Rhiannon

I was curious to see how this anthology would land with me since I'm not now, nor have I ever wanted to be, a mom (and am now even more reassured by my life's choices thanks to several traumatizing scenes in this book.)

I think it's a testament to the great storytelling that a good percentage of the stories in this collection were deeply, horrifyingly disturbing (and gruesomely bloody!) and go far beyond the thematic premise of childbirth and should be appealing to all fans of horror and dark fiction.

Particular standouts for me were:
Nuno Gonçalves – Dystocia (a single page of a story that was something I'd never even considered and was so deeply unsettling)
Deborah Coldiron – The Animus of Agnes Grishom (a solid commentary on the hypocrisy of society)
Patricia Lameida – There Was a Number Seven (a moving tale of the cycle of abuse)
Autumn Weese – Don't Say a Word (a shocking ending that I didn't see coming)
Ruth Anna Evans – A Piece of My Heart (the ultimate parental sacrifice!)
Jacy Morris – Mother Earth and the Terrestrial Birth (a darkly humorous ecological birth and revenge story all wrapped up in a short, sharp little tale)

A solid collection!

Naturally, I'm a sucker for anything rabbit related in cover or title (is that shallow?) and so I'm guaranteed to give it a shot.

And this had such an inviting premise – a southern gothic horror where a young college student returns to his small-town North Carolina home to look further into the mysterious death of his (long-dead) mother after he starts receiving cryptic messages from an unknown source. Hints of folk witchcraft and mysterious, otherworldly spaces are alluded to.

Although the writing itself was decent, I felt the coherence and pacing were purposeless and glacial. I was struggling to find the ‘mystery' to this story, some kind of real plot tension besides the obnoxious and selfish behaviour of the MC, but nothing noteworthy happened until about the 60% mark. Up until that point I was even questioning its placement as a horror novel – it seemed more a meandering drama-filled narrative of the small town lives of characters that just weren't that interesting or engaging. I honestly didn't like a single character in this story – they were all boring, flat and/or incredibly irritating. The ‘mystery language' which I suppose is there to create... well... some mystery, seemingly had no logic or effective purpose at all. The Night House could have been so much more of a central character, as what was there was intriguing: a bit of ‘liminal space' creepy horror to it, but again it felt glanced over and left wanting and unfinished.

I think this needed more focus with a clearer objective, with less unnecessary info-dump material and more character development. I don't have a problem reading characters I don't like, or are ambiguously moral, but I need them to be interesting enough to keep reading about, or a plot that's truly engaging. Unfortunately, this one didn't work for me.

My thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily. All opinions are my own.

Mixed feelings on this upcoming new release (expected Oct 2025). I enjoyed the Irish folk horror elements and the story itself, but I could not stand the main character. I get it, she has this “mysterious pelvic pain” that has, unfortunately, come to define her very existence, but the constant repetition of it, in nearly every other paragraph, was exhausting. It overshadows everything else in the story.

And yeah, I know folks are gonna say I'm heartless (because the author has gone through something like this and I guess I should have more empathy but I just can't) and probably tell me I'm missing the point or something (but look! she eventually overcomes it all!!) but it kept me from enjoying the actual story.

It seems the MC has exactly three elements to her entire personality: pelvic pain, crush on her best friend, mother trauma.

That's it. There's a great deal of feeling sorry for oneself, and a little bit of dark humour that just wasn't enough to overcome the relentless “I need to curl up in a ball again, mid-morning, because - you guessed it - pain!”

I give it a 2/5 for the folk horror aspects and the for the plot being ok. But this was just not for me.

My thanks to NetGalley and Creature Publishing for the ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

A southern gothic horror novel full of interesting, mysterious characters, beautiful settings, and the singularly fascinating premise of grave birds - a bird that is physically bound to the earth by an invisible tether holding them here as a representative of a soul with unfinished business.

Our main character, Hollis, drowned and was revived when she was eleven and since then she can see grave birds. It's a haunting and beautiful concept and one that plagues her as the birds cannot be freed until she's understood what their message is. (And this whole wonderfully, gorgeously tragic idea now has me obsessing about the nature of the birds. Different species appear for different people, there's no one type: cardinal, sparrow, chickadee, etc. So I keep wondering if the species is geographically specific, or more a representation of the person's personality? Would you get a shima enaga or a kakapo in South Carolina...? How about a penguin?

I don’t know what it is with Irish folk horror, or if I am now just simply obsessed with Sharpson's writing... I first discovered him just over a year ago with his second novel 𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙘𝙠 𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙘𝙠, 𝙊𝙥𝙚𝙣 𝙒𝙞𝙙𝙚 a horror novel with Irish folk underpinnings that I really enjoyed (I have his first which I haven't read yet, and looks very different, more scifi dystopian, which I also love so I need to get to that one soon.)

With The Burial Tide, he draws you into a mystery filled with terrifying creatures, a tiny, remote island community filled with secrets and a horrifying past, and the strange woman named Mara, who breaks her way out of a coffin during a storm after waking up with no memory of who she is. She receives an oddly reticent welcome into the community, with suspicion and some rather culty behaviour on the part of the locals.

I had (rightly) suspected that the story would centre around one of my favourite myths (hint: look at the cover) but I was so curious to see where Sharpson would take the story after reading his previous book and I was not disappointed! He weaves a modern day tale of mystery, isolation, and absolute terror as Mara struggles to piece together who she is, where she came from and why she looks just like a woman in a 100 year old picture…

And oh yeah… there’s that whole thing about why can’t she go into water…

I was absolutely enthralled with this novel. I need more Sharpson in my life!

Not a bad memoir. There were some chuckle-worthy moments but I don't think I'm a fan of her overall writing style. It often felt strained and over-wrought. I kept wanting to tell her to stop yelling and calm down.

But her family seems like a pretty wild and unique one, so her upbringing was definitely entertaining.

A new fungal-horror novel set in the Clackamas-Mount Hood area. The opening paragraphs of this rather busy horror story start out with great promise and some beautifully esoteric and dark prose setting up the location of the dark, saturated green forests where the local wildlife is behaving rather peculiarly, an exotic Strangeness is creeping, people keep disappearing into the woods and/or getting zombified, and there may be a serial killer at large...

There's a lot happening here with all that and I think it's all maybe too much. I could have done without the serial killer subplot and would have probably enjoyed this more if it had just stuck to the mysterious spreading corruption. There is some really beautiful writing, but when the story moves to the (rather large) group of friends and their various exploits I kinda got bored. I didn't really connect with any of the (human) characters – they just weren't that interesting to me.

There's a lot of movement in the plot so this would probably appeal to those looking for more of a straightforward action-y horror. Not a bad story, it just didn't really grab a strong hold of me.

My thanks to Netgalley and TOR Nightfire for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

1.5/5⭐, reluctantly rounded up

This read like bad teenage fan fic doing some misguided mashup of Wuthering Heights and Alice in Wonderland and Natural Born Killers. Nothing extraordinary about the book at all, it's rather clunky and often cringey writing in some weird attempt to be erotic revenge murder after two young 20-somethings, Heathan/Rabbit and Ellis/Dolly are reunited after being split up in their early childhood by their adult abusers.

Heathan's determination to have revenge on those that used and abused them as children means he's gonna school “his Dolly” (oof, eyeroll) how to kill and revel in blood and death and show her how to teach her former abusers a lesson for what they did to her as a 10-year-old girl. Of course, he just continues to infantilize and objectify Ellis (dressing her up as Alice in Wonderland with a knife and a blue gun to match her outfit) as his personal plaything and he's clearly not even remotely self aware to notice that he's just doing the same thing as those he's after...

As the two reunite they begin to cut a bloody swath across the south in their search for their abusers. The ‘horror' is meh, nowhere near extreme (if that's what it was going for.) It's too bad because I think if this had been better written it could have become a proper splatterpunk novel.

This short extreme-lite horror story wasn't as extreme as I expected. It has a whiff of McCluskey's superior Zola to it, but on a smaller, less developed scale. The story premise was alright – a young boy develops into an abhorrent ‘incel' teenager and takes his frustrations out on his younger sister and mother, culminating in a bloody, gruesome showdown.

Unfortunately, I found the writing problematic. I'm not sure if it's that the author is Dutch and maybe their English isn't great, if it's maybe a translation issue or just not edited properly, but the writing was clunky and very distracting. In some cases a single sentence would change tense three times, and this happened quite frequently throughout the short story.

I know I would have appreciated the overall story much more if not for that, but it was just too awkward for me to really enjoy it.

Charlotte Mallory has it all - fame, fortune and the most important thing of all - the love of her precious son, Malachi. What Charlotte did for this ‘perfect life' will haunt her forever, and the ramifications, as bad as they are now, may prove to be earth-shattering.

This hooked me right from the jump and didn't stop until the explosive finale. Ashley crafts a grisly tale here of the lengths one woman will go to for the perfect life and perfect love, that morphs into horror of epic proportions. And despite the most heinous acts, Ashley skillfully keeps the characters sympathetic and real, even as you feel their ultimate doom approaching. And Ashley pulls no punches.

The plot's momentum was near perfect, the story's structure fashioned to draw you in, just so, with the unfolding mystery. The story, structure, characters and pacing seamlessly meld into an unforgettable horror novel with a mother's love at its core.

My thanks to the author, John Ashley, for an ARC of this novel.

I won’t review the plot here as the book description does a good job of that, so just what did and didn’t work for me:

Pros: the set up and a strong first half, the body horror via the mycelium aspect, and the very obvious nod to Area X. The characters, some with intriguing haunted pasts, and their relationships with each other were (mostly) well done and interesting although I found the mysterious Brynn weirdly unlikeable and aggravating, even later as we get more of her backstory in the latter half of the book.

Cons: the second half was frustrating and chaotic as everything gets thrown in: in addition to mycelium body horror (which was plenty interesting for me as a horror trope and was carrying the story quite effectively) it throws in possible supernatural ghosty bits, murder, spirits that are fungi (or vice versa), unreliable narrators (are they crazy or did they really experience ‘all that’?), rabid scientists who will stop at nothing to observe the weird phenomena, including science experiments à la Resident Evil (it even has an Umbrella Corp secret ‘Nest’ in the woods that has experienced ‘containment breach’) but how those elements tie into the mycelium component gets a bit hazy… did Brynn summon it (aka, her ‘muse’) or did the ‘institute’ do that decades ago? It seemed like the author was tossing in a bunch of horror elements with tenuous links to the actual plot and really, I was starting to roll my eyes an awful lot.

The author’s writing was compelling in the creepy atmosphere depictions and some complex characterizations, and I enjoyed the initial mystery. I ultimately felt disappointed with the back half of the story and what felt like a free-for-all followed by an easy let down in the final chapter.

My thanks to NetGalley and Clash Books for the ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily; all opinions are my own.