Tagged: Book Review

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

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Title: The Library at Hellebore
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Publication date: 22nd July, 2025

Synopsis: The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled. But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together. If not, this school will eat them alive.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Murder Show by Matt Goldman

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Title: The Murder Show
Author: Matt Goldman
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Forge
Publication date: 15th April, 2025

Synopsis: Showrunner Ethan Harris had a hit with The Murder Show, a television crime drama that features a private detective who solves cases the police can’t. But after his pitch for the fourth season is rejected by the network, he returns home to Minnesota looking for inspiration.

His timing is fortunate ― his former classmate Ro Greeman is now a local police officer, and she’s uncovered new information about the devastating hit and run that killed their mutual friend Ricky the summer after high school. She asks Ethan to help her investigate and thinks that if he portrays the killing on The Murder Show, the publicity may bring Ricky’s killer to justice.

Ethan is skeptical that Ricky’s death was anything but a horrible accident, but with the clock running out on his career, he’s willing to try anything. It doesn’t take long for them to realize they’ve dug up more than they bargained for. Someone is dead set on stopping Ethan and Ro from looking too closely into Ricky’s death ― even if keeping them quiet means killing again…

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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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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

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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