Review: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Posted on October 29, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Review:

The movie adaptation of The Woman in Cabin 10 was just released on Netflix, and I decided that since I had the hardback on my shelf for almost nine years, I should finally read it. I am glad that I delved into the novel before I watched the film because there are so many nuances to the story that are completely lost in the adaptation that are integral to the success of Ruth Ware’s story.

The novel starts with Lo Blacklock, a travel journalist who is trying to make a name for herself at a magazine, getting an invitation to go on the inaugural cruise of the Aurora, a private ship that is owned by Richard Bullmer’s company. After she gets settled into her cabin and has too many drinks the first night of the cruise, she is woken by a fight and a splash of someone going overboard, someone from cabin 10. When she causes an alarm that someone is in the water, she is informed that Cabin 10 has been empty. The rest of the novel perfectly unfolds in the tight quarters of a ship at sea, where someone has to know what happened and someone on the boat has to be the killer. Of course the way that the other passengers and staff treat her, like she is delusional due to her her anxiety and stress or she was just drunk and hearing things, makes for a much more intense experience than the film because they use gaslighting and coverup to try to get Lo Blacklock to stop asking questions. 

For a novel that is not necessarily something that I would normally read, I enjoyed the isolated setting of it. The ship is all alone on the sea. There is no communication between the passengers and anyone off of the boat, and this isolation intensities the danger. The claustrophobic feeling reminds me of the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, where a woman vanishes on a speeding train and everyone tries to convince the passengers that the lady never existed. Ruth Ware takes the feeling that Lo cannot trust anyone on the ship except for what she knows, even when people are assuring her that her memories are wrong, and ratchets up the mystery and the danger until Lo is in just as much danger as the woman she heard splash into the water. 

The film falls short of the novel, like most movies do, because it cuts out some of the major tension that the novel has, particularly how her past mental health was used against her to gaslight her into making her doubt herself, and how there are people at home, off of the boat, particularly a boyfriend, that are looking for her when she is missing after the ship is docked at their destination. The novel makes the reader feel like Blacklock is in more danger than in the movie, and the final act is far more interesting and well structured than the ending of the movie. I definitely would read the novel again before I watched the movie again.

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Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood

Posted on October 26, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Catch-22 on speed and set in the Middle East, Vulture is a fast-paced, brilliant satire of the war news industry and its moral blind spots.

An ambitious young journalist, Sara is sent to cover a war from the Beach Hotel in Gaza. The four-star hotel is a global media hub, promising safety and generator-powered internet, with hotel staff catering tirelessly to the needs of the world’s media, even as their homes and families are under threat. 

Sara is determined to launch herself as a star correspondent. So, when her fixer Nasser refuses to set up the dangerous story she thinks will win her a front page, she turns instead to Fadi, the youngest member of a powerful militant family. Driven by demons and disappointments, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself in this war, even if it means bringing disaster upon those around her. 

Greenwood’s debut novel brings readers into the heart of the maelstrom, and with audacity and humor depicts the media’s complicity in the ongoing tragedy. 

Review:

Vulture is marketed as “A Darkly Funny, Heart-wrenching satire”, and this is an important thing to remember when reading about Sara’s journey through the Middle East. Sara is an ambitious journalist trying to get out of the large shadow her father casts. She is staying at a journalist saturated hotel in Gaza, when she sees all of the well established journalists every morning at breakfast getting ready to write their great stories, she feels that pressure to become a more important name in the room. This ambition leads her to be careless, demanding, impulsive, and to forget that there are actual humans involved on the other side of the stories she is trying to write. As a reader, it is difficult to like Sara from the beginning, not because of the way that she treats other people, but the way that she views them as humans, as if they are just props that will help her to succeed. We can see that Sara is one of those people that will use anyone to gain an advantage and if she is successful, she will immediately forget anyone who helped. 

Vulture is a perfectly fitting title. We see vultures as scavengers, ones who eat off of carcasses of animals, but also ones who will kill the animals who are wounded and sick. In the case of Vulture, the entire hotel of journalists is finding nourishment on the bombings and killings of the citizens around them. They are rushing to these events, picking the bones of the victims, asking questions of the survivors that feel intrusive and callous in a moment where a person has lost everything, and rushing back to their computers and Wi-Fi to report these stories back as fast as possible to the world. The satisfaction of getting their articles, meeting their deadlines, and possibly winning an award at the end of the year is the sort of nourishment that the journalists find in all of the death around them. Sara spends the entire book looking for her own carcass, one she does not have to share, even if that means creating one.

I found Vulture to be a frustrating novel at some points. There are moments when the humanity of the situation is not considered because ambition is way more important. There are moments when the citizens, the hotel workers, and the victims are treated as subhuman, people whose intelligence and opinions do not matter in the moment because the journalists know best. I see some of the colonialism that comes from journalists from around the world coming to Gaza to take over, to get stories about a culture they know very little about, and it is almost like the local politics and actual danger of the situation are just hurdles to jump to get the real story. This is satire at it’s best because it is really bringing up these issues without flinching, and it is up to the reader to sort it out and form an opinion. 

I received a galley from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: The Vampire of Plainfield by Kristopher Rufty

Posted on September 22, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Synopsis:

Plainfield, Wisconsin. 1954. Robbing graves to appease his malevolent desires, Ed Gein inadvertently sets loose an ancient vampire on the unsuspecting town of Plainfield. As the number of missing persons rises, Ed realizes the vampire’s ultimate plan has been put into motion, and to prevent his dastardly practices from being exposed, he decides to slay the vampire himself. But he soon understands that he’s all the hope Plainfield has. As the few people closest to Ed are sucked into the vampire’s realm, he’ll be forced to reach deep inside himself to bring the incredible nightmare to an end. On this night, the Ghoul of Plainfield must battle the Vampire of Plainfield…to the death!

Review:

I have been wanting to read The Vampire of Plainfield for quite some time. The premise of Ed Gein, serial kiiler and model for so many fictional serial killers, from Leatherface to Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, Gein has been a fixture in popular culture and American serial killer fiction for many decades. Kristopher Rufty uses Ed Gein has the centerpiece of the story, a outsider in town who spends many nights digging up graves for heads and body parts. When he finds an old graveyard in the woods and decides to dig up these older graves, he finds that one of the graves is of a corpse with a stake through his heart. He thinks it would be a good money maker to pull the stake out and then ram it back in, over and over, gathering crowds of people to see the spectacle, but as soon as he releases the stake, the vampire flies off and starts killing people in town. Ed Gein knows that he has to find this vampire and put it back into it’s eternal resting place. 

The premise sounds like a great horror novel, vampire against killer, but the story becomes more than that, and most of the extra things are not good. There are many choices that Rufty makes in the novel that are awful, especially when it involves the kids that he writes into the novel. He tries to make the novel more like Salem’s Lot, where Ed has a young man that helps him, but fourteen year old Timmy and his friends are horny and sex is more important to them than getting rid of the vampire. Timmy’s friend Peter is written to be the most horrible person in the novel, more horrible than a serial killer and a vampire. Peter is a classmate of Timmy’s that kidnaps and repeatedly sexually assaults a 10 year old girl before both of them become vampires. Timmy’s love interest, Robin, who is at least seventeen, has her clothes ripped off of her toward the end, and in the middle of the fight between Timmy and the vampire, Timmy has to stop and think about how Robin’s breasts are giving him an erection. All of the descriptions of breasts are the same: a description of the shape and then the size of the nipple. I do not want to read this about underage characters in this way, and it makes the parts about Ed Gein and his obsession with dead bodies, shrinking heads, and wearing the skin of a woman as armor, the least offensive parts. 


I had high hopes for The Vampire of Plainfield, but I cannot get past all of the sexualizing of the underage characters, particularly the ten year old who is repeatedly assaulted. It is unfortunate because I love the ideas behind the plot, I would have liked a more adult focused version of this, where there are no kids getting raped, but instead I have to be clear that this is not a book that I can ever recommend to anyone.

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Review: Daddy’s Boy by Michael David Wilson

Posted on July 28, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Wentworth is at his wit’s end. He has no money, his cat’s been kidnapped, and every time he tries to kill himself, he fails. Worst of all, he lives in Kidderminster.

But sometimes you’re given a lifeline. For some it’s a lottery win, for others a promotion. For Wentworth, it’s an out-of-shape 50-something named Norman wearing an ‘I was on Naked Attraction’ t-shirt and scuffed Reeboks.

Wentworth thinks he’s in luck but makes a series of progressively worse decisions and soon finds himself on the run from a gang of criminal reprobates.

The two flee to Norman’s holiday home but there’s a local serial killer on the loose, something messed up is happening next door, and Norman is becoming uncomfortably clingy.

Can Wentworth evade the criminal mob, shake off Norman’s advances, and uncover his neighbour’s secrets before he falls victim to the approaching serial killer?

Review:

Michael David Wilson is founder and one half of the This is Horror podcast. Every week he and his co-host Bob Pasterella interview horror and horror adjacent creators, mostly writers, about their craft. Having listened to This is Horror for years, I have learned about many aspects of writing, but also about the hosts, particularly what Michael David Wilson finds extremely funny. When he interviews Max Booth III, Brian Asman, Jason Pargin, or Danger Slater, you know that the interviews have a tendency to go off the rails. All of the episodes of This is Horror are fantastic, informative, and inspiring, but there are some guests, particularly Max Booth III, that spend the entire interview making Michael David Wilson laugh and struggle to keep the entire episode together. Having said this, constant listeners have a good idea of the things that Michael David Wilson finds funny, and for those who do not know, who have never heard the This is Horror podcast, all they have to do is read a copy of Daddy’s Boy.

Daddy’s Boy starts with Wentworth trying to get a loan from the bank, actually just waiting in line to get a loan from the bank, when a stranger comes up, a scraggly guy wearing a I was on Naked Attraction t-shirt, that promises Wentworth a million pounds to help him with a job. Of course the job doesn’t pan out and the guy, Norman, keeps making worse and worse decisions until the two of them are hiding out in Norman’s holiday home. The next door neighbors are a mystery, and the more that Wentworth finds out about Norman, particularly that he is his absent father, and the neighbors next door, the more that Wentworth realizes that he cannot just leave these people and the situation. Add in some dick jokes, some sausages, and a lot of really stupid interactions, and you have the idea of everything that makes Michael David Wilson laugh.

One movie that Michael David Wilson really praises is The Greasy Strangler, and I can see the influence of that humor in the story of Daddy’s Boy, not only the obvious father/son connection, but the way that the fathers are almost trying to teach their sons life lessons in their own bizarre way, and all the sons want is validation in the relationship. This is the same dynamic in the first few seasons of Rick and Morty, where you ask yourself “Why is Morty agreeing to this?” In Daddy’s Boy that question is the same. “Why is Wentworth agreeing to this?” The truth that there is a yearning in Wentworth to do the right thing, build a relationship with his father, regardless of how poor his father’s choices are, and make sure nothing bad happens to him. Buried underneath a thick layer of inappropriate behavior and humor, there is a genuine yearning for Wentworth to have something or someone in his life that is worth holding onto. 


I enjoyed Daddy’s Boy because I enjoy Michael David Wilson’s sense of humor. The story is absolutely ridiculous, and I can only imagine how much he enjoyed writing it. This will not be for everyone, but if you are someone who likes The Greasy Strangler, this is a must read. I hope that this will also steer more people toward the This is Horror podcast because it is really a treat for readers and writers alike.

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Essay 003: Ozzy Osbourne

Posted on July 26, 2025 by ghostvillehero

This week Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76, and there has been an outpouring of sympathy and tributes from the entire world. At nineteen, he was a founding member of Black Sabbath and had a successful solo career. He started the OzzFest music festival in 1996 when he was 47, but it was not until 2002, when MTV aired the reality show about the life of him and his family, The Osbournes, that he became a household name. This also switched his role from a feared metal singer to an iconic celebrity. Memories and sympathies have been shared by much more qualified people, including a heartwarming interview with Henry Rollins on CNN, but Ozzy is important enough to have every fan, no matter how small, share their memories about him, his music, and his influence.

I was born in the late 70s and when I was a kid, Ozzy Osbourne was the boogeyman. I grew up in a very conservative Christian home, and there was no way that I could listen to Ozzy’s music. He was the singer of Black Sabbath, and nothing should ever be dark about the Sabbath. He bit the heads off of doves and bats. He drank, did drugs, and pissed on the Alamo. But the biggest fear instilled in me was that listening to his music will drive me to suicide. In 1984, John McCollum, a clinically depressed teenager, listened to the Ozzy song, “Suicide Solution,” and killed himself. His parents sued Osbourne and lost, but this did not matter. In my house, he was the cause of it all. This was also in the midst of the Satanic Panic, with the crusade against everything that might have any sort of affiliation with the devil, so Ozzy Osbourne was very high on the list of public enemies. I was really young at this time so I did not really have much opinion. I just knew that going to the store and seeing the album covers and titles for The Ultimate Sin, Diary of a Madman, and No Rest for the Wicked reinforced the idea that my parents and the church was probably right. 

Then No More Tears came out in 1991. I was a freshman in high school, so by that time I was also listening to as much music as possible and starting to form my own opinions about life. Most of the songs on that album, including the hits like “The Road to Nowhere,” “Mama I’m Coming Home”, and “No More Tears”, seemed like songs less about evil and more about feelings of sadness and isolation, which is pretty much how I felt in my life. I also was starting to play music, and my guitar playing friends were really into “Crazy Train”. We played that song so much, multiple times every time we were jamming in my buddy’s barn, that I knew every beat of that song, every lyric, and I did not feel like it was really evil as much as just having a wild time. I also was learning a few Black Sabbath songs, mostly through covers from other bands, like Faith No More’s version of “War Pigs” and Pantera’s cover of “Planet Caravan.” Beyond these few songs and the Black Sabbath songs on the radio, which were pretty much “Iron Man” and “Paranoid”, I did not really delve into the Black Sabbath catalog or Ozzy Osbourne’s solo albums until I was well into adulthood.

Henry Rollins has a spoken word performance where he talks about meeting Ozzy and being such a huge fan of him and of Black Sabbath. I always respected Henry Rollins and his opinions, so him talking about Ozzy made me give his music a deeper listen. There is something to be said for the first four Black Sabbath albums being the music that not only shaped a generation but spawned a genre. Even when I listen to other metal bands, I am looking for the things that are prominent in those first four albums, especially the science fiction themes of songs like “Iron Man” and “Electric Funeral” and long instrumental breakdowns that really turn the song into a completely different listening experience. Black Sabbath has been in heavy rotation as I have grown older and started to appreciate different things in the music that I listen to. This has led to a growing love of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osborne because I love different things than when I was a teenager. Having said this, I do not think that I would have thought much about Black Sabbath if it was not for Henry Rollins being such a huge fan and friend of Ozzy Osbourne.

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats is also a huge fan and wrote a 33 ⅓ book about the Black Sabbath album Master of Reality. In the book, he talks about Black Sabbath being one of those bands that inspires a group of friends to start a band. Throughout his career, Ozzy Osbourne created music that was never perfect and polished. His best songs are raw and a little sloppy. His best singing is not great. His best lyrics are sometimes a little silly. The early Black Sabbath albums sound as if they were rehearsed mostly in neighborhood garages. This gives every artist hope. Aspiring musicians, like my friends when I was in high school, are given the courage to start bands, write songs, and be exactly who they want to be because Ozzy did it, and look at how good he did. This makes Ozzy Osbourne, not only a legend, but a true starting point, the north star or the ground zero of countless bands and artists, some famous but some still practicing in the garage. His success is proof that passion and love is just as important as talent. 

Ozzy Osbourne will be missed dearly, by his family, his friends, the artists he influenced, and by his fans, but I also feel like his legacy will live on in every single person that sees him and Black Sabbath as a part of their lives. He might be the starting point in their musical journeys but he is also the starting point in many every day journeys. True legends never die; they just continue to grow through those whom they influence. Ozzy’s music and legacy will live on forever. 

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Review: > rekt by Alex Gonzalez

Posted on July 11, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, Alex Gonzalez’s rekt traces a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.

> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man

Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.

Then a car accident changed everything.

Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.

The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself . . .

Not for the faint of heart, rekt combines the cautionary warnings of Black Mirror with the seedy rawness of Chuck Palahniuk in its unrelentless examination of the emotional holes we fill with content.

Review:

Last month, during the protests in Los Angeles, most of the rest of the country watched the confrontations between protesters and police through videos on social media. Many of these videos were of peaceful protests, but there were a few that were full-on battles between authority and protesters. One of these videos showed armored vehicles rolling down the street with people on an overpass throwing huge chunks of rock and concrete at the vehicles, smashing the windshields and whatnot. I watched this video several times in a row because there were some things that did not seem right about it, like the vehicles looked and moved weird, like the vehicles were getting smashed by debris thrown at them with incredible accuracy, and like there were no insignia on the side of the vehicles that marked them as Los Angeles or even California police. The armored vehicles that were getting destroyed by chucks of thrown concrete just said “POLICE” on the side. I have not been able to find the video since the first day of seeing it, and most of my doubts about the authenticity of this video and any video I see on the internet really started after reading >rekt by Alex Gonzalez.

The novel is about Sammy Dominguez, a guy who grew up watching video clips on the internet that he should have never seen. When he was ten, he watched a guy get beheaded in grainy internet footage while at a friend’s house, and this has shaped his entire life since. When his girlfriend Ellery dies in a car crash, he uses more and more extreme videos on the internet to help him cope and further drift away from being able to function in real society. One day he gets an anonymous internet link to a webpage that had the video of Ellery dying in her car crash. But also Ellery dying in hundreds of videos, over and over, each video in a different way. He soon learns that there is a whole group of people bet on the odds of how someone will die, all with videos made with AI. This leads Sammy into an investigation on who runs this website, and if his girlfriend’s death was really an accident or set up for a huge payout.


This novel has some very disturbing imagery and actions from the main characters, but the most disturbing aspect of >rekt is that the entire idea stems from a real problem. Many videos on the internet, especially social media, can be so easily manipulated and even created from scratch. This toxic sludge at the bottom of the internet surfaces and there is no longer any way to tell what is real from what is fake. Being able to make videos of someone dying is just as easy as videos of a talking sasquatch or videos of protests being presented as riots. Alex Gonzalez’s book reflects on this and how we are a society that needs to be smarter about technology, even when society is starting to drift away from critical thinking and channels are being placed where it is being discouraged. >rekt is a prime example of how people are being purposefully misled is not in the future but is happening every single day.

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Review: The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 23, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

Review:

The Staircase in the Woods is the newest Chuck Wendig novel, and it is the first novel written by him that I have read in a long time, since Blackbirds and the Angry Robot days. I have bought a few of his novels and have watched him find success, particularly with the Star Wars novels that he wrote, but this is the first I have read in close to a decade. It is a shame that it has taken me this long to get back to another Wendig novel, especially since when I wrote the review of Blackbirds in 2016, I said that he was a novelist that should be followed and read. I guess I did not follow my own advice.

His newest novel starts with a group of five friends that were always there for one another during high school. They saw themselves as friends with a bond that could never be broken. Until they were on a camping trip and a staircase in the middle of the woods appears and Matty decides to go up the stairs. He disappears and so does the staircase. After this, the friend group is accused of his death and their friendship dissolves. After years, one of the members, Nick, finds another staircase in the woods, and they decide to climb the stairs to try to find their friend who disappeared years earlier. The horrors that await them are unspeakable. A hidden world unfolds, making the friends face their individual and collective past, their anger toward one another, and their sorrow in and attempt to survive long enough to find their friend.

When I first started reading The Staircase in the Woods, I quickly remembered how Chuck Wendig writes. He uses a tone that feels lighthearted and jokey, even when his characters are in horrible and dangerous situations. There are times when the tone of the writing is what keeps the sadness and fear at bay, as if he is reminding us that these characters are in this story, but it’s still a story. There’s nothing to be afraid of. This tone keeps The Staircase in the Woods from being so bleak and dreary that it is unreadable. The way Wendig writes scenes and chapters keeps us as a spectator and just removed enough from the story to bring too much heartache and sadness. This separation is what makes this novel palatable and effective, and this is why any reader should not hesitate to climb up the staircase in the woods and disappear into this story.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

Posted on April 30, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions — demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost? 

Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful twist on the “cursed film” that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.

Review:

Paul Tremblay has been producing novels at a steady rate, releasing a new book almost every year. His latest Horror Movie is about a guy who was in a horror movie in college, a horror movie that was lost after an accident on the set, a horror movie that has become an obsession with horror fans and convention goers, a horror movie that is getting remade using as much of the screenplay as possible. Half of this novel is the narrator, who played “The Thin Boy”, as the only survivor left, living the best he can while getting calls to appear at conventions, and meet with producers and directors to make the new version of Horror Movie. The other half is the script to the original Horror Movie. As the novel progresses, the story starts to blend, and we learn what happened to make the original Horror Movie film be considered lost film, how fans think it is cursed, and what really happened to make everyone think this way.

The story is entertaining, the characters are interesting, and I really like the mechanics of the story, which is really about the mechanics of filmmaking. There is the whole mystic behind the “magic of moviemaking” because most of the time, watching a good movie then watching how difficult it was to film is the equivalent to learning how sausage is made. Unfortunately we do not want to believe that many movies are a nightmare to film. We want to think that making films is a wonderful process without difficulty, but the truth is that this rarely ever happens. In the case of Horror Movie, the original movie is shot with several problems, and it is no surprise that only pieces of the movie that even exist are a few clips uploaded to YouTube and a leaked script. Trembley tries to pulls us away from being readers of a novel to being fans of a lost film that we too hope is successful on the second filming. 


Horror Movie is a good novel but it kind of feels like the end is actually the beginning. When the final pages are over, this is a good place to really start the novel, that there is so much more now that could happen. This is not the feeling of “I want more” as much as the feeling that this story is incomplete, that the entire novel is the origin story of “The Thin Boy” and not the whole story at all. As it stands, the way that this novel ends undermines all of the buildup and weakens the entire story. The ending really lowered the experience of the story, and this is unfortunate because I did like the journey.

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Review: The Antidote by Karen Russell

Posted on April 27, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

Review:

Like everything I have read by Karen Russell, The Antidote is a difficult book to review. The story intertwines five characters, with three-ish narrators (there are a few more, but there are three main narrators) set in a Nebraska town where people are leaving at an alarming rate due to the failure of their crops and farms. With the real life devastation of loss and failure as the backdrop, Russell writes a story filled with superstition, magical realism, and hope. One of the main characters, known as the Antidote, is a “Prairie Witch” or “Vault”, a person who for a small fee will hold onto your worst memories and secrets so that you can live a happy life. She encounters a young girl, Dell, who has lost her mother and is living with her uncle Harp, who’s farm is the only one where crops seem to be thriving under the watchful eye of a sentient scarecrow. Added to this is a serial killer, The Lucky Rabbit Foot Killer going through Nebraska killing women, crooked cops, and a black photographer, Cleo, who has been sent to Nebraska to be a photographer for FDR, but whose camera is taking photographs of the horrible history of the region. The Antidote is a deeply unsettling yet wonderfully beautiful novel that is not easily forgotten.

This is not a quick read. This is not a novel that you can just zip through and go onto the next thing. Karen Russell writes books that demand your attention, that need to be absorbed. Stories that will sink into you and make you think about them for hours when you are not reading. The density of her writing is one of those aspects that can be appreciated because the story is supposed to be heavy, the situation the characters find themselves in is difficult, and the deep sadness of loss and everything that you own being destroyed is something that can be felt in the pages of The Antidote, like the hurt that the characters experience is real. And some of the story is real. The story of The Antidote is told against the backdrop of a drought in Nebraska, with dust storms killing crops and everyone starving to death. The buffaloes have been slaughtered, and the Native Americans have been pushed off the land. The violence and blood have soaked into the land, and this story is the result of this history. The real history and the magic that Russell adds makes a story that is immersive and heartbreaking.

Karen Russell’s writing is hard to review because it is nearly perfect. This is one of the few novels I have read in a long time where I just want to write “No notes.” Russell has written another novel where there is not much that can be said about it besides praise. Though it is not an easy read, it is an important read because Russell is writing the new American classics. 

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

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Review: The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe

Posted on April 18, 2025 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

When Phyl, a young literature graduate, moves back home with her parents, she soon finds herself frustrated by the narrow horizons of English country life. As for her plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. But the chance discovery of a forgotten novelist from the 1980s stirs her into action, as does a visit from her uncle Chris – especially when he tells her that he’s working on a political story that might put his life in danger.

Chris has been following the careers of a group of students, all present at Cambridge University in the 1980s, now members of a think-tank which has been quietly pushing the British government towards extremism. And now, after years in the political wilderness, they might be in a position to put their ideas into action.

As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a mysterious conference taking place deep in the Cotswolds. When Phyl hears that one of the delegates has been murdered, she begins to wonder if real life is starting to merge with the novel she’s been trying to write. But does the explanation really lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

Darting between decades and genres, THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE reimagines the coming-of-age story, the cosy crime caper and the state-of-the-nation novel with Coe’s trademark humour and warmth. From one of Britain’s finest living novelists, this is a witty, razor-sharp novel which explores how the key to understanding the present can often be found in the murkiest corners of the past.

Review:

When I started The Proof of My Innocence, I did not know how much I was going to enjoy every aspect of the story. The novel starts with a long prologue, with Phyl living with her parents at a vicarage after finishing college, working at the Japanese restaurant in the airport, coming home to watch episodes of Friends as a comfort, and trying to figure out her next step in life. One of her mother’s friends from college, Christopher Swann, stops to visit on the way to a convention of conservative leaders as material for his liberal blog. Phyl starts to read his blog and even though it is not a topic she finds very interesting, she feels like she can write too. She makes a list of the types of novels that are popular and/or books she likes to read. The list consists of three subgenres: Cozy Crime, Dark Academia, and Autofiction. The rest of the novel is set into three parts. The first part is a crime section, where Christopher ends up dead at the conference and the older detective close to retirement is trying to solve the crime. The second is a slim autobiography of a friend of Chris and Phyl’s mother from Cambridge, and how there were some strange things going on at the campus. The third section is in the voice of Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter Rashida as they travel around Europe trying to find more clues to the death of Chris. The three parts are written in the style of the subgenres that Phyl writes at the beginning of the novel, and they are distinctive and have their own rewards.

The entire novel also has a backdrop of a tumultuous political climate. England has a new Prime Minister, Queen Elizabeth passes away, and the Conservative government is changing things for the perceivable worst. This does not make much difference in the plot except that it is a device that adds another layer of turmoil to the world that the characters are trying to navigate, and it gives a good reason for someone who writes criticism against the conservative party to wind up dead at a convention for the conservative party. Even if this might be seen as a warning to some readers (especially in this moment in history when reading and art are an escape for what is happening at a government level), there are so many other elements to the novel that makes it worth reading. The Proof of My Innocence is a parallel story of trying to find your voice in a post college world, trying to find a place in a government system that you really do not fit into, and a crime novel poking fun at crime novels and literary cliches by making puns and even delving into pop culture theories like why many people stream episodes of Friends for comfort. Even the title of the novel is a play on words. This playfulness with tone and voice in a story about murder and shady politics is what makes The Proof of My Innocence a novel that I will remember and want to reread simply to catch the nuances I definitely missed the first time. 


I received The Proof of My Innocence as an ARC from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

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