“Hauntings or hallucinations?” asks this surreal, sleepless mystery for fans of Caddo Lake, Bodies, and seaside towns swirling with paranormal activity Fisher’s Luck is both dreamlike and doomed, a haunted woman’s history intertwined with her family’s haunted house. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a new episode of a familiar TV show and noticing that […]
Some novels build their power on noise. The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline does the opposite. It listens. Drawing on Kline’s own distant family connections to the real Yates sisters of North Carolina, who in the 1840s married the famed conjoined brothers Chang and Eng Bunker, the book settles into a hush that feels right […]
I’ve been thinking about what makes a great war novel for years without quite phrasing it as a question. It… The post What makes a great war novel? appeared first on She Reads Everything.
Ray Russell published The Case Against Satan in 1962, nine years before William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist. That chronology… The post The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell: The possession novel before The Exorcist appeared first on She Reads Everything.
War memoir is the form I trust most. Not because it’s more accurate than fiction, O’Brien spent an entire book… The post Best war memoirs appeared first on She Reads Everything.
I’ve always found the Gothic drawn to what’s left unsaid. It’s the thing in the locked room, the secret that… The post Best books on Queer Gothics: where to start with the subgenre appeared first on She Reads Everything.
Some novels announce themselves with a thunderclap. Others walk in barefoot, smelling faintly of beer, drop into a kitchen chair, and start talking before you’ve offered them coffee. Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible is the second kind, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay a crime novel set on the Grand […]
There are opening chapters in fiction, and then there are openings that ruin your evening because you cannot put the book down. Rosie Walsh’s newest belongs squarely in the second category. The first pages of The One Day You Were My Husband by Rosie Walsh drop the reader onto a beach in the Gulf of […]
A house fire takes about fifteen minutes to gut a kitchen. A marriage can take fifteen years to come apart, longer if you count the careful repairs. In her sophomore novel, The Burning Side, Sarah Damoff puts both timelines on the same page and asks what survives when everything you built with someone else turns […]
A rich, sweeping novel of community, belonging, love, and regret set in Senegal Alice has experienced much heartache since she last set foot in Africa: With a heavy secret, she left the first man she ever loved behind in Senegal; she lost her sister in a tragic accident; and she grew distant from the niece […]