Tag Archives: book-review

Review for Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Every parent thinks about what they’d do if they lost their kid. When they’re babies, we worry about whether they’re breathing in their cribs. When they’re toddlers, they get quiet in their rooms. We run to their room, and they’re usually asleep in a pile of toys or stuffed animals.

We lose sight of them when they get older, and we walk around the store. All the thoughts run through our heads. When they get to be teenagers and start driving or hanging out with friends, hell, in America, we worry about them not coming home at the end of the day because of a shooting.

That latter part is an everyday worry for me.

: SPOILERS AHEAD :

In Clay’s story, he takes the idea of losing your kid to violence and does a masterful job of following Glenn, our protagonist, through the stages of his life. Also, through the stages of grief.

Glenn feels the police have failed him and his son in discovering how he was killed.

His boy was left in a dirty, empty lot as a teenager.

Over the years, Glenn has done research and called whichever detective was assigned to the cold case, but he had a breakthrough when his wife urged him to join a writer’s group.

Glenn writes a story about his son’s death and how he believes it happened.

When he presents the story to the writer’s group, it begins a fracture in a community he believes hid the truth of what happened to his son. Glenn learns he didn’t know his son as well as he thought.

The heartwrenching ending for this book is brilliant, and I believe it captures the book well.

Glenn is looking for one last connection to his son. He finds it in writing the book but also in learning the truth about his son’s death.

It’s a magnificent ending, and as with all of Clay’s books, it will pull on your emotions.

I finished this book at work, and while it was a slow day behind the bar, I had to keep myself from crying.

We all think about how we’d handle the loss of our kids. Clay orchestrates a great story about loss, grief, and understanding that once our kids get older and have their own lives, we don’t know who they are.

We try to understand them as they grow older, and the best we can do is be there for them as they move through the world. Listening to them is essential.

Good morning, Good Evening or Goodnight?

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I’m writing this as I put a self-imposed ban on social media. I have deactivated my IG, Threads, and TikTok to get my head right. I have contemplated quitting writing over the last month, but I sold a book recently, and my thriller, Disunion By Force, is selling well.

I needed time to get my head right. It’s been in a bad place, and while I like sharing my journey with my mental health, it appears that my family doesn’t like seeing me struggle. I haven’t posted my usual content. I have been writing reviews. I’ve enjoyed the distraction of writing reviews for the last year. I’ve read some fantastic books. I got most of them through NetGalley.

I am going to start submitting short stories again. I feel I’ve fallen off somehow, and short stories are a way for me to get my head back in writing. I have three books left to review for my NetGalley account. After I finish the books I have, I’ll be taking a break from doing reviews for a while.

I’ll be cleaning up 30-40 short stories for submission. Each is a horror story and fits into various subgenres.

I’m taking time for myself, which will exclude social media for a while.

I am playing World of Warcraft: The War Within with my wife. It’s a great expansion, and we’re both enjoying it. I’m currently reading Nobody’s Hero by M.W. Craven. It comes out in December and is one of the books I received on Netgalley.

I’m not really watching anything. I will be seeing Terrifier 3 in a couple of weeks. I saw Beetlejuice this past weekend for my youngest’s birthday. It was fun—not great, but fun. She really enjoyed it, and it was nice to spend time with my wife and kids.

My job at the bar has changed a bit. It was bought in July, and they’ve made some significant changes. The food is better, and the menu is more manageable. It’s a lot cleaner than before.

I work four shifts now. I only worked once every week before. It’s been slow as some of our regulars change as the bar changes. That’s fine. People change in every aspect of the life of a business.

I’m ready to get back to work on the page.

Review for House of Bone And Rain by Gabino Iglesias

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Gabino is one of my favorite authors. I’ve taken a few of the writing classes he’s offered. I’ve read Coyote Songs, Zero Saints, and The Devil Takes You Home.

He’s not just a fantastic writer but a nice dude. He cares about the writing community, and his legendary tweets and TikTok posts about writing and some of the shady operators within the community reflect this.

I knew very little about this book going in. I try to do that for many reasons. I only knew the author. I received my copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

I remember the people I hung around with in high school, the crazy things we did, and the stunts we pulled, and I’m glad there is no video footage.

This book is about that. It’s about, at least to me, the brotherhood we take into adulthood.

We meet Gabe. He has a girlfriend, Natalia, who wants to leave Puerto Rico. He has friends Bimbo, Tavo, Paul, and Xavier. This is his brotherhood. These people he vouches for, fights for, and will do anything for. If someone messes with one, they mess with all of them.

This quote struck a chord early on: “We’re all sad animals looking for something to lift us out of the mud we lived in and make us think being alive was worth it.”

There’s something about Gabino’s writing that pulls the reader in. I’ve never been to Puerto Rico, but with his help, I know what it feels like to walk the streets and know if going to one part of Old San Juan will cause problems.

Bimbo’s mother, Maria, dies just before Hurricane Maria makes landfall. This is all intentional. They take it upon themselves to find out who killed her. This brings us into the realm of Dante. It’s a spiral of epic proportions as this group descends into the abyss of murder, mayhem, and death.

The storytelling and the connections to all the religions that make Puerto Rico the place it is had me feeling like I was back in American Gods as Shadow took his steps.

We followed these men and this brotherhood through the various belief systems within Puerto Rico. It was a learning experience and fascinating. This book is as brutal as Gabino’s others, but there’s a point to it, as with The Devil Takes You Home.

The darkness within Devil Takes You Home emerges in the House of Bone and Rain, but its brutality is never for show. You know that there’s some truth to it. There’s a reality to it. Gabino never does his violence for show.

When the bodies start adding up, and the brutality takes a turn I wasn’t expecting, the reality of it is as with this quote from the book: “You don’t need a huge army to take over the world; you need three or four crazy motherfuckers who really love you and are will to do whatever had to be done.”

This is what this book is about—showing up for those who need you.

Gabe realizes this too late.

There are some things in this book I can’t put in a review because of spoilers, but Gabino has written another banger.

I pre-ordered this in April, long before I could read it. He’s that good.

I’m looking forward to reading other’s reviews and having someone to discuss this book with.

Review for I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

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My first Slasher was Halloween. I was 10. My mom rented a couple of movies from UHaul—yes, you could do that at one point—and I watched them repeatedly.

My older sisters were teenagers, and I was left to my own devices. My younger sister was too small to watch it, and I knew that after the first time through.

I remember the opening scene vividly. Michael stalked around the house. His mask went over his face, and he stabbed his sister.

The reveal of him being a kid blew me away.

Moving forward in time to the following parts of the movie, I loved it. It’s still one of my favorite horror movies.

I always wondered what made Michael that way. Rob Zombie’s version touched upon this, which I loved.

Stephen does something with this creation idea in I Was A Teenage Slasher. It’s not what you expected; it certainly wasn’t for me. I struggled to read this early on. I needed help understanding the connections or the placement of certain story aspects. When it all came together, I was blown away by all the connections.

I’ve read many of Stephen’s books, but his Mapping The Interior is one of my favorites.

I’m halfway through the final book of The Lake Witch Trilogy. I had to set it down to finish book reviews.

Stephen crafts a story with Slasher mainly about a loner, maybe a bit of an outcast, like Jade in the Lake Witch Trilogy. Having read the book’s acknowledgments and seeing how personal Slasher was to him, I liked it better. He pulled a lot from his growing up in Texas. His acknowledging that made me think about my own writing and how I put bits of myself into it.

I felt a kinship with Tolly Driver. I know what it feels like to be an outcast. I was an outcast for most of my childhood. We moved around a lot. I attended five different elementary, three other middle schools, and three different high schools. I know that’s a little for some. I was the new kid/outcast most of the time. I learned to make friends quickly.

Knowing how Tolly felt being at parties and having others treat him differently and the reasons that come out in the story(spoilers) made me like him more.

He wants friends. He wants his classmates to like him, but instead, they shun him. His desire to be liked by someone leads him to be at a party. That’s where the story actually starts.

We see Tolly being with his friend Amber; then it takes a turn I wasn’t expecting. This event is sad to watch/read? Stephen’s description is so amazing that I felt I was watching it.

What happens is the birth of The Slasher. Stephen takes all of the things in the movies and makes us see what it’s like behind the mask. From the small things, quick movement, the ability to open any door to the more significant things, the indifference in the killer’s eyes, and the ability to withstand any physical punishment, it’s these things that really capture the idea of the book. As a fan of these types of movies, Stephen does this masterfully.

I can’t give things away, but it does take a turn. The brutality of a Slasher movie is front and center in the kills. It stands out as the work of someone who loves the genre and takes care to make it feel natural to the reader.

Stephen is at the top of his game in this one. If this is a standalone, it’s one of Stephen’s best.

Review for The Day Of The Door by Laurel Hightower

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I have a few reviews incoming. I thought I’d posted them here, but it was only on my substack, which doesn’t get any traction. I’ll post them here. I’m sorry for flooding your inbox.

Before this review, I knew this book was about childhood trauma. I did not know the depths it would take me to. I continue to deal with childhood trauma from abuse, physical, mental, and other.

I feel a bit of a kinship with the MC, Nate Lasco. I dealt with abuse, not on the scale of his siblings and himself, but enough that I understood where he was coming from. The pain of dealing with childhood trauma is something I work through daily.

Laurel does such a fantastic job of writing trauma. It’s one of the reasons she’s one of my favorite writers. Writing trauma of any sort is challenging. It can come across in many ways, but Laurel does it and makes it feel real. You think about what Nate and his siblings went through. Having lost a brother, not to violence, but knowing I can’t talk to him when I’d like, something that Nate mentions in the text, is traumatic by itself.

Nate hasn’t spoken to his mother since a scene at the opening of the novel. Reading that opening will give you the reasons why, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.

He and his siblings went through something traumatic. Something that changed the paradigm of their family.

Having dealt with a parent who treated me the same way, I found myself loathing the meeting. It brought up a lot of thoughts, things I didn’t want to go through. This book helped me deal with a few things I didn’t want to.

Our lives after childhood are influenced by that childhood. How we deal with our adult lives is different. Nate and his siblings deal with this.

While reading this book, I thought of the Netflix show Haunting of Hill House. The trauma in that show and how the siblings deal with it is similar to how the Lascos deal with it. Also, my siblings and I have dealt with some of our issues.

This novel pushed me to some uncomfortable places. Laurel posted on TikTok about comments she’s received about the book. Dealing with trauma was something she brought up.

Trauma follows you into your adult lives, relationships, and careers. It’s how it works. How you deal with it matters.

The sequences of fear in this story, from the coming together of meeting their mother to the grief of their brother and the scenes in which the reality of the haunted aspects of their lives come together, struck a chord with me.

I loved this book and gave it five stars on Goodreads. It’s one of the best depictions of adults dealing with their childhood trauma. I suggest anyone who’s dealt with childhood trauma of any sort check the CW and TW for this book. I would suggest anyone who’s working through their childhood trauma to read this book.