Nicholas Keating Casbarro’s Vitalerium: Descent into the Void is a vividly executed work of science fiction. A blend of space opera, political thriller, and phi...
James R. Gapinski’s upcoming collection The Museum of Future Mistakes is a brilliant descent into fabulist short fiction, interweaving lyricism, whimsy, the gro...
…a lot of people get scared when they hear they’re walking over dead people. Although we are all, more or less always walking over a greater or lesser number of...
Horror doesn’t have to scream. It just waits. The lights flicker, someone coughs, and you remember you’re alone.
That’s the trick. It never really leaves. It l...
Sean Hangland—the narrator/non-hero of John Tottenham’s hilarious novel of retail horror and art frustration—has had it. His three or four shifts a week at the ...
There’s a specific kind of silence that follows a person when they decide not to go home. Not grief. Just the quiet of knowing nobody’s waiting. A stillness tha...
There are days where I can’t tell if I’m bored or exhausted or just rewatching the same thought over and over. That’s exactly where Zuzu lives in The Other Wife...
Some books start loud. This one doesn’t. It lingers. It stares. It waits for you to notice it hasn’t left the room.
Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly is shap...
A touchstone, in its original use, was employed to compare the quality of gold or silver; in common parlance, it’s an event or object employed to judge highpoin...
Reading Be Gay, Do Crime feels like being handed a stolen car key, a lukewarm cocktail, and a list of exes you promised never to text again. It dares you to mak...
I hate Surrealism. I find it tedious, humorless, and hopelessly indebted to Sigmund Freud—a man who did as much to obscure and confuse the inner workings of hum...
A couple definitions of the word daybook: a ledger in which transactions have been recorded as they occurred and a diary. Nathan Knapp’s book isn’t exactly eith...
Almost exactly a year ago, I found myself in the perfect chaos of a conversation with Patrick Barb on my podcast, Textual Healing. The topic? I can't remember. ...
Ken Anderson’s The Ward at Twilight presents a heartrending exploration of vulnerability, memory, and the passage of time. Anderson’s language is both lyrical a...
A Review of The Children’s Horror: Cursed Episodes for Doomed Adults by Patrick Barb
FOREWARNING: The following review is not created for or targeted for adult...
Brian Alan Ellis' Hobbies You Enjoy is a darkly humorous exploration of modern ennui, capturing the absurdities of life with a raw, biting edge. As with much of...
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born offers a haunting exploration of the fears and anxieties tied to parenthood. Imagine holding someone els...
C.J. Spataro’s More Strange Than True is a witty and inventive novel that offers a modern twist on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream. Set in contemporary ...
There are books that make one paranoid and there are books that leave one insensate with paranoia. With so much content to compete with, it takes either a fortu...
I’ve lost more nights than I’d like to admit on Netflix, binging on Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy documentaries, and my bookshelf is a graveyard of true crime ti...
D.T. Robbins' Leasing is a striking foray into the complexities of modern existence, capturing the subtleties of human relationships, identity, and the somewhat...
Rick Claypool’s latest offering, “Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War,” thrusts readers into the twisted lunar wasteland of Moontown—a place where mutants with bodie...
Anne Waldman’s Tendrel: A Meeting of Minds is like hopping into a time machine and landing smack in the middle of a Beat Generation poetry slam, with a Tibetan ...
Sometimes a book will paint a person in an entirely new light. Fred Leuchter—the Holocaust-denying, self-taught execution equipment engineer and star of Errol M...
In a world on the verge of ecological collapse, Luke Healy’s latest graphic novel, “Self-Esteem and the End of the World,” offers a poignant and introspective l...
Charles Bukowski called love a dog from hell but Tyler Dempsey shows it to be an animal resilient enough to withstand arctic freezes and the weeks-long days and...
September 22nd, 2023: I take a copy of Death Egg to a cabin in Wisconsin. Unable to read. A goat that has found its way onto the porch keeps trying to eat it.
...
On February 16th, 2021, a writer downloaded FaceApp and fed it some childhood photos. The program alters race, age, and—most crucially, in this case—gender, to ...
Detecting violence is easy because it is transparent, we know and feel it when we see it, but locating the origins of violence (the why always covertly peeking ...
Bennett Sims, celebrated for his acclaimed works like "White Dialogues," skillfully crafts a captivating tapestry of surreal and absurdist narratives that will ...
