Friday the 13th Playlist: Mid-Day Mumbai

Leave the World Behind

“Alam has such skill with the omniscient narrator! The suspense and mystery is enhanced through each character and their reactions to the events, plus the info drops are intriguing and relevant. This is a novel that gets under your skin and stays there. And if that sounds creepy, well, it is! This novel is creepy as well as thought provoking, timely, and funny. It raises issues about parenting, class, race, and teenage hormones. Not what I expected, and so much more.”

Kristine, Buttonwood Books and Toys

Winner of the RUSA Award for Best Horror

When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods in this chilling novel that reads like The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show.

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead... Read more »

Mexican Gothic

“Mexican Gothic is a fairytale turned nightmare, perhaps with a nod to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In 1950’s Mexico, glamorous debutante Noemí receives a mysterious letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina. In frantic prose, she pleads for Noemí to visit her at High Place, the family residence of her husband, an English expat whom she has grown to distrust. Upon her arrival, Noemí finds a dilapidated, mold-ridden mansion on the grounds of a former silver mine with a sickly past, upheld by a eugenicist patriarch whose suffocating surveillance would drive anyone away, if only they could leave. Woven together like a mycelial network, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest features feminist heroism and commentary on colonialism, with language and culture as secret weapons. It’s absolutely delectable.”

Mary, Raven Book Store

Plain Bad Heroines

“This one's a stunner. Emily Danforth writes so compellingly, that even for its slow pacing, Plain Bad Heroines is impossible to put down. This is so much more than horror - a queer, coming-of-age, love story, history rewritten to include those it should never have erased - so atmospheric and character-driven, I found it difficult to find myself afraid, only undeniably intrigued. I giggled hysterically. I shook my fists at the patriarchy (because of course I did). Reader, I'd dive right back in again, even at the risk of yellow jackets following me back out.”

Britt, Second Star to the Right

A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut.
 
In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet's word is law, Immanuelle Moore's very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so... Read more »