Genre: Gothic

#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn FisherGrimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, historical romance, paranormal, holiday fiction, holiday romance
Pages: 299
Published by 47North on November 5, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Victorian England, a young woman inherits her father’s curiosity shop and all its ghostly secrets in a bewitching novel by the author of Salt & Broom.

It’s 1851 in old York. Lizzy Grimm struggles to save her late father’s charmingly creepy yet floundering antique shop, Grimm Curiosities. Then, during a particularly snowy December in this most haunted city in England, things turn…curiouser.

Lizzy meets Antony Carlisle, whose sister suffers from the same perplexing affliction as Lizzy’s mother—both stricken silent and unresponsive after speaking with ghosts. Working closely together to fathom what power has transformed their loved ones and why, Lizzy and Antony discover an important her father’s treasured set of rare books on ancient folktales, enchantments, and yuletide myths. Books that a persistent collector is awfully keen to purchase. Books Lizzy can’t bear to sell.

Every bewitching passage and illustration opens a doorway to something ancient and dangerously inviting. Keys to a mystery Lizzy and Antony are compelled to solve—even if doing so means unleashing one of this bright holiday’s darkest myths.

My Review:

To paraphrase a much more famous Victorian Christmas ghost story, Herbert Grimm was dead, to begin with.

And, while he has a chance to rectify his mistakes and failures from the afterlife, it’s a job that’s much too big for any number of spirits to handle in just one night.

It’s 1851 in cold, snowy, OLD York, and Lizzy Grimm has been doing her best to maintain the curiosity shop she inherited from her father – as well as somehow keep body and soul together for both herself and her mother.

The problem for Lizzy, the many, many problems for Lizzy, is that entirely too many of her father’s former customers and suppliers, both, are unwilling to deal with a woman, and her mother is ill and can’t help with the shop. Mrs. Grimm has disconnected completely from the world and can’t even help herself without supervision.

The rent is 10 weeks behind and getting more behind by the day, Lizzy can barely keep herself and her mother fed and prevent them from freezing to death in the winter cold. Christmas is less than two weeks away and, while business always improves BEFORE the holiday, it hasn’t improved enough to see them through the dearth of the bitter months after.

Which is the day when two men of considerably better means than Lizzy enter the shop and each present her with potential solutions to her woes. Collector Ambrose Stokes wants to purchase some mysterious books of myth and legend that her father set aside with a note not to sell. Antony Carlisle comes in seeking a present for his younger sister. A sister who is in the exact same walking somnambulance state as Lizzy’s mother.

It’s clear from the beginning that Stokes only wants to use her to get at something he covets badly and probably shouldn’t have. Meanwhile Carlisle is obviously searching for both help and friendship – even if he doesn’t recognize that the latter is only a small portion of what he seeks in Lizzy’s company.

Stokes can solve her immediate financial difficulties, while Carlisle is likely to only cause her heartbreak – even if that is far, far, from his intention.

Between them, they open up her world to the true legacy that her father intended to leave her. A legacy that holds the key to every question she’s ever asked, and every answer she never thought she’d need.

Escape Rating B-: I picked this up because it looked like it was just the kind of horror-adjacent story that I generally enjoy. And because it was set in York, the setting of one of my favorite historical mystery series. (If you’re curious about the York of four centuries before this story, check out the Owen Archer series of historical mysteries, beginning with The Apothecary Rose. Because if there is one thing that Lizzy Grimm is right about, it’s that York is absolutely rife with stories just waiting to be told!)

So I was expecting a bit more Halloween and got a whole lot of the Victorian Christmas season instead – mixed with a trip to Narnia and more than a soupçon of historical romance. Even though even a soupçon of actual soup is something that Lizzy has been forced to worry about a LOT.

Also, and I know this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing, Lizzy’s straddle of the line between having agency as the protagonist while being a woman of her time was even more uncomfortable for me than it was for her – and it was plenty uncomfortable for her. It just wasn’t what I was in the mood for and your reading mileage may definitely vary.

What was absolutely fascinating was the way that the supernatural and paranormal crept into the story on ghostly feet, that the gift she thought had passed her by was doing its damndest to warn her that she was heading for her own damnation if she didn’t figure out what was going on on both sides of the actual, honest-to-supernatural, wardrobe before it was too late.

From the standpoint of this reader, it felt like this story had too many irons in its fire. Each of the individual parts had the potential to be a whole, fascinating story, from the ghostly visitations to the world inside the cabinet, to the myths and legends coming to life to the mystery of just who the collector was and what he was up to and last but not least to the class-barrier hopping romance between Carlisle and Lizzy with Carlisle’s overbearing father serving as second-villain.

There were a LOT of fascinating story parts trying to weave themselves into a whole cloth – and they didn’t quite manage it and/or there wasn’t enough book for them to manage in. It had the bones of a good story – but either not quite enough bones or not enough flesh for the story-creature it was meant to be.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Graveyard Shift by M.L. RioGraveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
Narrator: Jess Nahikian, Max Meyers, Si Chen, Susan Dalian, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, horror, mystery, thriller
Pages: 144
Length: 3 hours and 9 minutes
Published by Flatiron Books, Macmillan Audio on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.
Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.
One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.
Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.

My Review:

I almost saved this one for Halloween, because it’s just the kind of horror-adjacent book that I love to pick for spooky season. But it’s out this week – and I simply didn’t want to wait that long!

Even though this particular “graveyard shift” takes place in an actual graveyard, the story doesn’t start out all that creepy. Unhealthy, maybe, but not creepy.

The ‘Anchorites’ are a group of insomniacs who meet up at midnight in a graveyard for a quick smoke. The ancient but historically significant cemetery and the church it’s attached to just happen to be the only location in the middle of a busy college campus that is the requisite distance from ALL of the various campus entrances. It’s the only place where it’s OK to smoke that anyone attached to the campus can reach during the length of a typical work break.

Two of the ‘Anchorites’ hang around because they work an actual night shift. Theo, the manager at a nearby bar, and Tamar, working her second job as a hotel night desk manager. Edie, the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, is too stressed out hunting for the paper’s next story to sleep. Tuck, a washed-out grad student with no place to go, is squatting in that derelict church and can’t resist the temporary camaraderie. Hannah, a rideshare driver, has had chronic insomnia for so long that she doesn’t seem to sleep at all.

The graveyard hasn’t been used – except by desperate smokers – in at least a century. They’re safe smoking in the middle of campus in the middle of the night. Or so they assume.

Until the night when they arrive for their not-exactly-arranged, never-truly-spoken-about, midnight rendezvous – and discover a freshly dug grave in the middle of their usual meeting place. Led by editor-in-chief Edie, they can’t resist speculating about whodunnit? Or perhaps this time it should be ‘who dug it?’

A question that gets answered when the gravedigger comes back, dumps a load of dead lab rats in the grave and covers it over – while they collectively hide all around and watch.

This game really is afoot – and so is one escaped lab rat making a literal meal out of one of the petrified Anchorites.

From there the story is off to a surprisingly twisted race, as Edie sees a story that might win her and her paper a prestigious award, Tamar sees a chance to use her library degree and her research talents for something other than merely checking in hotel guests or checking out books, Tuck sees an opportunity to use his experience with scientific laboratories and his knowledge of mycology to investigate a rogue project, while Theo sees a way to help the only friends he has. Hannah, however, seeks revenge on the people who gave her hope – and then snatched it away.

What they’re going to get is likely to be considerably more than any of them imagined, for good and definitely for ill.

Escape Rating A: Graveyard Shift wasn’t at all what I was expecting – it was better! It’s not really horror, although very Gothic in tone in spite of its contemporary setting, at least until the very, very end where the reader is left wondering – as are a couple of the characters.

But as it goes, it sucks the reader – or listener in my case – into this story, every bit as much as the ‘Anchorites’ get sucked into following Edie in pursuit of the potential newspaper story.

That story is told as snippets of the night, each slice of time from a different character’s point of view. This worked even better in the audio, as the five characters are voiced by five different narrators. (Insert here my usual rant at the lack of information about who voiced whom. As a group, Jess Nahikian, Max Meyers, Si Chen, Susan Dalian and Tim Campbell did a fantastic job but I very much wish I knew who voiced which part.)

One of the things that makes this story so riveting is the way that the tension seems to build almost minute by minute – and how we’re inside each character’s head as they experience their particular slice of that tightening noose. Particularly as the investigation continues feverishly through the single night of the story, and the identity of the person or persons who are about to get hung out to dry – figuratively if not literally – zeroes in on the real target.

Even as the group of investigators gets deeper and deeper into their own personal fog of jittery exhaustion.

I got caught up in this story in multiple ways. I always love a good story about an investigation – and this was definitely that. While Edie, the editor is at first idly speculating, she does have the threads of a big scoop in her hands – even if her moral compass has been knocked more than a bit askew after chasing stories for so long. There is something rotten going on, and it needs to be brought out into the light.

The ‘Anchorites’ as a group are fascinating, and part of that fascination is in their unacknowledged interconnectedness. They ARE friends, but they are each so used to being friendLESS that they’re pretty much incapable of acknowledging that fact. The way the telling of the story bounced from one to the other keeps the story hopping and the reader on their toes.

That the guilty parties got their comeuppance in the end was absolutely righteous, and the way that the story ended with just that shivery touch of frightening possibility made for the icing on a deliciously creepy horror-adjacent, Halloween-anticipatory reading cake. I’ll certainly be looking for the author’s next book, Hot Wax, when it comes out in January.

#BookReview: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan BallingrudCrypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy, #1) by Nathan Ballingrud
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: Gothic, horror, science fiction
Series: Lunar Gothic Trilogy #1
Pages: 112
Published by Tor Nightfire on August 27, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs.
Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.
It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.
But trouble lurks in many a mind at this facility and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

My Review:

When we first meet Veronica Brinkley as she’s on her way to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, we already know that this is not going to be a pretty story because the sense of creeping dread is there from the very first page.

At first, in spite of the story’s setting, that creeping dread is of the mundane but still extremely chilling variety. It’s clear that it’s set at in a period where it was entirely too easy for a woman to be labeled “mad” or “melancholy” or “hysterical” by doctors in cooperation with their husbands and fathers as a way of getting rid of an inconvenient child or spouse by locking them up in an asylum and waiting to receive word of their inevitable demise.

Veronica is well aware that her husband doesn’t expect her “black spells” to ever be cured. She’s never expected to return to their Boston home. The most terrible part of the opening of the story is that she feels she’s earned her place at Barrowfield – that it’s what she deserves for being weak, useless and self-absorbed. For failing in her duties as a wife.

And her treatment is horrific enough – and would be even if it was confined to the historically available treatments of its 1920s setting. But this is a version of our world – and our solar system – that owes a lot to the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Barrowfield is on the moon, a moon that once housed an indigenous species of giant spiders that would have the power to make even the mighty Shelob quake in her lair.

But those giant spiders left behind vast webs in the lunar forests, and a surprising number of more-or-less human priests and worshippers who seem to be passing the gifts of the moon spiders on to the staff at Barrowfield, where the patients are treated by scooping out parts of their brains and replacing their supposedly diseased brain matter with moon spider silk.

It sounds barbaric – only because it is. It’s clear that Barrowfield’s medical chief has an agenda for his experimentation that he never reveals to the wealthy clients who commit their wives and daughters to his care. He knows they don’t, wouldn’t and won’t care about any supposed ‘treatment’ he might possibly think to administer.

But the acolytes of the moon spiders have an agenda of their own. And in Veronica Brinkley, they’ve found the perfect receptacle for their hopes, dreams and plans. All they have to do is wait, and watch, and let the doctor do his work – up to the point where they can finally do their own.

Escape Rating B: I was absolutely fascinated and utterly creeped out by this story, all at the same time. If it had stayed with historical treatments it would have been creepy enough, because damn but they were.

Howsomever, the elements of Verne and Wells and the moon spiders absolutely kicked the whole thing onto another level entirely. Not in the way that the acolytes took control of Barrowfield, because that was both expected and honestly hoped for in a peculiar way.

But the implications that the reader is left with at the end definitely embody next-level chill.

Which is where the issue I had with this book absolutely kicked in with a vengeance. Not that the vengeance aspects of the story bothered me at all because all the men involved with this story were a despicable and deserving bunch of fellows.

The SFnal aspects of the story were enough to carry me over – or perhaps through – the horror aspects of the thing, except for the image of Veronica left in my mind at the end. For anyone who has ever played Dragon Age: Awakening, the expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, well, in my head Veronica ends up as a saner, more self-aware version of The Mother from that game, and the idea of a saner version is seriously both frightening and stomach-churning. (The picture at left is actually one of the less horrific images.)

Circling back around, the thing that is keeping this from an A-, because I was certainly riveted, chilled and downright appalled at points more than enough for that, is that the story feels incomplete – and not just in the sense that it’s labeled as book 1 in a trilogy.

I’m left on the horns of a reading dilemma that it feels like I didn’t get enough of this story – even though it contains plenty of things that I wouldn’t want in any more detail. It’s more that I turned the final page feeling like I didn’t know nearly enough of how this world got to this point and that I was piecing together bits in my mind much the same way that Veronica’s mind got pieced together and I feel the missing bits every bit as much.

Which means I’ll be waiting with the proverbial bated breath for book 2, Cathedral of the Drowned, in the creeped out hope that I’ll get more of that connective spider silk in the next part of the story this time next year!

#BookReview: Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Lady Macbeth by Ava ReidLady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, retellings
Pages: 320
Published by Del Rey on August 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.
The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men. 
The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.  
The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. 
But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. 
She does not know this yet. But she will.

My Review:

This is another story we think we know.. We certainly do know how it ends, thanks to the Bard and “ Out, damned spot! out, I say!” although we usually get it wrong and misquote it as “Out, out damned spot!”

But do we really know anything at all? Shakespeare certainly played fast and loose with any history he got near, whether for dramatic license or to please the current monarch or, if at all possible, as much of both as he could cram into four acts.

Lady Macbeth observes King Duncan (Lady Macbeth by George Cattermole, 19th century)

Lady Macbeth, as a character in the play, comes off as an evil, villainous, witch – whether she actually practiced witchcraft or not. But was she really – and whether or not she was, how would Shakespeare know?

Because as much as we tend to think that all the past is just jammed together in a big ball of timey-wimey bits, the reality is that FIVE CENTURIES separate the historical Lord and Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s dramatically licensed interpretation.

In other words, he didn’t actually know a damned thing and neither do we, making his version entirely fictional and this book a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of that well-known fiction. This is a case where we don’t even know what we think we know.

So what do we have here? Lady Macbeth, the book in the hand and not the play in the mind, is part of the phenomenon of telling – or rather reinterpreting – a well-known story from the perspective of a female central character. A character who was either silent or just hard done by  in the male-centric version that put a man in the center of a story that may not even have been his in the first place – and didn’t bother to reckon with the restrictions and assumptions that hedged around women’s lives.

This Lady Macbeth, while she is certainly a schemer, is mostly scheming for her own survival in a world that makes her the property of her scheming father until he sells her to her murderous husband.

To put it another way, she’s doing the best she can to stay alive with the tools she has – her beauty, her position to a VERY limited extent, and the reputation her father has created for her as a powerful witch.

Which she might very well be, after all.

Escape Rating B+: I picked this one up and surprised myself by getting immediately stuck into it and couldn’t put it down. So definitely tick off the box for compelling. At the same time, I had the feeling that I’d read this one before. Not exactly this book, but something very much like it in its reinterpretation of a familiar character, and its female-centric but not feminist perspective.

(If you’re wondering – as I was – it reminds me of The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton, which gives Countess Bathory a similar treatment. Also, her portrait of Lord Macbeth reads like it owes a lot of its physical description to Henry VIII of England – which was just a bit weird. Plausible based on the limited information about the historical ‘King Hereafter’, but still odd to read.)

On the one hand, what makes this work is that we’re inside Lady Roscille Macbeth’s head, so we see her motivations and her mistakes, and intimately understand why she does the things she does. At the same time, we see her inexperience and naivete, because the poor girl is only 17 and a stranger in a strange land at that, when she is forced to marry Lord Macbeth.

One thing that her perspective emphasizes very clearly is that his is the power, not hers, no matter her reputation. Her choices are always circumscribed by his complete power over her very existence. He has all the choices – at least at the beginning. Towards the end it’s his previous acts that constrain those choices, not hers.

(Her angst over the things she has done, and their effect upon her ‘soul’ may go on just a bit too long for 21st century readers as it certainly did for this one. The past is another country, they did things differently there.)

In the end, she was the dagger, often, but he was always the hand wielding it, which is not at all what the play would lead one to believe. And has led most readers and viewers, over the centuries. Seeing that possibility, that perspective, through the eyes and mind of that dagger, kept me riveted to the story – as if at knife point.

A++ #BookReview: Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: Court of Wanderers by Rin ChupecoCourt of Wanderers (Silver Under Nightfall, #2) by Rin Chupeco
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy romance, Gothic, horror, steampunk, vampires
Series: Reaper #2
Pages: 448
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Remy Pendergast and his royal vampire companions return to face an enemy that is terrifyingly close to home in Rin Chupeco’s queer, bloody Gothic epic fantasy series for fans of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree and the adult animated series Castlevania.
Remy Pendergast, the vampire hunter, and his unexpected companions, Lord Zidan Malekh and Lady Xiaodan Song, are on the road through the kingdom of Aluria again after a hard-won first battle against the formidable Night Empress, who threatens to undo a fragile peace between humans and vampires. Xiaodan, severely injured, has lost her powers to vanquish the enemy’s new super breed of vampire, but if the trio can make it to Fata Morgana, the seat of Malehk’s court—dubbed “the Court of Wanderers”—there is hope of nursing her and bringing them back.
En-route to the Third Court, Remy crosses paths with his father, the arrogant, oftentimes cruel Lord of Valenbonne. He also begins to suffer strange dreams of the Night Empress, whom he has long suspected to be Ligaya Pendergast, his own mother. As his family history unfolds during these episodes, which are too realistic to be coincidence, he realizes that she is no ordinary vampire—and that he may end up having to choose between the respective legacies of his parents.
Posing as Malek and Xiaodan’s human familiar, Remy contends with Aluria’s intimidating vampire courts and a series of gruesome murders with their help—and more, as the three navigate their relationship. But those feelings and even their extraordinary collective strength will be put to the test as each of them unleashes new powers in combat at what may be proven to be the ultimate cost.

My Review:

I loved this second book in the Reaper duology even more than I loved the first book, Silver Under Nightfall. Which means that it is going to be damn near impossible to keep my SQUEE under enough control to write this review.

But then again, I loved this so hard that I have literally nothing truly serious to say, except to tell people to go out and read this duology and to start with Silver Under Nightfall and be prepared to forgo sleep until you’ve finished the set.

The story in Court of Wanderers picks up right after the ending of Silver Under Nightfall, and everything that happened in that first book is part of the setup for this second. So my one very serious thing to say is to start with Silver Under Nightfall to get acclimated to this intricately designed and convoluted world where the good humans are working with the good vampires, the bad vampires are killing the bad humans and someone or something is maneuvering behind the scenes on both sides for dastardly reasons of their own.

Because divide and conquer has been a sound strategy since the dawn of, well, strategy.

At the heart of this truly epic dark fantasy are Malekh, Xiodan and especially Remy. Malekh and Xiodan are vampires at the center of seemingly ALL the power plays among their people. A people who are distrustful of each other and seem to hold humans in contempt. But are forced to or hopeful of or a bit of both regarding an alliance with at least some humans in order to fight a common enemy that is targeting them both with armies of infectious, unkillable monsters.

(And yes, anything that a vampire thinks is a monster is pretty damn monstrous – as are the people (for loose definitions of ‘people’) controlling them.)

Remy Pendergast, the point of view character for the story, is a garden-variety human. Or so he believes, in spite of all the rumors to the contrary he grew up with and was constantly reviled for. His father leads the human armies on behalf of the Alurian Queen Ophelia.

His father, quite frankly, is also a bastard – the marital status of HIS parents notwithstanding.

Remy was supposed to be his father’s spy among the vampire courts. Instead, Remy has found the first place he could ever call home. A place where he is respected, appreciated, and most definitely loved. By Malekh and Xiodan, the leaders of the third and fourth vampire courts, who want to make him their acknowledged third, whether he remains human or lets himself be turned.

But Remy isn’t quite the mere human that he believed himself to. Then again, quite a few of the things he believed and the people he believed in are not exactly what he believed them to be, either.

The war that Remy is at the forefront of, on both sides at the same time, will test his courage, his mettle, his resolve – and most especially, his heart.

What comes out the other side – intact or otherwise – is for Remy to discover. If he survives – and if his world survives with or without him.

Escape Rating A++: The SQUEE is strong with this review. Let’s get into at least a bit of the why of that fact.

The comparison that keeps being made in the blurbs is to Castlevania. I’ve never played the game, so I can’t say if that’s on point or not. What is very much on point – and not just the pointy fangs of the vampires themselves, is that the Reaper duology does a fantastic – no pun intended – job of combining the battle of good vs. evil that so often lies at the heart of epic fantasy with epic fantasy’s complex worldbuilding AND its underlying thread of very long, downright historical forces teeing up to fight the same battles over and over again.

At the same time, and I think this is where the Castlevania reference comes in, some of the prime movers and shakers in this world are vampires. And it has been observed, at least by this reader, that vampire politics tend to run towards exceedingly long games and even longer grudges because those original movers and shakers are still doing the moving and the shaking down through the millennia. It’s difficult to get a fresh start when the people who need it are battling not against institutional memory or country-founding ethos but against actual memory – usually in worlds where therapy is not remotely a thing.

A big part of what is ultimately uncovered, the evil at the heart of this world, is that the forces arrayed have been maneuvering on the down low for longer than the short-lived humans could possibly imagine – not that plenty of them haven’t either been caught up in it or killed by it or both over the centuries.

Our point of view on those discoveries, and on those centuries of underhanded and underground dealings, is Remy Pendergast. In Silver Under Nightfall, we’re with Remy as he’s used and abused by everyone around him in the human world, and we follow his perspective as he learns that the vampire courts are not much like he’s always been taught. And that he has considerably more value as a person than the human courts – particularly his own father – have ever led him to believe.

As Court of Wanderers begins to unravel the plots and counterplots that have set up the epic confrontation, Remy learns that so much of what he’s been taught to believe just ain’t so. We feel for him as his illusions are destroyed, as some of them get rebuilt, and as the layers of the whole onion of his life peel back with tears every step of the way. We get caught up in his journey as well as the battle yet to come and its multiple horns of dilemma consequences.

I got caught up in this story for Remy, because it was impossible not to feel for him, and because the way that his continual discoveries of how the world REALLY works as opposed to how he thought it did gave me a captivating and compelling ‘in’ to this complex world.

I stuck around because as the romance – and it is absolutely a romance – between Malekh, Xiodan and Remy gets deeper I found myself feeling for them, both in the romance AND for the centuries of trauma they had experienced and the way that their world was damaged and how desperately they wanted to fix it in spite of the forces arrayed against them.

I was fascinated with the way that the good vs. evil battle that has been fought through the whole story wasn’t reduced in any way to the easy fixes. Although many people at the beginning believed it was vampires vs. humans, and the villains were trying hard to make that point stick, in the end there was good among both and evil among both and deception on all sides. And redemption as well.

When I closed the final page of Court of Wanderers, I left this world with a deeply conflicted reaction. The ending of this book, and this duology, is utterly right for the story that was told within. The mix of the bitter of loss with the sweet of possibilities was, in the immortal words of Goldilocks, ‘just right’. But I’m deeply sad that this marvelous story is over, and that I won’t get to see the outcome of the life-altering choices that Remy has before him – and I desperately want to know.

Maybe I’ll find out in some future story by this author. I hope so. I KNOW that I’ll be all in on their next adult fantasy, whenever it appears, because Silver Under Nightfall and Court of Wanderers constitute a tale that I’m going to remember for a long, long time.

Review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Starling House by Alix E. HarrowStarling House by Alix E. Harrow
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, Gothic, horror
Pages: 320
Length: 12 hours and 26 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on October 3, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen….

Opal is a lot of things―orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier―but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago.

All she left behind were dark rumors―and her home. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway.

I should be scared, but in the dream I don’t hesitate.

Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House―and make some extra cash for her brother's escape fund―she can't resist.

But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she might finally have found a reason to stick around.

In my dream, I’m home.

And now she’ll have to fight.

Welcome to Starling House: enter, if you dare.

My Review:

They’ve been telling stories about Starling House and the woman who built it, Eleanor Starling, since Eleanor first came to Eden over a century and a half ago. Some of those stories are even halfway true – but it doesn’t matter because no one in Eden has ever cared about the truth if that truth made them the least bit uncomfortable.

They’ve been telling stories about Opal and her mother Jewel since the day they came to town, too. And even though her mother drowned a decade ago, they’re still telling stories about her too. But mostly, they tell stories about Opal, and most of those are halfway true, too.

One of the stories that no one tells about Opal, because she never reveals truths about herself to anyone at all if she can help it, is that she’s more haunted by Starling House than anyone else in town – because the rest of them just complain about the eyesore, and the bad luck it brings to Eden. While Opal has been dreaming that Starling House was HERS, and has been dreaming those dreams since she was a little girl whose only even somewhat permanent address has been Room 12 at the Garden of Eden Motel since her mom brought her and her little brother Jasper to Eden.

Opal never knew that her mother brought them back to the only home that Jewel had ever known. At least, not until Opal lied, cheated, and inveigled her way into a job at the broken down and dilapidated Starling House. A job that looked to rival Hercules’ task of cleaning the Augean stables.

But Opal doesn’t care. Because Starling House seems to want her there – even if the current Starling, Arthur, claims that he doesn’t. But the house is true because it needs her, and Arthur is lying because of the same damn reason.

While the vultures that have always circled Starling House see Opal’s lies and secrets as a lever they can use to finally pry their way into a place where their dreams will come true.

Someone should have been careful what they wished for, because they’re about to get it.

Escape Rating A-: Starling House sits at the confluence of the River of Dreams and the Stuff of Nightmares, at the four-way stop between the darkest of dark fantasy, outright horror, the angstiest of angsty romance and power corrupts, catty-corner to the Inn of No One Believes the Truths that Women Tell because it’s inconvenient for their wallets, their consciences or even just their privilege.

At first, it’s Opal’s story, a story that is considerably more honest from the confines of her own head than it appears to anyone on the outside, but Opal lies like she breathes – especially to herself. Sometimes she even does as good a job of convincing herself as she does everyone else, but there are always cracks in the facade in her own head. Even if she can’t admit it.

The only love and the only weakness that Opal will admit to is her younger brother Jasper. She will do anything – and everything – to get him safely out of Eden. Because he’s been the only sunlight in her world since their mother drove her car into the river and drowned. And Eden is slowly killing him. Not just his spirit, although probably that too, but literally. Jasper has asthma, they have no health insurance and sometimes not enough for groceries, and the power plant has never met an environmental regulation that they haven’t bribed someone to let them off the hook for. The air is toxic and the whole place is a cancer cluster and Jasper needs to be somewhere else – even if Opal can’t make herself go with him

But Opal also has a weakness for Starling House and the children’s classic, The Underland, that the house’s first owner wrote from within its walls. Starling House captures her dreams, and she can’t resist following those dreams in waking life.

Which is where this story catches her and drags us all down to Underland with her.

Starling House takes all the elements of a gothic romance; the dark and creepy house concealing secret rooms and family secrets, an uber angsty romance between star-crossed would-be lovers both believing they’re not worthy of redemption, adds in myths and monsters from the depths of the imagination, sets it in a hard-scrabble, hard-luck town and then takes the whole story through a metamorphosis when the truth quite literally sets everyone – or at least everyone worthy – free.

Even if more of those people than would ever have imagined at the beginning of this descent into dreams choose to take their hard-won freedom and spend it in that same hard-luck town that might just have won a freedom of its own.

So, even though the angst of the romance sometimes goes way over the top, described in overblown language of desire and denial – at least within the confines of Opal’s head – and if the monsters and the myths turn out to be relics of bad choices and just desserts, the story of Opal, and Arthur and Eleanor descending down into Underland takes the reader along for the wildest of wild rides. Often in the wake of the Wild Hunt itself.

And even if some of both Opal’s and Eleanor’s secrets become obvious to the reader very early on, the journey is still well worth taking with them.

I took this journey in audio, with Natalie Naudus as the most excellent narrator. As a narrator, she seems to specialize in heroines who think that everything is all their fault and that they have to do it all alone, and her voice made me think of her other characters, Emiko Soong in Ebony Gate, Zelda in Last Exit, and Vivian Liao in Empress of Forever. Opal is a fine addition to that illustrious company of women who stand on their own two feet but ultimately get by with a little help from their awesome, kickass friends.

I loved the author’s Fractured Fables, A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended, so I’m looking forward to her next book whenever it appears. I already have Natalie Naudus’ next narration in my TBR/TBL (To Be Read/To Be Listened) pile in The Dead Take the A Train.

Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: A House with Good Bones by T. KingfisherA House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, Gothic, horror, paranormal
Pages: 256
Published by Tor Nightfire on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
"Mom seems off."
Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.

My Review:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all,” or so goes the sampler. Sam Montgomery is experiencing something even weirder and creepier – she’s watching her mother turn into her frightening and downright abusive grandmother – and it’s scaring them both to death.

Sam is worried that her mother is going through early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or some really bizarre stage of delayed grief over her grandmother’s death. Or that she’s just fallen off her trolley. And there’s just a bit of worry on Sam’s part that whatever is going on with her mother is genetic – and that someday it will happen to her.

Although channeling her mother – as she was before this whole thing started – wouldn’t not be all that terrible. Her mother was cool. Her grandmother, on the other hand, was cold as the grave even before she was put into one herself.

But still, Sam is an academic, specifically an archaeoentomologist. Research is what she does. So she does. Research, that is, into what is happening to her mother, when it started, how it’s progressing, and whether or not there is anything at all that Sam can do about it.

What she finds are a whole lot of secrets that really, truly should have remained buried. And that the house her mother inherited from Sam’s grandmother doesn’t just have good bones – it also has very strong teeth.

Escape Rating A-: I never expected to find a story at the intersection of gothic horror with “I am my mother after all” and “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small” – but here is A House with Good Bones and that’s exactly where it sits. With a vulture circling over it.

At first, the horror is the kind that happens all the time. Sam comes home for a long visit when the dig she’s supposed to be on gets postponed, only to find that her mother isn’t quite right. As we reach middle age and later, if our parents are still with us at that point, we all come to realize that they aren’t quite what they used to be as time and possibly illness or tragedy take hold. As we see their mortality and we begin to feel our own.

And that’s what Sam fears most. At first. It’s a very real fear but it isn’t usually the kind that leads straight into gothic horror and then down into the depths of something even creepier. But this time it does. And does it ever!

As Sam digs deeper into the family history, she learns that that history wasn’t nearly as above-reproach or nearly as respectable – as her late Gran Mae made it out to be. There are some real skeletons in the family closet, and more than a few of them are still haunting the house.

Then again, so is Gran Mae.

Sam will have to dig deep, under the house and into her own reserves in order to lay all of the family skeletons to rest. One way or another.

Two things made this story for me. Actually three. One is that I will read anything T. Kingfisher writes, even in genres I don’t read much of – like horror. Second is that the initial horror is so very mundane and real, making it easy to get sucked into the story. Third is the character of Sam Montgomery herself, as in this book she represents the snarky, sarcastic and self-deprecating voice of the author.

Which is where that element of “academic politics” comes into the story. Sam is able to triumph over Gran Mae not because she’s all-knowing or all-powerful or any of those standard heroic tropes. Sam wins the day because she knows herself, in all her faults and all her virtues. Gran Mae’s insidious voice has no place of entry into Sam’s mind or heart because she’s survived so much worse in the bloody (not literally), hallowed (not exactly) halls of academe.

So I read – and loved – A House with Good Bones not for its horror but for Sam’s snarkcasm and the wry smiles and chuckles and occasional guffaws that it engendered. And it was terrific.

Review: The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Skeleton Key by Erin KellyThe Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: Gothic, mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 512
Published by Mobius on January 24, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A reunion leads to tragedy, and the unravelling of dark family secrets . . .
It is the summer of 2021 and Nell has come home at her family's insistence to celebrate an anniversary. Her father, Sir Frank Churcher, is regarded as a cult figure by many. Fifty years ago he wrote The Golden Bones. Part picture book, part treasure hunt, it was a fairy story about Elinore, a murdered woman whose skeleton was scattered all over England. Clues and puzzles in the pages of TheGolden Bones led readers to seven sites were jewels were buried - gold and precious stones, each a different part of a skeleton. One by one, the tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore's pelvis remained hidden. The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous degree. People sold their homes to travel to England and search for Elinore. Marriages broke down as the quest consumed people. A man died. The book made Frank a rich man. And it ruined Nell's life.
But Sir Frank has reunited the Churchers for a very particular reason. The book is being reissued, along with a new treasure hunt and a documentary crew are charting the anniversary. Nell is appalled, and fearful. During the filming, Frank finally reveals the whereabouts of the missing golden bone. And then all hell breaks loose.
From the bestselling author of He Said/She Said and Watch Her Fall, this is a taut, mesmerising novel about a daughter haunted by her father's legacy . . .

My Review:

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,’ is already deceptive – as it turns out are ALL the members of the combined, misaligned, co-dependent Churcher and Lally families.

The saying is deceptive because it sounds so much like Shakespeare – but it isn’t. It’s a quote from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion that is OFTEN attributed to the Bard. The many, many interwoven deceptions of the Churcher and Lally families are a whole lot more intertwined – and that much more difficult to untangle.

The Skeleton Key begins in the summer of 2021, just barely post-pandemic – or at least post the pandemic lockdowns, which adds a whole ‘other layer to pretty much everything. Frank Churcher, now in his 70s and starting to feel his age, has decided to have one last hurrah over the thing that made him famous 50 years ago and is still wrecking the lives of his entire family – even as it made their privileged lifestyle possible.

Frank, now Sir Frank, created an armchair treasure hunt puzzle phenomenon combining creepy, Celtic myths and a touch of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with gorgeous imagery into a book titled The Golden Bones. It wasn’t just a best-seller, it became a worldwide obsession. An obsession that some people still haven’t gotten over.

One of those people is his daughter Nell. Not that she was obsessed with The Golden Bones, but that more than a few of the fanatics who called themselves Bonehunters conflated the woman in the story, Elinor, with Frank’s daughter Eleanor and stalked her. With knives.

The prize of The Golden Bones was a literal set of golden bones which were worth lots of money to motivated – or crazed – Bonehunters. By the time Eleanor was 15, all the bones had been found except one – the pelvic girdle. As obsessions and conspiracy theories went, the idea that Eleanor’s pelvic bone was actually Elinor’s pelvic bone wasn’t that far a stretch. At least not for someone who had lost touch with reality.

Eleanor, who is now reaching middle age, left her family behind with all its messiness – including Frank Churcher’s massive ego. She still sees them, but she’s steadfastly refused any money or help no matter how much she might need it. She owns a narrowboat and lives on England’s waterways with a surrogate daughter she’d adopt if she could. Her living situation can sometimes be a bit dicey but it’s safer away from her family’s mess and the media spotlight that seldom leaves them alone for long.

But the 50th Anniversary celebration of The Golden Bones brings Nell back home – if only for the celebration itself. Frank was supposed to retrieve that last piece of the original skeleton from a tree behind the house. He does uncover a pelvic girdle, but not the tiny jeweled piece that was part of the original prize skeleton. What comes out of that tree hollow is a real human pelvis from a long-dead woman who is about to unravel all the secrets that everyone has been keeping for more than 50 years.

Those revelations and the events that precede them will melt the thin ice of Nell’s precarious safety. She’s never really been safe. She just didn’t know how unstable the web of lies that kept her family afloat truly was.

Escape Rating A: It’s all too easy to comprehend the obsessions of the ‘Bonehunters’ while reading The Skeleton Key, because the complex, twisted nature of the puzzle – and the people at its heart – sinks its teeth into the reader and does not let go until the end.

Two things to start. First, the concept of The Golden Bones may sound vaguely familiar – and that’s intentional on the part of the author and acknowledged at the beginning. There was a real, worldwide craze for armchair treasure hunt books in the 1980s, kicked off by the publication of the massively illustrated puzzle/story book Masquerade by Kit Williams in 1979. Plenty of people got obsessed with Masquerade and the imitations that followed in its wake, and there was a scandal around the solution to the puzzle. Not a murderous scandal, but a scandal nevertheless.

Second thing is that even from the beginning of the story, it’s pretty obvious that there are multiples of things wrong in this semi-combined, utterly co-dependent, joined at the hip double household. It’s tempting to say that the family is a hot mess, but even from the initial glimpses we get into the family dynamic it’s all too clear that a hot mess would actually be a step up. The Churchers and the Lallys are not putting the fun in dysfunctional, but there’s plenty of dysfunction to go around.

We see this family through Nell’s adult eyes as she observes these people she knows, loves and even sometimes hates through a perspective that is not exactly that of an outsider but still has more than a bit of distance. They may not recognize that the family is not healthy, but she knows that living in their midst is not healthy for her and never has been. That her parents named her after the dead woman in their famous story and never even thought that it might inspire the crazies is just the tip of a very ugly iceberg of parents behaving very badly indeed.

Because, as we see the incidents in the past that brought them all to this mixed-up present, the center point of the family is Frank Churcher and his ego – and he’s never cared or taken care of anyone but himself. Everyone else just enables him and lives off the proceeds – whether they see it or not.

And what Frank is, at the center of that massive ego, is rotten to the core. And that his rot has seeped into all of them. The best thing Nell ever did was to walk away. And it’s the best thing she can do now, too. Even if she has to let herself be smeared with just a little bit of that rot to escape from the rest.

While it is easy – and cathartic and filled with oodles of schadenfreude – to get caught up in The Skeleton Key for its story of rich people behaving very badly indeed, what made it fascinating for this reader was the way that the story wove backwards and forwards in time to reveal that everything that existed between all of them was founded on a web of lies that burned away once the truths started coming out – leaving them all blinking in the light of an unforgiving new day.

Just as I sat blinking when I turned the last page, because WOW! what a ride!

Review: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin ChupecoSilver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, Gothic, horror, steampunk, vampires
Series: Reaper #1
Pages: 512
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on September 13, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Full of court intrigue, queer romance, and terrifying monsters—this gothic epic fantasy will appeal to fans of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree and the adult animated series Castlevania.
Remy Pendergast is many things: the only son of the Duke of Valenbonne (though his father might wish otherwise), an elite bounty hunter of rogue vampires, and an outcast among his fellow Reapers. His mother was the subject of gossip even before she eloped with a vampire, giving rise to the rumors that Remy is half-vampire himself. Though the kingdom of Aluria barely tolerates him, Remy’s father has been shaping him into a weapon to fight for the kingdom at any cost.
When a terrifying new breed of vampire is sighted outside of the city, Remy prepares to investigate alone. But then he encounters the shockingly warmhearted vampire heiress Xiaodan Song and her infuriatingly arrogant fiancé, vampire lord Zidan Malekh, who may hold the key to defeating the creatures—though he knows associating with them won’t do his reputation any favors. When he’s offered a spot alongside them to find the truth about the mutating virus Rot that’s plaguing the kingdom, Remy faces a choice.
It’s one he’s certain he’ll regret.
But as the three face dangerous hardships during their journey, Remy develops fond and complicated feelings for the couple. He begins to question what he holds true about vampires, as well as the story behind his own family legacy. As the Rot continues to spread across the kingdom, Remy must decide where his loyalties lie: with his father and the kingdom he’s been trained all his life to defend or the vampires who might just be the death of him.

My Review:

I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into this book, and now that I’ve read it I’m still not entirely sure. Except that it was fantastic. Heart-pounding, fingernail-biting, stay up until 3 in the morning to finish fantastic.

But the question about whether this is fantasy or horror still feels a bit up in the air.

Let me explain…

Remy Pendergast is a Reaper. In this world that means vampire hunter. But Remy only hunts so-called “rogue” vampires – ones who are causing mischief in human-controlled countries like Aluria. Vampires also have fiefdoms of their own where the rules are undoubtedly different.

Where Remy wouldn’t exactly be welcome because he’s famous for hunting their kind.

Not that Remy is exactly welcome in his own country, either. And not because he’s a Reaper. There are plenty of Reapers in high positions in Aluria’s government. In fact, his father used to be one of them.

But his father, who is a cantankerous old bastard at the best of times – of which he has damn few – is also in the midst of a lifelong feud with the head of the Reaper’s Guild – who also happens to be the Royal Chancellor. A man who is just as big a bastard as Remy’s father, and who is taking his feud out on the son now that the father has publicly retired.

And that’s just the tip of the really massive and ugly iceberg of why Remy is persona non grata in his own country – unless they need something killed and everyone else is too scared or too prissy to get their hands dirty.

That’s where the zombies come in. Well, not really and not exactly zombies. But sorta/kinda and close enough.

Someone is creating monsters that at first seem to be super-duper enhanced vampires. But they’re not. They’re mindless husks who regenerate at will and seem to be impossible to kill. Upon closer scientific study (this world is steampunk-ish so there’s plenty of mad science at least of the medical variety) it’s revealed that these mindless husks were never vampires – and that vampires are immune to the infection that creates them.

Lord Malekh and Lady Song, leaders of the Third and Fourth vampire Courts, have come to Aluria to ally with its Queen in order to combat what they call “The Rot” and whoever is behind that threat.

They need a human liaison. They both want Remy (in more ways than one) – who isn’t at all sure what he wants except to get out of Aluria for a while. The political temperature is getting way too hot for him and his father’s demands are becoming even more outrageous than they always have been.

And he’s tempted. Even though becoming a vampire’s familiar is against the law. Even though he’s fought vampires all his life. Even though a vampire killed his mother and he was born from her corpse.

Even though Malekh and Song are clearly in love and engaged to marry each other. Remy can’t understand why either of them wants him when no one else has ever wanted to do anything except use him for their own purposes.

He has a chance at having the kind of happiness that he never expected to even get a glimpse of. And he’s so, so certain that someone will take it away from him – unless he does it to himself first.

Escape Rating A+: Clearly, the setup for this is ginormous. It’s also endlessly fascinating. I got stuck into this and absolutely could not get out until I finished the last page at about 3 AM. It was just that good.

To the point where I’ll probably be squeeing uncontrollably more than reviewing per se. But I did love it so, so hard.

While the blurbs reference the anime series (and videogame) Castlevania, I think that’s because of the vampires, the politics and the monsters. I haven’t played or watched that so it’s not where my mind went. Instead, I kept seeing Remy as a younger, less confident Geralt of Rivia, in a world where hunting magical creatures gone rogue is needed while the people who do it are reviled. I would call it a bit of a coming-of-age story for The Witcher but I’m not sure Remy is fully adulting even by the end of the story – although he’s finally getting there.

Where I started with this review was that I still wasn’t sure whether the book was horror or fantasy. It was presented to me as horror and the scientific experimentation with zombie-like monsters who roam the countryside and infect others definitely has that vibe. There’s even a Doctor Frankenstein who is entirely too proud of his work even if he doesn’t use electricity to achieve his goals.

And then there’s the vampires, both the rogue vampires and the sexy vampire nobility. Which pushes the whole thing towards the paranormal which is an offshoot of horror.

But the form of the story reads like a big, sprawling epic fantasy. The world is huge and vastly complicated. The political agendas have political agendas and everyone is trying to knife everyone else in the back. The grudges seem to last for centuries – and not just among the vampires who have the excuse of living that long.

Basically, the politics behind everything are beyond Byzantine – as much as that is still an understatement if I ever heard one.

All of that makes the story feel epic in scope in a way that horror seldom is. And most of what is truly horrible in this story isn’t the monsters. It’s all the endless betrayals. It feels like the foundations of Remy’s world get pulled out from under him over and over as he keeps learning that under the corruption of everything if you scrape it away there’s yet another layer of, you guessed it, rot and corruption. Nothing he thinks he knows turns out to have any bearing on any truth.

That the triad relationship between Malekh, Song and Remy becomes both his only source of solace and a never-ending well of betrayal AT THE SAME TIME is just the icing on what is an utterly decadently delicious devil’s food cake of a story.

Whether it’s horror or fantasy or gothic or all of the above it’s riveting and downright compelling every step of the way. But whatever genre it falls into, I’m absolutely thrilled that the story isn’t over. Silver Under Nightfall is the first book in a projected duology, so there’s more dark, deadly and decadent delights to come!

Review: A Lullaby for Witches by Hester Fox

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: A Lullaby for Witches by Hester FoxA Lullaby for Witches by Hester Fox
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fiction, paranormal
Pages: 320
Published by Graydon House on February 1, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


Two women. A history of witchcraft. And a deep-rooted female power that sings across the centuries.

Once there was a young woman from a well-to-do New England family who never quite fit with the drawing rooms and parlors of her kin.
Called instead to the tangled woods and wild cliffs surrounding her family’s estate, Margaret Harlowe grew both stranger and more beautiful as she cultivated her uncanny power. Soon, whispers of “witch” dogged her footsteps, and Margaret’s power began to wind itself with the tendrils of something darker.
One hundred and fifty years later, Augusta Podos takes a dream job at Harlowe House, the historic home of a wealthy New England family that has been turned into a small museum in Tynemouth, Massachusetts. When Augusta stumbles across an oblique reference to a daughter of the Harlowes who has nearly been expunged from the historical record, the mystery is too intriguing to ignore.
But as she digs deeper, something sinister unfurls from its sleep, a dark power that binds one woman to the other across lines of blood and time. If Augusta can’t resist its allure, everything she knows and loves—including her very life—could be lost forever.

My Review:

A Lullaby for Witches is a time slip story whose 21st century anchor is a woman who time slips for a living. Or at least that’s what she set out to do when she graduated college – and probably a master’s program – with a degree in museum and archival studies.

As the story begins, Augusta Podos is working in her field – sorta/kinda – in a dead end job as a tour guide and “interpreter” at the historical Salem, Massachusetts jail. She spends entirely too much of her work time dealing with disgruntled tourists who neglected to read the brochure and are unhappy that the infamous Salem witches were never housed in that jail – BECAUSE THE JAIL WAS BUILT MORE THAN A CENTURY AFTER THE WITCH TRIALS!

She’s also in a dead end relationship with a guy who may be financially stable – but is also emotionally unavailable and manipulative. Someone who has spent the four years of their relationship isolating Augusta from her friends, and who Augusta has spent the same four years making excuses for – over and over and over.

The “dream” job at Harlowe House – an amazing well funded private house museum – knocks Augusta out of her rut in more ways than one. She suddenly has a job she loves, with people who appreciate her, she makes enough money and has enough benefits that she can afford to strike out on her own if she can muster up the fortitude AND she has the chance to stretch her professional wings and use all of her skills and talents.

Augusta is also more than a bit obsessed by the resident ghost of Harlowe House, the mysterious and possibly even apocryphal Margaret Harlowe. Who may have lived a couple of centuries AFTER the witch trials, but who was still, most definitely, a witch.

A witch who has found in Augusta a woman she can use. Augusta believes that Margaret just wants to get her story finally told. Margaret, however, plans to use Augusta to finally get for herself that dish that is best served cold. In Margaret’s case, as cold as the grave.

Escape Rating B: I wanted to start out by repeating the old quote about the more things change, the more they remain the same, but that’s not quite right. And it’s not that history repeats, because that’s not exactly what’s happening here either.

A Lullaby for Witches feels like it’s a story about blame. Or shame, or responsibility, or all of the above. Augusta Podos, the contemporary heroine of this witch’s brew, is a woman who always takes the blame for everything that goes wrong – whether she’s at fault or not. Usually not. She spends her mental energy making excuses for everyone around her and making herself smaller at every turn.

Margaret Harlowe, who anchors the 19th century parts of this hidden history, is Augusta’s opposite. Margaret always was a woman who took up as much space, with expansive gestures, outrageous behavior and mysterious doings, as possible. Also, Margaret never accepts the blame or the responsibility for anything that happens around her, not even – or perhaps especially not – the trouble that she causes and is absolutely responsible for.

To the point where her need for revenge against those she believes have wronged her – no matter how much she may have wronged them first or equally or in return – keeps her spirit from finding rest. Margaret has spent the century and a half of her “afterlife” waiting for a woman of her bloodline to let her live again.

Whether that woman is willing or not.

So, on one side of this story, we watch Augusta finally break out of her self-imposed imprisonment and start to take charge of her own life. And on the other side (pun intended) we see the past from Margaret’s self-aggrandizing and self-justifying perspective – and we observe her start moving Augusta like a pawn on her own personal chessboard.

This ends up being kind of a mixed feelings review. I appreciated Augusta’s journey – but her relationships with her manipulative, isolating ex hit a bit too close to home. I loved her raptures about her new job at Harlowe House, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much fantasy was involved in the creation of a small museum like that being THAT well funded. (One of my best friends is an archivist and I think she’d be laughing a lot at the setup.)

On my third hand, I enjoyed, as I generally do, the portrayal of the research and digging involved with Augusta’s search for history, and I loved the idea of showcasing the forgotten histories of the women of Harlowe.

On my fourth hand – I think I’m co-opting Augusta’s and Margaret’s hands at this point – I didn’t get into Margaret’s story at all. She’s vain, she’s shallow, she’s self-serving to the max. Admittedly, she’s also just barely 20 so her out-of-line-ness isn’t really so far out-of-line. But I found her perspective to be a bit one-note. That meant that I didn’t empathize with her at all, because when it comes to empathy there’s almost no there there.

So the story didn’t feel like it was so much about female power as it was about one woman, Augusta, finding a way to climb out of one rut after another – including one that reached out to her from the shadowy past. But I liked and felt for Augusta, so that worked out alright for this reader.