My Favorite 2024 Reads

This is a pile of my favorite reads from 2024. In no particular order.

(Not pictured: Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield)

A lot of favorite writers of mine I didn’t read anything from this year, like Brian Evenson, Peter Straub, and many others I intended, only because this year overwhelmed me with both writing and reading, plus other outside factors. But I’m amending that for 2025–already working on it, in fact

While I’ve yet to read the remaining three stories from Four Past Midnight, I thought The Langoliers was a lot of fun. There’s a concept in the online spaces of Liminal Horror that goes something like, “I went back to the past, but there was no one there.” I’ve always loved that, and had no idea it may have originated with King’s vision of the past as an empty space soon to be consumed by incomprehensible things.

Nick Medina’s second novel, Indian Burial Ground, is as soulful, heartfelt, and thrilling as his first, yet somehow even more propulsive and chilling. There were scenes that flooded me with chills, along with an arc across the story dealing with the messy, unresolved nature of shame and grief that held me by the heart all the way through. It’s also a genuinely refreshing take on vampire mythology, and a poignant, heartfelt, haunting story.

Horror Movie, by Paul Tremblay, is among the most unsettling of the novels I read this year. There’s much to be said about its overlapping layers, the inventive storytelling going on, the biting view of a pitiless industry and what it can inspire in the damaged, vulnerable, and dangerously devoted. But what sticks with me most was the feverish unease that mounted across the length of the book. It made me feel uncertain about turning the next page, at times. A monstrous story crafted masterfully.

This was the year for my discovering the work of Michael Cisco, which means it was an excellent year. First was PEST, which was the weirdest book I’d ever read at the time—only to be supplanted by another Cisco book in the latter half of the year. PEST can be counted now among my all-time favorite books. It is a challenging and seriously disorienting read, doing things with narrative, point of view, and tone that I had never seen done before. It also introduced me to just how much of a master Cisco is, whether it’s the disarming beauty of the prose or the calculated turns of the story. I didn’t know an intentionally disorienting read could feel so meticulously designed. It’s a book that lives as much in my head as it does in my heart. Sure, it’s a book about a man who is/was/will be a yak, but somehow it also seems to be about the cruelty of time, the longing for return, the irretrievability of what we lose, and… I don’t even know what else, but upon an eventual, inevitable revisit, I intend to find out more.

His collection, Antisocieties, is among the most brilliant short story collections I’ve ever read, despite its very short length. Each story feels like it brushes up against the possibilities of the short form. Some feel more intellectual, others more emotional; and then there are those I’m still thinking about, trying to make more sense of.

Cisco’s book Unlanguage, meanwhile, continues to make me feel uncomfortable every time I glance at the cover on my shelf. I wrote a review recently that says all of this better; for now I’ll say, this is what I imagine an actually cursed text would read like. I’ve never encountered a more challenging or demanding work of fiction, yet grappling with it yielded such strange and unthinkable rewards. I found myself horrified by it, genuinely afraid of it, not even necessarily of the story—of what there is, within its pages, of a story—but of the book itself, the fact of it in my hands.

Sefira & Other Betrayals is the only book I read this year by John Langan—proof, for my own thoughts anyway, that it was somewhat of an unusual year in reading, for me. I blame the book I was writing. However, I can’t wait to read more from Langan this coming year, and I loved many of the stories in this collection. As said in the title, one of the central themes of the stories here is betrayal. This wasn’t always THE theme of the stories, but the betrayals contained herein ranged from vile to devastating. There’s forbidden desire and unrelenting vengeance; there’s pulpy fun given a delicious literary and horrific spin; there’s love and all that we would trade for it or all that we’d trade it for; and that’s just some of it. This was stunning, sometimes jaw-dropping.

I also read Laird Barron’s Occultation. Oh, man. It’s no wonder to me that his new collection is called “Not a Speck of Light,” considering how relentlessly dark each of the stories in Occultation is. Not a happy ending in sight, this collection is so full of artful darkness, whether it’s the cosmic kind Barron is well known for—tying into his Old Leech mythos—or the ambiguous or even Satanic. Barron is merciless and his voice is singular.

DRILL, by Scott R. Jones was an unexpected read. Was honored to be able to provide a blurb for the book. It’s wonderfully unhinged, filled with justifiable anger and disarming pathos. Weird fiction, metafiction, Lovecraftian in a way that feels genuinely original, and with a vivid, unforgettable narrative voice.

Green Fuse Burning, by Tiffany Morris, is a horror story novella about art, trauma, colonization, and how denial of one’s mortality—and, by extension, such things as one’s trauma—can paralyze you, keep you trapped in the same place in your own life.

I read Wind—Mountain—Oak—, The Poems of Sappho translated by Dan Beachy-Quick. It is easily my favorite of the three translations of Sappho I’ve read so far. The fragments are organized differently here, more so by theme and emotion than chronologically, and cut up into sections. The effect is this collection of Sappho’s fragments has a flow to it, threads pieced together in such a way the whole thing can almost be read as one long poem. It’s so unique and so beautiful.

My favorite living poet, Carl Phillips, released a chapbook called Scattered Snows, To the North. Seriously, Phillips’s poetic voice has cast a shadow over all poetry—written or read—for me. I carried this collection around and read it frequently, and it was a companion to many of the harder portions of this year. Outside of that, his poems may strike right through me, but they also bring me such joy because of what they do with language, with rhythm, with articulating such vast experience so precisely.

Sally Rooney, another of my absolute favorite writers, released a new book this year. Intermezzo announces itself as unique from page one—and that’s saying a lot from an already unique writer. There are two main POVs in this book; two brothers, each whose voice is distinct. One of them is Rooney in her more comfortable prose style. The other is a bolder choice, told mostly in sentence fragments. The effect is mosaic-like, poetic. I fell in love instantly and read a great deal of this book aloud to myself to better feel and hear the language. Beyond the awe-inspiring poetics on display is a deeply moving story of personal crises through grief, shaken identity, and the courage it takes to love, to be loved, to see clearly, and to be seen clearly. Maybe it’s okay to need others and to let ourselves be needed. I’ve encountered few writers who communicate the intricacies and ever-evolving dynamics of relationships and connections better than Rooney. It is all so startlingly clear that it’s impossible not to see yourself in the pages, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with discomfort, as though Rooney were holding up a mirror.

In this house we honor the name Mariana Enriquez. Her new collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, amazed and disturbed me greatly at turns. I’m still thinking about some of the stories. Some of them, I’m not even sure how to describe or talk about. It is a collection both incredibly weird and incredibly beautiful.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, was a reread from years ago. I loved every sentence in this book. The synesthetic part of my brain couldn’t help fall into the colors that Jackson’s prose evokes, most of them smooth, dark, almost moonlit. She has a way of infusing an unsettling atmosphere into even the most mundane of sequences, and her understanding of her characters’ psychologies—especially those that represent clashing aspects of herself—is something I find unendingly compelling.

This coming year I intend to read the entire Greatest Hits collection, but I started with what is arguably Harlan Ellison’s most famous story: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read Ellison. I know this wasn’t his favorite story, but it’s easy to see why its legacy endures. This story is amazing. Instantly unforgettable and deeply troubling. The narration is some of the most unhinged I’ve ever come across—and I highly recommend Ellison’s own reading of the audiobook, since he’s clearly having too much fun embodying the unstable narrator. To call it disturbing, especially the entity AM, feels like an understatement. There’s so much to unpack, so many grisly layers, such a sense of discomforting truths about humanity and its creations. Plus, you can feel Ellison’s doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude popping off the page with every sentence.

My Heart is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones, is a masterclass in embodying a character’s voice, made only more impressive that this is Jones writing the POV of a teenage girl. It’s a very literary slasher story, one that challenges and subverts the reader’s perceptions, and is infused with such a raw and vulnerable heart. What surprised me most was how emotional I became at parts of the story, near the end. This is a beautiful book.

I’ve already said a lot about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. No book has troubled, upset, or disturbed me to the degree this one did. It haunts me still, probably always will.

Oh God, The Sun Goes, by David Connor, was the last book I read this year—and I love how, in a year filled with Weird Fiction, the cherry on top was another incredibly unique and weird book. I’ll have an actual review posted soon. When describing certain types of poetry, I often talk about how some poems “chart interiority.” This book does just that, it charts a landscape of interiority, only in this case I mean it more literally. The landscape of this story is often abstract, the main character on a journey both interior and exterior, through an Arizona from which the sun is missing and the cities are locations in the brain—Amygdala, Hippocampus, Time, Memory. The writing lives in simplicity but is nonetheless poetic, capturing in character interactions a sense of absurdity and humor that can almost feel uncanny. It’s an exhilarating thing to discover a book in which you have no idea where it’ll take you on the next page, in the next chapter. I loved this strange book.

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle, is a small book that packs a huge punch. Prime example of understanding genre and how to bend it, the anger and hurt in this is palpable, and I felt it was honestly genius the way it merged that anger—and those themes—with the detachment of cosmic horror. So awesome.

Linghun, by Ai Jiang, is another little book that packs a massive punch, though in an entirely different way. From the beautiful prose to how with such clear-eyed, funereal seriousness the story captures many shades of loss, mourning, and grief, including the madness such experiences can inspire—in a sequence reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery—this is a story that continues to follow me around since I finished it.

I discovered the work of Clarice Lispector this year, with two books: Agua Viva; and The Hour of the Star. Hers is a voice unlike any I’ve encountered. She captures something so uniquely human in her voice, even in its experimentation, and with an honesty worth treasuring. I feel I won’t be able to speak intelligently about Lispector until I’ve read more of her work.

Other than the poetry I’m constantly rereading, I read W. S. Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time. A handful of poems here will be ones I revisit in years to come, I have no doubt.

If you have thoughts or your own list you want to share, please do! Thanks for reading :)

A Brief Update on the Next Book

I wanted to tell you all a few small things about the book I’m almost finished writing.

This new book has resisted a good title for longer than any project I’ve ever worked on, but I finally have a few good options. Right now, I’m calling it:

I’LL SEE YOU IN THE OUTER DARKNESS.

Here’s some basic information on what it’s about.

At the book’s heart is a love story about two people—with families from different cultures—who begin far apart, trying to make work a unique long-distance relationship. A wonderful, liminal space of a distant connection defined by phone calls that last for hours and hours, sometimes through the night; a relationship that begins sustained primarily by hope and longing.

Juxtaposed against this is the main character’s determination to uncover details of his sister’s mysterious and horrific death, which was the catalyst for the formation of a cult called Starlight. All the while, he is haunted by auditory and visual hallucinations of some unexplainable entity, something that seems to burrow through his thoughts like an infection, and which may be connected not merely to the Starlight cult’s mission, but also to his sister’s death.

That’s as well as I can describe the initial premise, at this moment.

When it comes to the horror elements, one of my early thoughts about the story was: What if you had good intentions to write a book—a book that could cause actual, positive change in the world—but you accidentally wrote a real-life equivalent to the fictional play The King in Yellow? Which is to say: you accidentally wrote something dangerous to those who read it, despite your best intentions.

The relationship aspect is, to me, the story’s heart. It’s rooted in a lived experience, something I wanted and needed to write about, fictionalized. From the start you know it’s doomed, but there is so much to it—and the juxtaposition against such shattering, encroaching horror is a jarring experience.

As the writer, it’s such a tormenting book that I’m sometimes afraid to keep writing it, in part because it is a vulnerable story to write. It’s so sweet and romantic but also so heartbreaking; and as the horror overtakes and dissolves any refuge from it, it becomes incredibly sad and disturbing.

I’ve been writing this book for just over a year, which is, I think, the longest I’ve ever taken on a first draft. It stands now at about 100,000 words, which is already longer than I expected—but who knows how much it’ll change and shorten in the editing process. Slowly, at last, the ending is coming into focus.

I am… scared of this story, but so excited about it.

Thanks for your time. There’ll be more details to come with time.

Love Letter to a Barnes & Noble Horror Section

When I made the bittersweet decision to leave my job as a bookseller at the Barnes & Noble in Medford, Oregon, after having worked there for over seven years, there were three primary factors that kept me holding on a little longer: (1) I worked with some genuinely wonderful people whose friendships I value; (2) there’s really just something great about working in a big bookstore; and (3) my Horror section.

I started at Barnes & Noble as a seasonal worker in December of 2016. I was twenty-one years old, which is strange both to realize and to write out in this sentence, because it doesn’t necessarily feel like a long time ago, but it also feels like a different life. This May, I’ll be turning twenty-nine, and the early-twenties version of me seems like an entirely different person.

There’s a lot I could say about my experience at Barnes & Noble, how it helped me as a writer, how it helped shape me as a person, the positives of the bookstore experience contrasted with the negatives of the corporate bookstore experience, plus the many meaningful connections I made with people, and maybe I will write about those things sometime. But what I want to write about here is the creation of the Horror section at my store, and how my love of the horror genre was, for a long time, tied to that section.

Back then, when I first started at B&N and for the next few years, there was no official section for horror. This was true not just of my store, but of the company at large. No official horror sections. Established horror writers could be found anywhere among Fiction, Mystery/Thriller, Sci-Fi, or Fantasy. It wasn’t long after being hired as an employee, not merely as a seasonal worker, that my managers apparently saw the potential in my love of the horror genre. If I’m recalling correctly, it started as a single bay; no more than five or six shelves loosely stocked with a few obvious authors, Stephen King making up the majority. I got to set up the section, move the books, make sure all was neat and pretty. Not long after, I was encouraged to essentially “go crazy” shortlisting new titles into the store to fill up the shelves. This was when the real work of building and curating the horror section began. I didn’t realize at the time how this process would expand my own horizons as a lover of the genre.

Now, I had always gravitated towards dark and spooky things. Don’t know what to blame for that, though. Could be how some of my clearest and earliest memories are of nightmares, with images that I still remember along with the feelings they gave the little-child-version of me, feelings of fear so deep, I hesitated to share them with the adults around me. What if I scared them by sharing these things? I thought. I could blame my being introduced possibly a little too early to certain films, like Hitchcock’s The Birds somewhere around age eight or nine. I could blame the bizarre era of surreal children’s cartoon shows that I grew up in, an era populated by children’s stories that mingled ridiculous, over-the-top humor and wackiness, with characters, narratives, and themes rooted in the mystic, the paranormal, the monstrous, and even the uncanny (which paired nicely with Disney’s final era of hand-drawn animation, these last films being surprisingly mature and dark and even disturbing).

All that to say: my taste in fiction was primed toward the Weird early on, and I discovered Stephen King at age 13-14. From consuming most of King’s published work, to discovering Peter Straub, then expanding to a number of authors that also proved important and formative to me as a writer and a person—such as Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, William Peter Blatty, Shirley Jackson—my mid to late teen years made a horror lover out of me. Being put in charge of building and curating the horror section for the bookstore where I worked in my early twenties put me unknowingly in a unique position to grow alongside the selection of books. It was a joy and an honor.

When my section was expanded to two bays, I gave myself the direct goal of diversifying it. As it stood, the main names were mostly obvious: Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, V. C. Andrews, Dean Koontz, plus a couple titles from Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, and Dan Simmons.

What I wanted was for this part of the store to become a haven of the genre, representative of its wideness and diversity. I spent time researching women horror authors, horror authors from different backgrounds, cultures, etc, and classics we for some reason didn’t already carry. With no books officially labeled horror, this also meant discovering a few authors who were already in the store but lacking the perfect home. In this way, a new variety came not merely to the shelves, but to my life, with such authors (or editors) as Tananarive Due, Gemma Files, Carmen Maria Machado, Ania Ahlborn, Lauren Beukes, Paul Tremblay, Dathan Auerbach, Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Ellen Datlow, Nicole Cushing, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Chambers, Arthur Machen, and Kathe Koja. I became familiar with names that would later mean a great deal to me as a lover of the genre, once I’d finally read their books, like Stephen Graham Jones, or Victor Lavalle.

Although I’m not entirely certain of the exact time, Barnes & Noble as a company did eventually bring back the Horror section. If I were to estimate, I’d say that happened in 2020. But in those early years, after shelving incoming new titles to my section, then straightening it up to make it look pretty, I’d step back and feel proud. A special few customers relished in the growing selection; it was, I hope, as much a haven for them as it was for me. I kept such close watch over the section that, when I came in to work after a couple days off, I could often tell, by sight alone, what titles had sold, and so I did the stocking and restocking on my own, with the support of my manager who did her best to make sure my shortlists were always approved.

There was a brief period, too—which I look back at with a slight mixture of longing and regret—when virtually any shortlist would go through. This was before I discovered the wider world of Indie Horror, which is to say: I didn’t realize how much power I had back then that I could’ve been taking advantage of. I ordered in titles from Gemma Files, Stephen Graham Jones, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Adam Nevill, Koji Suzuki, Clay Chapman, Todd Keisling, J. F. Dubeau, Aliya Whiteley, and so many more, not realizing how, one day, some of those same titles wouldn’t be approved to come into stores anymore, at least not with such ease. I’ll get to that. At the time, though, it was like my little horror section’s golden age before the company’s big changes. There was a unique thrill to discovering the name of a new author, or even the name of a reputable small press, and going down lists of titles and shortlisting a number of them for my section.

Then came the company making horror sections official, at last. My horror section became a standalone space with four whole bays. It became self-sustaining (a most wonderful Frankenstein’s monster), but I didn’t let this lessen my passion for curating it and seeking out new titles and new authors to bring in. However, changes in the company also meant tighter restrictions on what could be ordered into stores.

With the support of my manager, I was able to bring in obscurer titles every now and then, but with less frequency and less flexibility. It was during this period that I made seismic discoveries in my world as a reader and writer of horror: John Langan, Mariana Enriquez, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, Brian Evenson. I set up enduring displays dedicated to Weird or Cosmic horror, displays which gained small followings in loyal and excited customers. I believe I still remember a number of authors—or more titles from authors we may have had only a couple titles for—I was able to bring in for one of the last bigger shortlist orders, months ago: Michael Wehunt, Eric LaRocca, S. P. Miskowski, Mike Salt, Cynthia Pelayo, Ronald Malfi, Scott R. Jones, Gus Moreno, Livia Llewellyn, Jac Jemc, Andrew Najberg, MJ Mars, Scott J. Moses, Shaun Hamill, Craig DiLouie, Robert Levy, Timothy Hobbs, Andrew Sullivan, John Hornor Jacobs, V. Castro, Premee Mohamed, Scott Thomas, Daniel Braum, Noah Broyles, and many, many more. This was in addition to exciting works already coming in from authors like Christopher Golden, Gabino Iglesias, Nick Medina, Philip Fracassi, Gwendolyn Kiste, Richard Chizmar, Shane Hawk, et al. I absolutely cannot and would not take credit for these and other writers being in the section, rather it was simply my honor to either bring them into the store, or to have them already in the section and to shelve and display them.

In 2022, my book The Family Condition was released. I’ll never forget the running start given to me by the store I worked in, how I probably shortlisted ten or so titles of my own book and was so excited to see it on the shelf in my own horror section. My manager, however, ordered fifty copies in. I’ll never forget that—a box filled with my book, with a face-out in the section. When those fifty copies sold, I didn’t put in an order, my manager again did, this time for a hundred. Later, of course, Barnes & Noble would approve The Family Condition for distribution company-wide, but it got a head start in my store. I recount this with inexpressible gratitude to the wonderful people I worked with.

Toward the end of my time as the Horror Expert at that store, my frustrations with the ordering process had become considerable. From a business standpoint, sure, it makes sense… but we were told, once, that individual stores would be given a lot of power to curate and personalize their selections. You’ve probably even read articles about Barnes & Noble modeling itself after indie bookstores, doing away with the corporate model of every store having the same selection. I was excited about that, but I never saw it become a reality. My experience was the opposite. By 2023, with a lot of experience working with customers as a bookseller and a curator of more than one section, I felt like the company was saying to me, “We’re giving you the choice of what to bring into your store! But it’s multiple choice and there’s only two—sometimes three—options!” Even established classics became strangely difficult to get approved for shortlists. I never imagined having to fight for work from Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Jane Webb, William Hope Hodgson, etc, but at times we did. Close coworkers of mine met the same struggles in their own sections, like poetry, sci-fi, and fantasy.

In the last couple years, I could often be caught saying, “My horror section is a good one, but it’s at about 70% of its potential power.” If I were given complete and total control over a horror section, I like to think it’d be a spectacle. Maybe not the smartest section in terms of, you know, money, but when it comes to a great selection in art, the main factor can’t always be profit. I learned that during my time at the independent and stunningly eclectic movie rental store called Couch Critics, which was my first job back in Mount Shasta, California. But that’s another story.

However, there was also a positive change: Books didn’t have to be shelved, necessarily, where the system told us to shelve them. This was, I feel, the last imprint I left on the horror section: being empowered to seek out potential titles in other sections, and to place them in horror.

Now, Horror is a wide umbrella of a genre. The writer Peter Straub is very close to my heart, and I often revisit talks and interviews he gave. There was a talk where he discussed having his view of the horror genre broadened greatly, which was both difficult for him to accept and, simultaneously, quite liberating, since he himself had long struggled with the label of “Horror Writer,” being such a deeply literary writer in the genre. I think of Straub as an amazing example of a writer and a person who seemed always to be evolving. The example he offered as being readable as horror was Herman Melville’s Bartleby. Someone in the audience said, “Really? Bartleby, horror?” To which Peter Straub answered, “Why not?”

In my own writing, I often worry that I’m not “horror” enough for horror. But then I think of Peter Straub saying, “Why not?” And I think of my own taste in books alternating often between quieter literary fiction and horror fiction—often meeting somewhere in the middle with my favorite works of unconventional literary horror. I think of these things and I feel reassured, invigorated, and glad.

So, oddball titles ended up in my section, titles that normally would’ve been shelved elsewhere, such as titles from Julia Armfield, Ness Brown, Jenny Hval, et al. (Though, if you go to the section now, that won’t be the case, as I believe this has already been reversed since my leaving).

On my last day at Barnes & Noble, I spent more time chatting with my coworkers than I was normally able to. I had fun with a few customers, shared a few wonderful “farewell” exchanges with some of them, even. And I spent a lot of time in my Horror section. Put in a few final shortlists, straightened everything up, restocked a few titles from the back, reread my many (possibly too many) shelftalkers which many customers over the years had thanked me for. I took photos of the shelves, smiled at both my books (and possibly stealth-signed a handful), and left the section as mine for the last time.

My growth as a reader, writer, and lover of horror had the backdrop of that horror section for a few years. Through it, I discovered so many incredible and influential writers, and a number of now cherished favorites. When I published The Family Condition and, later, The Aching Plane, the section felt like a line connecting me, even just in a small way, to the writers who inspired me, allowing me to support—from my small corner—the absolutely lovely horror community. It even helped me become part of the local horror community in a small but meaningful way, with a few friends I made through a love of horror, and the Horror Book Club I still run.

This is really just a sentimental love letter to a bookstore’s horror section and my history with it, how it helped shape me while I was shaping it. But I like to think of it as having Lovecraftian tendrils reaching out across the horror community, reaching readers and writers the way books do. It was a joy and an honor to be part of it.

Lastly, I’ve named many voices in the horror genre in this blog post. If you need a resource for authors to look out for in the genre, I’d recommend looking into their work. Their work made mine, with this horror section, a more than worthwhile experience.