Category: Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Spite House by Johnny Compton

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​Title: The Spite House
Author: Johnny Compton
Genre: Gothic, Thriller, Mystery, Ghost story
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Date: 7th February, 2023

Synopsis:

A terrifying Gothic thriller about grief and death and the depths of a father’s love, Johnny Compton’s The Spite House is a stunning debut by a horror master in the making―The Babadook meets A Head Full of Ghosts in Texas Hill Country.

Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. When he comes across an ad for a caretaker for the Masson House, Eric hopes they have finally caught a lucky break. The owner of the “most haunted place in Texas” is looking for proof of paranormal activity. All they need to do is stay in the house and keep a detailed record of everything that happens there―provided the house’s horrors don’t drive them all mad, like the caretakers before them.

The job calls to Eric, not just because of the huge payout, but because he needs access to the secrets of the spite house. If it is indeed haunted, maybe it will help him understand the uncanny power that clings to his family, driving them from town to town, too afraid to stop running…

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Epeolatry Book Review: Draakensky by Paula Cappa

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​Title: Draakensky
Author: Paula Cappa
Genre: Fantasy, Magical Realism
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Date: 27th September, 2024

Synopsis: The Chief of Police discovers an elderly woman dead in the Mianus River. There is a ghost who resides here and flings its words through the spinning air. River magic too, streams across Draakensky Windmill estate, conjuring a secret in Bedford, New York.
Sketch artist Charlotte Knight arrives on Draakensky to a bright opportunity. She is hired to illustrate the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke under the direction of Jaa Morland, the recluse spinster of Draakensky. Jaa, a believer in ghosts, instructs Charlotte to ‘draw the ghosts.’
From the first night, Charlotte hears the watery voice of Draakensky’s ghost speak to her. Sinister dark eyes watch at the window. Fear mounts when a strange man stalks her through the village cemetery and shops. When a wicked force of nature strikes Charlotte, warning her to flee Draakensky, she is shaken to the bone.
Needing solid ground, Charlotte meets the local restaurant owner, Marc Sexton, who knows the ghostly Otherworld and the magickal practices from his Celtic ancestry; he sports a silver wolf amulet at his neck. Their romance takes Charlotte into a piercing adventure through darkness and doubt, passion and aching love.
As dark magick accelerates on Draakensky, Charlotte is driven into realms of owl magick, witchcraft, and necromancy. She battles her own fear of ghosts and wrestles with how to trust Marc Sexton, a man with hidden realities.
If magick is destiny, then Charlotte must survive the world of ghosts or surrender to a more powerful source in this literary tale of mystery, sorcery, and love.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Slow Burn by Mike Allen

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​Title: Slow Burn
Author: Mike Allen
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Erotic Horror, Occult
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Date: 16th July, 2024

Synopsis: The search for a missing grandson unearths a pit of unholy hunger. A war between flesh-stealing supernatural entities will subject an entire city to devastating mayhem. In a harrowing future world, a slave is charged by his terrifying master with building a creature in its likeness. The voyage of a plague ship won’t end at mere death. Parasites are partners and lovers, and the immortal soul is but a single stage in the complex life cycle of a symbiote.

Slow Burn gathers fourteen stories of horror and thirteen macabre poems by two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Allen’s works are “exquisite and vivid, his worlds rich with brilliant detail,” says three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. “The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled and unable to look away.”

These tales and verses, set in worlds of fantasy and sorcery, in twisted, surreal futures, and in hard-boiled modern milieus . . . all find ways to explore the abyssal darkness of the human heart.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Ninety-Eight Sabers by Elizabeth Broadbent

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​Title: Ninety-Eight Sabers
Author: Elizabeth Broadbent
Genre: Occult horror, horror
Publisher: Undertaker Books
Date: 29th September, 2024

Synopsis: The Trenholm clan helped found Lower Congaree, South Carolina. Their land is cursed. Their abusive patriarch has croaked. Only heirs who attend the funeral will inherit.

But when Truluck Trenholm suffered his eventually-fatal stroke, oldest son Ash turned the haunted plantation into an enormously successful reality show—with all the attendant ethical issues of profiting off its legacy. Forced to tolerate the intrusion of California producers, grip guys, and cameras, toting a ton of childhood trauma, Ash’s brother and cousins have plenty of animosity for each other, along with a strong aversion to the paranormal shenanigans of their childhood home. But when Truluck’s funeral goes pear-shaped and the cousins are cut out of his will, Hollywood producers offer the deal of a lifetime: they’ll turn the Trenholms into witchy Kardashians with a Southern drawl.

If the cousins walk away, they’ll lose everything. But the farm’s high strangeness keeps getting stranger. Something’s happening on Cypress Bend. And filming might make it worse…

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Epeolatry Book Review: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

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​Title: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Author: Ananda Lima
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Fantasy Anthologies, Contemporary Horror
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Date: 23rd July, 2024

Synopsis: Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.

“An astounding new voice.” ―ERIC LaROCCA • “I love it so much.” ―KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” ―JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” ―KEVIN WILSON • “Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny.” ―GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” ―JULIA FINE

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.

With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”

A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!

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Epeolatry Book Review: Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin

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​Title: Night’s Edge
Author: Liz Kerin
Genre: Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Date: 20th June, 2023

Synopsis: Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin takes a bite out of vampire lore in this blood-soaked novel about the darkest secrets we hide and how monstrous we can be to the ones we love most.

Having a mom like Izzy meant Mia had to grow up fast. No extracurriculars, no inviting friends over, and definitely no dating. The most important rule: Tell no one of Izzy’s hunger – the kind only blood can satisfy.

But Mia is in her twenties now and longs for a life of her own. One where she doesn’t have to worry about anyone discovering their terrible secret, or breathing down her neck. When Mia meets rebellious musician Jade she dares to hope she’s found a way to leave her home – and her mom – behind.

It just might be Mia’s only chance of getting out alive.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Rogue Sequence by Zac Topping

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​Title: Rogue Sequence
Author: Zac Topping
Genre: Action Adventure
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Date: 4th June, 2024

Synopsis: It’s 2091 and independent contract companies around the world are producing genetically modified soldiers…to be sold to the highest bidders.

Ander Rade is a super-soldier, a genetically engineered living weapon, and has been dutifully following orders since he gave himself to Xyphos Industries’ Gene-Mod Program several years ago. But when a mission goes sideways, he’s captured, imprisoned, and forced into brutally violent fighting pits for the better part of the next decade…until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces appear in the visiting room.

Things have changed since Rade was captured. Shortly after his incarceration, the World Unity Council banned human genetic engineering and deemed all modified individuals a threat to society. Overnight, an entire subculture of people became outlaws simply for existing. But instead of leaving Rade locked behind bars, the GCD agents have come with an offer: Freedom in exchange for his help tracking down one of his former teammates from that ill-fated mission all those years ago.

It’s an offer Rade can’t refuse, but he soon realizes that the situation is far more volatile than anyone had anticipated, and is forced to take matters into his own hands as he tries to figure out whose side he’s really on, and why.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Last Night of Freedom by Dan Howarth

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​Title: Last Night of Freedom
Author: Dan Howarth
Genre: British & Irish Horror, British Horror Fiction
Publisher: Northern Republic
Date: 11th October, 2024

Synopsis: Fifteen years after graduation, four old university friends get together to celebrate Luke’s stag party. Tucked away in a remote village in the Lake District, they expect a weekend of real ale, log fires and gentle hikes – but a stag party of locals have other ideas.

Unwillingly drawn into one-upmanship and animosity, the four friends find themselves being hunted across unfamiliar ground in a game of deadly consequences. With only one of them guaranteed to survive, old wounds and resentments threaten to tear them apart as much as their pursuers.

Can the four friends unite to fight back, or will they fall, divided and broken?

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