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 :)