Spooky Season Reading

Book Review: BETWEEN TWO FIRES by Christopher Buehlman

| Jessica Crawford

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is a 430 page standalone novel, initially published by Ace in 2012, later self-published, and now with a deluxe edition published by Tor Nightfire.

Genre

Horror

Subgenre

Medieval Horror

Description

And Lucifer “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of Heaven down…”

The year is 1348.

Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm―that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has become their battleground. Is it delirium or is it faith?

Now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and give him―blood-stained and wretched as he is―a chance at redemption he long thought lost.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

Opening Line

Now in these days the Lord God had turned His face from the business of men; and the angels who had remained loyal to Him said to one another, we must look after the children of Adam.

My Thoughts

“She’s holy,” he said, the words strange in his mouth. “Goddamn it,” he added, and felt better.

I started seeing this medieval horror novel all over the internet within the past year, and in this handsome edition Joe Hill writes a foreword about its unusual journey from being published in 2012 to becoming a sensation fourteen years later (“…that same pop culture churn that can obliterate a work of art can also resurrect one”).

This book is about a disgraced knight turned brigand who finds himself ushering an orphan girl across the French countryside during The Black Death.

This book is also about an epic battle between God’s angels in Heaven and the fallen ones of Hell that bedevil the world when it seems He has abandoned his post.

These two stories are actually one and the same.

This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

The setting in this book is about as bleak as it gets! The plague in the fourteenth century eradicated somewhere in the ballpark of half of the entire population of Europe. Eventually there were too many dead bodies and not enough living ones to bury them, and those who had managed to survive became increasingly desperate–this is the world Thomas and Delphine are traveling through. Add to that some devils testing the waters by coming to the world of humankind to terrorize God’s favorite creation, and you have a recipe for some pretty gnarly horror! But in the end it’s also a fairly touching story about redemption.

Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them.

I would love to check out more of this author’s work!

Spicy Opinion Alert! Book Review: THE WITCHES OF CAMBRIDGE by Alice Hoffman

| Jessica Crawford

The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman is a 416 page novel published on 2026, the first in a planned series.

Genre

Fantasy: Magical Realism

Description

The brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe known as the Lilith Society.

Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees. The Puritans blamed Eve for the sins of the world. That was when we began to meet in the name of Lilith, Adam’s first wife—banished for refusing to do as she was told. 

We Fly Together…

By the 1950s, Cambridge, Massachusetts feels far removed from the legendary witch trials that marked its early days as a colony. Ava, a bright young woman from a small town in Maine, arrives for her first year at Radcliffe College. There, she meets Lauren, her opposite in every way—the wild and brazen daughter of a wealthy and well-established Cambridge family. But the two have more in common than they think. Both are recruited by the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times. As they learn more about their legacy, Ava and Lauren form a close bond that is put to the test as they learn to navigate their new power, friendship, and love.

While Radcliffe seems like a safe haven, the shadow of McCarthyism looms large, an ever-present threat to the flourishing creative and intellectual life in Cambridge. And as girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realize the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.

Opening Line

Dear Reader,

Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees.

My Thoughts

What happened here? Did they say, “The marketing power behind your name alone is enough, you can go ahead and ignore all the rules for writing”?

This book is maybe 10% infodumping, 75% telling instead of showing, and 15% of actual scenes playing out for the reader. It spans the course of four years while the two main characters attend Radcliffe College in the 1950s, but don’t think you ever actually accompany them to a single class. They live at Lilith House, where magic is taught at Sunday meetings, but you’ll never actually see a single one of these meetings as it happens. Instead we are treated to only a list of classes they are enrolled in, are told what kind of things they learn in their witch meetings. And if the severe paucity of actually showing readers a scene as it unfolds isn’t bad enough, there is very little plot driving this story.

There is quite a bit of repetition of information, several characters appear on page and are given a name solely for the purpose of very quickly disappearing or dying or otherwise attempting to set a tense and mysterious tone. There are no rules to the magic, the author can just spew out another bit of whimsy ad hoc, making it feel fairly meaningless. These witches are polydactyl, pointy-toothed, and black-blooded–but good lord, don’t get me started on the characters who have apparently never shed blood in their lives, or the one who has never, not once, looked at her own menstrual blood.

As far as the earlier timeline with “the first witch of Cambridge”, as told through letters read by our 1950s protagonists: novels that highlight the horrors of the witch trials at the hands of Puritans and draw parallels with modern day women and/or McCarthyism are a dime a dozen these days. Many of these books are beloved, but in a publishing world now oversaturated with them, you have to make sure yours really offers something new and exciting to the effort. I’m not sure this one did quite enough of that.

A note on the audiobook: I found Mena Suvari’s voice during the narration very pleasant, but her performance of the dialogue for almost every character made them all sound absolutely insufferable, just the worst identical-sounding bunch of buttholes. I hated nearly every one of them because of this. I did find myself thinking that, had I read certain lines (not limited to just dialogue) on the page in a manner that seemed more appropriate to me, they would have hit different.

I just…I can’t wrap my head around someone who has written such well-performing novels in the past producing THIS. But it’s Goodreads ratings aren’t terrible, so I guess the witchy vibes alone were enough for some people. Just not this people.

Book Review: THE SHIP OF DEATH by Kyle Winkler

| Jessica Crawford

The Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler is a 256 page standalone novel published by Avon in 2026.

Genre

Horror

Description

The dice roll. Darkness answers.

House of Leaves meets Jumanji in this brilliantly original and twisted novel composed entirely of found documents, following an unwitting couple ensnared by a sinister tabletop role-playing game

Cole and Lorraine playtest board games for some extra cash as they save up to buy a home. But after a series of bizarre coincidences, and signing a strange NDA, the couple finds on their porch a mysterious indie developer’s tabletop role-playing game called The Ship of Death. The game relies heavily on the players’ imaginations, and takes up an ever-growing amount of space: in their kitchen, and in their minds. As its true sinister nature becomes clearer, and its forces capture more in its web, the boundary between the game and reality begins to dissolve. . . and the pair are instructed to possess a stranger’s soul.

Told entirely through game reports, emails, game forum posts, personal journals, and police reports, reading The Ship of Death feels like a dangerous dice roll. It’s a sleep-stealing, possession-inducing work of intense, intelligent found cosmic horror that announces Kyle Winkler as a spectacular voice in the genre.

My Thoughts

The description of this book sounded like it would be right up my alley.

Cole and his wife Lorraine are playtesting a new tabletop roleplaying game called The Ship of Death. The mere scope of the game has them super excited at first, but then the lines between the real world and the one in the game start to blur. The result is cosmic horror. The players meet shady characters that seem to have leapt straight out of their imagined story, and find themselves compelled to carry out horrifying actions from their roleplaying in real life. The entire story is told with a mixed media format—emails, journal entries, forum posts, etc.

So why wasn’t this a home run for me? I like weird books, but this wasn’t my kind of weird, I guess. There are so many things from the game world that have you repeating, “Huh? What does that even mean?” (e.g. The Saltation of Banal Objects, The Curation of Auguries from Flesh, Sustenance and Religio-Social Habitudes, etc). And this is intentional, it adds to the creepy factor and has the characters questioning everything. But it just didn’t hit for me.

I feel like I haven’t said much that wasn’t already in the book description, but the only other information would be unnecessarily going into too much detail of the story. 256 pages presented in mixed media format is actually a fairly short book. It’s a quick read that is mysterious, tense, and dark. As far as characters, I liked the psychic Cole consults, but it’s difficult with all of the others because even if they are essentially good people, they are no longer in control of reality and do some not very good things.

Again, all of this is a great idea in theory, but in execution left this reader a bit underwhelmed. But your mileage may vary!

Book Review: KISS SLAY REPLAY by Rachel Harrison

| Jessica Crawford

Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is a 320 page standalone novel published by Berkley in 2026.

Genre

Horror

Description

Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this wild and twisty new horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of So Thirsty and Play Nice.

It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.

Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.

Opening Line

Who knew that time could move so slowly?

My Thoughts

Gosh, Rachel Harrison’s writing just goes down so easy! I pretty much read this entire book in one sitting minus meal and bathroom breaks. And it was an absolute blast!

“…the only thing that will come from constantly looking back is an inability to move forward.”

The author manages to pack so much meaning into this story that’s dressed up in the trappings of horror. Willa is having a really difficult time after breaking up with her fiancé when she realized that their years-long relationship wasn’t working any more. But still she can’t help but ruminate, wondering if she made the right choice, if she was a coward, or selfish. Her friend Cass’s diagnosis is that she is in a hell of her own making, and her prescribed treatment is to watch true crime or horror movies to remind herself that “it could always be worse”.

My priorities are all wrong…My nervous system is on high alert, but it’s been this way long before today.
When everything feels life-or-death, it’s impossible to parse out the actual stakes.

Spending time with her best friends from college for a wedding should be a happy occasion, but Willa is freaked out by the fact that her ex will also be in attendance, with a plus one. She just barely makes it through the cocktail hour and the ceremony and exchange of vows, but before the reception can get started, the murders begin.

Things could always be worse!

And then they are. When Willa wakes up again that same morning and the day of the wedding plays out again, she realizes she is stuck in a grisly and horrifying time loop. What might break her out of the cycle of terror? Changing her patterns of behavior, practicing self-reflection, examining her life’s choices? Can she confront her problems head-on and steel herself to face an unknown future? Is it a matter of accepting that life is imperfect and messy and sad and lonely sometimes, and that’s okay? Or is all of that overthinking something much more straightforward (er, well, maybe more loopy than straight or forward)?

I fell in love and surrendered to its current, and it took me someplace else, and I opened my eyes one day not knowing where I was or who I was or how I got there. And it terrified me. It still terrifies me. Am I doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior? Delude myself into thinking that love will save me, only to end up right back where I am now, staring into a void, waiting for it to say my name?

I appreciated the characters in this one, as well as the messages about life, love, and happiness. Looking at these through a horror lens made for a very entertaining romp. Harrison is a master at what she does!

Lastly, an example of the amusing interactions that occur amongst the friend group at the wedding before the carnage gets started, providing a bit of levity:

“Why does your foot look like tie-dye?”
My right foot is just a massive bruise from when I dropped my suitcase on it. I popped three Advil and it’s still killing me.
“Ugh!” I sit on the bed, kick my foot up. “Is it super noticeable?”
He shrugs. “No one will be looking at your feet. They’ll be looking at your face. Or your, you know. Assets.”
I laugh. “Thanks, Ev.”
“There could be some people looking at your feet, but you don’t need to concern yourself with those people. Unless you’re interested in a very niche income stream moving forward. Which, no judgment.”

Book Review: WAYWARD SOULS (HARKER & MORIARTY #2) by Susan J. Morris

| Jessica Crawford

Wayward Souls by Susan J. Morris is the second book in the Harker & Moriarty series, with a publish date by Inky Phoenix Press of Bindery Books of March 17, 2026.

Genre:

Historical Fantasy, Paranormal Mystery

Blurb:

The delightfully dark sequel to the gothic supernatural mystery Strange Beasts.

Six days before Samhain—the night when the veil between worlds is thinnest—Samantha Harker, daughter of Dracula’s killer, and Dr. Helena Moriarty, daughter of the famed criminal mastermind, are thrown into their next the mysterious disappearance of two Society field agents in Ireland. Only this time, the Royal Society is sending Jakob Van Helsing to keep an eye on them.

Sam and Hel may have solved the Paris case, but that doesn’t mean the Society trusts them. Sam has the power to slip into the minds of monsters, and Van Helsing has sworn to kill her at the first sign of corruption. And if Hel can’t prove her father’s existence, she’ll soon go down for his crimes.

Their investigation takes them from the crumbling ruins of Ireland’s untamed wilds to the occult societies of the rich and powerful. The connection between the Sam and Hel is electric, but as they fall deeper into each other’s orbit, their secrets only multiply. For Hel, it’s the sins she committed when she was her father’s pawn. For Sam, it’s a plague of death omens, mysterious black feathers, and a siren song no one else can hear. And then comes a chilling revelation that is poised to shatter The agents who disappeared were each haunted by a ghost. And so, it seems, is Sam.

With characters drawn from the worlds of Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, Wayward Souls is a twisty puzzle box of a historical fantasy—perfect for fans of Genevieve Cogman, Theodora Goss, Freya Marske, T. Kingfisher, and Gail Carriger.

Opening Line:

Samantha Harker folded her hands on the scarred mahogany table, grateful her emerald-green riding habit would disguise any hint of sweat.

My Thoughts:

Sam and Hel (the daughters of Jonathan and Mina Harker from Dracula and Professor Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, respectively) are off on another adventure in this sequel to Strange Beasts. This time London’s Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena have sent them to Ireland with Jakob Van Helsing accompanying to keep an eye on things, as they don’t quite trust Hel’s loyalties or Sam’s abilities.

Like its predecessor, the vibes in this book are perfectly on point! Steeped in the darker aspects of Celtic mythology and folklore, this story was perfect for my spooky season reading (but with the Irish setting being such a large part of the story, St. Patty’s Day would be a fine time to pick it up as well!) People in Ireland are disappearing in ways that smack of the supernatural and it’s up to our team of field agents to figure out who or what is behind it all, preferably before the night of Samhain, when the veil between worlds is thinnest and dangers from the Otherworld are at their peak.

A theme of this installment is that no one is only one thing – all good or all bad. Characters who were midlevel villains of the last book have the opportunity here to show that they have another side. Our heroines have to learn to allow themselves as much grace as they do the monsters they confront in their line of work, who are sometimes made the way they are by monstrous acts committed against them.

I hadn’t recalled from the first book that the story is all told with third person POV through Sam’s perspective, so readers can only really get an idea of Hel and Van Helsing’s thoughts and feelings through their interactions with her. I do think a reread of that one would have been beneficial, as I couldn’t recall much about the situation with Sam’s grandfather, which comes into play as a fairly major plot thread here.

One complaint I have with this book is the same one I had for the first in the series – I couldn’t always follow the characters’ reasoning when they came to conclusions about things in their investigation. The answers and explanations here were a bit convoluted, with a lot going on. I kind of had to just enjoy the ride and accept the characters’ determinations without fully appreciating how they arrived at them.

Still, this was overall a fun story and perfect fit for my October reading, and I am grateful to NetGalley, Bindery Books, and Inky Phoenix Press for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

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Book Review: WE LIVE HERE NOW by Sarah Pinborough

| Jessica Crawford

We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinboroguh is 291 page standalone novel published by Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar in 2025.

Genre:

Horror

Blurb:

After an accident that nearly kills her, Emily and her husband, Freddie, move from London to a beautiful Dartmoor country house called Larkin Lodge. The house is gorgeous, striking—and to Emily, something about it feels deeply wrong. Old boards creak at night; fires extinguish; and books fall from the shelves—all of it stemming from the terrible presence she feels in the third-floor room.

But these things happen only when Emily is alone, so are they happening at all? She is still medically fragile. Her post-sepsis condition can cause hallucinatory side effects, which means she cannot fully trust her senses. Freddie does not notice anything odd and is happy with their chance at a fresh start. She, however, starts to believe the house is haunted by someone who had been murdered in it even though she can find no evidence of a wrongful death. As bizarre events pile up and her marriage starts to crumble, Emily becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about Larkin Lodge. But just as the house has secrets so do Emily and her husband.

Opening Line:

The raven watches the stone house on the crossroads through the long year.

My Thoughts:

This horror novel skews more thriller than the spooky kind I usually prefer, but once I got into it I tore through it in one day!

It’s got short chapters from two POVs–most from the wife but some from the husband, both in first person present tense. Is it a tad silly at times? Sure (oh, these four specific books fell off the shelf in the study inside the house? Must have been the “breeze”!) Was the “post-sepsis syndrome” question overused? Kinda. By the end, does it offer full explanations as to why things are the way they are with the house? No. But it was definitely interesting and I was hooked while I followed along on Emily and Freddie’s journey. And the ending was just right!

Of note: if you require an irreproachable, fully good character to root for in your stories, this book might not be your cup of tea. Also, if you’re marriage is currently struggling, maybe don’t pick this one up just now. But otherwise, I recommend this as a great choice for spooky season reading.

Goodreads

Book Review: THE BOG WIFE by Kay Chronister

| Jessica Crawford

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is a 336 page standalone novel published by Counterpoint in 2024.

Genre/Subgenres:

Gothic, Contemporary Magical Realism, Mystery

Blurb:

In this atmospheric Appalachian gothic, the Haddesley siblings of West Virginia must unearth long-buried secrets to carve out a future when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.

Brimming with aching loss and the universal struggle between honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one’s own, The Bog Wife is a haunting invocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bound us.

Opening Line:

On winter nights, they burned heavy bundles of dried peat in the hearth and inhaled the scent of sacred ground burning while their father paced the length of the room, reciting the history of the Haddesley compact.

My Thoughts:

Anything that lives and does not live alone makes compacts.

This book is not horror, per se, but it’s still a great fit for spooky season! Described as “Appalachian Gothic”, it’s basically a family drama/saga about a group of adult siblings who struggle to know what to do when the compact between their family and the bog on their land doesn’t play out the way their father always instructed them it would when he died (to borrow words from another Goodreads review I got a real kick out of, the promised swamp tart is a no-show!) Have they failed as custodians of the bog? Did they perform the rituals wrong? Is the whole thing just totally insane…or a lie passed down through the generations?

We see this story unfold while following each of the Haddesley siblings: Eda, who has dedicated her life to making sure her family maintains the compact through ritual; Charlie, the eldest son who was always a disappointment as the one set to inherit the family legacy as patriarch; Wenna, the one who tried to escape it all and lived in the “real world” for ten years before returning for her father’s burial; Percy, the custodian of the bog; and Nora, who just wants the whole family to get along and to feel accepted as one part of the whole. Then there is the matter of their mother, the last bog wife, who disappeared over a decade ago…

The occult parts of the story were really interesting, and the tension was ratcheted up by discord among the siblings and their plight to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. I do have to admit that I felt let down by the last 50 pages–the resolution just had a very different feel from the rest of the book, which was a 5 star read for me. So altogether I’d probably call it 4.75 stars.

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Book Review: THE HOUNDING by Xenobe Purvis

| Jessica Crawford

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis is a 240 page debut novel published in 2025 by Henry Holt and Co.

Genre:

Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Blurb

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before.

The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.

As relevant today as any time before, The Hounding celebrates the wild breaks from convention we’re all sometimes pulled toward, and wonders if, in a world like this one, it isn’t safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl.

Opening Line:

The girls, the infernal heat, the fresh-dead body.

My Thoughts:

“Wherever we go, however we behave, there’ll always be something to drive us inside. That’s where people want us to be.”

The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth-century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs. — For once I think the comp offered by the publisher is an apt one and not just marketing nonsense.

The atmosphere in this book is set perfectly, with the people of Little Nettlebed set on edge by the hot baking sun and the drought negatively impacting livelihoods. The five Mansfield sisters are unconventional, and a delusionally arrogant neighbor becomes obsessed with putting them in their place. Mob mentality takes over the villagers, even affecting those who try their hardest to resist.

I think the themes of this story are explored wonderfully. I also think the characterization is well done, it’s just that the manner of storytelling doesn’t allow the reader to delve too deeply into any single character. Third person POVs shift among five different villagers throughout the book, and we get a good sense of each of them. But the story revolves around their interactions with and feelings about the Mansfield sisters, whose own POVs we do not get directly. I thought this was the perfect way to tell their story.

He searched within his soul and saw a terrible truth: that he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls…He’d rather they were free than confined…

I included this book in my spooky season reading not because it’s horror (it’s not) or brings autumn feels to life on the page (nope), but for the witch hunt vibes, and in this it did not disappoint!

Disclaimer: Maine Coon cat Freya does not approve of any hounding whatsoever

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Book Review: WHAT STALKS THE DEEP by T. Kingfisher

| Jessica Crawford

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher is a 179 page novella, the third in the Sworn Soldier series, published by Tor Nightfire in 2025.

Genre

Horror

The Blurb

The next installment in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton investigating the dark, mysterious depths of a coal mine in America.

Alex Easton does not want to visit America.

They particularly do not want to visit an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia with a reputation for being haunted.

But when their old friend Dr. Denton summons them to help find his lost cousin—who went missing in that very mine—well, sometimes a sworn soldier has to do what a sworn soldier has to do…

Opening Line

So this is America.

My Thoughts

“That is horrifying and I want to go home,” I said, although I pronounced it, “Ah, I see.”

Another absolutely delightful entry in the Sworn Soldier series!

As usual, Alex Easton finds themself enmeshed in the investigation of truly creepy happenings. This time, they’ve traveled to America at the request for help from their old friend, Denton. The doctor’s cousin has gone missing while exploring an old abandoned mine, where he wrote about hearing strange sounds and seeing the ominous glow of a red light deep underground, a light that winked out when he tried to approach it to investigate. Can Alex, Angus, Denton, and a couple of fresh faces find out what happened to the missing man before yet another nightmarish being finds them?

This third novella in the series is still creepy, hilarious, heartwarming in equal measure. You don’t necessarily have to read them in order to enjoy them, but this installment does reference things that happened in the first book, including spoilers. The Big Bad in this one relates to something relatively obscure I had been thinking about recently, which only further cements for me the conviction that Kingfisher writes these books specifically for me. I love them so much!

“Most of your muscles have to have your bones to anchor them and push against. Imagine…oh…trying to punch someone with your tongue…”

There was a pause while we gave this particularly vivid mental image the credit it deserved. I opened my mouth to mention a young lady of my acquaintance in Paris, but caught a glimpse of Denton’s expression and closed it again.

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