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 Claustrophobic Sapphic Gothic: The Salvage by Anbara Salam Review
Before I get into it, I will say that my favourite part of this book was how information was slowly revealed, so I recommend going into this without knowing much about it. If you’re in the mood for a claustrophobic gothic novel set on a small, frozen-over island, pick this one up and skip overRead More
A Dread-Filled Gothic Thriller: The Salvage by Anbara Salam
The Salvage by Anbara Salam is a gothic literary thriller set on a small Scottish island in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The protagonist is Marta, a trailblazing marine archaeologist sent to investigate a Victorian shipwreck on behalf of a local wealthy family descended from the ship’s captain. On her first dive, she seesRead 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
Remember to Remember the Yellowjackets: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth Review
Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines is a dual-timeline horror that follows the mysterious happenings of Brookhants School for Girls. In 1902, two teenage girls fell in love, both with each other and with the scandalous writing of Mary MacLane, only to die tragically with the book by their side. More mysterious deaths follow, until the schoolRead More
Love in the Times of Seaside Horror: Providence Girls by Morgan Dante Review
In the past couple of years, I have discovered some real gems of independent and self-published sapphic literature. Last May, I read Morgan Dante’s stunning Providence Girls, which won Best Historical Fiction at the 2023 Indie Ink awards. The author pitches it as “a seaside sapphic cosmic horror romance” in the vein of The Handmaiden and The Shape ofRead More
A Haunting Carmilla Retelling: Hungerstone by Kat Dunn Review
From Gothic fiction author Kat Dunn comes a new retelling of Carmilla that is equal parts haunting and thrilling. Hungerstone (Zando, February 18 2025) is one of the best new releases of 2025. Set in mid-nineteenth-century England, Lenore has been married to her husband Henry for a decade. A steel magnate and social climber, their marriage has benefitted fromRead More
A Haunting Gothic About Family in (Climate) Crisis: Private Rites by Julia Armfield Review
As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
This Queer Horror Book Will Haunt You: Model Home by Rivers Solomon
This was my first Rivers Solomon book, and from the first page, I understood why I’d heard such good things about them. Here are the opening lines: “Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me,Read More