Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw 
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw
Tor Nightfire (May 2023)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Cassandra Khaw is known for their evocative prose, intensely dark and stunning worlds, masterful acts blending genres and lines of reality and fiction, and humans and monsters. In their fantasy-horror novella, The Salt Grows Heavy, a mermaid’s daughters unleash death upon the kingdom. Bodies line the streets, stacked in towering piles. They’ve gorged themselves on townspeople.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito 
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
Liveright (February 2025)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Victorian Psycho is soon to be a feature film from the horror fan-favorite A24, starring Margaret Qualley (The Substance). I heard the news before picking up Virginia Feito’s psychological and gothic horror debut, so I enjoyed envisioning Qualley as the bloodthirsty Ensor governess, Winifred Notty. This read was one of those rare instances where every responsibility of life feels like an interruption. I could not get back to it quickly enough. Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle 
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire (July 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Bury Your Gays was my first Chuck Tingle read. The cover features Hollywood’s bright colors, palm trees, and a bloodied sledgehammer to break apart the pretense of glamor. The imagery reminds me of Ti West’s characters, Maxine and Pearl, and their fierce fight for fame.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix 
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
Berkley (January 14, 2025)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Great horror reflects the societal fears of its time. In the 1950s, fear of the unknown and the atomic age inspired classics like Richard Matherson’s I Am Legend and Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. In the 1960s, distrust in the government worsened, and many feared mental illness and occultism, giving birth to Robert Bloch’s Psycho and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. In Witchcraft For Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix speaks to the evolution of these social anxieties and unrest but prioritizes an often suppressed point of view: women’s.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Sleep Tight by J.H. Markert 
Sleep Tight by J.H. Markert
Crooked Lane (September 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Sounds of the animals, like a kennel of demented beasts. The Lost Children had begun to gather on the Devil’s Backbone.
In perhaps his most ambitious tale yet, Sleep Tight, J.H. Markert ensnares readers with a serial killer’s execution. Like the most infamous killers, such as Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader (BTK), Markert’s man on death row was especially elusive because of his theatrics and efforts to appear normal.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman 
Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman
Bad Hand Books (September 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
It took thirty-eight laps around Billy’s skull to empty the roll of duct tape. They drew two lopsided and unblinking black ovals over his eyes.
Twenty years later, Glenn’s dogged mind runs on a constant loop — Billy kissing a girl at the dance, that squeal of peeling tape, his grim imaginings of his son’s final moments, where his soul may lie, and silvery ghosts. How can he and his wife, Carol, move on with every suspect’s fabric of guilt pulled at like a loose thread and then discarded? Without a conviction? A who or why?Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy 
Rest Stop by Nat Cassidy
Shortwave Media (October 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
I read Nat Cassidy’s novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror last summer and can’t shake how it made me feel more than a year later. Carpeted in historical and generational trauma, Mary was about women, especially “women who are only invisible until somebody needs to be blamed.”
Above the novel’s intricate weavings of religious fanaticism and Cassidy’s protagonist’s unsettling behavior, Mary is about power and the tendency to mythologize those who claim it like some god. Given the political climate, it’s a haunting reminder that this narrative has long existed in the real world and feels all the more suffocating.
Rest Stop, Cassidy’s latest release, a horror novella about a troubled musician, Abe, traveling to visit a dying relative who tormented him through childhood with spats of disapproval and disappointment, dissects the ghosts of historical trauma.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Through The Midnight Door by Katrina Monroe 
Through The Midnight Door by Katrina Monroe
Poisoned Pen Press (August 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Who doesn’t love a good jump scare? While some dismiss jump cares as a cheap element in horror, others know that those quick, intense scares can set the stage for complete emotional collapse when done well.
Remember the car scene from Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House? It was shocking, memorable, and effective. This scene opened the floodgates of the family’s shared trauma and revealed what the lack of communication has since conjured.
Katrina Monroe’s latest release, Through The Midnight Door, accomplishes this several times.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Drencrom by Hamelin Bird 
Drencrom by Hamelin Bird
Piper House (May 2023)
144 pages; $12.95 paperback; $5.99 ebook
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Hamelin Bird’s Drencrom is a graphic and poetic love letter to Lynchian horror and A Clockwork Orange.
Since getting kicked out of her home, Coda has indulged in a hippie-soul existence without much direction. All of that changes when she scours the dark web for an allegedly “mythical” drug called Drencrom, a crimson-colored liquid with unimaginable power. Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Diavola by Jennifer Thorne 
Diavola by Jennifer Thorne
Tor Nightfire (March 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
In 2022, I reviewed Jennifer Thorne’s debut novel, Lute, a folk horror story compared to Ari Aster’s Midsommar, where the town’s adults were impressively desensitized to occult traditions. (Are you thinking of the murderous ritual for the elderly? I can still see Florence Pugh’s face.) The execution of this element lends itself well to an unnerving mystery and a sense of outrage in Lute that made readers devour the pages and does so, once again, in Thorne’s latest release, Diavola.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Cranberry Cove by Hailey Piper 
Cranberry Cove by Hailey Piper
Bad Hand Books, LLC (April 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
Hailey Piper creates a haunting atmosphere and writes with stunning prose in her Bram Stoker Award-winning novella Cranberry Cove.
In the desolate halls of the Cranberry Cove Hotel, there’s an evil once called upon but abandoned. Even rodents didn’t dare enter. No one did until Emberly’s boss, Ricard, sent she and her partner, Conner, on a mission after his son was s*xually assaulted. What stands out here is: one, the victim is male, and two, there’s a lot of nuanced information. He didn’t see his attacker. There don’t appear to be secret passages to allow someone to sneak in and out unseen. Still, Richard’s son is instantly believed, a privilege both cisgender and transgender women fight tooth and nail for. Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Scribe by Michael R. Goodwin 
Scribe by Michael R. Goodwin
Dark Pine Publishing (September 2023)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
In Michael R. Goodwin’s Scribe (the Smolder prequel), an ancient force prowls and feeds in the woods, hungry for women, children, hunters, and whoever should be misfortunate enough to enter the shadows. The Penobscot natives lost several to the evil of the woods, with nothing left of the bodies, only scorched patches of earth.
Finally, an elder arranges a deal, trading sacrifice for immunity.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories InterviewsLeave a comment on The Cemetery Dance Interview: The Haunting of Gwendolyn Kiste 
Gwendolyn Kiste is a three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Haunting of Velkwood, The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Mortals, and most recently, a short story called “Your Mother’s Love Is An Apocalypse” in the Mother Knows Best: Tales of Homemade Horror anthology, foreword by Sadie Hartmann, edited by Lindy Ryan. Kiste has also won the Lambda Literary Award and received the This is Horror award for Novel of the Year.
She doesn’t just tell any old ghost stories. Kiste’s books, like The Haunting of Velkwood, orbit themes of self-identity, complacency, and unbreakable bonds. To her, “Everyone’s life is like a haunted house.” Perhaps that’s why her books linger, giving readers a ghostly book hangover.
Kiste spoke to Cemetery Dance about The Haunting of Velkwood, gothic horror, themes of complacency and accountability in her latest novel, and, of course, ghost stories (her specialty).Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen 
My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen
Poisoned Pen Press (May 2024)
384 pages
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen exceptionally invokes gothic tropes such as unearthing buried secrets at a dire cost, and relics of her predecessors to craft a chilling, sapphic love story that is possessive, haunting, and beautiful.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories ReviewsLeave a comment on Review: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay 
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay
William Morrow (June 11, 2024)
288 pages
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
In his classic, fatalistic tone, Bram Stoker Award-winner Paul Tremblay cleverly assembles a haunting level of empathy between readers, the narrator, and characters in Horror Movie. At times the story felt all-too real, which will appease fans of Tremblay’s previous work like A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) and The Pallbearers Club (2022). Down the road, maybe even a few weeks from now, the characters’ names from Horror Movie may evade you but you’ll never escape the reality-bending and unsettling “horror void.” Continue Reading
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