Satellite by Isle McElroy

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Satellite is a novel about a woman with complicated feelings about her marriage who sees her own doppelganger on TV. Johanna’s husband wanted a divorce, but then he was paralysed in a workplace accident. They stayed together and now Johanna cares for him. One evening, she spots a woman who looks just like her on TV, a woman who seems to be living the life Johanna could have if she had divorced her husband. She becomes obsessed, but soon it becomes apparent this isn’t just a TV show.

I wanted to read this book as I’ve read one of McElroy’s previous novels, so I started reading this without rereading the blurb and had no idea what to expect. The writing style is great, but for much of the start of the book, I wondered when anything was going to happen, worrying that this was the sort of literary fiction I don’t really enjoy in which a straight couple have marriage complexities. However, then the doppelganger stuff started happening, and the book became much more interesting.

I found this book fascinating at times, but I’m also maybe too used to reading books that go a bit weirder (whereas Satellite feels more like regular literary fiction). McElroy really conjures up a vivid 90s suburban setting, which is used well to compare with the doppelganger’s life and what Johanna might really want. It’s a book that can get people talking without being too weird (but I think my own reading of it might be coloured by the fact I recently read Public Access Afterworld, a very different book about seeing something weird on TV that I found a lot more personally memorable).

Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow by Sloane Murphy

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Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow is a collection of short stories about a group of trans women in Chicago, following their parties and interpersonal dramas. Each story follows a particular character, but the women all appear in each others’ stories too, and the stories move forward in time, meaning that you build up tiny pictures of the characters as you make your way through the collection.

This is like getting to live vicariously through someone else’s friend group drama: you start to learn things about the major players, you can’t always remember who everyone is, but you’re interested nonetheless. My personal favourite parts were Joan’s attempts to make it in her comedy career (which looks at the state of modern comedy and what you have to give of yourself for fame) and the final story in the collection, exploring trying to disappear (and the darkly comic failure of just hoping a tornado will do the work for you).

The collection consciously never quite gives you everything, refusing to fill in every gap or explain who people are. Instead, you have to let the tangled drama take over.

Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun

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Public Access Afterworld is a genre-defying novel about the secrets of TV transmission and people who go missing to the static. David Sawyer and his best friend Erin Morrison witness the analogue TV switch off, but what Erin sees in the static afterwards changes both of their lives forever. Years later, Bethany Peters works as a content moderator for a huge tech company, but soon she’s trying to work out what the mysterious phrase Public Access Afterworld means after she keeps hearing it from one streamer, Jules.

This was perhaps my most anticipated novel of the year, as I love Jane Schoenbrun’s films, so I went in with high expectations. Immediately, there is a specific vibe, setting up the framing device of the story being told as a number of episodes (if you look online, it’s easy to find out that the novel started life as a TV script). We know that this is a book about television. This structure works really well for such a long novel as it feels episodic and can take an “episode” (a few chapters) to tell a different part of the story or do something completely different for a bit to feed into the wider narrative.

The main idea in the novel is transmission, a culmination of the ideas in We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow by taking what it means for the self to be transmitted and making that a universe-spanning concept. As with Schoenbrun’s films, some of the horror side of the novel comes from what happens if you lose yourself in service of the transmission, the fiction, another character. There’s also transmission as it relates to human relationships and how you connect to other people (again, like in their films).

The characters in the novel are a real highlight, like the narrative-proclaimed ‘hero’ trans woman Bethany (whose story has a different take on the ‘content moderation is bad for the workers’ plot that a few books have explored over the past few years), the mini golf stoner Jules who wishes desperately to escape to Public Access Afterworld, and Wilhem/Chimotera, the lead character from a decades-spanning horror movie franchise (who gets a Camp Miasma-esque long set of comedy sequels). The episode structure allows to have those ‘special episodes’ to get a different character’s perspective, and character perspective is done so carefully to get across different things as the novel progresses.

Once you start reading Public Access Afterworld, I feel like you are either locked in or adrift. I found the writing style so joyfully thrilling and the ideas so fascinating that despite the length I sped through. I imagine that for others, especially those who haven’t seen the two Schoenbrun films that set up the ideas in this book, the book might feel dizzying. Personally, I loved the energy the book brings as Schoenbrun experiments with having so much more space than in a film to explore ideas.

Off The Reservation by Stephen Graham Jones

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Off The Reservation is a follow-up to The Only Good Indians, a roadtrip horror novel about four Blackfeet on a mission to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Five years after the events of The Only Good Indians, Nate Yellow Tail finds himself in new trouble, with his best friend Sebby on the brink of death. He’s offered a chance to try and restore balance and save Sebby by joining others on a quest in a run-down RV: head to a residential school to save the bones of a murdered boy. The thing is, once they get there, it turns out something else is there too.

Ahead of reading this one, I reread The Only Good Indians, which isn’t actually necessary (Off The Reservation is more of a companion than a sequel that requires knowledge of its predecessor), and I found I had a greater appreciation for that novel on a second reading. Stephen Graham Jones has a distinctive writing style that sometimes leaves me disoriented, but once I’ve got into the style, it works, and I think for my first read of The Only Good Indians, I never got into it. For Off The Reservation, it was more that the pacing is slow for the first part, leading us deep into the characters setting off on their journey, so there wasn’t the momentum to slip into his writing style, but once I got a bit further in, I got into it a lot more. There’s also a whole bunch of different character perspectives throughout the narrative, some of which are easier to get into than others.

Like how The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a take (an incredible take) on the vampire novel, Off The Reservation is a fresh take on a possession story, complete with misleading Christian iconography. It tackles some dark stuff, but also plays with a lot of pop culture inspiration (which the acknowledgements detail in great depth). I think if you’re a fan of Stephen Graham Jones’ style, this one will be up your street, with a great cast of fucked up characters and lingering message about the consequences of desperate choices. It wasn’t quite up there with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter for me, but it was a great read nevertheless.

You’re No Better by Andrew Joseph White

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You’re No Better is a dark YA thriller about an autistic trans boy trying to deal with living in the shadow of his serial killer father. Morgan Slaughter is seventeen and when he was ten, he put his serial killer dad behind bars. His mother, now an influencer cashing in on being an autism mom, has agreed that they’ll take part in a true crime documentary, but Morgan has another focus: finding the identity of his dad’s last victim. He finds himself teaming up with his new classmate Felicity who knows more about him than he’d like, but if Morgan is going to face the past, there’s a lot he’s going to have to deal with.

Having read Andrew Joseph White’s previous novels, both the YA ones and his recent adult novel, I was expecting the incredibly dark subject matter and portrayal of different kinds of trans autistic experience. What makes this one a bit different is how it is more of a real life thriller than his other books, with Morgan’s dad being a regular serial killer and the threats in the book coming from regular flawed human characters. The story is told from Morgan’s perspective, meaning that you really see his thought processes and experience other characters through him.

The characters are the most notable part of the book, with a lot of vivid personalities and messed up people. In particular, Morgan is given space to be not always a nice person, whilst the book still explores how that is different to his dad’s actions. I do wish that there was a bit more at the ending of the book that delved deeper into the character growth (or lack of), particularly around Morgan’s relationships with and thoughts about other people. I appreciated that the book does set up the future for the characters, but I wanted just a bit more of the consequences given how dramatic the book is.

This is a dark, sometimes uncomfortable book and I think it would be great for older teenagers—it would have definitely been a good stepping stone for teenage me from tame teen books to reading things like Lolita. I liked how it is in conversation with the concept of true crime, whilst not letting that distract from the character side of things.

Mothersucker by Kim Bohyun

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Mothersucker is a Korean novel about revenge, as a detective tries to track down a killer, but the killer is a mother avenging her daughter who has transformed into something else. Jin-seon is a detective investigating a series of violent murders of men whose only connection is that they all did terrible things to women. But she doesn’t know that she’s on the hunt for Geum-hong, a woman whose daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, and who woke up with a thirst for blood and a need for revenge.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting it to be, with the narrative told through a huge range of perspectives and it partly feeling like a police procedural rather than a vampire story, but that made it a very distinctive read. I found the many perspectives engrossing and it is a book that you can speed through thanks to its fast pace. The ending suddenly changes tack a bit, with a couple of short sections after the main bulk of the novel. I liked the first of these, but I found the second quite different to the rest of the book so it didn’t quite work for me.

Overall, this is an engrossing novel with an interesting structure that won’t be for everyone—there could be disorientation as you move between a lot of different characters—but which works well to explore a huge range of perspectives. It explores violence against women in South Korea and how injustice can lead to people becoming monsters, with the horror side very much tied up in the horrors of real life violence.

The Cracks by T.H. Huddleston

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The Cracks is a gothic horror novel about an English stately home with its own secrets, working to uphold tradition in the modern day. Sandra’s a recently widowed ex-punk without a job and about to lose her home when her old university friend Gerry offers her a sanctuary in the form of staying with them in his wife’s family manor in the countryside. At first, Sandra thinks she can use this as a chance to rebuild her life, but the longer she spends there, the more strange things happen, sinister accidents and figures in mirrors, and it seems that Hautmond Hall has its own ideas about what Sandra should do.

This book is a classic ‘haunted building makes people act in certain roles’ story, using gothic horror to explore the British class system (as gothic horror often does). Like the fictional punk song at its centre, this is not a subtle book. The history of the house and its family is cartoonishly evil, hitting all the expected horrible landed gentry notes, and Sandra’s friendship with Gerry is a take on the Brideshead-esque class difference between university friends.

The narrative starts as a slow burn, with the gothic trope of Sandra thinking she’s going mad with some of the things happening, and then builds to a bloody conclusion. I like the attempt to combine old manor house gothic horror with punk rock, though the story does end up very predictable, and the punk ethos perhaps didn’t quite get enough space to shine or make the book feel very different to other horror stories with old houses wanting to keep people acting in certain ways.

The Cracks is a fun take on punk gothic horror that is perhaps most for people who are like Sandra and her late husband: those whose punk ideals (or former punk ideals) sometimes brush up against being friends with people with other backgrounds and political views. I didn’t find it as funny as it was marketed as being (it isn’t quite as quirky and high concept as Grady Hendrix and Rachel Harrison, whose work this was compared to), but I appreciate the use of gothic tropes alongside punk ideas.

Quaint Folk by Bitter Karella

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Quaint Folk is a horror novel about an American family who move to a British island where the inhabitants take their strange traditions very seriously. Jessica is trying to appear like the perfect wife and mother, whilst also feeling inadequate and scarred from her upbringing. When her husband Greg’s job has him, Jessica, and their non-binary child Sandy move to a town on a British island to complete a deal, Jessica sees this as a fresh start. Once they’re there, both Jessica and Sandy find themselves battling the town’s expectations and the traditions for the upcoming holiday.

Having read Karella’s previous novel Moonflow, I was expecting something queer and weird, and Quaint Folk is certainly those things too, but sometimes in a different way to Moonflow. Immediately as you begin reading, the narrative tone gets across the satirical side of the novel, from the parody of an idealised American family with a father working for a generic tech company to the utter ridiculousness of the quaint British town they go to, complete with nonsense elements and very real ones. 

You need to read the book with this tone in mind, as the actual narrative combines this nonsense side with a very dark side, in which the characters are threatened for not conforming and treated with contempt, but the combination of the two elements gets across how Karella is exploring folk horror through a queer lens. For queer characters, folk horror isn’t just weird townspeople feeling a bit off; it is being actively misgendered or told you’re not the right kind of person, or being actually in danger. It’s more of an unsettling folk horror than something with scares, but that makes the nastiness more insidious.

There’s a lot of really interesting setup in the book, delving into Jessica and Sandy’s characters and building up the unsettling question of where the power in the town actually lies. The conclusion feels quite sudden after that, leaving a lot of questions unanswered and not quite exploring all of the implications, and I’m not entirely sure what I think of it. I think the ending might work better if it was a film, but as a book, I wanted slightly more from it.

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm

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Our Cut of Salt is a haunted house novel about a Palestinian family separated from their family home. Nuhad was forced to leave her childhood home in Haifa in 1948 and never got to return. After her death, her granddaughter Marina, who has grown up in the US, wants to visit her grandmother’s home and find out more about her family, whilst Marina’s mother Haifa fears that her daughter shouldn’t visit the city Haifa was named for. When Marina gets there, she learns that her family’s old house is haunted, with its residents disappearing, and that her grandmother was hiding secrets of what happened in Haifa.

There’s so much to say about the haunted house genre and what it can be used to communicate, and Our Cut of Salt offers a timely, horrifying take on the haunted house by asking what if the trauma of a family’s history is embodied in their home? It is a powerful way to tell the story of Palestine and of a family that had the concept of home taken from them. These messages in the book aren’t subtle—the house is even a voice within the book—but I found that was what made it particularly visceral. 

Despite being a haunted house book, the horror comes from the horrors of what has happened and what continues to happen in Palestine, making this a book that works for horror fans interested in the haunted house genre and also anyone wanting to read about legacies of trauma in Palestinian families even without an interest in haunted houses. 

Carrying by Samantha Josephs

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Carrying is a body horror novel about a stealth trans woman who becomes pregnant and finds herself with a mysterious illness that requires experimental treatments. Martha has it all: the house, the husband, a lovely stepdaughter. Nobody in her life now–except one old friend–knows she is trans. She finds herself faking pregnancy, trying to appease her husband’s desire for another child, when suddenly she starts feeling unwell, and then discovers she is actually pregnant. As her baby develops, her strange illness leads her to even stranger treatment, and she has to build lie upon lie to get her dream of motherhood.

This book is a take on trans body horror that I’ve never seen before. I love how it goes down the route of a lot of recent body horror films like The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding in not feeling the need to actually explain the ins and outs of the weird physical stuff going on, but instead is more focused on its characters and what it is saying about the body. Whilst there’s some disgusting body horror, there’s also some emotional moments, particularly as Martha finds herself getting something she never thought she would, but everything still not going smoothly. It is also purposefully ridiculous, never quite asking you to take it seriously or believe that someone like Martha doing these things would actually exist.

I love how this book subverts some of the expectations you might have about trans body horror and find new ways to play with those ideas, whilst also creating some quite tender moments about a woman finding different forms of motherhood and trying to survive them.