Matt O’Connell
There’s nothing spookier than the unvarnished banality of the human imagination, and that’s what you get writ large with Dominick Ricca’s I, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Other Stories. Ostensibly a loosely-connected series of vignettes in the style of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, it’s more like a fever dream, or a cry for help.
The title story involves a taboo sexual encounter between the titular theropod and a wounded herbivore, and that is probably the most coherent story in the whole book. Roughly half of the entries are some form of religious fantasy, where Jesus escapes his fate on the cross by delivering pizzas in Brooklyn or having a sword-and-sorcery adventure in space (both real examples). Jesus almost always does this because of an overpowering desire to live as a mortal man and be a husband, which will make the next paragraph even more bizarre.
The second most common story type involves a modern day young man who, otherwise healthy and vigorous, does not have a working dick or cock. He is therefore depressed, because without such equipment, he can apparently never get married. These young men are invariably blessed with big hard cocks by the end of their stories. To be a fly on the wall on the office of Dominick Ricca’s therapist.
I’m just kidding, of course. Dominick Ricca never went to therapy, or he wouldn’t have written this book. As fiction, it’s hot horse garbage. As a window into the untenable psyche of one of God’s own creatures, it’s perhaps one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read.
RA Pickup
As the resident Stephen King geek, it should surprise no one that I spent some time revisiting The Long Walk after seeing the movie. This book ripped my fucking heart out as a teenager, and it still delivers. King is at his best when he’s extra dark and keeps the prose clipped, and this is the best of the beloved Bachman Books. If you’re looking to jam little crescent moons into your palms and cry like a baby, this is the book for you. The film doesn’t disappoint here, either.
After I was finished ripping my heart out twice with the same story, I was worried I hadn’t tortured myself enough, so I opened up Crooks by Lou Berney. I haven’t quite finished, but if I know one thing about Lou, I know he’s going to have me shouting “NO! NO. OH NO!” in no time flat. I was charmed by Buddy Mercurio, who quickly falls for Lillian after watching her deftly rob a client at a Vegas dress shop. I’m a sucker for Bonnie & Clyde, so imagine my delight when Buddy & Lillian’s story continues to include a gang of children they’ve trained in petty crime through the magic of analyzing fairy tales and nursery rhymes. A story like this one—mobsters on the run, criminal kids, discos, and small-town crime—could easily become overly complicated and cheesy. Still, Lou’s books shine because he never lets you forget that his characters all have hearts, souls, and a deep desire to do right by someone, whomever that might be. I can’t wait to see how this book breaks my fucking heart.
Nicole Moore
Hoo-boy, I am way behind on my reading pile. I was sick with various things/incredibly depressed and anxious for most of September, and reading was nearly impossible … but I am making the time and space to read more in October! Appropriately enough, my reads for the month are also perfect for spooky season.
First up, the next installment in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Impossible Fortune, just dropped, so I am feverishly reading through that. I cannot say enough good things about this series; I love it so goddamn much. I am a huge Taskmaster nerd, so once I realized Richard Osman had written a book series, I picked up the first book, devoured it, read the next two, and now I preorder every single book he writes the moment I know it exists. I love the way he writes, the characters he creates, the complex plots that involve murder, antiques, mistaken identity, and people living in a retirement community in the idyllic British countryside. It has literally all my favorite TV show tropes (hello Murder, She Wrote and Midsomer Murders) in book form.
Also on the list: Tim Curry’s memoir, Vagabond, releases mid-month. While I sadly did not get an advance copy to review here, I promise I will write a thorough review for Dirge ASAP because I will inhale this book. My qualifications? My master’s thesis was about Rocky Horror and nobody loves Tim Curry more than I do. I did the Time Warp as Magenta for a summer talent show when I was eight. I *will* fight you. I’m also reading Indiana’s False Hauntings by Ashley M. Watson, and hopefully will have a review and interview with the author up here soon!
Valentina Daae
I didn’t have as much time to read this last month! But I am excessively enjoying the Audible performance of Dracula (full cast version with Alan Cumming and Tim Curry). It’s EXCEPTIONAL. EXUBERANT. Excoriating! Big fan of reading books in print first, and then listening to an audiobook recording, because I find there’s always so much you pick up on that you missed in prior reads. It’s included on Audible if you have a subscription. Really recommend if you are needing a gothic vibe check.
Similarly, after learning that Audible has exclusively released performances of the entire Bridge Kingdom series by Danielle L. Jensen, I had to start that. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s political romantasy. So far I’ve finished The Bridge Kingdom, which I enjoyed far more in performance than in writing (I do own that first book physically), and have moved on to The Traitor Queen. This isn’t intended as a diss to the author; this just isn’t my usual genre, and it’s hard to explain exactly why but something about hearing the story narrated by these particular voice actors made everything feel so vibrant. It felt truly like the protagonists were in the room with you relaying their history. My spouse walked in on the playback one day and asked me for the TL;DR. I said, “Trade negotiations porn.”
Now, y’all know I’ve gotta include a pervy book here. I recently finished Bride of Brutal Hearts by Kate Stevens. It’s dark romance high fantasy vampire erotica. You follow nerdy human Nessa as she becomes a surprise sort of soulbound mate to two smokin’ hot, very “morally black” male vampires, who are also t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r. Ehehehe.
Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of some elements of “dark romance,” so I did kind of gloss over certain violent or upsetting (to me) sections. I know this is an extremely popular genre, I’m just a big baby who can’t handle reading scenes where romantic partners are actually mean to each other in any way, LMAO. But if you like dark romance, you will probably adore this story. I still did despite my skipping around. Most importantly, the love scenes in this book were by far the hottest I’ve ever read, and I have definitely devoured like 100+ smut books in my lifetime. Bride of Brutal Hearts is 874 pages and I finished it in two days.
Jinx Strange
My terrifying Halloween pick for spooky season is: Chickens – A Backwoods Home Guide. At first blush, this chicken bible from Self-Reliance Publishing LLC is a fantasy story* about a world of bootstraps and candyfloss where a young family moves to a plot of unincorporated county to ride out the apocalypse rich in love, and laughter, and eggs. In this Atlas Shrugged of barnfowl husbandry, a white husband and wife and their two unvaccinated children move to 30 minutes outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, to conduct homeschool and eat chicken. The father, Budge Nelson, is looking forward to the collapse of civilization brought on by an authoritarian coup that mostly happens on social media. He stands in his yard practicing saying “No” to college professors, brown people, people with dyed hair, (Jews, maybe? Unclear.), people with media literacy, and It*lians (Budge’s hate is inscrutable) when they inevitably come begging for eggs.
Society doesn’t actually collapse, but mostly changes so that everything Budge thinks and cares to do is legal and pretty much nothing else is. Budge chooses to interpret this as having successfully survived the apocalypse all on his own. This is when things start to get dark.
It turns out that raising chickens is messy and hard, and since no one is a carpenter or skilled craftsman, the coop the Nelsons build is mostly a big knocked together pile of shit despite watching several Youtube videos. Raccoons keep getting in. Budge spends most of his time guarding the chickens and trying to figure out why they keep dying, even when the raccoons don’t get in.
Finally, Arbora Nelson pleads with her dumbfuck husband, “Please! You have to read this book!” She thrusts at him a copy of Chickens – A Backwoods Home Guide, the very book you’re reading! Budge first insists that he isn’t “reading a bunch of libtard propaganda,” but his wife insists that it’s okay because it was written by a conservative family annihilator.**
Finally, Budge decides to look at the pictures, but he sees that the pictures are all of him, and when he has it read to him, when Arbora gets to the part where Budge dies from fright, he drops dead from fright right there in the backyard, among the chickens he doesn’t know how to raise!
Just then Rod Sterling, host of the television program The Twilight Zone, steps into view and announces that self-reliance is delusional and that humans evolved as a cooperative species based, at minimum, around interconnected family groups, and should have never attempted governance and industry at such a mass scale because we haven’t evolved self-preserving guardrails that prevent us from shitting the entire planet – and each other – to death. In this version, Rod is also an evolutionary biologist.
Also, I recommend Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. It isn’t new but it is very weird and uncomfortable if you haven’t read it, and I deeply enjoy being uncomfortable. In reading. I do not enjoy discomfort in person at all. Really makes you think.
* None of this actually happens, it’s just a normal, wholesome practical guide for raising chickens, with zero libertarian stroke material, and it even has recipes and a little section in the back about how dinosaurs evolved into barn fowl. How about that!
** A specific author is not actually cited, which is weird, but I think we can safely assume this is also not true, on account of there being no evidence and also I made it up.
