protean depravity

Slasher fans, rejoice! After a vampire and a ghost novel, the Swedish Stephen King is back with a slasher!  Nine co-workers on a company outing arrive at the idyllic lakeside guesthouse Kolarsjöns Stugby in rural Sweden. They have been working on a project to launch a shopping mall in this remote place for which the land has been taken from local farmers, agreements have been made with shop owners and to build an Ikea around the corner in order to turn the place into a capitalist heaven overlooking the natural beauty. Despite the blatant tensions and conflicting interests within the group, they are trying their best to literally survive this trip and get on with their lives. But there are other tensions brewing too and one of them will result in a proper killing spree – where should they run to, where should they hide? And will they be able to set aside their quarrels in order to pull through together or will they even contribute to the killings?

Honestly, I am a little tired of reading North American horror all the time, which is, not always but usually, formulaic and predictable. So the Otherland Bookshop supports me in my quest of finding exciting horror from all over the world and gave me a bunch of translated horror review copies and Que nadie duerma - Let No One Sleep by Spanish author Juan José Millás is one of them.

I have a much better reading month behind me, luckily, so this time the short reviews won't be as grumpy and peppery as my last ones. Having read really all over the place these last few weeks, the reviews are a bit mixed too in terms of genre but the emphasis is, as always, on a bunch of horror books, mostly because all the Halloween-related reading challenges I took part in. But I actually read an unusual amount of good thrillers and crime novels too and I'll be reviewing them separately because they're so many. Hope you're enjoying the cooler reading weather!

Death can't be like life. Then it wouldn't be death, would it? As one of the few horror publishing houses that can look beyond their own local backyards, Valancourt did the worldwide horror community a great service by issuing Hungarian author and screenwriter Attila Veres' English debut short story collection, The Black Maybe: Liminal Stories . So, I want to give them a huge thank you to begin with. Where to start with this one? Maybe at the end, the very end. The moment I read the last page and closed the book. I was overwhelmed, appalled, fascinated and stirred inside, all in a good way, by the ten stories I had just read from an author who has the powerful talent to suck and tie in his readers immediately, no time lost. I'm saying this as a person who usually needs some time to warm up to new stories. I get attached to characters and when I go through an intense experience with them, as it is the case in a short story, I feel like it is hard to just quickly set tha...

Something terrible happened! I had already finished this perfectly fine article, with pictures and all, a few weeks ago but during the final touches I accidentally and irreversibly deleted it... After a few hundred moments of looking at the white page in shock and horror I decided to give it a rest for a while. Now I think enough time has passed for me to recover sufficiently to let it go and start anew. Here goes!

There are times in life when every read basically sucks... Putting together this selection, I realized what a bad reading month (or two) I had and it is just such a chore to write reviews for books that are meh or even worse. In the hope to better motivate myself to finally write down those thoughts, I decided to arrange them starting with the one I least liked and ending with the month's favorite. I don't know what I was thinking because I ended up finishing the favorites quickly and putting off reviews for the bad ones anyway. But don't be discouraged, who knows, maybe you can find more joy in them if you try! Here goes!