An Education in Malice - ST Gibson

42%

23.03.26

An education in overwrought, badly paced, over-adjectification. Yet another book very loosely based on Carmilla (in the sense of there being some vampires, girls in love and a character called Carmilla) but it didn't seem to make any particular point. Although if I'd drunk a shot of blood every time I read the word 'delicate', I'd be immortal by now.

They Own the Night - Amy McCaw

49%

06.11.25

This inexplicably has an almost-perfect Amazon score but I found it dull, confusing and poorly structured. With updates like this, no longer Dracula won't die.

Grave Birds - Dana Elmendorf

43%

19.10.25

There was an atmospheric Southern Gothic thriller fighting to free itself from this poorly paced, poorly edited book. I'm all for genre fluidity but it didn't know what it was (Romance? Apocalyptic horror? Murder mystery? Not enough of any of those) and so ended up as an unfocused muddle.

Carmilla - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

52%

01.10.25

Predating (ha!) Dracula by 25 years, this is celebrated as the original queer vampire story. But that's misleading - the lesbian implications seem mainly a metaphor for power imbalance and a blunt condemnation of 'unnatural' behaviour. The story, atmospheric as it was, didn't make much sense and rushed the ending.

Scuttler's Cove - David Barnett

64%

27.08.25

Hugely clichéd, hugely predictable and yet somehow hugely entertaining. I must like a folk horror that's leavened with humour - the light tone at times seemed to battle with the dark atmosphere but that's probably what made it so engaging, despite the uneven pacing.

(Interestingly, this very different but in some ways quite similar book is by the same author, particularly in terms of portraying the female experience.)

Black Sheep - Rachel Harrison

60%

08.12.24

If you confuse this with the Georgette Heyer novel of the same name, you'll get quite a shock. I'm not generally a horror fan but I enjoyed the way this ramped up from 'disaffected daughter reluctantly returns home' to full-on blood sacrifices before the fires of Hell. The wry tone was well judged and the structure engaging, but what's with the annoying trend for omitting conjunctions and gerunds? ('Julia read the sentence, shouted at her Kindle in frustration. She didn't like it, took her out of immersion.')
 

The Gathering - C J Tudor

68%

03.10.24

Despite the sometimes clunky phrasing, despite having too many characters, despite the confusing plot with an ending that had me asking, "OK, but what about...?", despite not being a fan of gory horror, despite the moral messaging that was as subtle as, well, a vampire, I kind of loved this. The tone, the pacing, the ethical grey areas, the setting and above all the clever worldbuilding all had me caught up in this alternative - yet maybe not so alternative after all - universe.

House of Hollow - Krystal Sutherland

 44%

21.04.24

Unusual, intriguing, unflinching, atmospheric, carefully plotted... and totally ruined by the (authorial? editorial?) decision for a British narrator, living in London, to use American English. And it wasn't just the extensive US vocabulary - there were references to graduating high school, to teachers 'failing' a student in a subject and to paying health insurance. Why? Again and again, it jarringly brought me out of the story's world. Surely American readers, brought up on Harry Potter, can cope with British English. Or just set it in America - it wouldn't have mattered much to the story. And the author is actually Australian. It made me so angry that I've deducted 20 points from the score it would otherwise have had. That'll teach 'em!

Ordinary Monsters - JM Miro

 53%

04.03.24

On the one hand, this was astonishingly well written, each sentence carefully crafted for the perfect balance of poetry and rhythm. That's what most of my points are for. On the other hand, it was astonishingly badly paced - even the action sequences were interminable and ultimately pointless. Clocking up nearly 700 pages, it was so boring and humour-free that I had to force myself to get past the confusing plot, two-dimensional characters, British people speaking like Americans (again!) and clichéd worldbuilding that's been done many times before.

The Woman in Black - Susan Hill

 64%

28.10.23

This modern classic was spectacularly (spectre-cularly?) well written on a line level, a model for using different techniques to create atmosphere, which explains its presence on Eng Lit reading lists. But the pace and the story itself didn't match that poetry. It wasn't particularly scary and only slightly creepy. And it never was clear why the woman wanted to get her revenge on random people. She just did. I suppose ghosts don't need to explain themselves.

Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 51%

06.08.23

I've struggled with Moreno-Garcia's style before - it feels awkwardly translated even though it was originally written in English. This story was also awkward - "walk through rooms, hallucinate, argue, repeat" with a final few chapters that didn't make sense. Not at all creepy, anyway, and, the colonial point was lost as the baddies could have been any nationality, as long as they were outsiders.

Small Angels - Lauren Owen

 

62%

31.03.23

This could have been cringingly cliched. It was slow, so slow - creating more impatience than psychological tension - and the characters didn't behave like real people, and the introspection about storytelling was rather too meta, but the strong world building, clear sense of place and the fact that there was never any question that supernatural forces were at work made it feel like a surprisingly fresh take on gothic / horror / folklore.

Creeping Jenny - Jeff Noon

70%

09.03.21

This was terrifically well written, entertainingly inventive and very, very weird. It's probably one of those 'love it or hate it books' - it is, after all, a silly satire on folk horror - but, as outrageous speculative fiction goes, I'm definitely inclining towards the love it.

The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell

60%
27.06.18

When I picked this up in Waterstones, three separate booksellers swooped down to convince me of its brilliance. Well, as derivative Gothic horror goes, it's pretty accomplished at ratcheting up the inevitable doom. But the characters, like the sinister 'companions' of the title, are unlikable and two-dimensional, and so much is thrown at the plot that it becomes more creaky than creepy.

The Shining - Stephen King

Didn't finish

Somehow I've got through my reading career without encountering any Stephen King. And this novel has moments of brilliance, both in terms of the quality of the writing and the psychological disquiet. But it was so hard-going that I forced myself to read it in small batches until I realised I really didn't have to. Will I read more King? Hmm, maybe, but there are many other writers I'd rather try first.

The Girl With All the Gifts - MR Carey

61%
18.10.16

As derivative zombie thrillers go, this was quite a page turner, at least at first. The second half sagged a little with its own self-importance.

The Loney - Andrew Michael Hurley

55%
04.06.16

With great hype comes great disappointment and this follows that well-trodden path (across the abandoned beaches and into the twisted local community, fanned with the poisoned winds of misplaced religious fervour). No discernible terror, very little drama and, of course, a frustratingly vague resolution. Hmm. Did I miss something?

Great cover, though.

The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

71%
08.02.14

An unflinching dystopian vision of violence, squalor and moral bankruptcy, you say. The narrator subjected to unrelenting pain and disappointment, you say. Hang on a mo while I look for the barrel with the laughs in it. It's the sheer quality of the writing that buoys the story along, carefully measured and complex. At its heart, it's a meditation on choice and its consequences. Well, it's certainly worth choosing to read it.

A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore

61%
19.06.13

Moore is big on laugh-out-loud humour and big on quirky characters and big on confusing, poorly explained plots that suddenly jump in time and end abruptly.

Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch

67%
06.05.13

Gory supernatural detective thrillers aren't my usual read of choice, but I kept coming across this and it intrigued me. And indeed it is a rollicking good story, gritty yet funny, and set in a strangely plausible London of mysterious, compelling characters that aren't quite human. But the plot does get a bit tangled in on itself and the ending seems to have been confusingly rewritten to anticipate a sequel.