I’m playing a bit of catch up here, but now that I feel fully settled in to a new city, a new job, and a new climate (I’ve already gotten my first cold of the year, naturally), it’s time to share what I’ve been reading and loving over the past few months!
September was a bit of travel reading (I went to Japan, loved it), a bit of literary fiction, and some pre-October horror thrown in. I read one of my favorites of the year as well as a few duds.
Check out my favorite reads from September below as well as notes on everything I read.
Best of the month
“’To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive…”
From The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
The Vaster Wilds / Lauren Groff
Story time: I’ve loved Lauren Groff since I was in college. She’s an alum of the university I attended, she wrote a novel with the same name as my hometown, and I really loved her novel Fates and Furies. My passion for her led me to suggest her previous book, Matrix, for my book club the year it came out. Matrix simply didn’t work for me, and I felt ever so slightly embarrassed that I fought for this book and then didn’t enjoy it.
Despite that, Groff is still an automatic read for me, and it paid off with her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds. Telling a story of a young woman escaping her repressive early-colonial settlement in eastern America and the lengths she goes to survive and build a life for herself in the wild, Groff is just in master mode here.
Her prose, the fable-like structure of the story, her vivid portraits of a world yet-unspoiled by European colonialism, Groff brings this world to life in spectacular fashion. I was genuinely obsessed with this while I was reading it, and it’s one of my favorites of the year.
Other highlights
Black Sheep / Rachel Harrison
Shocking update: I love Rachel Harrison, and her annual cozy-horror novel was everything I wanted it to be. Harrison uses horror tropes (witches, demonic possession, werewolves) to explore human drama, especially complex relationships between family members. Her latest, Black Sheep, continues this trend with a story about a young woman returning home to the religious cult she escaped when she was 18. What seems like a straightforward premise is quickly upended by a creative twist that induced a giggle-fit from me. Harrison has yet to write a bad novel in my eyes, and I hope she never breaks that streak.
The Morning Star / Karl Ove Knausgaard
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star was my big reading project for September, one that started primarily because the follow-up to this was released and it had a cool cover that I wanted to own. A dense, multi-POV story about a small town, a new star that appears in the morning sky, and the strange (and terrifying) events that follow. Knausgaard is best known around the world for his autobiographical novels My Struggle, a love-it-or-hate-it phenomenon, and while I struggled (yeah yeah) to get into that series, I found myself completely engrossed with The Morning Star. The novel is terrific slice of life storytelling, with a few of the most terrifying scenes I’ve read all year.
Maeve Fly / CJ Leede
I have read A LOT of horror this year (just wait until next month) and either I am growing numb to its effects, or the genre is taking fewer risks than it used to. Enter: CJ Leede. Maeve Fly is a nasty piece of work, and I mean that as a high compliment. A female-centered American Psycho, an LA satire of epic proportions, and a sick and twisted love story, Maeve Fly is all that and more. It is horror that restored my faith in the power of this genre and the dark places it can go to explore humanity. It’s also just fun as hell!
Notes on other september reads
Camp Damascus / Chuck Tingle
Chuck Tingle is a writer best known for his wild, self-published “romance” novels with titles like “My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass” and “Pounded By The Pound: Turned Gay By The Socioeconomic Implications Of Britain Leaving The European Union.” His traditional publishing debut, Camp Damascus, is a wonderful horror novel about religious trauma and repressed homosexuality, and it’s pretty damn good. Thankfully, it’s also really, really weird.
The Family Outing / Jessi Hempel
My book club’s September pick, a memoir about a truly fascinating family told is the most boring way possible.
Silver Nitrate / Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a very hot-and-cold writer, but the faucet’s on warm with this one! Her best since Mexican Gothic, a thoroughly researched (her calling card) horror tale about the occult and a cursed film. Such fun!
Masters of Death / Olivie Blake
The set-up of this novel, supernatural beings working as realtors in Chicago, is such a fun concept that it’s unforgivable how quickly Blake deviates from that set-up and falls down such a needlessly convoluted rabbit hole in the latter 2/3rds of this book.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe / Emma Törzs
When I procrastinate writing these wrap-ups for so long, there are books that just escape my memory. I enjoyed this enough, and the book delivers what was promised with the summary. If the plot speaks to you, I’d say check it out!
Stolen Tongues / Felix Blackwell
For the sake of the characters’ lives, yeah they had to get off that mountain. However, for the sake of the narrative, plot, tension, and horror, they should’ve never left that mountain.
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