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.

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Review: I Met Someone by Bruce Wagner

Posted on April 16, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

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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.

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

Posted on April 11, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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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. 

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Review: Superstars by Ann Scott

Posted on April 8, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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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.

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Review: Molka by Monika Kim

Posted on April 3, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

molka (n): the Korean term for spy cameras secretly and illegally installed, often to capture voyeuristic images and videos

Dahye can’t believe her luck when she finds herself in a whirlwind romance with handsome, charismatic Hyukjoon, the heir to a multi-million dollar fortune.

But then a shocking revelation threatens: the couple has been caught on a spycam amid Korea’s growing molka epidemic, and the video is all over the internet. When Hyukjoon flees the country to avoid the intense public scrutiny, Dahye is left to grapple with the ramifications on her own; and the demons from her childhood, long dormant, begin to surface.

Amid the chaos, she catches the attention of Junyoung, a nerdy, introverted IT tech at work. Junyoung harbours a dark secret: he has been spying on the women at work with his own hidden cameras. As Dahye’s life begins to unravel, she unknowingly becomes the sole target of Junyoung’s perverse obsession.

When the facts surrounding the invasion of her privacy come to light, Dahye is faced with the humiliating truth. Her pain and hurt turn to rage as she faces her past. Her desire for vengeance is insatiable, and she will not rest until the men who have wronged her have paid in blood…

A Short documentary about the Molka epidemic:

Review:

Molka is a term for the secret and hidden spy cameras that are put in places throughout South Korea by men to get secret footage of women. They are placed in public bathrooms, in department store changing rooms, in offices, in schools, and in hotel rooms. The problem with molka cameras quickly became an epidemic with over 30,000 cases reported between 2015 and 2018. There have been some huge cases including the Nth Room case, where molka was filmed, encrypted, and sent to chat rooms where for a price, people could watch these videos, and the case of Jung Joon-young, a popular singer who got his start on Superstar K4 and released solo music. He was also picking up women, secretly filming them having sex in hotel rooms and sharing the videos with his friends in a chat group. He only got into real trouble after filming and sharing of a video of him raping a woman in 2019. He served six years in jail, and when he was released, he did not have to wear any sort of monitor or put himself on the sex registry. The biggest fight about these crimes, the rise of molka videos, exploitive crimes, and the violation of women, has been actually the punishment of the criminals. Most of these crimes see very little jail time, very small fines, and very little repercussion. 

This is the backdrop of Molka by Monkia Kim, a horror novel that is fueled by the anger and the injustice of this whole crimewave. The main character Dahye works in an office building, is dating a charismatic, rich businessman named Haukjoon, and is doing her best to get over the death of her sister Eunhye. She is also being watched along with the rest of the office by the IT employee Junyoung, a loser who lives with his mother and has a very low opinion of women, who starts obsessing over Dahye after watching videos of her recorded by his spy cams in the women’s office bathroom. When Haukjoon gets a terrible call in the middle of the night and disappears on Dahye, saying that he is heading to the United States for business, Dahye knows that something worse is going on. The truth is that all of the men in this novel are scum, men who live with no accountability for their actions, like Haukjoon getting out of trouble by being wealthy and Junyoung getting out of trouble for setting up spy cameras because “boys will be boys”. The complete disregard for the safety, privacy, and feelings of the women by every man in Molka, including people in places of authority (the bosses at the office and the police), is palpable, and in the end, when Dahye takes matters into her own hands, we cannot stop rooting for her. 

This is revenge of the highest order, one that compares with stories like I Spit on Your Grave. The criminals get what they deserve, and the truth is that by the time Dahye starts taking drastic measures to hold these men accountable for their actions, she not only represents herself and her story but the story of all of the women who have been abused terrible men who have not received a proper punishment. She becomes more than a character in her story. She becomes a representative for an entire system that let down women and protected disgusting men. 

Molka is Monika Kim’s follow up to The Eyes are the Best Part, and it is an uncomfortable story. I like this more than Kim’s debut because it feels more real, that it want to really spotlight a problem in South Korean culture, and it feels like this is not just the story of Dahye, but the anger of an entire population of women. There is some horror, some difficult scenes, and some paranormal moments, but as a whole this is about the true horror of men who do whatever they want and get away with it.

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

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Review: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Posted on April 1, 2026 by ghostvillehero

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Synopsis:

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet was viewed over 10 million times. 

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse. 

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.  It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,’ a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11. 

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.

Review:

Omar El Akkad’s first book of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is one of those books with many huge ideas packed into a small book. At less than two hundred pages, El Akkad breaks down the reasons why the political parties of the Western governments are letting down the world by the way that they act toward global tragedy. He uses the war in Gaza that started in October 2023 as a backdrop to every point in his argument. The way he explains this is that Western Liberals are just as guilty in their response (or lack of response) as the conservative party. In fact his his eyes, they may be worse. The Liberal party issues statements that they care about the Palestinian people but then sign along with the bills to fund the opposite side while they watch all of the Palestinian children die, get crippled, or starve. El Akkad also spends time discussing why fear is one of the driving factors in attitudes toward the Middle East, particularly Muslim countries, how by turning our backs to one atrocity, it makes it easier to turn our backs on all future atrocities because it turns into conditioning, and how both parties in the United States needs to overhaul the way they respond to conflicts and construct their foreign and domestic policies. 

This book should anger any reader in the United States that has any type of political leaning, Omar El Akkad pulls back the curtain and lays out the ugliness behind both parties and how our complacency has gotten us to this point. When a book brings up a real emotional response, particularly a nonfiction book that brings up anger by anyone who reads it, it is wise to take a minute and try to figure out this response is happening. Personally I am a liberal leaning person, but I am also aware that the things Omar El Akkad describes are true. For years I have said that the difference between Republicans and Democrats in America is that Republicans will tell you to your face that they don’t like you. On the other hand, the Democrats will tell you to your face that they have your best interests in mind, but then turn around and prove that to be a lie. Omar El Akkad gives examples of this kind of behavior, proof that this idea is true, and that many Western liberals see something terrible happening across the globe and become immune to it, and this callousness and indifference is worse than being hateful and rooting for one particular side. 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and I am kind of shocked considering this is not a book that really paints a good picture of America’s place in the world. It does not say that the United States is a lost cause, but it does say that at the rate he West is going, the government will grow weaker and weaker. There are very interesting arguments and points that are made throughout the book, and it is one of the books that demands to be reread because I have barely scratched the surface of the content in this review. There are many good topics presented in a voice that is upset and frustrated with response to the Middle East by the West, particularly by the country that boasts to being the most powerful and best country in the world. The government of the United States has major, glaring flaws, and by not discussing and fixing these flaws, the government will eventually crunble. 

“The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.” p. 59

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Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on March 30, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it now

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Synopsis:

The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own.

Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld.

Review:

Gods of Jade and Shadow is the story of the Lords of Xibalba, the twin brothers Hun-Kame and Vucub-Kame. Hun-Kume is killed in a conspiracy by Vucub-Kame and stuffed into a wooden chest until a curious girl, Casiopea, opens it. Casiopea is living with her grandfather, who’s house it is and who’s bedroom the chest is located, her mother, her aunts, and her cousins on a large estate. Her cousin Martin is a few years older than her and is awful to her, ordering her around, making her run errands for him, and calling her names, She feels like nobody likes her, and she does nothing but chores, gets yelled at, and tries to stay out of trouble. The whole time, Hun-Kume is in the foot locker at the end of her grandfather’s bed, a decapitated skeleton waiting for fifty years. Casiopea reanimates him and he immediately wants revenge against his brother Vucum-Kame for killing him and for taking his eye, ear, finger, jade necklace, and his kingdom. He tells Casiopea that he will give her anything she wants to help him get his items back and to get revenge. This takes them both through the backdrop of Mexico in the 1920s, and as the story moves on, it is more and more obvious that the Gods in this novel are doing nothing but using the mortals as pawns to fight with each other. Gods do not care about the welfare of humans whatsoever. 

I have read a few of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels, and I like her writing and storytelling. Gods of Jade and Shadow is the weakest of the novels that I have read by her. Her stories are well constructed, and the stories that she writes are generally interesting, but there id something about this novel that just did not click with me. I found myself spending most of my time rereading pages because I was much more distracted that normal, counting pages and having my mind wander off while reading. This happens sometimes when I am reading for hours, but in the case of Gods of Jade and Shadow, it happened within minutes. It is not that the novel is boring, the adventure of going around trying to get pieces of a Mayan God should be interesting, but I do not feel like I was ever connected enough to the story to be interested in what happens next. This was a chore to finally get through, but there is also nothing really sticks out as being horrible. The novel just did not have any characters, settings, or plot I could relate to. The really developed characters are Casiopea, a young girl who is enjoying her time away from being treated like a fairy stepsister, mistreated by her family, wanting to fall in love with Hun-Kume, hoping he loves her because he makes her feel like she is better than someone destined to do chores and clean the rest of her life, and her cousin Martin who is just a hateful prick. The rest of the characters in the novel, even with Hun-Kume at Casiopea’s side most of the time, do not feel developed enough for me to find myself interested in anything that they do. 


I do recommend Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels, and this might be one that someone else will find more connection with, but if I were to recommend one of her books, I would go with a different choice. I have five more of her novels on my shelf to read, and I hope to get into some more of them before the end of the year. As for now, Gods of Jade and Shadow is my least favorite of her novels. 

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Review: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on March 27, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synospsis:

The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she’s suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister’s wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she’s not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life – she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu’s life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

Review:

If you are someone who enjoys Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction and fantasy novels, you will be disappointed in her latest novel Death of the Author, because it has very few sci-fi/fantasy elements. If you are a person who wants a literary novel that involves a Nigerian-American woman in a wheelchair, writing a science fiction novel about robots in a post-human Africa, only to shoot to fame and be torn down just as quickly, Death of the Author is exactly the novel you want to read. The story of Zelu, a Nigerian paraplegic adjunct professor who loses her job, fights with her family, gets too drunk at a wedding, and has an idea for a science fiction novel (a genre she does not even like), unravels as she gathers fame. Her novel is made into a movie, and Zelu gets opportunities that she would not have gotten if she was not a famous artist. Even still, she needs to navigate her family that does not always believe in what she is doing, thinking that she is making mistakes with her choices, and eventually stop contacting her but gets mad when she is not contacting them. Zelu is a strong-willed character, a little angry, a little bitter. All she wants is her own independence, and she feels as if she is underestimated due the fact that she was in a wheelchair most of her life. When she meets a company that helps fit her with prosthetic, robot legs (another decision she receives backlash for from her family and the internet.) While you are rooting for Zelu because it feels as if she is being discredited and underestimated by everyone around her, you also learn they are trying to help her make decisions with her own best interests in mind, choices not made out of spite.

This paradox of Death of the Author is that every choice Zelu makes has a downside, that is pointed out to her. Every event in her life seems to have a disagreement. She gets robot prosthetic legs so that she can walk through life, works very hard to gather the strength and determination to live her life as a person who can walk, and this hard work is called out as someone who is ashamed of her disability, who is trying to be someone she is not. They make a movie version of her novel, Rusted Robots, and they change the setting from Nigeria to America, change the names of the main characters to more American names, and Zelu is angry about it. Her anger is thrown in her face because she does not consider these changes to the story will give something new that the BIPOC population in American can relate to, making Rusted Robot a story for more than one culture, without changing the fact that the novel is based in Nigeria. The fame that she finds makes her angry because it makes her a target, where everything she does and every reaction she has is scrutinized. The overall perceptions of her novel and her success added to her personal actions and her reactions to the pressure she receives from social media, her publisher, her family, and those random fans she sees on the street or in line at the airport puts so much pressure on her that it is only a matter of time before a choice she makes will changes her life once again.

Nnedi Okorafor says in interviews that this is the novel that she has been trying to write for years, that it is the most personal novel she has written. There are enough parallels between her and Zelu that it is easy to assume a great deal of Death of the Author is autobiographical. Zelu is in a wheelchair due to an accident. Okorafor spent her teen years paralyzed after complications of a spinal surgery. Both have large Nigerian-American families, both spent much of their childhood traveling to Nigeria. Both find success writing science-fiction stories set in Nigeria, and both have stress and anxiety that they both have to learn how to control. Okorafor definitely uses Zelu as a reflection of herself and as a way to try to express how she feels about the pressures that have been put on her by her family, her fans, and social media. Some of these pressures have boiled over into Okorafor’s internet life, including a controversy about posting pictures of owls on Threads and when someone asked for spoiler warnings before pictures of owls because they are a dark omen in some cultures, she says, “No.”. She also has had tense words with fans through the years. These incidents could have just as easily been experienced by Zelu and her internet experiences. The pressure on famous people on the internet is relentless, and fandom is something that all successful writers have to live with. Fans also seem to want to break down the wall between fan and artist, and there are moments when fans do forget that their favorite artist is a real human. I am glad that Okorafor has found a way to not only to express her frustrations and her desires but also to give us a way to help us understand our frustrations and desires as well. Death of the Author might not be the novel that we expected from Nnedi Okorafor but is the novel that we need.

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Review: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Posted on March 23, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

  • “Merge the house and the woman—watch the woman experience her own body as a haunted house, a place of sudden, inexplicable terrors—and you are reading the blazingly talented Carmen Maria Machado.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Review:

Carmen Maria Machado released the memoir In the Dream House in 2019 about her abusive same sex partner, and the way that the memoir is presented makes the story not only an important document about the hidden abuse in same sex relationships, but also the true feelings behind relationships that bind us to abusive people. She tells the story in short chapters that uses metaphors, research, and anecdotes to construct the story of her navigating her relationship with a woman she calls Dream House. Dream House is also a metaphor for the true feelings that blossom at the beginning of every relationship. When we start to get feelings for someone else, we start to see ourselves together in a house, growing up and growing old. We dream about this house, and this is also a early relationship comfort. A house is supposed to be where you go to rest and recharge, a place that you find safety and feel peace. Some of us can share this home with a person, but some of us bring the wrong person into this space. Sometimes we see this person take over our home, and we lose all of the benefits. Machado’s relationship with her Dream House slowly erodes to the point where she does not see the relationship as one of comfort and safety but one of precarious uncertainty and anxiety. 

“Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure, everyone else should be afraid. Pg. 76

Everyone else should be afraid because in the end because the control that Dream House gets over Machado is enough to make her question herself, makes her drive back and forth between Iowa and Indiana, spend hours on the phone when they are apart convincing her she is not cheating, crying behind closed doors, and ignoring the ugliness and abuse that she receives from her partner, who post-abuse is clearheaded, sweet, and doesn’t understand what she even did to make Machado upset in the first place. There are stories that are told In the Dream House that will make any person cringe, yell, and want Machado to finally stop the relationship, but it takes much more than our will as a reader to get her to do this. 

The story of the relationship is engrossing but so is Carmen Maria Machado and her writing. We do see her navigating this horrible situation, but we also get to see the way that her mind works. She does not write a straight-forward memoir because she cannot look at the situation in a straightforward way. She struggles with the big picture so she writes a story that when pieces together forms the big picture. Everything that we do is connected, everything that we have done and seen in the past informs our next step, our feelings, and whether or not we will give a person our time and energy. She has a way of showing us different elements of the story that do not seem connected but are completely connected, like the story of her crush on an associate pastor at her church at sixteen, like how her father told her that on test questions, if you do not know the answer, you write all of the things that you do know so that you might get half of the credit (which is the basis of the structure of this memoir), like the dismissive way the world views abuses in lesbian relationships, one of the things that she never knew existed until she was in one. The things that Machado creates to tell the story makes the memoir more of a kaleidoscope, giving us the picture the best it can instead of being a complete narrative where she has filled all of the blanks. This make In the Dream House not only a memoir that feels more of a literary piece, but a story that is interesting in more than one aspect, that makes the reader think about domestic abuse and rewires our brains on how to look at relationships in general.

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Review: Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Posted on March 18, 2026 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

Review:

Part of “Canto XVII” of Paradiso was written by Dante Alighieri during his exile from Florence. He is part of a group that Pope Boniface VIII did not like, so suddenly Dante sees himself as a man whose home, family, and everything that he has known is taken from him. Exile is uncomfortable, and a person is forced to spend time with people he would not spend time with. He writes in “Canto XVII”:

“You’ll leave behind everything dearest to you

And that will be the first arrow

That the bow of exile lets fly.

You’ll have to learn how the bread of others

Tastes like salt, and what a stony road it is

To go up and down other people’s stairs.

And what will most weigh down your shoulders

Will be the evil and asinine company

With which you’ll fall into this sinkhole.”

~Paradiso Canto XViI, lines 55-63 trans. by Mary Jo Bang

This is basis of Paradiso 17, the new novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi. The story starts with Sufien at a young age, fleeing war with his mother and siblings while his father fights. He never sees his childhood home again, the only image being of a house with a blue door. Sufien spends the rest of his life in exile, never going back to his childhood country, moving all over the world, trying to find a place where he can relax, make money, be a good husband and good father, and find a place that just does not always feel uncomfortable. He travels from Palestine, to Kuwait, to Italy, to New York, to Arizona. This movement is because he does not feel settled like these places are not home but they offer a new opportunity. Arizona and the desert is the closest he can get, where he at least has some reminders of what he is searching for and trying to remember. His life is not perfect. He is not a perfect husband, father, or friend, and there are moments when he acts out of desperation, with the underlying issue being that he never finds a place that feels like his home. The novel begins at the end, when he is dying, slipping away from this life into the afterlife, with the line between the two growing thinner and thinner, where he might be finally finding his peace.

The writing is beautiful and powerful. Hannah Lillith Assadi really pulls emotion out of the scenes, whether it be longing, isolation, sadness, or a sense of loss for a place. She uses language as a tool to make us feel out of place too, many phrases and words that we can understand throught context clues, but do not know unless we spend the time to look them up. She makes us feel like we are also someone in someone else’s home, a guest that does not know how long we should stay. The writing really pulls the reader in so that they can feel some of the same feelings as Sufien and have more empathy to his situation, even when Sufien is not always the most sympathetic character. The narrative also swirls between past, present, and future, and it can be compared to Paradiso by Dante, because this is how the entire Divine Comedy is written. 

Assadi chooses Paradiso as an inspiration, and we must remember that this is not the section of The Divine Comedy where Dante goes to Purgatory and Hell but where Dante is seeing Heaven. And this is a remind of how Paradiso 17 needs to feels. No matter what, this is not just story about the Purgatory or Hell of being in exile, but it is also a reminder that at the end of the day, through all of the trials and discomforts, Paradise waits. For Sufien, this paradise has always been just beyond his vision, the slightest memories of the house on the hill, of the blue door on the house, of looking at the stars in the sky when he is a small child and running from the war with his mother and siblings. Even though he leaves all of this behind as he grows older and never gets to see it again from the same part of the world, he never forgets, and his feelings about this place are never lost. He just needs to find his way back, and the only option is through paradise. Paradiso 17 is a powerful and beautiful novel that will most likely not be read as much as it should.

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

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