Review: REAMDE by Neal Stephenson

Posted on February 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.

For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.

Review:

I have always joked that Neal Stephenson is your IT person’s favorite author. He writes science fiction and history novels leaning heavy on technology, math, computers, and video games. Many of his novels are super long, and there are many like Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash that are considered science fiction classics. Stephenson has a wide range of interests and stories that he likes to tell, and even though there are times when he does stretch his legs into other genres, these ventures are not always completely successful. Reamde is one of these examples. 

The story starts with an online open-world video game. T’Rain is the brainchild of Richard Forthrast, another man of many interests, and the first half of the novel is about hackers using T’Rain as a way to spread the REAMDE virus that holds all of the files on your computer hostage unless you bring money into the game to pay the ransom, and equivalent of $73.This seems like a little problem that becomes a global situation when Zula, Richard’s niece, and her boyfriend, Peter, get caught up in finding the origins of the Reamde virus because Peter has sold credit card numbers to some Russians, numbers that get locked with the Reamde virus along with all of the other important files on the Russian criminal’s computer. Over the one thousand pages of this novel, the story moves further and further away from this original story, T’Rain, the Reamde virus, and technology completely. It eventually evolves into a thriller novel where jihadist terrorists are trying to sneak into America over the Canadian border by using Zula as a hostage in exchange for Richard’s cooperation. 

The last two hundred pages or so takes place in the mountains, where all of the characters are trying to navigate the rocky, uneven terrain, the cold of being in Canada, and the vastness of the wilderness. Every single movement from all of the characters is described, and it is a battle of endurance. Not only for the characters but for the reader. There are a few places in the novel that feels like it could have been edited down for readability. If something is not vital to moving the plot forward, in a book that is focused on moving the plot forward, I do not need to read it. For example, Stephenson spends several pages getting one of the Russians, Sokolov, to a place if safety and to meet another character MI6 agent Olivia Halifax-Lin. This includes a day at the gym where we learn about each exercise that he does, sneaking around a hotel, and eventually getting to the right place without being spotted. The journey he takes is uninteresting, unneeded, and could have been summarized in a paragraph if Stephenson felt as if it was really needed. So many scenes are “He did this. Then he did this. Then he did this,” and very little of it matters. Unfortunately there is more of this type of plot movement than there is in character development.

Stephenson had a lot of pages to bring these characters to life. Some of the characters get more development than others, but the terrorist jihadists are the most generic and uninteresting villains that I had read in a thriller. Stephenson spends no time developing their personalities, no real exploration of their actions or their motivations. The main bad guy, Abdallah Jones, is a tall black guy from Wales who converted so he really does not have to get into the pratfalls of being an American getting into middle eastern ideology. Jones does get a more of the interesting dialogue and actions in the novel, but the other jihadists are just a name with most of them being faceless and generic. Maybe this is because Stephenson knows that if he is going to write a novel with middle eastern or terrorist characters as the villains, he will be trying to toe the line between character development and using stereotypes to do so. The choice he makes is to not develop them at all. Instead he focuses on the eight good guys who seem to all converge on this mountain through different means and intuition for the final showdown. One of the most engaging parts of any action thriller is a good villain, and this might be where some of this novel comes off as incredibly uninteresting; there is not any reason for the terrorists to want to get into America except for a vague idea that they are plotting a mass casualty event in Las Vegas, but it is only alluded to and there is not a real exploration of this plan. There is no real reason except that they are terrorists. The only really interesting thing about the way that this novel shifts from one plot to the next is that the computer virus and the things that are set up in T’Rain as a result are completely abandoned for a novel that ends with no internet. 


After finishing Reamde I felt like I had been lost in the snowy mountains as well, trying to survive while getting to a place where I can eventually be rescued. This novel is exhausting, the writing is too detail oriented and slow for a story that needs to be fast paced to stay interesting. The main villains are incredibly generic, and the other characters, the good guys, are mostly forgettable. This feels like it could be set up for a miniseries for a streaming service, but to read all 1000 pages really seemed like a chore at some points. It is not the typical Neal Stephenson book, and even though I do appreciate him trying different and new stories (especially since the second half of this has very little of the technology he is known for), this storytelling has too many flaws for it to be a good execution.

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Review: Ashland by Dan Simon

Posted on February 8, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Booshop

Synopsis:

A deeply moving family story unfolding in richly evocative prose and a poetic portrayal of a town in decline during the final decades of the American century, Ashland is a book of metamorphoses—of the dance between permanence and transformation. 

In Ashland, New Hampshire, Carolyn, born of a teenage pregnancy, grows up alongside her mother Ellie, her aunt Jennie, and her cousins. Ashland is the type of place that most people plan to leave, but few do. Beauty can be found in small things—the trees in the wind, the sky’s particular shade of blue, a swim in the river, love, and family. But life can often be unforgiving and solace hard to come by. Carolyn reconciles the losses in her own life with an education at Plymouth State, the local university, and then by capturing in words her world and the people who inhabit it.  

Recalling the novels of Richard Russo, Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout, Ashland is a novel of debut great intensity and poetry told in the voices of many vivid characters and, through them, in the voice of Ashland itself. 

Review:

The main character in Dan Simon’s novel, Ashland is the town of Ashland. New Hampshire. Ashland is a town with a population of less than 2000 since it’s inception in 1868. The town lies in a triangle wedged between the Pemigewasset River on the west and Little Squam Lake on the east. The town has a history of a sawmill and textile mill industry. During the time period of the novel, 1970s-1990s, there are changes happening in the town’s job market, with downsizing of the L.W. Packard textile mill, (which eventually closed for good in 2002). The story of Ashland is told through several narrators, the main one being Carolyn, born in 1972 when her mother is seventeen, and how she sees Ashland and herself as part of the world. She lives with her mother, her cousin who is a few months younger than her, and with her aunt who had her cousin at fourteen. Carolyn recounts her childhood, but there is not much about her father, who is long gone, or how her mother and aunt had children too young. She focuses more on the way that she interacts with nature and how Ashland might be a place that people want to leave, but she sees it as the only place that she can live.  

Most of Ashland is an exploration of nature. The town, but also the rivers, the lakes, and the mountains that surround the area. The people who are not born there are people who think that it is paradise, a place that should not even exist. The teacher at Plymouth State, where Carolyn and her mother eventually attend at separate times, says that he has fallen in love with the state and the area because of the soil, the mountains and the beauty. He is in awe that the mountains are close enough that his students can attend morning classes, climb one of the forty-one 40,000 feet elevation mountain peaks in the area, and be back home in the evening to study. Every person in Ashland who narrates feels that they are living in a place that is special, and even though bad things happen to the people who inhabit the town, job loss, teenage pregnancy, long time sickness, and even death, there is a sense that everyone is blessed by being in this town and in this area. 

There are many different voices and narrators telling the story, but the main one is Carolyn as a child and teenager. This voice was kind of confusing to me at first, due to receiving texture hints that there are major things happening between the adults in her life, but she is focusing on nature and the rivers and the way that the wind is blowing in the trees. I thought it was strange that all of the adults seemed to get along in a beautiful way from her perspective, even when they are ex-lovers, fathers of their children, and people who should not genuinely get along. I finally realized that with this being told mostly through the eyes of a young girl, the adults are being nice to one another in front of her so that she does not recognize some of the turmoil around her. This little quirk to the narrative makes me think that the story is not about the truth, not even really about Carolyn, her family, and her neighbors, but about growing up in a small town in the middle of the mountains and forest, and how this can overshadow anything bad and hurtful. 

Ashland is a meditation on nature and place more than it is about story and characters. There is very little of the appeal of other small town novels like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or To Kill A Mockingbird because those are instances of characters driving the story of a small town. Ashland is more like a small town driving the characters. Those who were born in Ashland think about leaving but do not really want leave this land, and the people who have move there feel like they have been dropped into the lap of God. This is a love letter to growing up, nature, and to Ashland, New Hampshire and the surrounding area.

I received an ARC of Ashland through the publisher, Europa Editions, in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves

Posted on February 4, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.

Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.

Review:

When I saw the title of the debut novel by Ben Reeves, I knew I had to read it. I did not need to know the synopsis or read a sample to know that it was a novel for me. The title is a quote from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and the context is that life is tough and filled with ugliness and pain but once this life is over, once death comes, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. This could not be a better title for this book.

The novel is narrated by Travis, who is also Death. He is not a jokey death though. He does not have black hood and scythe, but he is someone who comes to spend your last moments with you, to hear your last story, make you a cup of tea, or hold your hand one last time. The gentleness and empathy that he shows to the people whom he comes to collect, trying to console those who are scared, trying to listen to those who have just one more story to tell or one more regret to name, makes him someone that you like, even though he is helping people move from this life to the next. Travis is a pretty quiet guy. He lives on his own, restores photographs, and does not want to be bothersome to anyone who is not going to die. When he gets close to Dalia, the single mother across the hall in his apartment building, and her two young girls, you want to hope that he is finding some happiness and balance in his life, a life that up until this moment is solitary, filled with grief from the moments and stories that he respectfully holds onto after they move on. Ben Reeves does a masterful job of making Travis come to life on the page without him saying much or doing much. There are scenes where he does not say a single word but his presence is always there, and it is interesting to think that a character can be written in such a way that he can be in a room during the entire scene, and do nothing, but you never forget that he is there. The clarity that he represents Death is never forgotten, even when the scenes are not about him at all.

There is a heaviness and a quiet calm to Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt that really makes every single moment just as beautiful and heart wrenching as the last. The novel is a perfect testament to how those moments between life and death are a transformation, and this is okay. Reeves has written a novel that is a respectful and compassionate ode to these final moments between life and death. None of the deaths are really fantastical, there are no skydiving victims or police shootouts, so it also makes many of the deaths relatable. The people here in their last moments are normal people, living with normal struggles. This is also a reminder that sometimes life is tough but we are all together and we should lean on each other to get through the tough times when we need to. So it goes. 

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

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Review: Last Tango in Cyberspace by Steven Kotler

Posted on January 31, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler crafts a near-future thriller about the evolution of empathy.

Hard to say when the human species fractured exactly. Harder to say when this new talent arrived. But Lion Zorn is the first of his kind–an empathy tracker, an emotional soothsayer, with a felt sense for the future of the we. In simpler terms, he can spot cultural shifts and trends before they happen.

It’s a useful skill for a certain kind of company.

Arctic Pharmaceuticals is that kind of company. But when a routine em-tracking job leads to the discovery of a gruesome murder, Lion finds himself neck-deep in a world of eco-assassins, soul hackers and consciousness terrorists. But what the man really needs is a nap.

A unique blend of cutting-edge technology and traditional cyberpunk, Last Tango in Cyberspace explores hot topics like psychology, neuroscience, technology, as well as ecological and animal rights issues. The world created in Last Tango is based very closely on our world about five years from now, and all technology in the book either exists in labs or is rumored to exist. With its electrifying sentences, subtle humor, and an intriguing main character, readers are sure to find something that resonates with them in this groundbreaking cyberpunk science fiction thriller.

Review:

Two days ago, while I was finishing up the last few pages of Last Tango in Cyberspace by Steven Kotler, Literary Hub published an essay by Naomi S. Baron titled “No Matter How Much Great Literature We Feed Into AI, It Cannot Feel”.

No Matter How Much Great Literature We Feed Into AI, It Cannot Feel

In the article, Baron proposes that many readers of books, particularly fiction, develop more empathy toward everything around them (which is also a personal thing that can be developed with work and not automatically depending on the reader) and since AI cannot express any sort of emotional depth, the literature that uses AI (including any use of synopsis of a great work of literature) cannot express what feelings a story might stir in the reader. I can read the highlights of Frankenstein compiled by AI, can know the entire synopsis from beginning to end and not understand the feelings that the words on the page evokes in the reader. AI strips emotion from all reading and writing. 

This has an interesting tie-in with Last Tango In Cyberspace because the main character, Judah “Lion” Zorn is an “em-tracker”. His brain has been neuro-wired and trained to understand culture and the trends that are happening and yet to happen. He cannot exactly predict the future, but he has a better understanding of how people are working and what anyone’s next move might be. He is offered a job by Arctic, a major technology corporation, to investigate what happened to Robert Walker, a big game hunter who’s head has been found taxidermized and mounted to the wall of his den. The journey that Judah goes through to find out what happened to Walker and why Arctic has so much interest in this killing feels a great deal like one of the recent Thomas Pynchon detective novels. Kotler has written a pulpy mystery story with a science fiction (but more science fact) slant, fueled by drugs, sex, and a heavy dose of Frank Herbert’s Dune. There is so much Dune influence as well as the constant back and forth between Judah and his friend Lorenzo that sometimes is nothing more than lines from the movie Apocalypse Now. Last Tango in Cyberspace ends up being a science-based detective novel mashed with tons of pop culture references (including Rainer Marie Rilke, William James, Banksy, the origins of Rastafarianism, Joan Didion, and of course Infinite Jest), and even a few history lessons thrown in for good measure. It seems like this would make Last Tango in Cyberspace an unfocused mess, but the truth is that it becomes a net that is meshed together and holds the clues to the mystery. 

The idea of the de-evolution of empathy does come up a great deal in Last Tango In Cyberspace considering Judah is an “em-tracker”, someone who has honed in his empathy to be able to read people and situations before they fully develop. In this world, this skill has become rare enough to where he is hired at high prices for jobs. One of the things he explains toward the end is that empathy is not something you develop to help yourself. It is developed to help a whole community, to learn to work with others, and to build a better and more caring world. This idealistic feeling in Last Tango in Cyberspace is also one that is fairly relevant today as most people have completely stopped trying to understand people with different beliefs and opinions. Our communities are divided when we should be developing communities that are beneficial to every type of person instead of using individual feelings to tear them apart. I feel like this novel brings up many interesting questions and explores some interesting ideas, and I know I will be thinking about this book for a long time. This is by far the best book I read this month.

Personally I love the questions that have been raised by Last Tango in Cyberspace and Naomi S. Baron’s essay because these are things I enjoy thinking about. I agree that a great deal of my empathy and emotional depth has come from reading a large amount and variety of books. Not every book I read is for me. I am not always the target demographic, but I will say that reading gives me a better grasp on other cultures, histories, religions, sexual genders, sexual orientations, and the problems that arise in the world that might never affect me personally. Just because I am not the target demographic for a story, it does not mean I should ignore it. Instead I should try to learn something from it. When I read a novel that is not for me but for the transgender teen that is struggling with their true identity or for the person of color who is fighting racism and microaggressions in their workplace or for people who have a thousand other issues that do not affect my life as a late 40s cis white male, I can recognize this, still enjoy the novel, and learn something. Reading books that are not for me helps me grow as a respectful human who accepts and appreciates the people in the community who are not like me. However, reading also glaringly shines a light on so many people who live with hatred in their hearts. Right now people are showing how much they actually lack empathy toward marginalized groups. These hateful people are guided by feelings and fears and are convinced they are the only ones who are valid. Every day I meet hateful people or see hateful comments on social media. The first question I want to ask anyone who is being ugly to another person online is, “How many books did you read last year?” I firmly believe that reading literature changes most people for the better, and this is why the divide is growing between those who want to build communities and those who want to only look out for themselves. There is a decline in the average person reading a single book, and with AI development and emotional depth getting more and more shallow, more people are losing their empathy.      

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Review: Moderation by Elaine Castillo

Posted on January 28, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A bold and inventive novel about real romance in the virtual workplace—​bringing Castillo’s trademark wit and sharp cultural criticism to an irresistible story about the possible future of love.

Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places: she’s getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground—the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider—she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction.

Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family’s problems with money and mobility. She doesn’t have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all—she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.

Review:

The beginning of Moderation starts with Girlie Delmundo working as a person moderating social media posts, flagging and removing posts and videos that violate terms and agreements. She specialized in videos about sexual abuse, child assault, and other terrible things done to women and children without their consent. People do not stay at this job very long, but she has been doing it for over ten years and is good at it. With this comes a numbing to the things outside of work, particularly interpersonal and romantic relationships. The first section shows how Girlie lives her life, financially taking care of her mother, her cousins, and herself, lifting heavy weights (no cardio though), buying vintage watches and bags on the internet, and being a great character built on the traumas that she is suppressing. 

The book changes when Girlie meets William and gets a promotion of become a moderator in a VR world that is a historic theme park, built digitally with high quality models. The VR job is a big promotion but also does not seem as interesting as the social media moderator would be. This position comes with her starting to see the corporate psychologist who uses VR scenes to get her to open up about her life and her feelings. As soon as this promotion happens, most of the middle half of the novel is about work, her relationship with her boss, William, and opening up as a person. Her workout and family routines are not even mentioned anymore. When I go to therapy, I have a habit of when I no longer want to talk about myself and the things in my life that I am trying to fix, I start talking about work. Work is an easy thing topic of discussion because most people can relate to the office, the politics of any job, and whether or not people can be trusted as friends or only as coworkers. Talking about work is safe, easy, and pretty boring. Moderation feels like this is what happens; Girlie no longer wants to talk about herself so she focuses on work instead. This feels like a deflection and is a shame because Girlie Delmundo and her family in Las Vegas is a much more interesting than Girlie Delmundo at work. 

Maurice de Coligny, one of the principal characters of the merger between the VR company she works for and a French amusement park company, L’Olifant, gives a speech about halfway through the novel. He says,

“In 1989, my father came up with an idée” De Coligny began, surveying the audience in the Grand Ballroom. “What if you could build a theme park that didn’t have one single ride?”

He held up his right index finger. “What if, instead of the commercialism and cheap thrills of other, more famous theme parks, you could imagine a different way to connect with visitors–a different way to connect with ourselves, and our history?” p. 176

This feels like what Elaine Castillo is trying to do with Moderation. She does show us an amusement park but then does not want to use any of these things for cheap thrills. The Goldie in the beginning is fascinating, with her interesting quirks and culture that can be explored but instead Castillo writes a novel about her figuring out how to connect with people (or one particular person). In the meantime she becomes a different and better person. She become more connected to her history and what she has been through previous to becoming Goldie Delmundo, and she is more willing to make bold choices for different outcomes for the future. Goldie is living the idea laid out by de Coligny in his speech, but as a reader who is watching her do this, I want her to ride more rides. I like Goldie and I enjoy the writing by Elaine Castillo, but I do feel like both the character and the writer’s choices are not as interesting as they could have been.

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Review: Dollface by Lindy Ryan

Posted on January 24, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Barbie meets Scream with a 90s nostalgia twist in this horror romp from Bless Your Heart author Lindy Ryan.

Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends.

But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she might just be the last woman standing.

A delightfully murderous novel that is equal parts scathing and salacious, Dollface will win you over with its gossip and gore, one body at a time.

Review:

The plot summary of Dollface sounds like the setup to a great horror novel. Two sisters are home when their mother kills herself, and they make a pact to always take care of each other. Jill becomes a horror writer and Kitty becomes an internet influencer. When Jill’s husband moves the family from the west coast to the east coast, the sisters are split up, and Jill has to figure out how to navigate her new life, which includes Darla, the neighbor who brings a welcome basket, wants to become her friend, and insists that Jill becomes involved in the local PTA. Jill meets the other PTA members and immediately after, they start to be killed or severely injured, and it is only a matter of time before Jill feels like she might be next. For as interesting as this novel could have been, the writing, the character development, and the telling of the story makes this a novel that could be the biggest disappointment of the year.

The way the story unfolds is so bland and mediocre that I could not wait to be finished reading it. The beginning starts interesting but before too long, there is no emotional development, no character depth and really not a single interesting quality in any of the characters. The only thing that Jill can rely on to help her navigate the other members of the PTA getting stabbed and maimed is that she is a horror author, proven by wearing horror t-shirts all of the time and wondering if they are inappropriate. Much of the writing is bland, uninspired, and extremely repetitive, so bad that it could be turned into a drinking game. Each time it is mentioned that Jill is “a horror author”, she has “a darling husband”, that the house they move into is “creaky-not-creepy”, her son likes “kaiju” (not any specific one like Godzilla or King Kong or Clifford the Big Red Dog, just “kaiju”), and Darla is her “new sweet neighbor”, we have to take a shot. Of course we also would not get very far into the novel at all. The weirder aspect of this is that lack of emotional depth in any character throughout this novel. Jill does not have much real visceral response to the crimes happening around her. She cares much more about solving the murders since she is, you know, a horror author. She does not express much about her feelings of danger or fear about the things going on around her, about how all of the new people that she is meeting are suddenly ending up victims to violence. Even by the time she does fear for her own life, it does not feel too urgent, she takes no steps to protect herself or her family, but is more like, “Well. I guess I’m next.” Her husband is supposed to be military, but there is not any mention of a gun in the house or any weapons to protect her or her son when her husband is away with his government work. The connection that she does have with her husband is one of the better aspects of the novel. I love when main characters have strong relationships with their partners (and even better still when they trust their partners enough to ask them for help with the problems), but after a few scenes of them having the most uninteresting lovemaking scenes I have ever read, I started to think that Jill is not connected to her life at all, that there is no passion in anything, even when she is having sex. This lack of real thrill in her life and the flatness of her as a character is consistent throughout. Probably the most irritating aspect of Dollface is the subplot of Jill trying to find the next horror novel that she is supposed to write. Characters struggling to write the next bestseller is the most lazy, boring plot someone can dream up. Nobody cares, and nobody is interested. Jill also mentions many many times that she is a “horror author” yet she has only written one novel (a bestseller of course), and she is having issues with coming up with anything for a sequel. This thread of trying to brainstorm a new horror novel is not only uninspired and generic but is also abandoned about halfway through because quite honestly it goes nowhere.

The repetition of phrases, the lack of emotional depth in the characters, and the generic plot movement makes me think that if I were to read a novel that was heavily written or edited with Chat GPT or another AI program, it would feel like this. I will never accuse anyone of using an AI program to write their novels, and to be fair I have not read any of Lindy Ryan’s other books to see if this writing is consistent with her previous works. This is not what I am saying. I am saying that I have read enough books to get a feeling that if I were handed AI generated fiction, it would likely have many of the same characteristics as this writing. 

Dollface is like a poorly remodeled house that still has good bones. A story about anxiety of moving to a place where nobody knows you, meeting an overbearing and potentially dangerous neighbor in a brand new house, surrounded with nobody you can trust, and a killer on the loose sounds like a great story. Many of the broad strokes of the story are interesting, and I would love to read this again with better characters, more creativity, and characters that actually feel tension and danger in the situation. 


I received Dollface as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Gutmouth by Gabino Iglesias

Posted on January 22, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

He has a mouth in his gut. An obnoxious, toothy, foul-mouthed, pig of a mouth. Luckily, his girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind. Marie, the one-legged stripper and cyber-prostitute love of his life is very accepting of it. And then a little too accepting. What would you do if your girlfriend cheated on you with the voracious yapper under your belly button? If you live in Gutmouth’s world-a bleak city where gruesome, spontaneous mutations are no big deal, klepto-roaches take anything not tied-down, drugs turn pain into pleasure, consumers are tortured for growing food, and your best friend is a misogynistic rat-man-you might do something crazy. And what if you got caught?

Review:

By the time Gabino Iglesias became the well-known author of great novels like The Devil Takes You Home and House of Bone and Rain (and became one my favorite book reviewers), he has already published a half dozen novels and novellas. His very first novella from 2013 was published by Eraserhead Press as part of their New Bizarro Author Series. Many great authors have published their first book through this discovery series, and Gabino Iglesias’s first novella, Gutmouth, might be one of the best. The story is about David “Gutmouth” Dedmon, an employee of the single corporation that rules everything, MegaCorp, and someone who is living a normal life until a mouth with a nine inch tongue, a British accent, and a wicked sense of humor named Phillipe grows out of David’s stomach. When Gutmouth starts dating a one-legged, three-breasted prostitute, Marie, he feels like his life is going pretty good, despite the annoyance of Phillipe, or at least tolerable. But then he feels like Maire is being unfaithful and the best thing to do about that is to kill her in a way that will not get him caught. 

What makes Gutmouth more interesting and entertaining than it should be is the skill of Iglesias’s writing. Each sentence paints a perfect scene, and there is not a single word that is not used to it’s full potential. Like the writing of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, or even Bruce Wagner, each sentence in Gutmouth is richly texture and meaning to the point where any of them could be the launching point of an entirely new story. A person could use this novella as a writing exercise book, opening a random page, picking a sentence, and making their own story from that sentence. Very few authors write like this, and fortunately Iglesias is one of them bringing those types of skills into a novella about a one-legged hooker getting killed by her lover with a mouth growing out of his stomach. It is no wonder that he has continued to grow and become a Shirley Jackson and Brom Stoker award-winning success.


With this being a bizarro novella, there is no scene that does not have something weird, absurd, or deviant at its core. Bizzaro fiction thrives on the idea that everything is possible, so the things that happen in Iglesias’s novella range from the silly, like the kleptomaniac roaches in Gutmouth’s apartment that will steal your things if you do not tie them down, to the grotesque, like the business below his apartment being the Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center, and the drug that turns peoples pain into orgasmic pleasure. This really displays the two sides of bizarro fiction, and it is ultimately shows what brought the genre down. These two aspects, the silly and the perverse, slowly steered away from the silly and more toward the disgusting and that is how extreme horror really evolved out of the genre. The silly aspect of bizarro evolved too, but more in the weird erotica, like the Chuck Tingle stories (before he published more mainstream horror novels for Tor Nightfire) and all of the weird erotica on Amazon Unlimited with humans having sex featuring dinosaurs, cryptids, aliens, doorknobs, snowmen, and whatever else a person can have sex with. There are still some bizarro presses and some presses that are ran by people who’s foundation is in bizarro, so the ideas of the genre are not completely dead, but it is not nearly as prevalent and relevant as it was in the first two decades of the 2000s. Reading bizarro novels and novellas have almost become a niche thing, and they are still really fun to find and to read. Some bizarro books and authors are required reading for any horror or weird fiction fan. Bizarro as a genre has an interesting and short but rich history with tons of short books to enjoy. Gutmouth is definitely one of them.

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Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Posted on January 17, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

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

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

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

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

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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