It’s been another wet, grey, cold, humid week. Nothing dramatic. Just wearying weather providing the theme music to days disproportionately dominated by the slow grind of administrivia.

Fortunately there were books. Good books. Books I even managed to finish.. When I’ve forgotten this weather, I’ll still remember these books.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.

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This week I finished one extraorcinary novel, two very good novels and a short story that didn’t work for me. My currently distracted state of mind shows up in the fact that I have another five books on the go at the moment and am having trouble settling to them.

You think you know everything about your life.
Long-married couple Junior and Henrietta live a quiet, solitary life on their farm, where they work at the local feed mill and raise chickens. Their lives are simple, straightforward, uncomplicated.
Until everything you think you know collapses.
Until the day a stranger arrives at their door with alarming news: Junior has been chosen to take an extraordinary journey, a journey across both time and distance, while Hen remains at home. Junior will be gone for years. But Hen won’t be left alone.
Who can you trust if you can’t even trust yourself?

This was an astonishingly strong novel. It was so intense that I had to make myself take breaks from it. The sense of gathering darkness, deepening wrongness and oncoming but unknowable tragedy made that very hard to do. 

From the beginning, there is a sense that something is off, that there’s a gap between words and actions. That the most important things are being left unsaid and that there’s a lie behind every smile. The more I searched for the truth in the novel, the more I realised how deeply it was hidden, which, of course, made me hungry to find out not just what was being hidden but why and by whom.

The novel is 275 pages long and structured into three acts. For most of the novel, there are only three characters: Junior and Hen, a married couple who live on a remote farm, and a stranger whose entry into their lives changes everything.

I won’t spoil the novel by revealing the plot except to say that I spent most of the novel in a state of conscious ignorance and anxious anticipation of that ignorance ending. 

The uncertainty in the novel pushed me to think about bigger themes: the nature of identity, the reality of and restrictions on choice, the reciprocity needed to sustain a marriage and whether the interior world of an individual’s experiences is unique or fungible.

Sixteen light-years from Earth, a black hole spins inthe darkness, gravity and rotation flattening it into a Kerrsingularity. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, a suicidal man signs up for theultimate one-way trip: to be frozen, sent light years away from home,and shot into the black hole itself.

I’ve read and enjoyed two of Yudhanjaya Wijerantne’s novels,’The Salvage Crew’ and ’Numbercaste’, so I decided to read this thirty-five-page short story of his. The story is clever, well-written, and packed with interesting ideas. Even so, I did not enjoy it. I was the wrong reader for this. I had no sympathy with the main character or what he set out to do. 

My review is HERE

AA year ago, he was an upstanding instructor of English at Harrison State College. Now Andy is on the run with his daughter. A pigtailed girl named Charlie. A girl with an unimaginably terrifying gift.

A gift which could be useful to corrupt authorities. Soon Charlie will be caught up in the menace of a fateful drug experiment and a sinister government ploy . . .

‘Firestarter’ (1980), is the second of the twelve Stephen King novels that I’m planning to read for my Stephen King 2026 Reading Challenge. I enjoyed it much more than ‘’Salem’s Lot‘, the first book in the Challenge. It’s a great Speculative Fiction thriller.

The writing is taut, focused and vivid. The story is both unrushed and tense. Stephen King takes the time to make the reader care about the Magee’s rather than rushing on to the spectacular scenes of destruction. His bad guys are both very bad and very plausible. When the destruction does come, it’s biblical and graphic. I was glad that he didn’t end the story there. He took the time to consider consequences, and the ending he came up with made me smile.

When Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, is called to Paris to present at a medical conference, she expects nothing more exciting than professional discourse on zombie reconstructive surgery.

Unfortunately for Greta, Paris happens to be infested with a coven of vampires – and not the civilised kind. If she hopes to survive, Greta must navigate the maze of ancient catacombs beneath the streets, where there is more to find than simply dead men’s bones.

‘Dreadful Company’ (2018) was so much more fun than I’d expected it to be. Vivian Shaw has managed to produce a book in which our heroine is abducted by a murderous vampire coven, led by a deranged, violent egomaniac, that turned out to be a delightful read. 

It’s not that the violence or the threat was absent or poorly described, but rather that the people, human and otherwise, living, dead and undead, were engaging, and the plot had strong themes of redemption and compassion without becoming mushy and sentimental.

For me, the book was anchored by Greta Helsing’s pragmatic altruism, unforced empathy and endless curiosity. She’s the only human in the plot. She has no supernatural abilities. Nor is she without fear. She simply deals with what’s in front of her, helps when she can and refuses to give up.

The supernatural cast around her was varied, fascinating and easy to engage with both individually and as a group.

I’m glad that I already have the next book, ‘Grave Importance’ (2019), on my shelves. 

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This week, I’ve bought three books from authors that I know and one book by an author heralded as the new voice of Nordic Noir. I have one Urban Fanstasy, one collection of horror novellas and two mysteries.

When a sorcerer tells you to track a magician, you do it — or risk spending life as a hamster.

But the scary magician? Not our biggest problem.

Between raging squirrel mobs, sewer monsters, and bungalow-dwelling necromancers with attack dogs, staying alive is a full-time job.

Then we stumble onto something worse. Something that makes one dead son look like small carrots. Something that could wake an ancient almost-god and bring the world to its knees.

Unless G&C London — Yorkshire’s only magical PIs — can stop it.

We really should’ve charged for this one.

I was impressed with the third book in this series, ‘Gobbelino London and a Complication of Unicorns’. For me, it was the book where I started to cheer for Gobbelino. I want to keep up the momentum on the series, so I’ve bought the fourth book and I’llbe reading it in March.

When nature gets up close and personal, it isn’t always pretty. A fallen tree sparks a poisonous feud between neighbors. A child searches the darkness for the gleam of a tiger’s teeth. A woman holds off a colony of oddly relentless prairie dogs. In unsettling stories that range from horror to magical realism, award-winning authors lay bare the secrets hidden in the land.

The Tiger Came to the Mountains by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexico, 1917. On a farm during the violent tumult of revolution, a more immediate threat prowls in a short, emotional story about survival by the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

Wildlife by Jeff VanderMeer
The miniature wilderness of a neighborhood greenbelt offers sanctuary for a woman with a violent past. But anything can happen when borderlands are crossed in a short story about the menace next door by a New York Times bestselling author.

The Backbone of the World by Stephen Graham Jones
An American Indian woman’s past and future collide in unthinkable ways in this richly imagined short story about deep secrets and Lovecraftian horrors by a New York Times bestselling author.

Stag by Karen Russell
Feeling alone? Join the party in a darkly comic and deeply felt short story about fragility and resilience in the Mojave Desert by the New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia!

A Righteous Man by Tochi Onyebuchi
A missionary in nineteenth-century Africa suffers a chilling crisis of faith in a short story about deliverance, friendship, and metamorphosis by the award-winning author of Riot Baby.

Bloody Summer by Carmen Maria Machado
What do children know that adults can’t begin to believe? The answer is hidden in plain sight in this haunting short story by the bestselling author of Her Body and Other Parties.

Amazon keep sending me ‘We think you’d like to buy this’ notes about the individual novellas in the Trespass Collection but I had to dig a bit to find that, although the five novellas are sold seperately both as ebooks and audiobooks, there is an audiobook compilation that gives me the whole collection for one credit. Given that I’ve read and enjoyed novels by all the contributors to the collection, this was ‘Buy It Now’ offer for me

Every family has a secret.
The mega-rich Pallanders are used to luxury – a castle in the Scottish Highlands, a villa in Tuscany, a billion-dollar fortune and an island in the Caribbean – but their perfect life is about to be shattered.

Every father has a favourite.
Sebastian Pallander dies, leaving a pitiful amount of money to his wife and children. His family fight over the scraps as old rivalries and bitter jealousies come to the surface. And when Pallander’s son is killed in mysterious circumstances, everyone suspects foul play.

Every killer has a motive.
After a desperate race for survival, the relatives gather at their estate to weather the storm. They all begin to wonder: who will be next? Where has all their money gone? And will any of them get what they truly deserve?

My wife’s been enjoying Denzil Meyrick’s Christmas-themed Frank Grasby mysteries, so we decided to try one of his recent standalone mysteries.

When a body of a woman is discovered at a lighthouse in the Icelandic town of Akranes, it soon becomes clear that she’s no stranger to the area.

Chief Investigating Officer Elma, who has returned to Akranes following a failed relationship, and her collegues Sævar and Hörður, commence an uneasy investigation, which uncovers a shocking secret in the dead woman’s past that continues to reverberate in the present day …

But as Elma and her team make a series of discoveries, they bring to light a host of long-hidden crimes that shake the entire community. Sifting through the rubble of the townspeople’s shattered memories, they have to dodge increasingly serious threats, and find justice … before it’s too late.

I saw that Eva Björg Ægisdóttir won the CWA New Blood Dagger in 2022 for ’The Creak On The Stairs’ and decided to wait. Now, her Forbidden Iceland series stands at five books, all of which have been translated into English, so I’ve decided to give ’The Creak On The Stairs’ a try.

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Next week is a catch up week for me. I’m not adding any new books to my reading list because I’m already partway through five novels. I’d like to finish at least four of them next weelk. Here’s a short summary of where I am with each of them.