Review: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

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

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

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

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

Review:

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews, book review, nonfiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller

Posted on May 20, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

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

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

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

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

Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in book review, horror book reviews, literary book review | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: House of Margins by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Posted on May 12, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy Here:

Amazon Bookshop

Synopsis:

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

Anaya Sebeya is missing.

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

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

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

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

Review:

This could very possibly be my Book of the Year.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in book review, historical fiction, horror book reviews, literary book review, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

Posted on May 9, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The outrageous and immortal, gender-bending and polymorphously perverse, over-the-top, and utterly on-target comic masterpiece from the bestselling author of Burr , Lincoln , and the National Book Award-winning United States .

With a new introduction by Camille Paglia

“I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.”

So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner’s Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees.

Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent (“Has literary decency fallen so low?” asked Time), Myra Breckinridge‘s moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.

Review:

This is the first book I have read by Gore Vidal, but I have known who he is for a long time. I know that he was a book reviewer, essayist, novelist, and social commentator who came across as very opinionated, arrogant, prickly, and someone who did not suffer fools. He is part of the group of white American male writers who reviewed one another’s books and were hypercritical of one another. Between John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving, there is a steady stream of barbs and banter going back and forth through published essays, reviews, interviews, and straight to the other author’s face. I knew that Gore Vidal is in this group of cranky writers slinging insults at one another, but I did not know how involved until I was doing research about these literary feuds for a story I was writing. I wanted a character in my story to have a feud with Norman Mailer. I was well aware that Mailer had some big fights with Tom Wolfe, calling him a silly for wearing a white suit all of the time in New York and saying in his review of Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full that reading it was like having sex with a 300 pound woman: “Once she gets on top, it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” This is not a nice thing to say about someone else’s work (or women for that matter), but this was the type of stuff from Norman Mailer that I was looking into when I learned that Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett show in 1971, leading to a lifelong feud. I also started looking more into Vidal again when I read his praise of the work of Carson McCullers. Considering all I knew up until this point was his political stuff and his feuds with Mailer, I decided to pick up one of his early novels Myra Breckinridge, out of print for decades but finally reissued in 2019. After reading a few more biographical things about Vidal, a few essays about Myra Breckinridge, and from all of his very public feuds and fights with other people, it is not a stretch for anyone to feel like the character Myra is very close to the personality of Gore Vidal himself.

This is not a very high compliment. Myra Breckinridge goes to Hollywood to fleece the uncle of her dead husband, Myron, out of some inheritance. Myron’s uncle is the retired western movie star, Buck Loner, who has a empathy and posture school where many big screen hopefuls are working on their skills. When Myra comes into town, she demands her inheritance and half of the school as well, and she will teach there until she gets it. Buck instantly does not like her, knows that she is a fraud, and he has every right to be skeptical. Not only is Myra trying to get money, and is rude to the students who she is trying to teach, making them upset and quit, she is also a predator. She is looking for a person, particularly a young male, to sexually abuse. She sets her sights on Rusty, a young and naive man who is dating another student, Mary-Anne, who is even younger and even more naive. Myra wants to destroy them both, and her schemes work in ways that are equally effective and disgusting. Her acts only done to make Myra feel like she is more powerful than anyone else in the novel. 

Myra Breckinridge was initially published in 1968, and there are some of the themes, some of the language, and some of the plot that would be edited out if this novel were written by today’s standards. There are some homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semetic, and misogynistic scenes and feelings by the characters. Even the language around Myra herself is a little off-putting, but this is nothing compared to the climax of the novel, where Myra finally gets her way with Rusty, showing her power in a 24 page, highly detailed assault, ruing him the exact way that she wants. The sad thing is that Vidal’s portrayal of Myra and predators in general is too accurate to dismiss, that there are threads that connect the artists with the art. The only person Myra really befriends is Letita Van Allen, a Hollywood agent who is looking for a new stud to abuse. Predators generally recognize each other and compare notes, and this is what these two women do, which even involves Myra and Letita working together in a plot to break up the relationship between Rusty and Mary-Anne for good. At the end of the day, both women are on the same team. 

Through its problematic characters, it also illuminates a very problematic author. Gore Vidal was a notable sex addict, who was said to have had over a thousand sexual encounters by the time he was twenty-five. He spent his whole life having quick encounters with anonymous men, some of them paid, throughout his whole life, and he saw sex as something that you did outside of a relationship because it was more about power than pleasure. With the anonymous nature of most of his encounters, it shows that he had no interest in any sort of emotional attachment to his sex partners. This really is the same attitude as Myra Breckinridge, and she shares many of his other traits. She is sneaky, spiteful, and an ugly person, and I feel like Vidal was not a fun person to be around. Even still there is something compelling about him and about his writing. He is a masterful writer, sometimes incredibly funny, but always incredibly smart. He seems to be someone who can reference almost anything at any time. His distaste for hippies, drugs, and television are obvious, but so is his love for film, politics, and literature. Having read Myra Breckinridge, I should be put off by Gore Vidal, but there is something more intriguing about him, like his naked opinions about his sexual behaviors and feelings about relationships are enough to want to know more about him. However, it also feels like Norman Mailer might have been right to punch him in the face. He was most likely insufferable to be around for too long of a period of time.  

Posted in book review, literary book review, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Posted on May 6, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

Review:

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a story that Murakami has been working on for decades. It started as a novella that he published early in his career but would not reprint because he was not happy with it. Instead he reworked the novella into the first part of this novel. He then decided to write two more parts to make it a whole novel with the three parts intersecting. 

The story starts with young lovers, fifteen and sixteen, who meet and create a fantasy world where a city is surrounded by walls and they live in peace there. When the girl disappears, the boy learns that she has went to this city, so he follows her, to work in a library with no books but to read some of the old dreams on the library shelves. The first section has unicorns, Gatekeepers, and when he enters the city, a disconnection from his shadow. The first part is surreal, fantastical, and almost like reading from someone’s dream journal. The second part is the same main character, decades later, getting a job at a library in a small mountain town, where the former library founder hires him as his successor. At the library, he meets a teenager who does not talk except to ask for your birthday so that he can tell you the day of the week you were born and read mass quantities of books. When the librarian and the teenager eventually interact, their main topic is the city, and the teenager decides he has to go. The third part is the mixture of these two parts, and in the end, the story is weird, surreal, and a little bit like a long dream.

I struggled with the first part of this novel, simply because I do not find reading about dreams to be very interesting. With the fantasy of unicorns and walls that move and shadows that talk to their previous owners, it feels more like a dream than a story, and I knew it was not very likely to have a satisfying conclusion. When I started the second part, the tone shifted and it feels more real. The second part really sucked me because it spends a great deal of the time in the present, with the guy from part one, now in his forties, and living his life in the Murakami way, with tea, cats, music, and the other quiet things that run through all of his novels. Of course this slowly changes, becomes more and more weird, and by the time the third section comes, we are almost prepared for the return to the city. I like reading Murakami’s novels because they have a quiet weirdness, like the amount of time spent in front of a fire reading and talking is just as prevalent as time spent in a library reading the dusty dreams that are pulled down from a shelf. Of course every book starts as a dream, with the germ of an idea, but in the City, this these library dreams are the subconsciousness of the entire city.  


I read an article in a recent issue of Runner’s World with Harry Styles and Haruki Murakami in conversation. Styles says that one of Murakami’s philosophies has really stuck with him about living your life quietly and disciplined so that your art can use the pinned up chaos that is controlled with life. Murakami has been doing this for years, living a life of running, music, and cats, but also consistently writing some of the strangest and most interesting stories. This novel feels like the quietness of his real life and the wildness of his writing are starting to be less and less separated because The City and Its Uncertain Walls really feels like both. The story is soft, disciplined and the characters are even a little boring, but there are also parts that feel like the world is spinning out of control. Fortunately Murakami has the strength to balance this, and the story stays right where he wants it to be. Haruki Murakami is a legendary writer, and though I would suggest some of his other novels before this one, there is no doubt that The City and Its Uncertain Walls should be on your reading list.

Posted in book review, fiction, literary book review, Reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: You Like it Darker by Stephen King

Posted on April 30, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

Review:

Love him or hate him, Stephen King is a steady writer who has published a book or two a year well into his seventies. Most of the time you also know what to expect from the next King release. Recently he has focused more novels on Private Investigator Holly Gibney and has been swaying more toward mysteries and thrillers because this what he likes to write and read. These novels are not always that great. In his twelfth short story collection, You Like it Darker, King spends less time thinking about mysteries and more time writing good horror and suspense stories. A few of these stories are a standard ten page short story, but there is also a longer novella, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream”, and one of the best horror stories I have read from him in quite a while, “Rattlesnakes.” 

“Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is actually the one story that feels closest to his Gibney stories, without the Holly as an annoying lead character. Danny Coughlin is a school janitor that has a dream about a dead girl being buried behind an abandoned gas station. When he finds the location, the girl is there, so he does what he expects to be the right thing; he calls the police. The police make him the prime suspect because he has a “dream” when he had never had one before. This means the police are convinced he did it, even though there is no evidence. This is the longest piece in the book, about 160 pages, but there is also no time wasted. The story moves briskly and the tension is high throughout. I was fully invested in the story when I started to also think that this is good because he spends more time with the victim, Danny Coughlin, and not with “good cops” trying to solve the case. The longer the story goes, the more likely it is that the police will be able to find Danny guilty, over a dream. I also like that besides a dream, there is not much supernatural that happens, that the reason why the police think he did it is because the supernatural is not a good defense, and it is much easier to believe facts, even when you cannot find them.

“Rattlesnakes” is the story of Vic Trenton, the father in the novel Cujo, who is much older now, retired, spending some time in his friend’s house in Florida. Not only do we get an update on the family in Cujo and how the events destroyed everyone’s life, we also get a new horror that Vic has to deal with. When he goes to Florida, there is a woman in the neighborhood where Trenton is staying, Ms. Bell, who pushes an empty double stroller around the area, a stroller from when she had twin boys before they died to rattlesnake bites. The two adults have both experienced loss of boys and this quickly bonds them together before the true horrors start to reveal themselves. This is a great story, and one of the creepiest King stories I have read in a long time. Like “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” “Rattlesnakes” is a longer story that kept me engaged and interested the entire time.

Many of the other stories in this collection are pretty good, but there are also changes in the characters that make them interesting. Most of the main characters are older, adults in their seventies like King and not only dealing with the situation in front of them but also with the existential dread of failing health and eventual death of those around them and themselves. I generally like horror stories that involved the older generation because the problems come with more challenges than when a teenager is fighting a threat. I have been reading through The Stand this month as well, a novel written when King was in his late 20s and the characters are younger, angrier, and doing things that King characters could not do now. The tonal differences are very interesting, and it shows that King is a much different writer now than he was then, and his characters are more cautious and thoughtful as well. 

Of course, King still has his bad habits, and if these habits annoy you, they will continue to annoy you. He spends a great deal of time on nostalgia. He sometimes writes things that are inappropriate about younger characters. He likes to sprinkle his own politics into the stories (nothing as bad as the Holly stories though), but as a whole, many of these stories in the collection are too short to spend much time on these things. Most of the characters are old men or the grown children of old men, and with a few exceptions, these stories are very strong and some of the best stories I have read by him in years. If I could choose between King writing short story and novella collections or novels, I would pick collections because they hide King’s writing flaws and habits much better than his novels.

Posted in book review, fiction, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo

Posted on April 24, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Simón López Trujillo’s “mind-blowing” (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance . . .

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro’s kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn’t ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that’s always one step ahead of us.

Review:

Scientists have learned that fungi communicates with one another through electrical pulses that travel underground through the Mycorrhizal network. They have learned there are at least fifty specific patterns they consider to be words and phrases that fungi use to talk to the entire network. Some of this communication is about placement of resources and to relay environmental dangers and stresses. The discovery of all of this is still unfolding, but the findings so far is that all of the fungi in the forest is communicating in a way that turns all fungi into one single minded organism, connected to through the Earth and showing the way for survival.

I think about this when I read Pedro the Vast, the new eco-disaster fiction novella by Chilean author Simón López Trujillo. The story is about a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro who starts coughing. He ends up with a fungal disease that has been killing his coworkers. He does get sick, sick enough to be in the hospital while his two children, Cata and Patricio, fend for themselves the best they can. Pedro finally wakes up, the only person with this infection who has lived, but he is definitely not the same. He starts saying all kind of things that do not make sense to anyone except to a cult who thinks Pedro is connected to the network of the universe, through the mycorrhizal network. There are many other threads the show up, like corporate greed, like globalization destroying local culture by connect it to the network, like knowing that scientific research relies on corporate funding and livelihood, like how people who die in work accidents and hazards have to fight to become recognized as a person who was once part of the huge network.

The feeling of this book, the true feeling that Simón López Trujillo shows us is that we also have a network that connects us all, a communication that we use that is not overt and obvious but is happening. When someone is pulled out of that network, they are lost (the children without their father) or excommunicated (like those families trying to get settlements and corporate responsibility for their loved one’s death). The person stuck in the middle of this, showing this community that there is more connection between everyone and everything is Pedro, or at least a form of Pedro being used by the fungi as a conduit for their message. There are scenes in this book that on the surface seem to be out of place or irrelevant, but what Pedro is saying is that everything is relevant, that the entire world is a vast network, but we don’t treat it this way. Simón López Trujillo uses this idea in everything that happens in Pedro the Vast. Even with the children getting a PS5 and playing a soccer game. They play this game over a network that connects them with other players around the world playing at the same time. They might not always be online, but there is still communication that happens between people playing a video game, connecting everyone to one big network.


Pedro the Vast is a slim, densely written, poetic novel. There are moments when it feels like this is just a great deal of depth into something that is senseless, but at the core, the idea of the vastness of the world and how everything is connected in more ways that we think comes across loud and clear. I did not know how much I would liked the book while I was reading it, but considering the story has made me ask questions and think about it for a week since I finished it lets me know it would be wrong if I said this was not an impactful and impressive piece of social commentary through storytelling…and fungi.

Posted in book review, fiction, literary book review, Reviews, science fiction review | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: I Met Someone by Bruce Wagner

Posted on April 16, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

An emotional thriller by novelist Bruce Wagner, I Met Someone is the story of a fictional Hollywood marriage on the precipice of disaster—and an enthralling meditation on the world in which we live.

Bruce Wagner’s I Met Someone is the story of Oscar award-winning actress Dusty Wilding, her wife Allegra, a long-lost daughter, and the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamor of their lavish, carefully calibrated, celebrity life. After Allegra suffers a miscarriage, Dusty embarks on a search for the daughter she lost at age sixteen and uncovers the answer to a question that has haunted for decades. With riveting suspense, Wagner moves between the perspectives of his characters, revealing their individual trauma and the uncanny connections to each other’s past lives. I Met Someone sends the reader down a rabbit hole of the human psyche, with Wagner’s remarkable insights into our collective obsession with great wealth and fame, and surprises with unimaginable plot turns and unexpected fate. Alternately tender, shocking, and poetic, I Met Someone is Wagner’s most captivating and affecting novel yet.

Review:

If you have watched David Cronenberg’s 2014 film, Map of the Stars, you have been shown a good example of Bruce Wagner’s writing. He tells Hollywood stories in short non-linear scenes weaving several different characters and stories happening at the same time that will eventually overlap and affect one another. The stories sometimes have characters doing disgusting, perverted, and illegal activities, but a majority of the characters are actors, producers, and fringe movie and TV staff trying to either change their course or find real meaning in their lives. I have not read every Bruce Wagner novel, but the structure and the character types seem to be consistent. In I Met Someone, Wagner writes a novel that he considers a companion piece to his script for Map of the Stars. The main story is about Dusty Wilding, an older actress with a storied career. She is married to Allegra, and after they have a failed in vitro fertilization pregnancy, Allegra struggles with depression and Dusty starts to think about finding the child she gave up when she was sixteen. While this is happening, Dusty and Allegra’s movie producer friend and sperm surrogate, Jeremy, is in love with a young kid, Tristan, and both of them have their secrets, including Tristian spending most of his life online being hacking information, doxing and trolling people. While Dusty is trying to figure out how to find her lost daughter, Jeremy is thinking about finding a new surrogate for his child because he really wants a child now. 

The book unfolds and there are some minor characters that come and go but have more impact than they expect, but this is different for a Bruce Wagner novel in the sense that there is a more narrow focus. With a smaller cast and a simpler story, it is easier to keep track of who is who and what is going on. Sometimes this narrowness causes the story to stall when it gets deep and contemplative. This is a change because many of his characters in previous novels do not have the depth as those in I Met Someone, as if Wagner is more interested in these characters, showing them with more emotion and the struggles with the choices they have to make. This is a Hollywood novel in a sense that the characters are actors, producers, stand-in markers, and those dreaming of their next project, but this more of a human novel, with the real focus being on the humans when the cameras are no longer rolling and they are trying to navigate a life that is just as dramatic as their roles on screen.


I love Hollywood stories. I love the ideas of the private lives of actors, directors, producers, and those on the fringe of our entertainment industry. The feeling that Bruce Wagner’s novels give is that so much of Hollywood is fake, and everyone is looking for something real. The fraud is everywhere. Even if you are not the person in front of the screen, most of the people who work in the industry have a face that they show everyone else in the industry. Many times these people have used this face so long that they lose sense of who they are as a real person. This is why so many people in the entertainment industry are looking for a connection with something spiritual, something outside of their everyday life. They want something to make them feel more than the shell that has been hollowed out by the hours and days and weeks of pretending to be someone else, someone who is written for them, someone they have very little control over. This is why groups like Scientology and NXIVM become so popular with actors and their orbit; they exploit the idea that so many actors are looking for something to help them get back to a “normal feeling.” Actors are susceptible to these groups because not only are the actors seen as someone important to the organization, but the organization does not want them to be an actor, they want them to be a “normal” person who has found a deeper meaning to their existence, that their name is no longer more important than who they actually are. They are susceptible to this treatment, and it only makes sense that many people are an easy target. I Met Someone does delve deep into this some, but this is also an overarching theme in Bruce Wagner’s novels and screenplays. Most people in Hollywood are not only searching for their next project or next big break but they are searching for the person that they lost to get there. This is not my favorite of Wagner’s novels, but this is because I like the chaos of more characters doing wild stuff, but it is a good, contemplative novel about what it means to search for the person that you were before you were famous, trying to fix the problems that you left behind to get there.

Posted in book review, fiction, literary book review, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder

Posted on April 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Sister, Maiden, Monster is a visceral story set in the aftermath of our planet’s disastrous transformation and told through the eyes of three women trying to survive the nightmare, from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lucy A. Snyder.

To survive they must evolve.

A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together.

Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good?

Savannah, a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters.

Mareva, plagued with chronic tumors, is too horrified to acknowledge her divine role in the coming apocalypse, and as her growths multiply, so too does her desperation.

Inspired by her Bram Stoker Award-winning story “Magdala Amygdala,” Lucy A. Snyder delivers a cosmic tale about the planet’s disastrous transformation … and what we become after.

Review:

Sister, Maiden, Monster has a reputation for being a weird book, one of those horror novels that fits into several different subgenres and none of them at the same time. It is cosmic horror. It is zombie horror. It is apocalypse horror. It is body horror. It is sapphic horror. Since it falls into so many different categories, and it is a good, weird novel, Sister, Maiden, Monster is also one of those rare novels that belongs on several different stacks of book recommendations.

The book starts out with Erin coming home to an anniversary dinner, happy with her relationship and her life. During this dinner, with sushi and wine, Erin starts to feel awful, and this is the last normal night of her life. She gets a virus that has several different classifications with different predilections that the sufferer displays. Some want to drink blood, some want to eat brains, but all of the people who have survived the virus are a danger to the rest of society due to their unpredictable nature. Erin has to live alone, be monitored all of the time, and have routine checkups at the hospital for her desires and impulses. Little does anyone know that the person who picks her up from the hospital in her rideshare will the be the person who beats these restrictions and changes Erin’s life for good. While Erin is figuring out her new life as someone with these new, strange, and somewhat dangerous proclivities, Savannah is gaining knowledge and power about the coming apocalypse through meeting people and killing them. When she kills a Catholic monk, she starts to get his guidance and visions of who she is in the coming apocalypse and who she needs to recruit for help. Erin is on that list. Also on the list is Mareva, a random office worker who has a special role in the coming end of the world that she is not going to like it. While the world is burning, Sister, Maiden, Monster focuses on the smaller stories of the people who are initially infected by the worldwide virus and their reluctant role in what is going to be the end of the world. 

Sister, Maiden, Monster is a wild ride. Early in the novel, it is obvious that there is no way to figure out how it is going to end, and trying to predict what will happen next is impossible. The characters are fairly interesting, but there is not much of the human left in them when they are turning into the things that the virus is wanting them to evolve into. Erin’s life starts out much different than it ends, and we do get to understand that while the characters are changing, they are losing their real human characteristics and turning into people completely driven by their desires and their impulses. This is a key factor in why this novel is so unpredictable: we are subject to the impulsiveness of the characters that no longer can make sense of the world how it used to be before they were radically altered by the virus. While going on this journey with these characters, they change physically as much as mentally. This makes it safe to say that the story more than the character development becomes the driving force. This is not a hindrance in the novel because there is enough action and horror that we do not even notice the characters being overshadowed by the plot. In the end Sister, Maiden, Monster lives up to the hype of being a weird and disturbing story that should be recommended in all of the different genre discussions. 

Posted in book review, horror book reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Superstars by Ann Scott

Posted on April 8, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

One of the premier French cult novels of the last thirty years, a tender and combative portrait of Paris’s queer rave scene in the 90s — for fans of Virginie Despentes and Gary Indiana.

Louise is a woman in her early thirties with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and has recently started seeing a much younger woman named Inès.
One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. She struggles to handle the responsibility of professionalizing her lifestyle, one suffused with the omnidirectional drama of the women in her circle, and with her own equivocations about her role in it. They bar-crawl, watch MTV, go to each other’s sets, hook up, and do copious drugs.
Tension builds as Louise finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths: forward in her career in the techno world; backward toward rock’n’roll, Nikki, and the life he represents; toward Alex again; and toward Inès, leading to a dangerous and ultimately devastating affair. Ann Scott portrays the Paris underground in all its beauty, ugliness, and pulpy grandeur, with the caustic voice of a born punk struggling to conform to the standards of a new, hungry world of anticonformists.

Review:

In 2000, Ann Scott released Superstars, a novel about young women in the Paris rave scene, and it became a cult sensation. Twenty-six years later, we get an English translation, and the story feels like a time capsule, a reminder of how the late nineties so far removed that we can look back with nostalgia and horror. The story’s central character is Louise, a DJ and artist trying to figure out how to navigate her way through the dance scene. She is older than the rest of the women she parties and has sex with, in her early thirties compared to everyone else being in their early to mid-20s (except her biggest love interest Ines, who is seventeen). Louise is drifting from party to party, from drug to drug, and from woman to man to woman. Louise is not the most likeable character and her biggest flaw is that she does not see this in the actions and reactions of all of her friends. 

Louise is a pathetic character. Even though she has a record contract and an advance coming from Virgin Records for her debut album, the only reason most of her friends stick around is for her payday, the day her advance gets deposited into her account and she can pay back the money that she borrowed from all of them. Her friendship with the women and her place in the group barely makes it to this point because Louise has not only worked her way through most all of the friends sexually, she has some nights where she can no longer function due to her drugs and bad behavior. Louise is aware that her behavior is making some of her friend group distance themselves from her but she does not find their coldness as something she did. When her advance is deposited, even the money that they are owed is not enough to repair the damages that have been done. 

An unspoken thing about Louise with this group is her age. Since she is older than the rest of the girls, getting into the scene after a long relationship with Nikki, a guy who idolizes the Rolling Stones, and only embraces the rave scene due to her girlfriend Alex. I can see that her friends only accept her to a degree. She is someone to hang out with, but they do not trust her, probably see her as a bit of a poser, and none of them are close to her outside of the bedroom. I feel like there are some conversations about her behind her back, calling her creepy and pathetic. An older person in a young person’s scene is never fully embraced except for the things that she can do for them. Once she is too much of a hassle or is too annoying for them to be around anymore, they cut her off. She does not exactly understand. This might be that she has been in such a drug haze that she cannot recognize the way she is perceived and treated in her friend group. This becomes her downfall.

Superstar does feel like a time capsule, a walk down memory lane. I remember how popular some of the music she mentions was at that time. I did not go to raves or do heroin, but I would have been the same age as most of Louise’s friends at the time this takes place. When the discussion about the popularity of Marilyn Manson, particularly the album Mechanical Animals and the song “Dope Show”, I remember how much we listened to the CD in the car. There are also times when Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin are put on repeat in the background, and there were so many times when a CD would get played over and over while we did other things (not so much drugs as video games and reading books). I love the feeling and the vibes this novel brings, like a musical and cinematic moment in time is dusted off. Superstars also feels like many of the other drug books and movies that were very popular at the time, those stories where the drug use and the partying steal all of the time and creativity from many good artists that never finished their novel or their album. There could have been many more books telling stories equal to Superstars, but they were not written because the scene swallowed them up. Fortunately we get this novel and this perspective. It is a masterful document that very deftly illustrates how being young in the late 90s and early 2000s felt. I found this compelling and a little nostalgic to a time of renting videos for the VHS and smoking cigarettes absolutely everywhere. I am shocked that not only is this the first translation of Superstars, but it is the first of any of Ann Scott’s books that has been translated into English. I hope we get to read more of her work in English.

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

Posted in book review, fiction, literary book review, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment