hi yah yah! have you read any good horror lately? I always love your book recs. unrelated to horror but I’m currently reading the fifth season bc I remember you mentioning it a while back and it’s so good!
oh! I've read a few bangers last year + this year! (Also yes, I need more people to be Fifth Season pilled, you all need to know the glory of essun and alabaster, of orogenes!)
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin; in a post-apocalyptic landscape where a disease/mutation turns men into monsters, two trans women navigate a world that's getting uglier and meaner towards them. Literally so good and Felker-Martin deals with everything with a carefulness/coolness, but of course she does, she's a trans woman as well
PTSD Radio by Masaki Nakayama: horror manga! I kept reading it at night, which was an mistake. There's a cursed object, strange things happening with hair. Not surprised the author wanted to stop writing it because it was upsetting him.
Chlorine by Jade Song: I know I have a letterboxd list that says life would be safer if we encouraged teenage girls to do sports, but this book proves me wrong. A teenage girl in sports is dangerous, especially if she's being isolated by her abusive couch and becoming obsessive about winning and the attention of one of her teammates
Failure to Comply by @librarycards: I don't say this just because I'm friends with Cav, but this is quite literally one of the best horror-scifis I've read in a while. Set in a dystopia that prizes conformity, wellness and sameness, it's about embracing your "sickness", your disabilities and "disfigurements". Obsessed with it, literally recommended it to Chana Porter because I thought she'd love how it matched the vibe of "The Seep" and "The Thick and The Lean"
Full Immersion by Gemma Amor: A severely traumatized woman steps into a virtual therapy world to unlock the hidden parts of her psyche. Very interesting, with some twists that surprised me big time!
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang: Many books to me feel like the daughters of "The Uglies" by Scott Westerfield, but this one is like, thee daughter to me. It's about an Asian American woman working at this wellness/beauty store that's doing extremely weird racist, eugenics things with their products. So unsettling, so odd. I thought it was a little like the substance, the body horror aspect at the end. So lovely!
Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry: inspired by a true case in which a white man stole and used the body of a latino woman, when I say a book hasn't made me so nauseous and angry but also intrigued. It's the way the book is very clear with you about the man's racism and fascism, and how white people around him assume the best/assume love out of his mummification and parading of this dead woman's body. It's so eerie. And if you read the reviews, it makes it all the eerier, how white people will see romance in the most violent of racist acts.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman: A disgraced knight, a little girl and a fallen priest walk into a black plague...no, but seriously, if I ever stop talking about Between Two Fires, assume I'm dead. One of the best horrors I've read, so so SO good.
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez: A man with a dark and dangerous power and his son trying to avoid/escape the clutches of a violent, exploitative system. Absolutely beautiful and the way everything goes together, even things you didn't think mattered much. Fantastic, I'll take fourteen more.
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito: A governess with a weird past moves into another family. It reads like an actual Victorian penny dreadful and it's AMAZING!