Category: Reviews

Epeolatry Book Review: Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light by Henry Corrigan

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Title: Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light
Author: Henry Corrigan
Genre: horror
Publisher: Slashic Horror Press
Publication date: 15th May, 2025

Synopsis: Having suffered years of neglect, an implacable house in upstate New York waits for a new family to bring it back to life. Haunted by a lifetime of poverty, Eric Tillman is just looking for a place where his family can grow up. One hopes to escape screaming landlords and sleepless nights, the other has standards to maintain, expectations that must be met. And as the house brings those standards to violent life, Eric learns there are chances too costly to take—for some doors lead only to ruin.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Scuttler’s Cove by David Barnett

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Title: Scuttler’s Cove
Author: David Barnett
Genre: folk horror
Publisher: Canelo
Publication date: 13th February, 2025

Synopsis: Scuttler’s Cove is a working village, nestling in dramatic coastal scenery in Cornwall , where life has gone uninterrupted for centuries… until this seaside idyll was discovered by the rich. Now the quaint harbour-front cottages have been snapped up by second-homers and rental companies, and the locals can barely afford to live in their own town.

It is a very different place for Merrin Moon, who left for university at the age of eighteen and never looked back. Now in her thirties, she returns to the Cove for the first time since, after the death of her mother. She soon discovers that there are forces at play in the village she could never have imagined. Is someone trying to drive out the second homers? And has their arrival started a chain of events none of them will be able to stop? For something old and terrible is awakening beneath the town’s hallowed ground. And with it comes a horror that the residents have fought for generations to keep secret.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

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Title: The Daughters’ War
Author: Christopher Buehlma
Genre: action and adventure fantasy
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication date: 25th June, 2024

Synopsis: Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.

The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.

They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.

Now, our daughters take up arms.

Galva ― Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill ― has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.

The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted ― not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

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Epeolatry Book Review: An Ocean and a Desert by Rachel Roth

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Title: An Ocean and a Desert
Author: Rachel Roth
Genre: eclectic horror
Publisher: Alien Buddha Press
Publication date: 18th December, 2024

Synopsis: A collection of seven horror stories ranging from Lovecraftian tales of unnamed terror to smaller-scale, personal tales of anxiety and paranoia. Starting in a dark cave inhabited by a paranormal figure in “Our Land, Our Cave, Our Home” and ending lost in the deserts of New Mexico surrounded by a pack of shapeshifters in “The Moroi,” this collection dives deep into the unknown and all its nightmares.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Blood Cypress by Elizabeth Broadbent

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Title: Blood Cypress
Author: Elizabeth Broadbent
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Publication date: 3rd April, 2025

Synopsis: What would you do for more time?
No one cares when Lila Carson’s ten-year-old brother Beau disappears. He can’t speak. He throws tantrums. He’s a useless Carson, one of those kids in a broken-shuttered house that lost its glory when his father died. When the sheriff and his good ol’ boy deputies show up to investigate, they eye up Lila and call her twin brother, Quentin, names. A closeted bisexual girl in the South, she’s terrified.

Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. But as the long night drags on, it’s clear Beau disappeared behind those ancient trees. The sheriff’s deputies won’t risk going back there.

Lila might not have a choice.

 

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

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Title: The Book Eaters
Author: Sunyi Dean
Genre: Horror Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books
Publication Date: 2nd August, 2022
Synopsis: Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods

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Title: Upon a Starlit Tide
Author: Kell Woods
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books
Publication date: 18th November, 2025

Synopsis: Saint-Malo, Brittany, 1758. To Lucinde Leon, the youngest daughter of a wealthy French shipowner, the high walls of Saint-Malo are more hindrance than haven.

While her sisters are busy trying to secure advantageous marriages, Luce spends her days secretly being taught to sail by Samuel, her best friend―and an English smuggler. Only he understands how the waves call to her. Then one stormy morning, Luce rescues a drowning man from the sea.

Immediately drawn in by the stranger’s charm, Luce is plunged into a world of glittering balls and faerie magic, seduction and brutality. Secrets that have long been lost in the shadowy depths of the ocean begin to rise to the surface, but as Luce wrestles with warring desires, she finds that her own power is growing brighter and brighter, shining like a sea-glass slipper.

Or the scales of a sea-maid’s tail.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Chaos, Uncharted Hearts Book 3 by Constance Fay

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Title: Chaos: Uncharted Hearts, Book 3
Author: Constance Fay
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Publication date: 11th March 2025

Synopsis: Lore Olympus meets Winter’s Orbit in this pulse-pounding romance between a space mercenary and a super soldier whose mind-control breaks when she touches him.
He’s a mind controlled killing machine, until her touch frees him
Engineer Caro Ogunyemi thinks she has everything in control. Sure, she has a dark secret in her past and aim so bad that she can’t shoot the side of a spaceship when she’s right in front of it, but those are minor details in the life of a space mercenary. When Caro embarks on a solo mission infiltrating a prison planet that is run by the deadly Pierce family, she embraces the opportunity to prove she’s a hero.
It’s there that Caro meets Leviathan, a super soldier with a chip in his head that turns him into a mindless killer. He’s drop dead gorgeous with an emphasis on drop dead, until she touches him and renders his chip inert. The danger begins when she lets him go.
In the heart of enemy territory, where love is at stake, life is treacherous and time is short, Caro and Leviathan must figure out how to recover his agency, protect her crew from Pierce’s sinister machinations, and stage a prison-break before Leviathan is lost to her—and himself—forever.

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