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armandyke · 1 month ago

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February 2025 Reading Wrap Up

What a year, huh? What the fuck do you mean it's still February

First, my holy quartet of DNFs

1) Along the River of Flesh by Kristopher Triana (DNF)

Sometimes a good story just doesn’t need a sequel. I fully read about 30%, then started skim reading to 50% before finally accepting that it was just boring as all hell. All we were doing was going backwards and forwards between innumerable POVs of characters who were trying to learn things I, the reader, had already learned in the first book.

It’s a shame because Gone To See The River Man was really good. I think ultimately it was the choice to have multiple povs that let this one down. Instead of getting to know the characters, I was just trying to keep up with who the hell all these different people were.

At one point we started a chapter in an entirely new character’s POV just for them to be murdered halfway through the same chapter. It had absolutely no emotional impact because I was too busy trying to remember if I was supposed to know who the guy was already. At most this book should have stuck to dual POV, but ultimately I think it would be impossible to recreate the impact the first book had, and maybe it should have been left alone.

2) A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (DNF)

I read approximately five pages of this before putting it back down. In a very short space of time I could tell this was going to be a bunch of wannabe edgelord nonsense. Get a load of this:

“[...] a young man, tall and thin, with long aristocratic fingers and skin the color of Brillat-Savarin. [...] Later, though not much later, I'd explore the inside of this young man’s mouth with my tongue and my fingers; it would taste of bourbon and ennui. His mouth would explore the lemon and salt of my pussy; it would taste of multiple orgasms and poor judgement. The young man in question was long and creamy. A delight; a cream puff stuffed to bursting with pointed sweetness and cum.”

You’re doing too much, and yet you’re giving me nothing. Maybe this is a controversial thing to say, but if I have to keep stopping to google things so I can understand your descriptions, you might be a bad writer. And if your book is about cannibalism and I still can’t bring myself to read more than a few pages, you’re definitely a bad writer.

It was pure pretentious word salad, and when the main character described her pussy as tasting of salt and lemon, I closed the book and put it back on my shelf. See a doctor about that, lady.

3) So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison (DNF)

The vampires don’t have fangs. The vampires don’t have fucking fangs. I don’t have words to express my rage. THE VAMPIRES DON’T HAVE FUCKING FANGS. EVEN THE FUCKING TWILIGHT VAMPIRES HAD FANGS. YOU WROTE VAMPIRES WORSE THAN TWILIGHT.

I’m calm. This book is about a woman named Sloane stuck in an unhappy marriage with her scumbag cheating husband. When she and her best friend Naomi go away for a fun birthday weekend, they end up being turned into vampires. I can’t tell you any more than that because, despite reading 50% of this book, that was all that had happened. And that was the synopsis on the back of the book. I think I’ve said this before but one of my biggest book pet peeves is when it takes too long just to catch up to the synopsis.

That being said, I wasn’t having a bad time. I really enjoyed some of the vampire side characters, though they were, unfortunately, a lot more interesting than the main characters. But my god. What is the point of writing a vampire book if you’re going to take out all of the vampire lore? Was the author being held hostage? Did someone kidnap her family and tell her to include a vampire in her book or else? Rachel, if you didn’t want to write about vampires, you could just not do that. Nobody asked for this.

4) This Book is Full of Spiders by Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong) (DNF)

I actually started reading this one before any of the others, but I wasn’t really feeling it so I decided to take a break and try something else, but after the hat trick of disasters that invoked I decided fuck this book as well.

On a serious note, I might come back to this one because it’s main sin was just being really slow paced. It also kinda gave me the ick that a white author is using an Asian name (I’m pretty sure the character himself in the book is also white. Just a strange choice but who am I, really?). The humour made me giggle at times, but came across as a bit try-hard at others, and I fear the book is a lot more focused on its characters than it is on the flesh eating brain controlling spiders. Not a crime in itself, but unfortunately the characters did not come across as interesting enough for me to care about them more than the aforementioned spiders. Maybe that’s on me, this book is technically the second in a series, so maybe I missed the chance to come to care about these characters in the initial book, but from what I can tell it’s intended to work just as well as a standalone.

5) Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrews (5⭐)

I don’t know how to get through this without crying so I’m just gonna give you a summary and go from there.

Wyatt grew up on a farm with her two best friends, Peter and James, until her mother decided to take her away and cut off all contact with her father and both boys. Five years later, her father dies, and she returns to the house intent on burning it to the ground. Instead, she finds Peter chained up in the basement.

It turns out that Wyatt and her father descend from a long line of witches, tasked with keeping up magical wards on the farm to prevent eldritch horrors from being able to cross over into our world. To do this, the family have been keeping Peter, an immortal, hostage and ritualistically sacrificing him every few years. All Peter wants is to go home, back to a mother he barely remembers, but to do that he needs to sacrifice Wyatt to the beast in the woods.

This book cut my heart out of my chest and handed it to me on a platter. It’s about these two childhood best friends who love each other so deeply but can never return to a normal life unless one kills the other. It’s about feeling like a monster and finding someone who loves you in spite of that. It’s about longing to return to a home you don’t ever remember having. It’s so beautifully written. I don’t know what else to say about it other than I loved it and it tore me apart.

It also has fungus. If I had a nickel for every time I loved a horror book involving fungus, I would have four nickels.

6) Undercover by Tamsyn Muir (5⭐)

This is a short story so there’s not much I can say without spoiling it. A detective has gone undercover to work for a lesbian mafia boss to find out whether she is in possession of a dangerous flesh eating ghoul. If that doesn’t sell it to you I don’t know what will. It was great, and the ending gave me chills.

7) Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen (2.5⭐)

You know I love a book with dual timelines. Unfortunately this one just didn’t hit for me.

This book follows Nick, going back and forth between his life as a child growing up with his father and brother Joshua, and the present day as an adult (Nick having moved away from home, Joshua having been disowned for marrying an Asian woman) when they are both summoned back home to their father as he reaches the end of his life.

It’s hard for me to explain a lot of what was wrong with this book without spoiling the plot (which I’m happy to do for anyone who is more curious). Let’s just say that this book could have been cut in half, maybe cut by even more. A large amount of what is detailed in Nick’s childhood doesn’t have any relevance to the climax of the book. I never thought I’d say this, but the gay side plot was unnecessary. I really thought it was going to end up with some kind of reveal, but no, it seemed to be there mostly just to pad out the book. I think this would have been a lot more impactful if it had been condensed down to a novella or a short story.

I came very close to DNFing this book (ultimately I stuck with it because it was an interesting story) because for some reason the first half of this book is just… badly written? The lack of quotation marks for dialogue alone makes it very difficult for me to read, but on top of that the author just seemed to forget about the existence of commas. I feel like I read the first half of this book twice, because almost every sentence was so lacking in punctuation of any kind I had to keep rereading everything to make sense of it. And I assumed this was some kind of stylistic choice, but then the problem seemed to vanish. There was the odd sentence here and there that read clunkily, but overall it seemed as though only the second half of the book had been looked over by an editor. And it was such a jarring shift that I still found myself rereading passages to check I hadn’t just adjusted and started adding in punctuation in my head. It was just… very odd.

I enjoyed the overarching story and the climax of the book but overall this book felt more like an exercise than an escape.

8) Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six by Lisa Unger (3.5⭐)

The problem with me reading thrillers is that I have no patience and need to know exactly what’s going on immediately, which then leads to me sitting up all night to finish reading it in one go.

This book is about three couples: Hannah, her husband, her best friend and her boyfriend, and her brother and his wife, who are staying, as the name suggests, at a secluded cabin for a long weekend away. Everyone is keeping secrets, and when a storm hits and knocks the power out, they find themselves isolated in the middle of nowhere, with an intruder lurking outside.

Simple premise, though nothing about this book is simple. There are several reasons this book didn’t reach 5 stars for me, and the main one was that there was too much going on. There were so many different povs, one of which was so unnecessary that I ended up skipping those chapters all together without missing a single piece of information. There was an entire ghost story side plot that came to nothing in the end and didn’t add anything. So many names were thrown around in various anecdotes or other chapters that never came up again.

I will say, and I don’t even consider this a spoiler because so much else is happening, that if the author intended for it to be a twist that one of the characters was a bad dude, she could have laid off on repeatedly mentioning that he named himself after a shark and drove a tesla.

9) Deliver Me by Elle Nash (5⭐)

This book was sitting pretty at 4 stars until the ending. I suddenly realised what was going to happen with about ten pages left to go and then sat there whispering “oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no” which I think is exactly how a good horror book should be.

The story follows Daisy, or Dee-Dee, who has escaped her fundamentalist Christian upbringing and now works in a chicken slaughterhouse. She desperately wants to have a baby, despite a series of miscarriages. And when she finds herself pregnant again she becomes absolutely determined to see the pregnancy through.

Throughout the pregnancy Dee-Dee has to contend with her overbearing, disapproving, and staunchly religious mother, her distant, criminal boyfriend with a bug fetish (just trust me), and the return of her idealised childhood best friend, who is also pregnant and brings a lot of long forgotten feelings back to the surface. On top of that, she has her work, her constant body issues, and at the center of everything, a longing to just once feel loved and needed. It’s not a comfortable read by any stretch of the imagination, and sometimes it made me feel a bit sick, but unlike a lot of more extreme books I’ve read, everything felt intentional and well thought out.

There’s a lot going on in this book. Please, for the love of God read the trigger warnings before going into it. The trigger warning at the start of the book says “discussions of miscarriage” but I would say it’s a hell of a lot more than that. It gets very graphic at points. If miscarriage or difficulties with pregnancy in general is something you are sensitive to it would probably be best to skip this one.

10) Hold the Dark by William Giraldi (2⭐)

I have no idea what to write for this one because I don’t really have any thoughts. Never has a book left me feeling less in my life. It finished and I simply said “oh, okay” and then never thought about it again. I was going to give it a lower rating but that felt unfair because I don’t know if it was bad, it just… exists.

The synopsis on the back made it sound like this was going to be dire circumstances in an isolated snowy setting, which as you know is my jam, and this time it was going to feature wolves. Except the wolves had nothing to do with anything in the end and honestly the circumstances weren’t even that dire, just weird. I don’t know man.

11) A Haunting in the Arctic by C.J. Cooke (4.5⭐)

If nobody else got me I know C.J. Cooke got me.

This is another dire circumstances in an isolated snowy setting book, but this one was good because it was written by C.J. Cooke. As with all her books, this story goes back and forth between the perspectives of two women at different points in time, in this case following Nicky, the daughter of a whaling ship merchant who finds herself kidnapped and brought aboard the ship for their next expedition in the arctic, and Dominique, an explorer visiting the wreck of that same whaling ship over a century later in order to try and document the history before the wreck is dismantled.

We’ve got ghosts, we’ve got selkie folklore, we’ve got a locked room murder mystery and peculiar goings on where nothing is quite as it seems, and as usual it comes together beautifully. Honestly I don’t really know what to say besides yeah, she wrote a great book, again.

As I’ve mentioned in my reviews of her other books, this author won’t shy away from difficult topics, and in this case both rape and self harm are discussed and shown throughout the book so if those are things you struggle to read about then this is a book to avoid. But again, as usual, she does a great job of writing about the issues in a way that isn’t gratuitous, but still feels raw and real.

The only reason this book didn’t get the full five stars for me was because throughout the book we occasionally got one-off povs from characters who, most of the time, never came up again, and I didn’t really feel like they added anything to the story. There was nothing in those short one-off chapters that couldn’t have just as easily been incorporated into Dominique’s pov while she was researching the ship’s history. Luckily these chapters were so short and few and far between that the book didn’t actively suffer for it, they were just unneeded.

12) American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (3.5⭐)

As with all the big name books I read, I’m not gonna go too much into this because we all know what it is and what it’s about to some degree.

I don’t think you’re really supposed to enjoy reading that, so I can’t really fault it in that respect. It was mind numbing, but that’s kinda the point. I don’t know, rating this was hard because I hated it but I also knew that was the author’s intention, so can I really give him a bad rating for succeeding? I will say that I didn’t expect the violence and gore to go as hard as it did. Any time I heard some normie saying this book is horribly violent I would always roll my eyes but no, they were right, so I’m retroactively apologising for that. It did make me feel a bit sick at times. I’ve read self described extreme horror tamer than some of the stuff going on in this book. Fair play.

13) Cult by Ash Ericmore (1.5⭐)

Speaking of extreme horror.

My constant search for good extreme horror that doesn’t just read as a man writing graphic sexual violence for the sake of it is endless and ongoing. This one, alas, was just another man writing graphic sexual violence for the sake of it. My quest continues.

Bonus .5 of a star because a man got his dick snipped off with garden shears and I thought it was funny. Sue me.

14) Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio (4.5⭐)

To the shock and surprise of everybody, I read another book about fungus and enjoyed it. I know, it’s crazy.

This is a short novella about a group of begrudging friends who meet each other every night for a cigarette in an abandoned graveyard, only when they arrive on this particular night they find that somebody has dug a fresh grave. It quickly turns into a fast paced overnight investigation with everything from scientific malpractice to kidnap and torture. All in all, just a lot of fun.

Docked that final .5 of a star because there were two characters named Hannah and Heather and I kept getting them confused, and in a book with so few characters I don’t think it would have been that hard to give them slightly more distinctive names.

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