Avery Curran’s Spoiled Milk is a gothic tale of a girls’ boarding school in 1928. After the tragic death of golden girl Violet, Emily, Violet’s best friend, knows this was no accident. Emily is desperate to prove she was murdered, so she enlists the help of the other girls in her year, including even prim and properRead More
A Sapphic Boarding School Gothic: Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
By turns haunting, compelling, and illuminating, Avery Curran’s new novel, Spoiled Milk, is perfect for fans of queer Gothic horror and historical fiction. Set in England in 1928, Emily Locke is in her final year at the Briarley School for Girls, an isolated boarding school designed to provide middle- to upper-class girls with accomplished educations. WhatRead More
An Atmospheric, Otherworldly, and Sinister Experience: The Salvage by Anbara Salam Review
Courtesy notice to readers: Anbara Salam’s 2025 The Salvage is a haunted novel. Read with care. All playful warnings aside, I hope you’re into slow, creeping dread, because this book is absolutely dripping with it. Set in the early 1960s, on the isolated, insular Scottish island of Cairnroch, The Salvage immediately plunges readers into the icy, freezing waters ofRead More
A Queer Boarding School Gothic: Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran Review
Everything about the summary to Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (out March 10, thank you to Doubleday for the ARC) made me so unbearably excited to read it. “The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school turns out to be the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events. A thrilling debut novel aboutRead More
A Beautifully Melancholic Read: Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens
Briefly, A Delicious Life has been on my radar for years—a literary novel with a sapphic ghost main character? I’m listening. But it made its way to the top of my TBR after I read and loved Nell Stevens’s 2025 release, The Original. This one follows Blanca, who died when she was 14 years oldRead More
A Bloody Gothic Love Story: My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen
Roos has been kept small her whole life. First, when she was five years old, hiding under the floorboards to help her mother fake seances. Then, when she got older and began participating in these seances herself, she was kept underfed to appear younger and more delicate. But while her abusive mother kept her isolated,Read More
The Horror of Getting Everything You Thought You Wanted: House of Beth by Kerry Cullen Review
Cassie is a bisexual woman with harm OCD. She is struggling at an entry level publishing job with a boss she hates, reading manuscripts at all hours despite no longer being sure this is the industry for her. She loves her girlfriend, Lavender, but feels like Lavender would be horrified if she knew about herRead More
A YA Paranormal Romance with Wings: On the Wings of la Noche by Vanessa L. Torres Review
I love shapeshifter characters for the many dualities they can represent, and I also like reading about lonely, troubled girls, so my paranormal pick for this October was the young adult novel On the Wings of la Noche by Vanessa L. Torres. Estrella (Noche) Villanueva straddles two worlds. At school, she’s a science whiz who keeps toRead More
Haunted in Every Sense: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence highlights the power of words. As it is set in a bookstore and the author herself owns Birchbark Books, I anticipated a richly detailed sense of place and community as well as a clear love of books. The Sentence delivers those things along with a complex look at what it means to be haunted. (ContentRead More
An Extremely Queer and Ghostly Cinderella Retelling: Cinder House by Freya Marske Review
Freya Marske fans, mark your calendars for October 7, when her new novella Cinder House comes out. It’s a Cinderella retelling, which I am always a fan of, with some fun fresh twists that left me enthralled. It’s a quick read, perfect for a cozy afternoon in front of your own hearth. In Cinder House, the titular Ella isRead More
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