Hedgehog is ready for a change. After building the same house year after year, he’s planning something new this year.
Something brighter. Something bolder.
Like many introverts, Hedgehog’s imagination is big and so is his attention to detail. He figures out the perfect plan to make his perfect home a reality, but the best laid plans of mice and men (and hedgehogs) often go awry.
Opening yourself up to change in one area of your life often generates change in others. It isn’t long before Hedgehog has the opportunity to overcome obstacles.
Although he probably wants to roll up into a ball and hide, Hedgehog chooses to be courageous, being clear about what his needs are and accepting help from others.
Along the way, Hedgehog and I gain much needed confidence and learn that while alone time is so very important for introverts like us, we also need others in our life.
I love Katy Hudson’s books. She’s one of my favourite illustrators, bringing the struggles and triumphs of the most adorable animals to life. Their emotions are clearly portrayed and they’re always so relatable. Having read almost all of Katy’s previous books, I was delighted to find a few familiar faces amongst the pages.
The words are just as rewarding as the illustrations. I see myself in so many of Katy’s characters so her books are always a good reminder of lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Like the stories that preceded it, I haven’t found the reread that’s one too many. I don’t think I will ever tire of this book.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Capstone Editions, an imprint of Capstone, for the opportunity to read this picture book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
A plan to build a unique home takes a timid Hedgehog on an incredible journey of self-discovery. From meeting new friends to conquering countless obstacles, Hedgehog tackles his house plan with a newfound confidence. Best-selling creator Katy Hudson (Too Many Carrots and Mindful Mr. Sloth) combines her stunning, detailed artwork with themes of friendship, problem solving, and self-awareness in this empowering picture book.
I will never tire of final girls. Against all odds, they have what it takes to survive. But for every final girl running for their life, there’s a slasher casually walking behind them and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me cheering the slasher on. (Unless the final girl is Jade Daniels. She’s off limits.)
The body count can never be too high. The river of blood should be cascading. The more organs on show, the better.
I love watching slashers follow and, every so often, break the rules. I search every scene for potential weapons. Horror movie soundtracks tend to earworm their way through my life. (My texts tell me Jason is nearby. The Halloween theme is my ringtone.)
I always want to know what makes the slasher tick, though, and it’s not like they’re the chattiest bunch so a lot is usually left to my imagination. I get the flashback scene so I know what those camp counsellors were up to when they should have been making sure Jason’s lungs weren’t filing with water. Jason now? He’s doing some walking and some killing but he’s not exactly inviting me to sit in on his therapy sessions.
What makes him a slasher and not someone else? Someone like me?
Schting!
That’s where Tolly comes in. This is his story.
Places to be, people to eviscerate.
This is also Amber’s story. Tolly is writing this for his best friend, who he hasn’t seen for half a lifetime. While Tolly didn’t even know what a slasher was before all of this started, Amber knows all of the rules.
This time, we get to see insides become outsides from the slasher’s POV and with Tolly talking me through it, I finally got the inside scoop (sorry!) I’ve been waiting for. Tolly isn’t quite who I was expecting, though.
He’s a slasher with heart. No, not one he ripped from the chest of one of his victims. One who has the ability to make me tear up, because he’s just so relatable and I want everything to turn out well for him. (Is there ever going to be a Stephen Graham Jones book that doesn’t make me cry?)
These kids are my kind of outcasts. The fact that they’ve been cast in this genre is just a bonus.
Favourite no context quote:
If she’d had sad eyes earlier, then now what she was about to tell me was that the moon was hurtling toward the Earth, and our only shot at stopping it was to catapult all the Earth’s puppies up at it.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A community driven by oil and cotton – a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Tolly Driver, seventeen, a good kid with more potential than application, exists on the outskirts with his best friend, Amber. They navigate the hellscape of the teenage social scene, sticking together in a place that doesn’t know how to be different.
But when they go to a fateful party at Deek Masterton’s house – a party that ends in a series of gruesome, brutal and extravagant murders – Tolly’s world gets flipped upside-down. Because some slashers are born in violence and retribution, some were born that way – and some were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time…
I can’t do this book justice, no matter what I say, but I’m going to try. It’s epic: in scope, in scale and, yes, the slang works, too.
It’s a story of monsters, made by people and circumstance. It’s also about those that life tried to make into monsters but who, against all odds, kept their heart intact.
You’ll meet so many characters: complicated, multifaceted characters. Those who are overwhelmingly good will do bad things; sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. The characters you will love to hate may surprise you with their capacity for good. No one is what they first appear.
You’ll meet Sophie, who saved the world when she just was a kid. She followed this feat with a couple of decades of debauchery with her friends, the Killers. Each Killer is carrying a secret from their past that could change everything.
There are Giants and Behemoths and made things that belong in your nightmares.
It’s dark and there’s the Dark. There are doors and Doors. You’ll encounter magic that creates and magic that destroys. This is a world where you follow your dreams.
You will need to pay attention. The details matter. If the door is red, remember there’s a red door because you may see it again and the fact that you remember it will tell you something the next time you encounter it.
With some characters living for lifetimes, there are plenty of backstories to catch up on. Alliances are formed and broken. Motives change over time. Names no longer fit as well as they once did.
This story is nonlinear. This is also where your attention to detail will be rewarded. Your reactions to reveals will likely run the gamut of “I knew it!’ to ‘Huh?’ to ‘OMG!’ Knowing what you now know, though, you’ll be eager for a reread to pick up clues you missed the first time around.
You will curse the fact that the next book hasn’t been published yet because you need it right now! In fact, you need the whole series, dammit!
But you’ll wait, because you don’t have any other option. There’s no other option, right?
While you wait, you’ll take the time to feel the warmth of the sun on your face. You’ll appreciate trees in a way you didn’t before. When you see a butterfly, a delight may bubble up in you that you haven’t felt in a long time.
You will wait and you will think about these characters who are neither all good or all bad, and you will look forward to the day you get to see them again.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and DAW Books, an imprint of Astra Publishing House, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Welcome to the Wanderlands.
A vast machine made for reasons unknown, the Wanderlands was broken long ago. First went the sky, splintering and cracking, and then very slowly, the whole machine — the whole world — began to go dark.
Meet the Failures.
Following the summons of a strange dream, a scattering of adventurers, degenerates, and children find themselves drawn toward the same place: the vast underground Keep. They will discover there that they have been called for a purpose — and that purpose could be the destruction of everything they love.
The end is nigh.
For below the Keep, imprisoned in the greatest cage ever built by magicians and gods, lies the buried Giant. It is the most powerful of its kind, and its purpose is the annihilation of all civilisation. But any kind of power, no matter how terrible, is precious in the dimming Wanderlands, and those that crave it are making their moves.
All machines can be broken, and the final cracks are spreading. It will take only the careless actions of two cheerful monsters to tip the Wanderlands towards an endless dark … or help it find its way back to the light.
Justin Chase’s worst week is on the home stretch. He has officially made it through the worst week weekdays of his life.
Justin was thrown a curveball on Friday night and now it’s a whole new ball game, one with zombies! I must have been behind the eight ball because learning that Justin’s home backs onto a cemetery came out of left field for me.
It’s not any old cemetery either. It’s the Cemetery For Elite Athletes, which gives rise to the pole-vaulting dead. Literally. Athletic zombies mean Justin is definitely out of his league.
Not one to throw in the towel, though, Justin is going to try to Pac-Zombie himself, his family, Mia and Marvin (even Marvin) to safety.
On your marks, get set, run for your life!
Par for the course, Justin’s mortification is televised for all the world to see. Someone really needs to suspend Marvin’s tech privileges.
Nan’s gonna need a bigger swear jar, we’re reminded of the horrors of Lycra and I will never think of ‘stunned mullet’ the same way again.
Mia may not have had time to show us any of her drawings today but I was introduced to the holographic robot pirate shark ghost of my dreams.
That’s a book I definitely need in my life…
It’s down to the wire now and I can’t wait to get acquainted with our feline overloads. If Captain Fluffykins’ grumpy face is any indication, the gloves are coming off and Justin’s going to have to keep rolling with the punches. Have our heroes got a sporting chance of surviving this impending cat-aclysm?
Matt and Eva keep hitting these books out of the park. What they’ve teed up for Sunday, I can only imagine. I can’t wait to watch from the sidelines. Until then, I’ll be holding my Cloppy Doppy plush toy tight in anticipation.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Have YOU ever had a BAD WEEK?
Justin Chase sure has, and THIS is it!
He miraculously made it through the mayhem of MONDAY, the trauma of TUESDAY and the weirdness of WEDNESDAY. He was throttled by THURSDAY and frazzled by FRIDAY! It’s time for a nice, relaxing weekend, right? WRONG!
Now it’s SATURDAY and Justin has to somehow survive a zombie apocalypse … and he lives next door to the cemetery for elite athletes!
Being in the splash zone when someone is Wile E. Coyote’d piano style isn’t the strangest thing that’s happened to Misha this week. He’s been nominated for an Oscar and he’s probably about to lose his job. Oh, and a bunch of the characters he’s written are out to get him. If he’d chosen any genre besides horror, this might not be quite as scary, but here we are.
Misha is dealing with the evils of AI in creative spaces and the unscrupulousness of the entertainment industry, with a good dose of past trauma intruding on the present thrown in for good measure.
“It’s no fun when your plotline goes sideways, is it?”
Supporting Misha through the ups, downs and OMG, we’re gonna die! are his boyfriend, Zeke, who’s the kind of too good to be true that you really want to be true, and his aromantic and asexual best friend, Tara.
I loved Zeke and Tara in their supporting roles and spent much of my time with them hoping they wouldn’t be collateral damage. I needed more page time with Tara, though. There aren’t enough asexual characters, especially ones with personalities that bound off the page.
“They’ve got everyone up there besides an ace character,” she observes. “Every fucking time.”
Taking place in the same universe and after the events of Camp Damascus, this book has the body horror, the heart and the WTF that I was looking for.
I didn’t even attempt to try to figure out what was going on when the impossible started showing up. I was happy to sit back and enjoy the ride, and enjoy it I did. This was such a fun blend of what’s going to happen next? and I need to see that movie! I wanted to watch every TV series and movie described, even the crappy sequels. Especially the crappy sequels.
Best lamb ever!
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Misha is a jaded scriptwriter working in Hollywood, and he’s seen it all. All the toxic personalities and coverups, the structural obstructions to reform, even dead actors brought back to screen by CGI – and finally, maybe, the hint of change.
But having just been nominated for his first Oscar, Misha is pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale — “for the algorithm” — on the same day he witnesses to gruesome death-by-piano of treasured animator (and notorious creep) Raymond Nelson.
Success, it seems, isn’t the answer to everything.
With the help of his best friend and paranoid database queen, Tara, and his boyfriend, Zeke, Misha has face down his traumatic childhood and past mistakes. But in a paranoid industry that thinks nothing of killing off talent, it’s not so simple to find a way to do what’s right.
This has been one of my most anticipated reads for five years. I preordered it in hardcover and Kindle. I was practically foaming at the mouth waiting for it to be published. And then I didn’t read it. For five years.
Why? First, I was intimidated by the names. How was I ever going to tell Roger and Dodger apart? Duh, easily.
I almost got over that when the first reviews started coming in and they were all so eloquent and thoughtful. I got tripped up by them, wondering if I was even smart enough to fully grasp the layers of this book.
Then Seasonal Fears arrived and I couldn’t read that without having already read this one. Then the publication date of Tidal Creatures drew near and I couldn’t stand the thought of another Seanan book being out in the wild without me.
So, trust Seanan. It will result in much less angst and much more OMG, this book is amazing!
It starts at the end, and there’s just so much blood.
I wasn’t looking for perfection because that doesn’t exist. Outside of this book. Perfection doesn’t exist outside of this book. If a 5 star read is something I’m going to get to the end of and immediately want to reread while simultaneously bashing you over the head with it until you inevitably fall in love with it too, this was that and more. The stars are so full that there’s blood gushing out of them and they’re still getting filled as they overflow.
I can’t even begin to describe this book to you. It’s just perfect!
I loved Roger and Dodger. Individually. Together. I kept wavering between yearning for a connection with someone who understands me to my very core like they have and the thought of that kind of intimacy making me want to run in the opposite direction.
Erin is one of the best characters I’ve ever met and I need an entire book dedicated to her.
This is one of my all time favourite reads. I’m convinced I could read it ten times and get something new from it each read. I cannot wait to revisit it! This time, without the unnecessary angst.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story.
Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math.
Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.
Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own.
I blame Mulder. Sure, I already knew about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster through some sort of cultural osmosis but had no overwhelming urge to learn about creatures I hadn’t met before. Thirty years ago, I found out that the truth was out there and, well, my curiosity never went back in its box.
This book is divided into three sections: cryptids, folklore and mythology. The entries in each section are alphabetised and illustrated. I absolutely loved the illustrations!
If you know me at all, you know it’s not possible for me to overdose on fun facts. I may drown you in them but I’ll be good to keep going. It was so hard to decide which were my favourites. I’ve managed to narrow it down to three from each section.
Cryptids
The hoop snake bites its tail to form a hoop. It gets to its victims by rolling towards them, “reaching speeds of up to 60 mph (97 kmph).” It stabs its victims with sharp prongs at the end of its tail.
The tizzie-whizie loves ginger biscuits and warm milk.
One of the descriptions of the Lusca, a Bahamian cryptid, is half shark and half octopus, which naturally made me think of one of the many Eric Roberts movies I’ve seen too many times, Sharktopus. Come to think of it, I met a lot of these creatures in B grade movies.
Image credit: Rachel Quinney
Folklore
Cat sídhes have an interesting collection of stories behind them. Many believe them to be witches who have transformed into cats. Limited to transforming only eight times between human and cat, on the ninth transformation, the witch would be unable to return to their human form and would be thus trapped as a cat. Some believe this to be the origin of the tale that cats have nine lives.
Image credit: Hallalaween
With its name translating to “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast”, the mapinguari isn’t a creature you want to come across. Some descriptions include a “large mouth across its stomach to devour humans who are too slow to escape.”
According to Romani and Slavic folk legends, pumpkins and watermelons are the only two types of vegetation that may become vampiric in nature. If a pumpkin or watermelon is left out under a full moon or kept for ten days after Christmas, it will turn into a vampire. Once transformed, the pumpkin or watermelon will roll around and pester the living with snarls or by knocking into furniture.
You know I’m going to try this one!
Mythology
There is a popular legend of the sazae-oni: A group of wealthy pirates rescue a young maiden, the crew have sex with her (versions vary on whether it was consensual or not), and she cuts or bites off the testicles of every man before returning to the ocean. From the ocean, she taunts the men and demands that they buy back their testicles from her. The pirates trade away all their gold in order to get their testicles. In Japan, testicles are sometimes called “golden balls,” creating the punchline that they paid for gold with gold.
Qilin are said to be so gentle that they walk on clouds because they don’t want to damage a blade of grass. However, they also “protect innocent people by incinerating those who seek to harm them with their fiery breath.” That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance I can get behind.
Rompo sing to themselves as they consume human flesh. If a mythological creature is going to eat my corpse, at least I can be content knowing they enjoyed doing so.
Image credit: Rachel Quinney
This is one of the most fun introductions to all things monstrous and maybe mythological that I’ve ever come across. I found out new fun facts about some of my favourites, learned of the existence of myths I’ve never encountered before and have an entire list of cute, creepy and downright diabolical creatures that I need to know more about.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Cryptids, Creatures & Critters: A Manual of Monsters and Mythos from Around the World features 90 different creatures from around the world, each with their own researched description and full-colour illustrations. The book is divided into three sections: cryptids, folklore, and mythology. It features popular cryptid favourites, such as Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster, and some lesser-known cryptids, such as the Enfield Horror and the Montauk Monster. For folklore, there are kelpies, selkies, cat sídhes, and grimalkins, along with the dobarchu and the vampiric pumpkin! In mythology, you’ll find Medusa, sphinx, Pegasus, and the bukavac!
The book is fun for newcomers to cryptozoology, folklore, and mythology but is also fun for those who are well read about the creatures in the book. While written by Rachel Quinney and mainly illustrated by her, there are twelve guest artists featured within the book, too.
A group of adults reunite in the town they all grew up in. The secret they’ve been hiding since they were kids is about to be exposed. I’ve read so many books with variations of this theme but I keep going back for more.
There’s something about nostalgia, even when it’s someone else’s, that draws me in. Nostalgia contaminated by unspoken trauma that’s been dragged into adulthood is intoxicating.
While I want to run in the opposite direction when drama threatens to knock on my door, I can’t get enough of it where fictional characters are involved. I blame a steady diet of shows like Days of Our Lives during my formative years. I mean, who can watch Marlena get possessed and not become a drama junkie?! But I digress…
Even though I was fairly convinced I’d been there, done that, I still wanted to read this book. It was in part because I’ve yet to meet a Ronald Malfi book I haven’t enjoyed. However, I also needed to know what the secret was and watch it bring together or destroy the friendship of the people who’d been living with it for so many years.
Andrew has secrets. There’s the big one from his past but there’s also the fact that he owns a house his wife doesn’t know about because … reasons. At least it gives him somewhere to stay when he takes an unwanted trip down memory lane.
“The five of us are cursed, man.”
I love so many of the books I read but, for whatever reason, they rarely surprise me these days. This one did. I was blindsided more than once and it absolutely delighted me when my assumptions kept being proved wrong.
I’d argue that every horror story needs a lighthouse. This one also has turkey vultures and itchy eyes. Counting has never been so creepy. This was such a fun read!
“You shouldn’t have come back here.”
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Maybe this is a ghost story…
Andrew Larimer has left his past behind. Rising up the ranks in a New York law firm, and with a heavily pregnant wife, he is settling into a new life far from Kingsport, the town in which he grew up. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he has no choice but to return home.
Coming home means returning to his late father’s house, which has seen better days. It means lying to his wife. But it also means reuniting with his friends: Eric, now the town’s deputy sheriff; Dale, a real-estate mogul living in the shadow of a failed career; his childhood sweetheart Tig who never could escape town; and poor Meach, whose ravings about a curse upon the group have driven him to drugs and alcohol.
Together, the five friends will have to confront the memories — and the horror — of a night, years ago, that changed everything for them.
Because Andrew and his friends have a secret. A thing they have kept to themselves for twenty years. Something no one else should know. But the past is not dead, and Kingsport is a town with secrets of its own.
Amnesia’s never fun but it’s even worse when you come to in the lab of a Dread Lord sans eyebrows and there’s someone at the door. Imagine your horror when you discover that the Big Bad is you!
“It’s a pleasure to watch you work, my lord. The way you have of targeting someone’s deepest insecurities and just … eviscerating them. Verbally. Before you eviscerate them. It’s masterful.”
Gavrax has interesting taste in decor, questionable fashion choices and a princess locked in the dungeon. Every Dread Lord’s castle needs a dungeon, after all.
Gav has questions. Like, why is there a princess locked in the dungeon? Who chose these horrendous clothes? What happened to his eyebrows? And who is he if he doesn’t have his memories?
This is one of those books I knew I’d love. I was so convinced that I preordered a signed special edition when I’d only read a chapter.
The struggle of trying to figure out who you are when you’re weighed down by other people’s expectations has a whole other layer when you’re the villain.
“Do you think there’s a point where someone is just … irredeemably evil?”
I loved watching Gav navigate this for himself while encountering huggable squid, goblins that would prefer not to be BBQ’ed –
How did he possibly keep the castle running if he kept executing the staff?
– and the ever present threat of garlic breath.
Gav may have had a complexity I wasn’t expecting (and loved – I loved this about him) but it was the princess who stole the show for me. I’m not usually one for damsels in distress but it turns out I absolutely adore damsels who aren’t quite as distressed as advertised.
Which reminds me. Not that I ever planned on being all ‘yay, false advertising!’ but yay, false advertising! This book is not Dreadful after all. There are characters of the mwa-ha-ha variety planning deeds most dastardly. There are some ‘did you choose that outfit with your eyes closed?’ moments. The dreadfulness, though? It’s fairly limited to the menu. Sorry, Orla. You know I love you.
Bonus content: If you sign up to the author’s newsletter, you’ll get a copy of Here Comes the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss, a story that’s a prequel to Dreadful. It contains some spoilery bits so it’s probably best if you read the book first.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something.
It’s a lot worse when you realise that Dread Lord Whomever is… you.
Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed.
But as he realises that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be?
A high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, an evil wizard convocation, and a garlic festival. All at once. Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks.
It takes a lot to disturb me. I’m disturbed. And that was from reading the author’s note before the first chapter. Besides disturbing me, it also made me more keen than ever to read the Father of Lies trilogy. Because disturbing me definitely doesn’t equate to stopping me coming back for more.
This is one of those books where I would recommend you read the content warnings. I’ll be quoting them at the end of my review. Had I read them first, I probably would have baulked at the “scenes depicting sex and sex acts”. Even now, my brain is interjecting, ‘Or whatever the hell that was!’
Despite wanting to scrub those images from my mind, I enjoyed this read. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t say enjoyed. Do you enjoy depravity and gore? Do you admit it if you do?
Psychologist Dr Rachel Hoggendorf has a new patient, David. If you believe him, though, he hasn’t been new for a long time. Not for centuries, in fact.
“He’s an interesting case.”
It’s not clear when Rachel meets David but I assume it was a few decades ago because Dissociative Identity Disorder is still known as Multiple Personality Disorder. David’s story is … let’s go with disturbing.
No matter how ick, ew, I’m not sure I want this image permanently etched in my brain thank you very much, the urge to keep reading won. If this book had been written by pretty much anyone else, I wouldn’t have even ventured past the content warnings, but it’s a Steve Stred book.
Steve’s taken me hiking in the Canadian wilderness. He introduced me to Bruiser. I’m so many books behind but he’s already cemented his place in my must read list. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
This book is absolutely worth all the stars. For the ick. For the what the fuck did I just read. For the disturbance.
Also, that cover is incredible! I would have read this book even if it wasn’t a Steve Stred book.
“Be careful. If it gets out … just be careful.”
Thank you so much to NetGalley and DarkLit Press for the opportunity to read this novella.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Dr. Rachel Hoggendorf has seen it all. An accomplished psychiatrist, she’s always prided herself on connecting to the patients who’ve been brought to the facility, no matter how difficult or closed-off they are. That is, until David arrives.
At first, she listens to what David has to say. How he claims to be four hundred years old and possessed by a demon. She diagnoses him as having multiple personalities and approaches his treatment as such.
But as their time together continues, David begins to share details he shouldn’t know and begins to lash out violently. When Rachel brings in her colleague Dr. Dravendash, David’s behaviour escalates and it’s not long before they begin to wonder if David just might be telling the truth. That he’s possessed by a demonic presence… and it wants out.
A visceral, edge of your seat novella, When I Look to the Sky, All I See Are Stars is everything you’d expect from 2x Splatterpunk nominated author Steve Stred. Frantic pacing, hooves and horns and the growing dread that what lies beyond this plane is a land filled with ash and a place we never want to visit.
Schizanthus Nerd 