Review: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Posted on February 28, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

Review:

The Ministry of Time is Kaliane Bradley’s debut science fiction, romance, espionage novel about time travel, culture shock, and how the government is always up to no good. The unnamed narrator is hired to work for the Ministry of Time to be “a bridge” for a person who is basically kidnapped at certain points in history and brought to present day London. Her “expat,” which is a much nicer term than her “kidnapped historical figure”, is Commander Graham Gore, a lifelong sailor who was to die in the Arctic on the mission to find the Northwest Passage (a story famously retold in the Dan Simmons novel and the first season of the AMC show The Terror). Commander Gore is brought into current society where he adjusts to living with his bridge, a single woman who’s mother escaped Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. She is brought into the project because of this background, but the truth is that her background is not even close to the real reason why she is hired.

This novel has some interesting ideas, but there are too many moments when it is trying to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be an action novel, a science fiction time travel novel, a romance, or does it want to be a novel about how time and the timing of the decisions we make always affects the outcome and trajectory of our entire lives, whether it’s noticeable or not? We are given many threads, but there does not seem to be much follow up to many of them, just random thoughts and scenes. The characters are likeable, especially Commander Gore, but it feels like the good premise that starts the novel runs out of steam, and in the end, Kaliane Bradley has to choose one of the stories she started to complete the novel. She chooses one of the easier ones, the government being up to no good. My favorite threads that should have been explored deeper are the ones that draw parallels between Commander Gore adjusting to a society he was thrown into (going from 1840s England to present day England) and the adjustments the narrator’s mother had to make when coming from Cambodia to England, being thrown into a society that she does not recognize. (This is flirted with but there is no solid connection.)

I also like the thread that is given to us but again not really explored on page 271:

When something changes you constitutionally, you say: “The earth moved.” But the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts.  P. 271. 


The whole idea that there are things and events that change the way we see and interact with the world. Sometimes it is sudden (the earth moved) but other times it is a gradual change, like the year spent with a person who was taken from the 1840s. This does relate to the plot of The Ministry of Time, with the relationship between the bridge and Commander Gore changing rather quickly, but the change has also been gradual, that by the time the big events happened her entire relationship with the world and everyone in it has changed. Ideas are mentioned throughout the novel, and they are treated as disposable. Bradley’s ideas of time, our relationship with the world, and how events change everything that we know, are far more interesting than the actual plot of the novel. If she would have focused on these ideas, the novel would have been shaped in a much different way, and it would have most likely been less popular. But these are the things I will remember from this book, not the actual plot and characters because the ideas are much more impactful and interesting. As it is, Bradley focuses on the government, the science fiction and time travel aspects, and the intriguing thoughts are just there. This makes the novel feel unfocused, inconsistent, and not as good as it could have been. The Ministry of Time has many great ideas, but they really get lost in the plot.

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Review: Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark

Posted on February 25, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In America, demons wear white hoods.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan’s ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.

Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan’s demons straight to Hell. But something awful’s brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.

Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?

A video explaining the Ring Shout:

Review:

The Ku Klux Klan was born out the end of slavery and is a group who started by terrorizing, torturing, and murdering newly freed slaves. The first wave of the KKK lost much of their power due to federal government passing the Enforcements Acts of 1870-1871 that protected people of color against the harassment by this and any other organizations. The second wave started with the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915, the start of Prohibition, the end of WWI which came with economic instability, and the changes of American culture that was moving away from the traditions of a white only past. This second wave, from 1915-1940, had over 5 million members, was in every single state, and not only targeted people of color but Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers. The official start of this second wave was when Colonel William J Simmons burned a cross on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, GA on Thanksgiving Day in 1915. However the biggest Klan rally at that time was July 4, 1923, when the D.C. Stephenson was appointed Grand Dragon in Indiana in front of 100,000 Klansmen. (I mention this because this rally happened to have taken place at Malfalfa Park, where I would attend YMCA camp over 65 years later.) This history is the backdrop of P. Djéli Clark’s novella Ring Shout.

The novella takes place in Georgia, where Maryse Boudreaux is a Ku Klux hunter, with her targets being demons who started as Klan members but have turned into mindless monsters who are only out to murder. The Ku Klux hunters are women who can see the Ku Klux for who they truly are. For strength they use traditional African folktales, haints and root magic, and most importantly, the ring shout, a song and dance from the Gullah-Geechee culture that help connect the fighters to all of their ancestors. The Klan is aware of these hunters and are planning to do something big to defeat them. Led by Butcher Clyde, they plan another rally on Stone Mountain where they will show Birth of a Nation, turn all of the Klan into Ku Klux monsters, and release the most powerful demon of all. 

I find this novella fascinating because of the historical context more than the plot or characters. I love the things that Maryse and the fighters use as strength when they go into battle, how there are older men and women doing a ring shout while they go into battle, and how Maryse lets the anger of those before her run through her sword as she battles the Ku Kluxes. The plot is much larger than the page count, and some of the story is hampered by this. A few of the things that they do deserve more time and explanation, but this might also slowed down the story, turned Ring Shout into a slow action horror novel. As it is, Clark wrote this story with plot and purpose more than understanding and explanation, and it is up to our curiosity to delve deeper into the situation. I also like some of the ideas on race that are mentioned but not dwelled on. There are a few moments when the white people who become Ku Kluxes are considered, and how the anger and fear these people have is processed in an artless, ungracious, and damaging way. This is why the Ku Klux Klan rose to power in the first place, and why racism still exists as a major thorn in the side of American culture. I would have liked more of this story, but it also does so much for being such a short novella, bringing up so much history and social thought that I would instead like a second in a series. There is a hint of a sequel toward the end, but I am not holding onto hope. 

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Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Posted on February 23, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

n his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

Review:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders has been around long enough for me to have a good idea of what it is about. The story is about Abraham Lincoln and dealing with the death of his son, Willie, while Lincoln is president. The true story is that when Willie died, Lincoln went to visit the crypt where his son was laid, and Lincoln would hold him. This story also takes place within the first year of the Civil War so Lincoln also feels the mounting pressure regarding a war that many do not see as very popular. With Lincoln’s grief over the death of his child, a wife who is not in the best state of mental health, and himself getting pushed against his beliefs because ending the war is something that might be the popular opinion of his colleague but it does not feel right in his heart, Abraham Lincoln is stoop in grief, sadness, and worry. But Lincoln in the Bardo is not about him. 

A “bardo” is a Tibetan Buddhist idea on the afterlife where a person stays for an undetermined amount of time, sometimes seconds and sometimes trapped for eternities, between death and rebirth. The time spent is determined by the way that person conducted themselves during their life. William Wallace Lincoln died when he was 11 years old in February of 1862 of typhoid fever. His death came only ten months after the death of Eddie Lincoln, age 3, his younger brother. Willie is a good kid and he loves his father, so when he see his father in the graveyard mourning him, Willie wants to stay in the bardo for as long as he can because he feels like his father is going to come get him. The Lincoln in Lincoln in the Bardo is Willie Lincoln, but the novel does not soley focus on him because there are so many other people trapped in the bardo with him.

Lincoln in the Bardo is about the afterlife as a whole, the people who are stuck in the bardo, and how they arrived (how they died) more than what is keeping them from moving on to the next life. Three of these characters, Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and Reverend E Lawrence Thomas, tell most of the stories about the bardo, and the truth of this afterlife is that there are so many people stuck for different reasons, not able to get to the true afterlife. They want to make sure that Willie Lincoln is not one of them, so they do what they make it their mission to help him crosses over.

The audiobook of this novel has 166 narrators, one for each character. This is due to George Saunders leaning heavy on a way of telling this story in clips and excerpts. Most of the story involving Lincoln, the death of his son, the state of the White House and the feelings on Lincoln as president are told through quotes from books, articles, letters, and diaries from historians and people around them. Some of these quotes are real, some of them are fictional. The telling of the stories in the bardo is more about oral tradition, people sitting around and repeating the stories of their lives or the lives of those that they know. With Vollman, Bevins III, and Rev. Thomas taking the lead, the three of them can tell the stories of everyone we meet in the bardo, and it almost feels like they are trying to entertain us by telling the story of Willie Lincoln. However to tell his story, you have to hear all of the stories of the people in the bardo. This makes Lincoln in the Bardo less about Lincoln and more about the bardo itself, the people who are already stuck there and how their lives never change. 

There are some moments that really show how powerful of a writer that George Saunders can be. He paints the picture of Lincoln and his grief in a haunting and heartbreaking way, the mourning over the loss of his child being something that is most likely going to break him as a human. This sadness is only shown in spurts throughout because most of the novel is not about his sadness but about three guys trying to get an 11-year old boy to move on to the next life. At times this novel does not feel very focused, and some of the stories that are introduced do not seem like they have much importance to the whole of the novel. This is difficult to say because it is difficult to think that telling about one person’s life and death is more or less important than another, but for the sake of the focus of a novel, this aspect could have been a little more condensed. We could have done with fewer narrators and stories, because some of them really push away the impact of how grief-stricken and devastated Abraham Lincoln is while he visits his young dead son in a borrowed crypt. I do not know if this was purposeful distraction, like to break the tension and sadness, but there feels like more of it than necessary. People love this novel, it has won awards, it will most likely be one of those novels that will be on “Best Novels of the Century” lists, and it might be a novel that is taught in universities in the future (if not already). I can respect these ideas, and I can agree with how people feel about this novel, but my agreement is not wholehearted. This is a good book, but it is not gong to be the best book I read this year, and most likely will not be in the top ten. Maybe I will revisit this novel at some time in the future, but for right now, my feeling is that this is not even George Saunders’s best book.  

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Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Posted on February 21, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Review:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is the first in the Alex Stern series, a character who has been selected to be a student at Yale University to also work as part of their team of people who oversee the different houses while they use their magic and complete rituals. Alex is a high school dropout and recovering drug addict who is found after she flees a house where everyone that she lived with and knew are murdered and is found on the street naked and delirious. When Alex is in the hospital, Yale comes to recruit her, because they know. For centuries, New Haven and Yale University has been a hub of paranormal activity and magical powers. The eight houses who are sanctioned to do rituals sit on weak points between this world and the magic world. This means many people are doing weird stuff and it is up to Alex Stern and the Lethe House to make sure none of this goes sideways. Enter the murder of a girl on a Thursday night when all of the rituals are being done around campus. Since the victim is not a student or someone important, her murder is seen as a simple case of a boyfriend stabbing his girlfriend to death. Alex sees things differently, is bothered by the whole murder and excuse, maybe because she felt something weird happen at the same the the girl was being killed and maybe she sees a little bit of herself in the dead girl (both underestimated and seen as inferior to those around them). She cannot stop thinking about it and cannot stop investigating. 

Part of Ninth House is setting up a world of magic and mayhem, where different magic houses are doing things they probably should not be doing. What could possibly go wrong when we give young people, many of them without fully developed frontal lobes, access to magic powerful enough to have someone visit the underworld or someone to lose all of their inhibitions or the abilities to make super powerful drugs? Even with Lethe House trying to keep track of all of this, there is no doubt that most of the magic done on campus is not sanctioned and not every ritual is done in good faith. The biggest part of Ninth House is about the characters and developing them in a slow and steady way so that the reader will want to come back for the next book in the series. There is no illusion that this is planned as the beginning of a book series, and from the very beginning this book is doing a lot of heavy lifting to establish the world and the major players. I like all of the characters at Lethe House. I enjoy the rawness of Alex Stern, how she does not fit into the societies that she has been brought into, societies that have been established through the centuries. She does not always follow the politeness or manners that are expected of her as a member of Lethe House. Her time before Yale University when she lived off of her wits and instincts really does her favors in this setting because she can surprise many of the entitled kids that are her peers but underestimate her. She is always thinking about the final outcome of any situation before she does it, particularly if there will be repercussions for stepping outside of the normal boundaries. She believes she can get away with many of the corners she cuts and the rules that she breaks because everyone has something they want to keep hidden. I also like the backstory of Darlington, the person who is supposed to be training Alex but disappeared before the book begins. He is thought to be stuck between the living world and the magic world, and they have to wait for the new moon to get him back. I even like Dawes, the research assistant who is irritated by Stern and reluctantly helps her when all she wants to do is listen to her headphones and work on her laptop. The other characters are interesting enough. Some of the college students are a little cliche, but they are also vehicles for the Lethe house characters more than having their own narrative. In the end, Bardugo does spend time and effort to give the major characters backstories and histories that make them unique but believable. 

The most minor part of this novel is the actual plot, the investigation of the dead girl but also trying to get Darlington to return home. The plot is good enough, interesting and keeps the book moving, but it is also kind of like the college kids: a vehicle for the main characters and world structure to become well established for the next book. Bardugo’s interest is definitely more about the characters and the magic tricks than actually the plot. Sure it all ties together nicely, and the storytelling and plot are well done, but the focus on the murder investigation seems to be a little soft compared to the amount of time spent on building the world. 


Ninth House is interesting and I do like fiction that take place on college campuses. There is a great deal of thought and skill used to the build a version of Yale University that runs on secret societies using magic for their own gains but is still believable as a university. The characters of Lethe House are strong enough to want to read the next book about them. There are many moments where I think that Ninth House does some unique and wonderful things, but this is also a novel that really spends more time with character development and world building over substance, and sometimes it feels like more of a setup for books to come than a book that does much on it’s own. I will be reading the next in the series though. I need to know what happens next, so I guess that means Ninth House does the job.

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Review: Beyond the Planet of the Vampires

Posted on February 19, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Indie Pubs, Bookshop, Amazon

Synopsis:

A speculative avant-garde queer horror novel that reads like an erotic vampiric nightmare directed by Jodorowsky playing at a ’50s drive-in.

Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is a gay pulp horror novel of chance. The narrative erratically loses and regains consciousness during an apocalyptic space invasion of psychic vampires, reaching across intergalactic fathoms in search of future victims.

Smoldering in a social alienation reminiscent of Genet’s outlaw anti-heroes, Baer’s novel screams with Joycean word play in an entirely new and unique idiom, where theories of Kant are situated with reckonings of identity and postulations on the nature of evil.

On each page, Ulrich Baer creates an enigmatic performance of both philosophical and queer thought, exercised through the rich aesthetic experience of a retro horror film. Beyond the Planet of the Vampires redefines avant-garde in a relentless, generation-defining voice.

Review:

I am a big champion of art that is not easy. Though it is definitely okay to like the type of music, books, and films that you like, it is also important to sometimes stretch beyond normal experiences. Sticking with that musical album you do not understand or rewatching the movie that makes no sense, or in the case of Beyond the Planet of the Vampires, reading something that relies on feeling morning that narrative, it makes you stretch and grow as a consumer of art and eventually an artist. Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is billed as many things. Avant-garde. Queer Horror. Joycean. A B-movie nightmare. In his blurb, Laird Hunt calls it, “Think Pale Celan and Buck Rogers meet up with the Beowulf poet in Nosferatu’s castle were Dennis Cooper is watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show and you’ll get some small sense of what goes down in Ulrich Baer’s excellent new novel.” None of these explanations are wrong but also none of them make any sense to me. The truth is that most of Beyond the Planet of the Vampires defies any explanation, that there is so much more focus on mood and vibe than character, setting, structure, and story, that what you feel while reading it is more important that what the novel is saying. 

Ulrich Baer writes like he was an avid reader growing up, but the only book that he had access to was a dictionary. The vibe presented is structured with words you have to look up, combined words, words that are stylistically shortened (the Sonic Youth-esque “yr” being one throughout), and sentences that stop in the middle of a thought and never pick back up. The writing is something that makes sure that the reading is always in flux, always deconstructed, and never really what it seems. I was actually most of the way through before I realized that the first person narrator was the vampire. I also started re-reading it from the beginning as soon as I was done, thinking that there might be a little more clarity, but there is none. A work of fiction like this is completely up to the reader’s interpretation, and this is why the descriptions on the back are not necessarily wrong or misleading, but they are not the feelings I get out of it. I see this as more of an exploration of feelings about being alive in a world where you do not fit in than a vampire story.

The vampire comes from another world, crash lands on Earth so from the beginning, he feel like an outsider, someone who is exploring the world where he is completely alien (I have not read any of Baer’s other writing yet, but reading some of the descriptions, outer space and being an outsider on a planet seems to be a recurring theme). Having said this, the world where he crash lands might not even be Earth, that there are things that resemble Earth, like deserts and cliffs and a dungeon in a castle, and there is talk about Mississippi and the south, but this could all be illusion. The real setting is nowhere, like the Earth is so foreign that even the places that remind him of something else are not real places but just reminders. The search for lovers and victims by this vampire is definitely a search for queer love but in a trans male to male way. The vampire identifies as male but does not have the proper sex organs (which is pretty prevalent in vampire lore) so he uses tools to have sex with men, most of the time to feel like he can have a connection to humanity. Vampires do not need to have sex to survive, but this one seems to have a major interest in doing so. He likes the feeling of being called “my cute boy” and the post-coital joy that sex brings, feelings that he does not feel any other way. Baer uses the outer space vampire as a way to express existential feelings, the anxiety so high that even when he is somewhere he recognizes, it might not be real. He also uses the vampire imagery to explain the feeling of being a transperson, that not having the right organs to do the things that he wants to do is the same as not having them at all. In the end, the vampire does feel like a sympathetic character, one that is completely lost in a foreign world and trying to find a way to survive in a productive or at least enjoyable way. 


Of course this is just my interpretation. The best thing about novels and art like this is that there are so many ways to look at it, and it is up to the reader to decide what they see and how they understand it. I always remember the David Lynch interview where he is asked to explain the meaning of his movie. His only answer is, “No.” It is up to us to make our own meanings, and though it is something that I do not want to do with every piece of art that I consume, it is something that exercises parts of my brain that need exercised sometimes. This is something that we should all do as readers or music listeners or filmgoers, especially if we make art as well. A book like Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is definitely a work that stretches your definitions of what reading means and what a novel can be. I am actually impressed that Clash Books has committed to publishing these types of books because most of them are very polarizing (the Goodreads for this novel has exactly 22% of 5 star reviews and 22% of 1 star reviews). I will definitely be paying closer attention to their catalog of books.

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Review: Never Flinch by Stephen King

Posted on February 14, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From master storyteller Stephen King comes an extraordinary new novel with intertwining storylines—one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker—featuring the beloved Holly Gibney and a dynamic new cast of characters.

When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion—a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Thrilling, wildly fun, and outrageously engrossing, Never Flinch is one of King’s richest and most propulsive novels.

Review:

The three things that 2025 Stephen King wants to write about are crime stories, politics, and Holly Gibney. Since 2014, the last twelve novels that he has written (not those cowritten with Richard Chizmar or Owen King), eight of them have been crime stories, and six of them have featured Holly Gibney. King has always had a fondness for crime novels, and he has leaned heavily on these thrillers and pulpy private investigator stories in the last decade simply because he loves them. He also loves Holly Gibney. This is the third stand-alone Holly novel since 2018, and including a novella in If It Bleeds, this is the fourth full story with her as the main investigator. She is a side character in the Bill Hodges trilogy and King loves her so much that he might never get tired of writing more stories with Holly (rumor has it that the fifth Holly novel is on the horizon). When King is not writing about Holly, he is thinking about politics. I have noticed through the decades that King loves crime novels, but I did not notice his deep interest and involvement in politics before the 2016 Trump administration. This does not mean that he was not previously involved, that he did not write about his feelings about other administrations or political topics, but I did not really notice his involvement until he and Trump started squaring off in cyberspace, King not being a fan of Trump at all. His writing has always had characters with political ideas and leaning, but it feels like these affiliations are so obvious now that when a person picks up a Stephen King novel, there is an expected amount of politics, good or bad. King’s focus in the last decade or so have been crime, politics, and Holly Gibney, and Never Flinch is the latest Stephen King book to really lean into these topics.

The story starts with a person who is killed in prison after being wrongfully convicted of owning child pornography. Someone decides that innocent people are going to pay for the actions of the jury, the judge, and the lawyers who convicted him. The plan is to kill thirteen innocent people and one guilty person. The killer starts this mission and once they get into the rhythm of killing, they actually feel like it is their calling, a quick addiction they do not know if they can stop. Another person who has a calling is the member of the small cultish Wisconsin church that is following a feminist speaker, Kate McKay, across the United States on her lecture and book tour in a plan to eventually kill her on stage. Holly Gibney is brought into the serial killer case by living in Buckeye City, where the serial killer is murdering at a rapid speed and being friends with the police who is working the case. In the middle of this, she is called by Kate McKay to be her bodyguard against the threats she is receiving. Not only is Holly in a position where she has to protect someone from a fanatic, she is also trying to figure out who the person is. Holly still does very Holly things, like saying “poopy”, wishing she can have a cigarette, hating carrying a gun, and talking about being fully vaccinated against Covid, but besides the irritating quirks, she does have a good sense of putting pieces together in a way that she figures out the puzzles before anyone else.

This is not the best Stephen King novel. He even admits in the afterward that it is not his best. He also admits that he worked hard on it, especially after his wife read the first draft and said, “You can do better.” I do not know how much better this final version is from the first, but there are things that are interesting in a novel that is pretty mediocre in the realm of King novels. One thing is that Never Flinch involves some very fanatical people and much of it is political. Kate McKay lectures about women power and how abortion bans are horrible for American women considering all of the bills are written by men, who have never had an abortion. The person that is stalking McKay plans to kill her because she is pro-choice. They are from an extreme fundamentalist church (a stand-in for churches like Westboro Baptist Church), who do not have anything better to do than to go around the country and protest abortion clinics. The serial killer of the innocent kills with a righteousness because the justice system failed, and people need to pay for the faults of the judicial system. And while all of this extremism is going on around her, Holly deflects conversations that ask her opinion on topics like religion and abortion, even though she is a vehicle for the idea that Covid vaccines and masks are safe and important as a way to protect yourself. The feeling in Never Flinch is that this is a reflection of an America where all of the people are wrong, that there is a middle ground nobody can see anymore because there are too many left or right, black or white feelings. This extreme polarization has gotten to the point where both sides are fighting, verbally and physically. Every one of the characters, regardless of what they are doing or thinking feeling like they are doing the “right thing”, and this how society completely breaks down.

This is not his best novel, but King also does something in this novel that most of his other novels do not do. He does not use any sort of supernatural or paranormal device to explain the action that is happening. He writes this as a straight crime novel, and this might be why the novel feels weaker than some of the others. The characters are limited to what they can actually do. Stephen King has been publishing books for fifty years, and he has earned the right to have his obsessions, write the stories that he likes more than the stories his fans clamor for. He can say and do whatever he wants within his novels. There will be people who will still read every single book he publishes, but some of his fanbase know that there are too many books to read and they are getting tired of the Holly stories. With Never Flinch, it makes sense that some of these fans are getting close to the point where they will just skip any new Holly novel. 

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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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