Morsel by Carter Keane

The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.

Lou did what the children of parents with back-breaking, poor paying jobs are supposed to do; pulled up her bootstraps, went to college, and got an office job with coworkers who won’t stop talking about their multi-level marketing scheme disguised as self-betterment.

Determined to lift her ill mother out of poverty before it's too late, and in the spirit of climbing the corporate ladder, Lou accepts an assignment in the rural hills of Ohio. She quickly finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a sabotaged truck, a dog she’s determined to keep safe, and something stalking her through the ancient Appalachian woods.

If she can’t escape the woods in time, she’ll come face to face with the fact that her job isn’t the only thing that wants to eat her alive.

Morsel is a chilling testament to the burden of generational poverty and the all-consuming nature of capitalism, where the monster and the monstrous, in the end, are not the same.

 First, I have to say that it was the cover and the comparison to The Ritual that made me accept the invitation to read this book. I loved The Ritual, but I hated Blair Witch. Still, I don't get the comparison. I guess they took that liberty because something happens in the woods. Oh well.

Morsel gets off to a very slow start. So much so that I was just about to decide that this book may not be a good fit for me. I was wavering around the 30% mark when it suddenly got downright scary, and I was hooked.

There is a lot going on in this story all at once, sometimes a bit too much. The gist of it is that Lou is struggling to pay bills and wants to help out her overworked mom. She accepts an assignment to go out in the middle of nowhere to survey a home. Once she gets there, her life is in danger, but is it really the monster we were expecting from the synopsis or something else? It's hard to tell because Lou has some memory gaps and is an unreliable narrator. The story is frequently interrupted by a "podcast" concerning others who have gone missing in the woods. The ending was confusing to say the least. I mostly enjoyed the middle third of this book, but the slow start and crazy ending made this just an ok read for me.

My thanks to Tor Nightfire for the gorgeous paperback.

Get a copy

Truly, Madly, Weirdly: Four Strange Tales of Love Turned Sour by Victoria Williamson

Four unnerving tales of the weird and uncanny from award-winning author Victoria Williamson.

A mother afraid of the rot eating away at her perfect family.

A son who’ll do anything to bring the woman of his dreams into being.

An ex-husband whose acceptance of his exploitation comes back to haunt him.

And a fiancée who suspects her partner’s miniature model is hiding a terrible secret in plain sight.

Turn the pages of this anthology to discover just how far they’ll go for a chance at love, no matter how tainted it might prove to be.

Truly, Madly, Weirdly contains four stories of obsession and desperation. Whether that is desperation to hold on to what they already have or to possess what they have never had, these characters are all suffering one way or another from choices they made against their own better judgment.

In the first story, "Shrink Wrap," a woman is enjoying her second chance at a peaceful family life. Her adoring husband and well-behaved children are everything she ever wanted, but her domestic bliss is threatened by the return of her estranged daughter from her first marriage. All she wants is to protect her family, but her compulsion takes a dangerous turn. 

The next story, "Lilac and Old Lace," finds twin siblings hoping their recent inheritance will free them from their overbearing mother's clutches. Alas, the dilapidated property left to them by their uncle is not the path to the freedom they hoped for.

In "The Picture of Happiness," a recently divorced man whose wife took everything, including his self-respect, moves into a small apartment with a dark past, where he begins to suffer what he thinks is sleep paralysis.

In the last story, "The Model Partner," a middle-aged woman believes she has finally found her first and only chance at love with a recently widowed man from her church. At first, she is willing to overlook a frightening coincidence or two, but will she see the truth before it's too late?

 I've never been one for love stories, but there are no happy sappy romances to be found in Truly Madly Weirdly. Tales of love turned sour are definitely something I can get behind, especially when they turn dark and deadly with spine-chilling consequences. I enjoyed every story, and they should all serve as a reminder that if you feel like something is wrong, it probably is.

My thanks to Silver Thistle Press for the paperback.

Get a copy

About the author

 

The Horror Collection: Neon Edition Kevin J. Kennedy (Editor)

 The Neon Edition explodes onto the page as the thunderous 30th instalment in Kevin J. Kennedy’s celebrated horror series - an unthemed, unchained, full-throttle descent into chaos. This is horror without boundaries. Without mercy. Without brakes.

Inside, the future is a merciless wasteland where the desperate barter their own body parts just to survive. Flesh warps and betrays. Lovecraftian wormholes rip open the fabric of reality. Urban legends stalk the streets in broad daylight. Faith curdles into fanaticism and dread. Neighbours hide unspeakable secrets. Funhouses pulse with neon delirium, bending sanity until it snaps.

Savage, surreal, and relentlessly imaginative, The Neon Edition doesn’t just cross lines - it obliterates them. Thirty books in, and the nightmare is louder than ever.

The Horror Collection Neon Edition is my first foray into this series of anthologies, and now that I see what I have been missing, I am beside myself, wondering where and how I can cram the earlier volumes into my TBR. 

From the first story, Zero Sum by Laural Hightower, where electricity and basic needs cost far more than cash, to the last story, Alone Together by James Jobling, where parents make an annual pilgrimage in search of what happened to their missing daughters, and all the kink, ghosts, dark humor, and gore in the stories in between this is an unforgettable collection that belongs on every horror lover's shelf.

If there were an award I could give for best opening lines I have read this year, it would go to Carlton Mellick III and his story Simple Machines for "Oliver Madu awoke one morning to discover two tiny copper doorknobs growing from the corners of his eyes. He didn't remember ever having doorknobs in his eyes before." If you can read that and not keep reading, then you are even stronger-willed than those people who can stop at just one salty potato chip.

My thanks to  KJK Publishing for the e-ARC

Get a copy

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson

 

Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate.

Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He's a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.

But then, strange things start happening to Nona and mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons. Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely.

Nona has her secrets too. Her affair with the married church pastor has been weighing on her conscience, but that’s not the only guilt haunting her. She fears that someone—or something— is seeking revenge for an act she made in a moment of weakness to protect her family. And now everyone in Hester Gardens must pay the price...

The sun never shines in the apartments on the north side of Hester Gardens. This leads some to believe that those apartments are haunted. And they are right. People who don't survive life in these housing projects tend to linger there. A shadow, a figure, or sometimes more. A pervasive feeling of something wrong, footsteps, and appliances that turn themselves on and off. Something is going on here. But does that mean Nona is cursed? It sure feels like it.

 The supernatural horror in this story is secondary to the horrors of poverty, drugs, and crime, so it was not really what I was expecting or hoping for. Nona has lost her eldest son to gun violence. Her husband is in jail, and now something seems to be coming for her middle child.

This turned into more of a social commentary than the horror I was hoping for. I did care for Nona and her boys, but she seemed a very contradictory personality, which felt off to me. At times, she seemed strong, but then some of her actions were naive and gullible. The pace was very slow and made the book feel longer than it needed to be. You may enjoy it more than I did, but this was just an ok read for me. 

My thanks to Erewhon Books for the e-ARC

Get a copy