, not only battling to get their story told in a way that is pleasing to the prize jury, not only a battle against one another because there is only one prize, but it is a battle of the spirit, the memories of the house being the biggest villain of them all. 

I love so many aspects of the story, and even though I was a little off-put at the beginning because of how the story is being told and me feeling like this story is probably going to be the same story I have read before, the story proves me wrong. House of Margins grows, becomes more surreal, more intense, and more emotionally charged as the story develops. I feel like the reader has to have some sense of spirituality to get into the novel, to be open to the idea that there could be spirits in another dimension who are trying to get the attention of the characters. There are also a few of the contestants who believe in God and calls out to Him for help, and this does become a plot point in the story. The battles that these young contestants go through are compelling, and I will also say this is one of the more frightening books I have read in a long time. I have read plenty of horror and weird stuff, but there is something special about House of Margins, a realness and a creepiness in the action. This is a testament to Tlotlo Tsamaase’s story telling, but it is also because the story feels real, that the emotionally charged motivations of everyone in the book allows anything to happen and the actions make sense, regardless of how improbable they might be. 

I have talked a great deal about this novel to my friends and family because it really does have an impact on the reader. The moments when Anaya’s manuscript is done and her mentor on the prize committee says that it needs to be toned down seems like something that Tsamaase might have been told a time or two but has chose to ignore. This story is very much a horror story written by someone who has a firm foundation in speculative fiction. There are weird things that happen throughout, and with the roots of the story firmly based in Africa, there is little doubt that some notes have been written to Tsamaase’s stories need “toned down”. I have loved everything that Tlotlo Tsamaase has published. From her short stories to House of Margins, everything she writes is unique, compelling, and absolutely masterful. Finishing this book makes me want to reread Womb City simply because I need more of her writing. 

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

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