Reviews and Comments

I like Cassandra Khaw. Their other book I read was a little bit fantasy in terms of world-building but this one gives us characters inhabiting the same world we do. It's an intensely visual book, which is often an approach I struggle to connect with, but it this case it really worked for me. The visuals are all about the mansion, its contents and the motifs on its surfaces. The horror is folkloric, the story pretty simple but played out effectively. Khaw writes so well, poetic and deliberate. I'd love to read a full length novel of theirs at some point.

SGJ wrote I Was A Teenage Slasher while he was supposed to be writing a different book. So it has no right to be this good. Like his other books, the characters jump out of the pages. It's a well executed concept, it's funny and it's sad.

I really enjoyed the first half or so for the interesting backdrop of the Cultural Revolution as told by a Chinese author and the lively dialogue and general good humour. Later on, however, so much of it is recounted rather than played out through the characters which was disappointing and felt like lazy storytelling. I wasn't super interested in the long departures into physics, but that's down to taste more than anything. I'd still recommend this, though.

Well that didn't take long

Oh dang, there I go giving another book five stars. But this was so good! Even when part way through I realised this could pass as magical realism, and I don't like magical realism!

Monstrilio weirdly reminds me most of a Paul Auster family drama, despite all the blood, guts, fur and fangs. Every character is so well realised yet I didn't notice when this happened. The structure, where each act is told through a different character, kept the story fresh and continually building. I was expecting a different ending, I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers. I just really loved this. I've run out of books again.

I need to finish this over the weekend or I suspect I'm going to be ugly-crying on my commute next week

Honestly this is an absolute banger of a book and maybe my favourite horror novel. It's tense, scary, multifaceted, funny, shocking and entertaining. I haven't actually seen the movie before, quite an omission on my part but I'm really glad I read this book first - I didn't see the ending coming.

That didn't take long

This is a very incremental psychological horror about our propensity to absorb and assimilate the not-quite-right in ways that aren't good for us. It's quite brilliantly done as sort of a haunted house story, but also a story about two people and their relationship. I really loved it.

My main worry when I started this book was that it wouldn't do much but cover the well-trodden ground of US race politics. That worry was founded, but at the same time this is such a we'll-executed book it doesn't really matter. It was evident early on what was going to happen, save a few minor plot twists. So it was a bit predictable, but also meant that the book was very tense all the way through - I was terrified of reading the climax. At the time I was going through a difficult period in real life so I avoided reading more than a little bit at a time. The scares in this book aren't supernatural. They're real and they're pretty sadistic too. I know I'm not selling this book but it was good - the characters, even, especially the minor ones, were well-written and the world fully realised.

I was completely taken by the Ikea catalogue parody design of Horrorstör and that counted for a lot. I enjoyed this a lot although once the shit hit the fan it seemed a bit rushed. Grady Hendrix can be very scary but in this case didn't quite make it. The ending however did not cop out. I recommend this if you're looking for something light and fun in between horror reads.