Friday, December 31, 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight December 2021

The Ladies of Horror Fiction team is putting a spotlight on Young Adult and Middle Grade horror each month. Below we are featuring the books that were released in December as well as what our team has been reading and reviewing.

Young Adult New Releases

No Beauties or Monsters by Tara Goedjen

No Beauties or Monsters by Tara Goedjen

A mystery about a girl whose family secrets are as threatening as the desert that surrounds her—but whose quest to expose the truth may tear apart reality itself.

Rylie hasn’t been back to Twentynine Palms since her dad died. She left a lot of memories out there, buried in the sand of the Mojave Desert. Memories about her dad, her old friends Nathan and Lily, and most of all, her enigmatic grandfather, a man who cut ties with Rylie’s family before he passed away. But her mom’s new work assignment means their family has to move, and now Rylie’s in the one place she never wanted to return to, living in the house of a grandfather she barely knew.

At least her old friends are happy to welcome her home. Well, some of them, anyway. Lily is gone, vanished into the desert. And Twentynine Palms is so much stranger than Rylie remembers. There are whispers around town of a mysterious killer on the loose, but it isn’t just Twentynine Palms that feels off—there’s something wrong with Rylie, too. She’s seeing things she can’t explain. Visions of monstrous creatures that stalk the night.

Somehow, it all seems to be tied to her grandfather and the family cabin he left behind. Rylie wants the truth, but she doesn’t know if she can trust herself. Are the monsters in her head really out there? Or could it be that the deadliest thing in the desert . . . is Rylie herself?

Published December 7th 2021 by Delacorte Press Goodreads | Bookshop

Young Adult Books Reviewed

This month Kathy read and loved Bad Witch Burning by Jessica Lewis. Don’t miss her 5⭐ review of Bad Witch Burning (“Bad Witch Burning is one of the best young adult books I have read this year.”)

Kathy also read and reviewed Last One to Die by Cynthia Murphy. Check out her review of Last One to Die (“It has just the right mixture of mystery and horror to create a fast-paced page turner.”)

Middle Grade Books Reviewed

This month I (Jen) read and reviewed The In-Between by Rebecca Ansari. Be sure to check out my review of The In-Between (“The In-Between was a really unique ghost story and will probably wind up being one of my favorite middle grade releases from this year.“)

I also read and reviewed Ghost in the Headlights by Lindsey Duga. You can check out my review of Ghost in the Headlights (“Ghost in the Headlights is the perfect book to give a young reader starting out on their horror journey.“)

2021 YA and MG Horror Spotlights

Thank you so much for spotlighting YA and MG horror with us all year long! If you missed any of our posts this year, you can find them below. I’m looking forward to spotlighting another amazing year of YA and MG in 2022.

YA/MG Horror Spotlight January 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight February 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight March 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight April 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight May 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight June 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight July 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight August 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight September 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight October 2021

YA/MG Horror Spotlight November 2021


Jen is one of our LOHF admins. Jen manages the technical side of the Ladies of Horror Fiction website. She also keeps a spotlight on middle grade and young adult horror each month.

You can also find Jen on her blog Book Den, Twitter as @bookden, Instagram as @bookdenjen, on Goodreads, and Letterboxd.

Monday, December 27, 2021

What We've Been Reading #117

Welcome to a new batch of review link-ups of recent reads. Go ahead and add some dark joy to your bookshelves!

We hope you find your new favorite book and don’t forget to click either tag above to find more good books ♥ 


A Tricker-Treater Christmas by Briana Morgan

Get ready to experience a monster’s high-stakes game.

When one man’s wish goes horribly wrong, he must make an impossible choice. Faced with his own demons, and at the Tricker-Treater’s mercy, how far will Luke go to keep his daughter from leaving?

For fans of The Tricker-Treater and Other Stories comes a fresh, festive tale of a desperate father and his struggle to preserve his family—fitting for the holiday season.

Goodreads | Amazon

Alex’s Teaser Review

Move over, Krampus, there’s a new contender for dark creature of the year in Briana Morgan’s latest short story, A TRICKER-TREATER CHRISTMAS.

Read Alex’s entire review at Goodreads.


Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper

Love twisted into horrific shapes, nightmares driven by cruel music, and a world where what little light remains fractures the sky into midnight rainbows in eighteen stories tracing the dark veins of queer horror, isolation, and the monstrous feminine.

The universe unwinds to the tune of a malicious ice cream truck jingle in “We All Scream.” “The Law of Conservation of Death” dictates that a ghost pursue his prey across her every reincarnation. Superstitions thrive even in the distant future and across the stars when a colony shuttle mounts a witch trial in “Hairy Jack.” And try to “Forgive the Adoring Beast” as it scavenges a world of dead gods for tokens of bloody affection. Including two new short stories and a never-before-published novelette, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy digs deep inside and clings to the beating nightmare heart you always knew was there.

Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop

Cassie’s Teaser Review

The range in this collection & in Hailey’s writing is unbelievable; I’m honestly convinced that she can do no wrong at this point – her talent is unmatched. She has a unique perspective and a unique mind, and she blends them together with this natural sort of otherworldly, terrifying brilliance that blows me away every time I read anything new she’s written.

Read Cassie’s entire review at Goodreads.


The Diary of a Serial Killer’s Daughter by L.A. Detwiler

If you knew your father’s darkest secret, would you turn him in?
What if his secret was connected to you?

Ruby Marlowe’s always been a daddy’s girl. Her mother died when she was two, and her single father has ensured she has everything she needs. However, everyone has dark secrets, and Ruby’s father is no exception…

When she’s young, she doesn’t understand the weight of her father’s killing game. However, as she ages, she realizes her obsessive tendencies aren’t the only elements that separate her from her peers. After she begins to investigate her mother’s life and death, Ruby starts to believe there are some secrets even she doesn’t know about the serial killer she calls Daddy.

As her father’s killing grows rampant, the secrets get harder and harder to hide—and she fears it will all come crashing down. Will Ruby seek a different life for herself and betray the only person who has ever loved her, or will she get wrapped up in his sinister path?

Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop

Laurie’s Teaser Review

It’s super dark and I think you’ll enjoy it if you’re looking for something a wee bit different than the standard serial killer novel.

Read Laurie’s entire review at Goodreads.


Thank you for joining us today! We hope you found something to add to your tbr list. Please share your recent reads with us in the comments below.

If you are a LOHF writer and have a book you’d like us to consider for a review please visit our review submission page here.


Laurie is one of our LOHF Admins. Laurie creates our review posts, coordinates review requests, oversees the Ladies of Horror Fiction directory, and manages our LOHF Goodreads group.

You can find Laurie on her blog Bark’s Book Nonsense, on Twitter as @barksbooks, on Instagram as @barksbooks, and on Goodreads.

Friday, December 17, 2021

#LadiesFirst22 Challenge

It’s time for another Ladies First challenge! The Ladies of Horror Fiction team is hosting the Ladies First challenge again for the New Year!

To participate in the challenge, simply choose a Ladies of Horror Fiction book as your first book of the year and share it with us on social media under #LadiesFirst22!

We love seeing everyone’s picks each year. Any LOHF book counts, but I’ll post some of our recent Instagram photos for inspiration!

Will you be joining us for the challenge this year? We’re excited to see which book you choose to read for #LadiesFirst22!


Jen is one of our LOHF admins. Jen manages the technical side of the Ladies of Horror Fiction website. She also keeps a spotlight on middle grade and young adult horror each month.

You can also find Jen on her blog Book Den, Twitter as @bookden, Instagram as @bookdenjen, on Goodreads, and Letterboxd.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

What We've Been Reading #116

We have three recent reads to share with you today! We hope you find your new favorite book and don’t forget to click either tag above to find more recommendations that you need in your collection.


Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre edited by Alison Peirse

“But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.”

“Women are just not that interested in making horror films.”

This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.

Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.

Goodreads | Amazon

Audra’s Teaser Review

This is a fabulous and much-needed collection of film criticism. Both by women and about women, these essays explore the horror genre and women’s often overlooked contributions. With essays on directors and writers, mainstream and experimental cinema, and movies all over the world, this work offers a historical corrective, and I can only hope we’ll see more criticism in this vein.

Read Audra’s entire review at Goodreads.


Daughters of Darkness II Anthology

The Daughters are back! This time with a new quartet of women horror writers to thrill and scare you, in the latest anthology, Daughters of Darkness II, from the women-run indie horror press, Black Angel.

Within these shadowed pages you will journey into the depths of the myth-rich Scottish countryside,  into the horrors of suburban life, where beneath the skin of Hummingbird Academy the truly macabre ferments. You will encounter haunted girls and young men, with dark and deadly secrets, and travel into the Gothic heartlands, culminating in the hell of WW1 and encounter who or what comes home from the trenches.

These are four women horror writers at the top of their game, conjuring stories of quiet, skin-creeping terror. 

Goodreads | Amazon

Cat’s Teaser Review

With horrors that were emotional, unsettling and magical, Daughters of Darkness II directed a spotlight on a quartet of women, three of which were new to me. There was a decent amount of variety, and I enjoyed the overall subtlety that, in turn, made the gruesome scenes even more effective when they came around. There’s no question that it was worth the time.

Read Cat’s entire review at Red Lace Reviews.


Hairspray and Switchblades by V. Castro

Hairspray and Switchblades by V. Castro

When Maya and Magdalena lose their parents to a home invasion, Magdalena puts her dreams on hold and turns to exotic dancing. Cash is what the sisters need to stay together and keep Maya in an elite catholic high school that has set her on the path for an athletic and academic college scholarship.

These sisters come from a bloodline of Jaguar shifters from Mexico and have gained unwanted attention. The San Antonio Stripper Ripper is stalking the streets, out for a specific kind of blood.

Though Magdalena trades in skin, there is no way she will allow anyone to own her. Steamy. Bloody. Dangerous. Hairspray and Switchblades, what more could a girl need to survive the hot streets?

Book 5 in the Rewind-or-Die series: imagine your local movie rental store back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, remember all those fantastic covers. Remember taking those movies home and watching in awe as the stories unfolded in nasty rainbows of gore, remember the atmosphere and textures. Remember the blood.

Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop

Laurie’s Teaser Review

This is my kind of book. It’s savage and sexy and the main character is both strong and likable and that’s something too many books get dreadfully wrong. But not this time. 

Read Laurie’s entire review at Goodreads.


Thank you for joining us today! We hope you found something to add to your tbr list. Please share your recent reads with us in the comments below.

If you are a LOHF writer and have a book you’d like us to consider for a review please visit our review submission page here.


Laurie is one of our LOHF Admins. Laurie creates our review posts, coordinates review requests, oversees the Ladies of Horror Fiction directory, and manages our LOHF Goodreads group.

You can find Laurie on her blog Bark’s Book Nonsense, on Twitter as @barksbooks, on Instagram as @barksbooks, and on Goodreads.

Thursday, December 9, 2021

December New Releases

Each month the Ladies of Horror Fiction team posts all the books we are aware of that will be releasing during that month here and on our Bookshop.org page. You can also check out the releases for the whole year here.

Please let us know if we missed any new releases so we can add them to our lists!


59079201. sy475

The Shivering Ground and Other Stories by Sara Barkat

The Shivering Ground blends future and past, earth and otherworldliness, in a magnetic collection that shimmers with art, philosophy, dance, film, and music at its heart.

A haunting medieval song in the mouth of a guard, an 1800s greatcoat on the shoulders of a playwright experiencing a quantum love affair, alien worlds both elsewhere and in the ruined water at our feet: these stories startle us with the richness and emptiness of what we absolutely know and simultaneously cannot pin into place.

In the tender emotions, hidden ecological or relational choices, and the sheer weight of a compelling voice, readers “hear” each story, endlessly together and apart.

Published December 1st 2021 by T. S. Poetry Press Goodreads | Amazon


59221154. sx318

Waif by Samantha Kolesnik

Angela has everything she thought she ever wanted—a successful husband, a lavish house, and a bottomless fortune.

But the sight of a strange man in a grocery store one night reawakens her dormant sexuality and soon Angela embarks on a dangerous descent into the world of underground pornography and back-alley plastic surgery.

As the stakes get higher, long-buried memories resurface and Angela finds herself enamored with Reena, a fetish film performer. With some help from a queer gang called The Waifs, Angela is forced to make the decision between her unhappy upper-class life and the treacherous world of underground film.

Published December 1st 2021 by Grindhouse Press Goodreads | Amazon


56898223

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.

Published December 7th 2021 by Atria Books Goodreads | Bookshop


57413711

No Beauties or Monsters by Tara Goedjen

A mystery about a girl whose family secrets are as threatening as the desert that surrounds her—but whose quest to expose the truth may tear apart reality itself.

Rylie hasn’t been back to Twentynine Palms since her dad died. She left a lot of memories out there, buried in the sand of the Mojave Desert. Memories about her dad, her old friends Nathan and Lily, and most of all, her enigmatic grandfather, a man who cut ties with Rylie’s family before he passed away. But her mom’s new work assignment means their family has to move, and now Rylie’s in the one place she never wanted to return to, living in the house of a grandfather she barely knew.

At least her old friends are happy to welcome her home. Well, some of them, anyway. Lily is gone, vanished into the desert. And Twentynine Palms is so much stranger than Rylie remembers. There are whispers around town of a mysterious killer on the loose, but it isn’t just Twentynine Palms that feels off—there’s something wrong with Rylie, too. She’s seeing things she can’t explain. Visions of monstrous creatures that stalk the night.

Somehow, it all seems to be tied to her grandfather and the family cabin he left behind. Rylie wants the truth, but she doesn’t know if she can trust herself. Are the monsters in her head really out there? Or could it be that the deadliest thing in the desert . . . is Rylie herself?

Published December 7th 2021 by Delacorte Press Goodreads | Bookshop


58184429

Sloth by Joanne Askew

Britain is rotting. Sloth has taken over the land. Natali and her wife, Lana, must raise their heart rates every three hours or the Sloth virus will slow their hearts to nothing. But Natali faces more than Sloth. She faces the depression her wife is consumed by, the loss of their child, and soon they must face a new presence on Britain’s decaying roads. There are voices that yell through the silent night and gunfire that echoes from the skeletons of a society in ruins.

Published December 7th 2021 by Rebel Satori Press Goodreads | Amazon


58105186. sx318

Square3 by Mira Grant

We think we understand the laws of physics. We think reality is an immutable monolith, consistent from one end of the universe to the next. We think the square/cube law has actual relevance. We think a lot of things. It was perhaps inevitable that some of them would turn out to be wrong.

When the great incursion occurred, no one was prepared. How could they have been? Of all the things physicists had predicted, “the fabric of reality might rip open and giant monsters could come pouring through” had not made the list. But somehow, on a fine morning in May, that was precisely what happened.

For sisters Susan and Katharine Black, the day of the incursion was the day they lost everything. Their home, their parents, their sense of normalcy…and each other, because when the rift opened, Susan was on one side and Katharine was on the other, and each sister was stranded in a separate form of reality. For Susan, it was science and study and the struggle to solve the mystery of the altered physics inside the zones transformed by the incursion. For Katharine, it was monsters and mayhem and the fight to stay alive in a world unlike the world of her birth.

The world has changed. The laws of physics have changed. The girls have changed. And the one universal truth of all states of changed matter is that nothing can be completely restored to what it was originally, no matter how much you might wish it could be. Nothing goes back. 

Published December 31st 2021 by Subterranean Press Goodreads | Bookshop


Audra

Audra and her horror hound, Ouija, help manage the Ladies of Horror Fiction Instagram page. When not ghost hunting or rollerskating, she also contributes articles and helps maintain the website.

You can find Audra on Instagram as @ouija.reads, Twitter as @audraudraudra, and Goodreads.

LinkWithin