horror
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Review of Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont
To read Lautréamont; one is mugged by him in a mental dark alley, beaten with a cudgel of heresy, left marveling at the strange, beautiful bruises. If Pascal was a mathematician of the spirit, Lautréamont is the original gangster edgelord of literature: a refuter of Pascal’s humble trembling before God,…
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Review of It by Stephen King
A gratuitous lump of a novel about an amorphous entity that prefers to appear as a clown in order to torment kids and vulnerable adults, often but not always murdering them in the most shlocky ways imaginable. The main characters are kids for a lot of the book, and when…
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Review of Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Vegetarianism for edge-lords. Sure, there are some pros and cons to consuming meat,—who among us has not read Ruth Ozeki’s Year of Meats?—but the taboo of cannibalism is more persuasive than the supremacy of meat in our gustatory culture. The author seems to forget that hundreds of millions of people…
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Review of Happy Bunny and Other Mischiefs by Rebecca Gransden
Beginning with a descent into uncanny horror, the collection invades other genres, reaching tentacles into Realism, science fiction, and magic realism with aplomb, grasping at philosophy, abstraction, and startling dream-logic, but maintaining a steady undercurrent of tension while germinating unsettling horror elements. Ever think, when you’re adjusting the stats on…
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Review of American Gothic Tales (William Abrahams) by Various
A recommendable collection full of some stories I’ve read before and some unusual choices. Plenty of classics like “The Veldt,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “A Rose for Emily. But I preferred my encounters with the less-commonly anthologized ones like “Death in the Woods” by Sherwood Anderson, “The…
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Review of Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates
A more succinct example of Dark Academia than The Secret History, and in my opinion, better. Better yet, it can be read in one sitting. The only criteria I require a book to fulfill to earn a five-star rating from me is that I can’t stop reading. And this book…
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Review of The Architect by Brendan Connell
Connell delivers another absorbing fictional account of bizarre people acting in satirical fashion. This is a baroque and elegant gem about a brilliant architect driven mad by his vision of the greatest edifice ever to be imagined. His eldritch genius spreads to others, infecting them with illusions of grandeur, leading…
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Review of Authority (Southern Reach, #2) by Jeff VanderMeer
I am sad to say I did not get any entertainment out of this one. Sure, it put a few of the pieces into place, but the ever expanding mystery of Area X remains largely unexplained. But we did not go into it hoping for explanations, I would think. We…
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Review of Creepy Sheen by Rebecca Gransden
An entertaining and thought-provoking collection of scary stories to peruse in the half-light of sun-baked twilights. A moody, unhurried taste of dreamy apocalyptic nostalgia. With an appreciation for film and music, the author frames the scenes in enigmatic layers of imagery, where molting skyscrapers and abandoned stores abound, where dead…
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Review of Bio Melt by Carlton Mellick III
I can still remember all 50+ CM3 books I’ve read, which is more than I can say about Orhan Pamuk or other more critically acclaimed slingers of words. I prefer to remember the books I read, instead of letting them fade into a pleasant blur of impressive but barely perceptible…
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Review of My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Listening to 80s Synthwave Halloween mix on Youtube while writing this review. This was the kind of audiobook I had to invent chores to continue listening to. An incredible audiobook performance first of all. And a beautifully written book, oozing nostalgia from every acne-scarred pore. The angst. The rich details,…
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Review of Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works by Edgar Allan Poe
It was nice to pick up a leather bound edition of Poe for my Halloween rereading of his stories. I rediscovered amazing stories like “King Pest” and “The Devil in the Belfry.” this activity reminded me of the many qualities I admire about his writing. I was disappointed in the…
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Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuelsby Justin Isis
The Weird Tale, as a genre, plays host to stories of far more diversity than most other genres. It can combine elements of horror, literary fiction, historical fiction, humor, adventure, science fiction, and fantasy. Examples abound of Lovecraftian experiments in cosmic dread and Machen-esque descents into sub-realities, but no author…
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Review of Hettie and the Ghost by Becca De La Rosa
In this richly descriptive and atmospheric novel, I was pleased to find intricate sentence structure and mature characters. Many of its descriptions have an old-fashioned elegance. It is a nuanced ghost story with an intriguing premise, tackling central concepts of spiritualism, the afterlife, and growth. The language is always surprising…
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Review of Survival: A Sci-Fi/Horror, where reality begins to bite. by Chris Wright
Guided along by smoothly flowing prose, the reader will perceive a consistent building tension in this genre-bending novel. Parts of it almost read like diary entries, and provide intimate details as well as high-level backstory description.Full of subtle tension and propelled by the interactions of realistic characters in a sequence…
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Review of Fragments – A Sci-Fi/Horror: The sequel to Survival: The rules of reality have now changed by Chris Wright
In this second installment in the series, the pace ratchets up quickly. We join characters familiar from the first book (but I think this book can even be appreciated on its own, without some of the backstory). It is a good example of descriptions of cosmic proportions, and how paranormal…
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The Tale of Nathaniel Ravendrake, a short story
Bewildering Stories published my new short story. Click Here
L. S. Popovich 