It was an accident that I found out about the Forward collection on Amazon Prime—but I’m so happy I did. Turns out, if you have Prime, it’s free, and each short story is interesting in its own way. There’s six in all, so I thought I’d cover my thoughts on each of these tales.
The Luminous Dead is perhaps one of the hardest reviews I’ve done in a long time. The nature of the work has clashed with my usual operations.
Now it’s time for the negativity. The stuff I least enjoyed reviewing. I’ve sandwiched this part between two positive articles, so we don’t end this retrospective on a low note.
I’ve written many articles this year and reviewed piles of movies, tons of shows, and even a few books. And while a lot of media flees my memory once I’m done reviewing it, a few things were so good and memorable that they’ve stuck with me throughout the year. And in the same vein, some media pieces were so disappointing that I still wish for a better version.
Dark Harvest is a novella from 2006 I oopsed into reading because I wanted something short and spooky for October—and then only finished it a few days ago. And now, having discovered that it’s getting a film adaptation that appears to be trapped in some bureaucratic/logistical hell and will come out eventually, it seemed a perfect book to give a review.
Short Art Has A Different Vibe Than Other Projects I love long-form content: epic scope books, five-hour video essays, and sprawling television shows. I also love binging YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. So, today, we’ll talk about short media in a deliberately brief article. I’m talking really short media. Short stories like our own Friday…
American Elsewhere resists review—because it’s massive. The paperback is 662 pages. That’s Stephen King tome levels. That’s epic fantasy size.
Rules for Vanishing is such a different book from anything we’ve reviewed on the site in a long time. It’s a dark medley of The Wizard of Oz, Lovecraftian Horror, and The Blair Witch Project.
Black Tide was a different sort of book than I expected. The premise of a cosmic horror-style alien invasion was interesting by itself, but Black Tide marks the first “bottle episode” book I’ve ever read.
What We Harvest wasn’t what I thought it would be. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just hadn’t expected a zombie story. The synopsis suggested creeping slime.
The Nothing That Is sits on the list of books I’ve reviewed that scared me. Only certain scenes in The Twisted Ones, The Night Will Find Us, and some Fazbear Frights moments caused similar reactions in recent memory. Since I finished listening to The Magnus Archives, it takes a lot.
I wish I had more nice things to say about The Twisted Ones. Given how impressed I was with The Hollow Places, I expected another creative cosmic horror with a breezy pace. And while I will ultimately have several nice things to say about the book, it’s a step down in quality.
