Alright before I get to the main event, I first have an announcement: I have a new zine out! “Map of the Lost City of Uatdan Wuchke” is an interactive fantasy story in which you, the reader, must draw the map. The zine includes a fold-out drawing surface for readers to use while they read. You can order it online on etsy, and I’ve also just added some bike goblin stickers to my etsy shop, if you’re interested in those.

Now, on to the spooky stuff! Every October I like to read a few horror books, and then review them all together in one post. You can see my previous spooktober posts here. This year I read:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr — I always expect multi-author short story collections to be a mixed bag, with some decent stories, some great ones, and some duds. But this book’s got no duds! The worst stories were just decent, and the best had me wanting to read more by their authors. The pieces encompass a great breadth of styles and genres, from blood-and-guts horror to lyrical ghost stories to gritty crime. It was also really fascinating to see so many takes on storytelling, with several of the pieces containing stories within stories. Here were some of my favorites:

• “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau—a beautifully lyrical wendigo story which, three quarters of the way through, switches perspectives to become a kind of monster-of-the-week episode. Both parts well executed.
• “Scariest. Story. Ever.” by Richard Van Camp—Much like Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, this is not the scariest story ever, but a story about the scariest story ever. The narrator wants to win a scary story contest, so goes to a storyteller to ask him for the scariest story he’s ever heard. The storyteller agrees to pass the story on, but starts by explaining how he came to hear the scariest story ever … wonderfully absorbing, layered, and sticks the landing. This one’s my favorite of the whole collection.
• “Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala—a Native American English major goes to her lit professor’s party so she can schmooze a letter of recommendation out of her, and finds that the professor’s house is decorated with human heads. Real heads. No one else seems concerned. Collections.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s into horror or dark fiction—with any luck, you may find a new favorite author in there.

Strange Pictures by Uketsu — A novel structured around nine drawings which hold some clue to various murder mysteries. Starts out silly and then gets stupid. The pictures are a fun gimmick, but there’s just too few of them, and they contain too few clues, to carry otherwise bland, contrived mysteries.

The writing is basically just reportage, and the characters are robots. Which is fine, but if you’re not going to deliver on characters, the mystery has to be ingenious. And it’s not. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary. You’re never really able to play along and solve things. Arbitrary details are made to mean whatever Uketsu needs them to mean.

Okay, so if you’re not going to deliver on well-crafted mysteries, then you’ve gotta dazzle me with spectacle. The spectacle here is the strange pictures, but there’s really only seven of them—and five of them are all tied together in the first mystery. So that’s two pictures worth of spectacle stretched over the remaining 180 pages. Thin, thin gruel.

A Scout is Brave by Will Ludwigsen — A novella about a boy who moves to Innsmouth and forms a boy scout troop. A solidly crafted tale which first wins your interest with the characters, then plunges them into peril for the final third. The themes of idealism and misplaced nostalgia never really gelled for me—the story works most powerfully as a coming of age story, the other stuff is just ornament. Nice ornament, but just ornament.

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull — This is a hard book to summarize. When I started reading it, I kind of thought I knew what it was about—I knew it had werewolves and other monsters in it, and I knew that the inciting incident was a police officer murdering someone. And that is accurate, but that doesn’t touch on the secret societies, or the mysterious first-person narrator, or the multiverse stuff, or whatever the hell a Zsouvox is—suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on in this book, and that’s what sucked me in. For the first time in a while, I really felt like I had no idea where the book I was reading was gonna take me.

A big part of this is the changing viewpoints. The book is divided into several sections of about five to ten chapters, with each section following a different character. There are some characters that we get repeats of, but some who are just one-offs. Sometimes it’s clear how the new character connects to the rest of the story, sometimes you’ve got to read a while before the pieces fall into place. Oh, and while all of this is written in third-person, occasionally there will be a first-person narrator intruding for a sentence or two. The first time it happened, I freaked out. It felt like realizing someone had been reading over my shoulder the whole time—though really, I’d been reading over this narrator’s shoulder, and hadn’t noticed it.

The world-building, which we get in a steady stream of tantalizing glimpses, is intriguing too, but Turnbull’s formal inventiveness was really the strongest point of the book for me.

Unfortunately, the book is all set-up. It’s the first in a trilogy, and it’s not the type where it tries to tell a complete story. Only one character really gets a compelling arc, gets some resolution, but the main plot with the monsters isn’t resolved, it isn’t even left at a point where anyone has accomplished anything. So I struggle to say whether I’d recommend it. I may read the other books at some point, I may not. But I had a good time reading this one.

Okay that’s all for this post! I will probably write you next on Public Domain Day, Jan 1st 2026. Every year I celebrate by writing a post about the public domain, and releasing one of my works to the public domain. If you’d like to join me in ceding one of your own works (art, photos, short story, poem, anything!) to the public domain, shoot me an email at Francis.R.Bass at Gmail dot com and I’ll share it on the day! See you then!