Full disclosure: I requested Mexican Gothic from the library back in September or October, which is practically the only time of year that I seek out horror and/or Gothic reads. When my turn finally came up in November, I wasn’t necessarily in the mood for this kind of book but I decided to read it anyway and see what all the […]
I liked this well enough. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the Titanic and the paranormal elements. I was never entirely sure what was going on, although I did have all the pieces pretty early in the story. It is refreshing when I can’t quite put everything together. My biggest quibble is that the story could have been tightened up […]
Adam Snow gets lost in the countryside on a drive back to London one evening and finds himself at a derelict house. He gets out of the car to look around and feels a small hand slip into his. There’s no one else there. He takes the memory of the hand with him and remembers Continue Reading…
When Charlotte Brontë died, she left 20 pages of a novel behind. Clare Boylan decided to finish it. A little girl is enrolled in a private girls’ academy. She is shy and reclusive, but the headmistresses make much of her because it’s obvious that her benefactor has money. Trouble arises when her benefactor can’t be Continue Reading…
Dr. Spencer Black was a brilliant doctor whose career was derailed by an obsession with mythological creatures. He believed that anatomical deformities were not so much mutations as throwbacks to earlier days in the evolutionary timeline. He believed he could prove this by recreating creatures from fable and myth. If he could make them viable, Continue Reading…
Author Mardi McConnochie imagines what the lives of the Brontë sisters would have been like if they had grown up on a remote island/penal colony off the coast of Australia. In this fictional tale, their father is the warden of the colony, paranoid to the point of madness and with a giant God-complex. He makes Continue Reading…
Vida Winter is called the Charles Dickens of her age. No one has ever been able to find out the story of her life. Any reporter who tries gets a beautiful story, but still, it’s only a story. But now Vida is old and sick and she must share her story with the world. She Continue Reading…
Fermín Romero de Torres is finally getting married. He’s got one problem though–he’s living under an assumed name. He has absolutely no proof that he legally exists. How is he supposed to get married without all the paperwork to prove that he is whom he says he is? As he explains this to Daniel Sempere, Continue Reading…
Dr. Montague, a researcher into paranormal activity, has rented the fabled Hill House for the summer. The house has a reputation for being haunted. Very few people have managed to stay in it for more than a night. In order to sort of help the house do its worst, he invites people to stay with Continue Reading…
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister, Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content Continue Reading…
Moses Froben, an opera singer of world-renown, raised a son who could not possibly have been his own. When his son asked how they had come to be together, Moses would studiously avoid the question. On Moses’s death, however, his son found a memoir that told of Moses’s humble beginnings and how father and son Continue Reading…