Rhiannon

Paul did such a fantastic job of setting up the creepy haunted house setting (which he excels at) with its mysterious murderous past, which then takes off into a fast and furious tale with youtubers Wes and Andrea as they (foolishly) attempt to document the last tour at ‘one of the most haunted locations in Oklahoma” that gave me genuine creeps. Paul always knows how to set a scene, and he managed to pack a lot of dread into a small space for this one.

Estranged brothers Nate and Jake are still haunted by the night that turned their childhood into a life of overwhelming guilt and grief. The damage done to them has preyed upon their psyches into adulthood and the reverberations have become unavoidable. Now in their late 20s they must confront the horror of their nightmare before it destroys them, facing one of the creepiest, haunted places I’ve experienced.

Blaine’s newest offering has some serious parental trauma issues – his characters are consistently dealing with parental loss of some kind (death, abandonment, abuse) and honestly, I’m really starting to worry about Blaine. He handles these horrors with a finesse and refined elegance that has become his signature – he hides his horror in beauty and stillness that creeps into your subconscious and takes root.

Reading this book late into the night I found myself jumping at every little bump and sigh in my old house (of course it’s been very stormy in my part of the world), getting up several times to repeatedly ‘check on things’ and reassure myself. This has been a dark, wintery read that has left me unsettled in all the right ways.

My thanks to the author for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

The vinyl revival makes a roaring, blood-soaked comeback! I had Motorhead's ‘Ace of Spades' and Ministry's ‘Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste' blasting in my head for the duration of this lightning fast read. The warehouse is dripping blood and viscera from the rafters and pooling on the floor by the end with no quarter given.

The violence is utterly gory and wickedly creative. Don't go into this looking for high-minded subtext – although... there is a bit of an inferred lesson in unsafe work practices coming back to bite company execs and their hapless employees. And maybe a subtle jibe at the absurdities of some music industry personalities (oh DJ CowThey... you're just a copy of a copy of edgy DJ culture... of course you were doomed!)

I had an absolute blast with this ear-shattering, cacophonous musical slasher. (Oh, and Paul Avery Tindol, is there some former workplace trauma you're working out here? 😆)

My thanks to the author for the ARC!

This ‘are-they-really-out-there-no-they're-here (maybe)' kind of X-files horror story was absolutely compelling right from the start and didn't let up. Written in a kind of ‘dossier' format (podcasts, damaged journals, news articles) paired with narrative, the format keeps you fully engaged and entirely guessing. The plot seems like a good old fashioned x-files episode but thoroughly modernized.

Mutilated cattle are being found in very disparate places in east Texas, precisely defaced and defiled. A child goes missing, comes back, goes missing again. Perfectly normal people suddenly erupt into the most violent behaviour... Podcasters theorize and the MiB are creeping on the periphery... all of these pieces perfectly dovetail into a cohesive whole.

And just when you think the wild ride is really “out there” you dig a bit and find out that it's based on actual, real events from 2023.

Tindol does such a good job of bringing fictional characters to authentic life that it's easy to believe they are ALL real people. He skillfully blurs the lines between fiction and actual reported events that I was absolutely thrilled to be so completely unsure (and therefore so Very Very Uneasy) and thoroughly beguiled by what I was reading.

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!

A fast-paced horror-thriller that starts as a childhood abduction trauma story but evolves into a complex tale with an unreliable, but very likable, narrator, Josh, who may have had far more (possibly nefarious) involvement in his own childhood abduction that he can't seem to remember. There's a mysterious cult-y group of rich folks, buried bodies, a serial murderer...

...and maybe something even worse...

There definitely seems to be some real-life conspiracy theory inspiration to some of the story – I'm thinking of all the stuff that's been permeating the online world the last ten years – with rich cabalistic satanic worshippers and all that.

Howard does a very good job of holding your interest throughout and right to the very last page, peeling back layers and layers of the horrifying puzzle, as Josh tries to hold on to himself and the life he thinks he's been leading amidst mounting dread and terrible revelations.

My thanks to NetGalley and Wicked House Publishing for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

So I read a very advanced copy of this in April 2024, and have been impatiently tapping my toes for the final FINAL FINAL version to be published. When I read it (nearly two(!!) years ago now) I did a review for the author. And it was... utterly amazing. I wasn't even a few pages into the story when I immediately ordered physical copies of his other books. He immediately jumped to the "auto-buy physical copies author" category for me. Here is the review I posted on a few socials on May 5, 2024 (I'll be posting an updated review once I get my mits on a physical copy):

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Ok, so I was recently privileged enough to be allowed to beta read Jordan's forthcoming novel, The Swallowed Town (released hopefully in the fall?!?) This was my first beta read, and my first time reading something by Page. So, I feel like this experience has set the bar for any future ARC/beta reads really, really high.

I was utterly blown away by the story and the very high quality of writing – the setting, the mystery, the characters… Page pulls off a meta-meta complexity of a tale of a small southern coastal town with a mysterious origin story that was a weird and wonderful cross of House of Leaves and The Shadow over Innsmouth set in our modern technologically driven world. The ‘found footage’ of documents, video, audio, newspaper articles, forum posts, and journals as a narrative device is perfectly woven into a deeply creepy tale that I can’t shake.

It's a kind of ‘cosmic’ horror, but less overt, it’s more subtle. It is an abyssal horror that seems like it’s a few hundred years old, but you just know or feel is really all about that deep time that is unknowable and terrifying.

There is a beautiful, haunting imagery here that paints an atmosphere of dread. If you’ve watched, and appreciated, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3, particularly the ground-breaking Episode 8 (The Return) and were left with that frisson of emotional and physiological fear, this will also set your teeth and nerves on edge in the best possible bizzarro-creepy vibe way. It’s like reading the literary version of those aural and visual assaults on your senses. There are stunning pieces of prose – whole paragraphs – that stole my breath away and I felt myself unavoidably and inextricably spiralling into the mystery at the heart of the story.

Stylistically, there are influences of, and comparisons to be made, to Langan, Lynch, Evenson, Danielewski and Kiernan that for me, are all about that unshakable feeling of unease that just kind of stays with you and rises up from your subconscious during the most normal, mundane part of your day, like when you’re on the bus going to work or standing in line to pick up your coffee.

Page’s story has taken up permanent space in my brain and I am all the better for it. I fully intend on making more room for his stories on my bookshelves and in my apperception.