connorjdaley's reviews
1154 reviews

Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You're Too Scared to Watch by Emily C. Hughes

informative

5.0

Thanks to NetGalley and Quirk Books for the audiobook ARC! Cassidy Brown did a nice job, handling the author’s humor well. 

This was a unique read for me. The kind that stuck out to me the entire time. It is a nonfiction book, about many horror movies that are originally books. So… a book about film based off a book. I don’t know, maybe that’s not that special/weird. 

For me, the ones I appreciated listening to the most, were the ones I’ve seen before (and some I’ve even read). They are: Psycho, The Exorcist, Halloween, The Shining, The Thing, Candyman, Scream, The Blair Witch Project, The Ring, 28 Days Later, Saw, The Conjuring, It Follows, Get Out, and Hereditary. While the majority here may not be based off books, there is a slew of unmentioned goodies throughout that are, and are equally worth checking out I’m sure. I enjoyed these because it was nice to hear someone else’s take aways and thoughts on things I don’t get to discuss much. 

As somewhat of a newbie to horror myself, it was interesting to read someone else’s journey through finding horror later in life. And no spoilers, but it was equally interesting to find out which of the FanFi/FearForAll crew were also Weenies! I used to not even stay in the room if someone else had something scary on, and what counted as scary was shockingly mild compared to now. 

The author runs the reader through each film almost like giving a synopsis, then discusses why they found it an important inclusion, and then explains some interesting tidbits that they say you could use at a party with diehard fans. I took this as more wit, because honestly I wouldn’t go toe to toe with any facts on something that was someone else’s favorite. Not me at least. 

My favorite part was the author discussing what impact the choices had on horror as a whole. Why it was a hit, or flop, and how it impacted the horror industry. Not everyone may agree with the choices made, but for me, there’s a whole new set on movies on my to-watch list now. 

The Love Song of Nathan Crane: A Novel by E. Reyes, E. Reyes

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Had my eyes on this one for a while and decided to grab it for National Book Buying Day. Perfect timing for Hispanic Heritage Month too! 

Nathan Crane is a typical young adult. Handsome, somewhat charming, normal. Sure he’s had some issues with love in the past, and sure his life at home isn’t perfect, but who hasn’t gone through something like that? 

When Nathan meets Christine, the new girl at school, they instantly connect, and while he walks her to class, they agree to meet up again for lunch. The friendship is fast and strong, and Nathan is immediately taken with her, even ignoring Marlene, who so obviously is interested in him. One night at an alcohol-infused party, Christine is a little too generous with herself, and Nathan leaves upset—which also hurts Christine. But when Nathan finally lays his heart out to her, she’s quick to turn him down. Already coming undone throughout the novel, Nathan starts to crack and splinter, spiraling into a deep, dark descent. 

Personally, I happened to really enjoy the fact that the relationship has some building before the initial rejection starts. In that way, it’s a lot deeper than the blurb gives it credit for. Christine is interested, she’s flirtatious, she’s engaging, she just doesn’t want to be with Nathan. For me, it just gives the story a much needed layer where it allows for Nathan to not just be this colossal creep. 

However, once Nathan has gone over the edge, and settled on his plan, there’s nothing left to keep the creep from showing, and god is he awful. Perhaps Reyes’ best writing yet, this is a fantastic showcasing of infatuation, toxic masculinity, and a torturous upbringing coalescing into all out obsession. If Nathan can’t have Christine, no one can. 

Nathan’s spiral gives Reyes the room to give us some unique and gruesome kills. From self defense to unfettered cruelty. And while I wouldn’t say I had fun with them, as I was so investing in the creep factor, this is a set of spree killings that really do show just how unhinged the main character is. There is a small paranormal plot line that the reader is never really sure about throughout the story. It’s quick and small, and I found myself wondering why it was there. The twist it brings really worked for me though, and it adds to Nathan’s craziness once you understand. 

This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

slow-paced

• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

adventurous challenging emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Thanks to NetGalley, Tor Nightfire and Macmillan Audio for the ARC, I really enjoyed this one! 

This was a first for me from the author, and I’m quite satisfied with the outcome. This is part commentary/satire of Hollywood, social media, and the all powerful algorithm, part supernatural, part slasher, and even part trauma story. The blend is unique, and I imagine probably quite hard to balance, but the author does it fantastically. 

Misha is a screenwriter, doing his best to write characters and stories that he never got to see as a kid. Unfortunately, he is still beholden to the world that we live in, where characters are at best perhaps gay, rather than openly out. The author does a fantastic job of showcasing the conflict and intricacies within by having Misha himself being only “LA out,” but not officially out to his family or hometown. And that is where the trauma lies. 

In the ever-growing scifi world we live in, with holograms and cloning and AI-altering, the author perfectly lines up a horror story that’s just farfetched enough to read as near future. When Misha’s boss sits him down, stating that the company wants his characters killed, rather than getting their excruciatingly earned and beautiful outing, Misha is understandably outraged. Even refusing and promising a lawsuit even after being (not so) more or less discreetly threatened. 

The idea that the company he worked so hard for, made money for, would come after him was simply too absurd to put any faith in. So when characters from Misha’s filmography start popping up and interfering with his life, he assumes it’s nothing more than a cosplaying prank. Some well done cosmetics, a high quality costume, a well planned and tailored prank set to make Misha feel frightened enough to submit. Nothing more. But as his more outlandish characters start to appear, and the body count starts to grow, Misha learns it’s anything but a prank. 

Is this a horror novel, is it horrific? Yes of course. There are interesting villains and kills, and the villain at large is something wholly unique. But what makes this book so good is what it’s actually saying. 

The author ends this harrowing trial by flipping the script. This is not just a trauma story, we are not simply our past, nor are we our fears. Misha gets to give a beautiful speech in which he finally announces to the world what he should have years ago. Representation is important, but it’s not just about being seen. It’s not gay misfortune, it’s life, and love, and it’s joy and growth. And Chuck Tingle, through Misha and Zeke, is showing the world that in explosive fashion. 

Limelight and Other Stories by Lyndsey Croal

adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad fast-paced

• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Huge thanks to ShortWave for the physical ARC. I love this cover!

This is a science fiction short story collection, and I loved that the stories varied in length from flash fiction to novelette. I also really enjoyed the mixture of sub genres this goes through, from dystopian to horror. There’s some really incredible concepts being played with here, and the distinction the author draws between loss, love, grief, and affection in such a short amount of words is a huge win. 

The title novelette, Limelight, is the real highlight for me. Experimental treatments allow for those dearly departed to come back. Would you make that decision? Could you leave them alone if there were options to tweak things, enhance things? For the parents in this heart breaking story, they’re split right up the street. But when one wins out over the other, they may find they get more than they bargained for. 

The idea of changing, or even enhancing someone that you loved and lost, is in my opinion, directly besmirching their memory. But if your intentions were pure, what then? Or, do you really believe that that could ever be pure? For me this hit notes of Black Mirror, Ex Machina and Sarah Chorn’s A Sorrow Named Joy. A dystopian world where something like this could exist, but never fully be accepted. As a high schooler, she is ridiculed and insulted for being brought back, for living. A choice that was never truly hers. To me that made this the most horror based story in the collection. 

As her mother continues to grasp for more and more control over her, all in the name of giving her daughter the life she ‘deserves’, her father does his best to stay away, ashamed of what he’s allowed. The juxtaposition of the two’s feelings were really well done. The split between obsession story and self guilt really drove home the theme.  Personally, right as this one ends, I’d love to see it open up into an entire novel, but I’m blown away with how well it worked as it stands. 

From scifi stories that seem near future, to those that seem out of reach, the thing this collection drives home is that Croal knows exactly how to make believable, and heart wrenching short stories. Body enhancing/manipulating mixed with various angles of corporate greed, make this its own kind of new body horror that I frankly want nothing to do with!

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

Wanted to like this as it seems like a new take on urban fantasy and vampires/creatures, but 20% in there’s nothing but talking/rambling and no work done whatsoever to make me like the characters enough to listen. 

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Thanks to Saga Press for the physical ARC. This book has a great design and I’m happy to own one. 

This book was a bit of a gamble for me. I was really interested in the blurb, had seen some early reviews that were great including other FanFiFam, but I had read one full length from the author and I hadn’t really gotten along with it. After finishing this and loving it, now I’m wondering if it was simply because I read the other when I was newer to horror. So perhaps a reread of The Only Good Indians is imminent now. 

This has to be one of the most unique takes on the Slasher genre. It brings to mind another recent read for me, which was Brian McAuley’s debut, Curse of the Reaper. Where that novel blends Slasher tropes with psychological horror, Jones went completely off the rails and made a slasher memoir. And not just any memoir, but one that takes place within a world where slashers do exist. There’s definitely no wondering here why zombie stories take place in worlds where no one knows what a zombie is, Jones has offered up his teenage slasher all the reference material he needs. 

In a kind of self referential nod that felt like Jamie Kennedy’s Randy from Scream/Scream 2, our main character’s best friend Amber is the launch board for all of Tolly Driver’s necessary slasher info. Her brother, a slasher fanatic, has the goods on what’s going to happen, when, how, and maybe even where, not that she’s necessarily going to share all of it. And on the inverse of maybe the ‘why’ zombie worlds don’t know of zombies, this created this really interesting tension where Tolly spends a huge portion of the book not believing what happened to him simply because his real life couldn’t become like the movies. These things existed in his world, but as fiction, they couldn’t possibly become him, right?

The detachment of Tolly from his Slasher self is another really unique dynamic to this novel. The Driver (pun intended), taking over has this supernatural angle to it that starts all the way at the beginning with the blood from the Joss kid. And just like any slasher, revenge is the driving force, right? And while the reader does live through the near death experience with Tolly, it did kind of feel like a somewhat weak reason to go around killing people. However, slashers aren’t usually known for being reasonable, rational, believable even. And it’s within that, that this story lies. There are things that seem extreme, things you’d never believe or assume, but neither did Tolly. 

Multilayered and compelling, Tolly Driver is anything but a mindless killer. With notes of coming of age, of finding oneself, with angles of grief and strength, this bleeds through as a love letter to Lamesa and Texas as a whole. And I absolutely loved Tolly’s internal commentary and struggles from the passenger seat. Jones has this way about his writing, this meandering, sometimes longwinded, sometimes unconventional sentence structuring, that just lends itself so well to someone telling their own story. And, I think, especially someone trying to remember it as well. It had this really nice stark contract to another read of mine at the time, Deep Freeze by Michael C. Grumley, which had such short chapters to enhance its pace that there were over 100. Jones instead, uses long winding pieces of each day to show just how much Tolly was really going through, both trying to stop it, and failing miserably. 

Poetic and heart breaking, the final 15 pages of this may break you. 

Stinetinglers 3 by R.L. Stine

adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced

4.0

I went with the audio for this one too. It had a multi-narrator cast again, mostly tackling the different POVs, and they did a good job. 

This is 10 more short stories from the master of middle grade horror. As always, I’m not really sure on the legality of these things, but I’m eternally wondering why all of his stories aren’t under the umbrella of Goosebumps. It’s his signature style anyway, and they all bring to mind GB stories anyway. 

These 10 are spooky too, some of which were actually quite a bit scarier than the second book. Particularly the idea of trading bodies with a dead person, where in the story, this zombie kindly asks for 30 minutes inside a living body. You’d still be alive, but you’d shortly live inside their deteriorated zombie-esque body. To me, the ending, and what was left as the consequence, could have been even scarier than the story itself. I’d really have liked to see that become a full novel from Stine, with notes of Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls and (a really) Freaky Friday. 

This one unfortunately did not continue on with Stine introducing the shorts. It was a bit jarring to hear someone random do it, and definitely felt like a downgrade. But I’m sure a middle grade reader probably would not notice something like that. Maybe he was too busy?

Spooky, eerie, silly, multiversal, and body changing, these stories from Stine continue to offer interesting and enjoyable places to go for a short while. While I feel like some of these hold back a bit more than Goosebumps did, I’m glad generations to come are getting their intro to Stine. 

Stinetinglers 2 by R.L. Stine

mysterious tense fast-paced

4.0

I went with the audio for this one. It had a multi-narrator cast, mostly based on the perspective of the story, and they were pretty much all solid. 

This is 10 new short stories from the master of middle grade horror. Again, I’m not really sure on the legality of these things, but I’m always left wondering why all of his stories aren’t under the umbrella of Goosebumps. It’s his signature style anyway. 

With that being said, these 10 are spooky, eerie, a little silly, and some even have a blend of scifi. Stine continues to prove that he has quite the imagination, and I loved that these featured an introduction for each story. The intros were even recorded by Stine too, and I love that their inspiration is mostly from his childhood experiences. I just can’t imagine writing that many stories, some of which feature similar ideas and plot lines. Like how do you keep track? 

While I wouldn’t necessarily put these on the level of Tales to Give You Goosebumps or the somewhat longer shorts in Goosebumps Triple Header 1, these are still enjoyable stories for a quick little read. I love their covers too. 

Deep Freeze by Michael C. Grumley

adventurous challenging mysterious tense medium-paced

• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Went with the audio for this, and Scott Brick did a good job bringing the pace and action to life in this one. 

An attempted store robbery, a bus crash. A tragic death that was not only a drowning, but a complete freezing beneath the frozen lake. When John Reiff wakes up in a scientific lab, what should be an absolute miracle, he has no idea where he is, or who he can trust—nor does he know why he has this sneaking suspicion that things are not as they seem. As the events of the novel progress, the reader just might find out that everyone has secrets. 

I listened to this one while reading I Was a Teenage Slasher, and the thing that stuck out the most was the authors’ completely different decisions: this one features incredibly short chapters, over 100 total. And while that could easily turn your night of “just one more” into a never ending sequence of more, I did find the shorter bits to be hard to digest as there was a lot of science, as well as a lot of confusion. As a plot structure, it makes perfect sense, as we know and find things out as John Reiff begins to, it just didn’t fully grab me. Until one particular line at the end of chapter 44 completely hooked me. Like I actually said, “alright I’m all in.” And while I won’t spoil it, I’m excited for readers to get into it. 

With how technothriller the blurb sounds, I was surprised with how dystopian this was. The world outside of the lab is shambles of what once was. War, famine, inflation, the use of AI—has turned the world into a husk. People died, starved to death, while the richer got richer still. So of course John Reiff has been roped into something completely corrupted! A guinea pig to a bigger scheme. 

I really enjoyed the mystery of this one, as well as the fact that almost everyone was hiding something different. The commentary of where it seems we are headed was nice as well, although a bit jarring as this is rather near, near-future. While the end did go a bit action thriller on us, it was entertaining throughout and I enjoyed the ending a lot. I’m glad to see there’s a planned sequel.