Here’s to Another Year of Fear!

Yes, please, I very much would like to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a gorgeous, Gothic novel about a crumbling manor full of decaying splendor and terrible secrets. When Indigo married her husband, she made him promise her one thing: he would never ask about her past. With her fortune, and their love, they would live happily ever after, and nothing about who Indigo was or where she came from mattered in the face of their beautiful future. Until word of a dying family member forces the newlyweds to return to Indigo’s childhood home. In the House of Dreams, the past that Indigo tried to leave behind surrounds the newlyweds, and how can her bridegroom not ask questions when so many of the house’s secrets seem to be Indigo’s as well.

Speaking of books that I’ve been long anticipating and can’t wait to get my hands on! I’ve loved Cassandra Khaw’s work ever since I first got my hands on their novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and I’m so excited for their newest novella, The Salt Grows Heavy. A dark and fantastical tale about a mermaid and a strange doctor who set out together through the heart of the taiga, a wild subarctic forest*. Deep in the forest — as in all the best and most terrifying stories — our travelers come upon three surgeons charged with the keeping of a village full of eerie, ageless children and find themselves in terrible danger.

(*Yes I looked up what the taiga is, and yes I have a new biome to be obsessed with. Please give me all your boreal forest horror stories.)

Give me all the queer retellings of classic Gothic novels, always. In The Alchemy of Moonlight, a retelling of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emile escapes his aunt’s guardianship when she threatens to disown him for being gay unless he promises to marry and secure his inheritance. But while hiding out as a servant in the home of Count Montoni, Emile realizes he may be in as much danger among strangers as he was among family. A murder on the estate only furthers Emile’s suspicions, while also bringing two new men into his life — one of whom is Montoni’s nephew, Henri. When Emile’s identity is suddenly revealed, however, things take an even darker turn. Montoni forces the entire household out of the mansion and into the isolated and forbidding walls of Udolpho Castle. If Emile wants to survive with both life and love intact, he’ll have to find a way to escape and foil the sinister Count’s plans, because the longer he remains trapped in Udolpho, the greater the danger grows.

After Hide completely blew my mind last year, there’s no way I won’t be preordering White’s 2023 novel, Mister Magic. There’s nothing better than a creepy “cult classic” children’s program that, while it lives on in the memories of its generations of devoted fans, mysteriously vanished without a trace after being shut down by a tragic accident. No recordings of Mister Magic, nor any clue as to who created it or why, survive. The remaining members of its cast remember, though, and they hold tight to the happiness they felt when all five were part of Mister Magic’s Circle of Friends. When they belonged. Thirty years after the accident, the five are reunited at a remote compound in the desert and it’s like they were never apart. Unfortunately, their reunion may be more than it first appeared. They all came to the compound by choice, but there’s a lot about that tragic day they don’t remember, and secrets about Mister Magic that they may have chosen to forget.