All the things that thrilled me in December, 2025:
Michael McDowell's Katie was my 100th book of the year; I made a really sound choice of a book to hit that milestone with! In Katie, our impoverished heroine has her inheritance stolen out from under her by a murderous family of inveterate criminals. Chief among the ne'er-do-wells is the titular Katie Slape, a young woman who can see the future and has a penchant for grotesque killings. (She favors a hammer to the head, but she's flexible on that.) Will the heroine get revenge? Will she get her money back? Will she find true love and a family that accepts her? Will she avoid that hammer's cruel fall? The only way to find out is to pick this one up--and since it's written as a pitch-perfect Victorian penny dreadful, you're going to love every lurid episode in this novel.
The prospect of a new Blut Aus Nord album is always exciting--you never know exactly what you're going to get, but you can go into it pretty confident that it's going to be, at a minimum, a solid record. Ethereal Horizons might well be one of the project's most accessible releases, but that doesn't mean it's for the faint of heart. Ethereal Horizons marries black metal to hypnotic, atmospheric haze. At times, Ethereal Horizons even ventures into blackgaze territory; imagine Alcest, but heavier.
Paranoiac is part of a spate of films made by Hammer that feel like they were intended to muscle their way into the Hitchcock Zone. When the heir to a fortune turns up after eight years after he supposedly committed suicide, it throws his alcoholic brother and mentally unstable sister into a tale spin. Is he who he says he is? What secrets are the rest of the family hiding? Taken as an example of the Hitchcock-esque, Paranoiac is extremely successful. The acting is taught, and the plot has just the right combination of thriller, crime story, psychological horror, and twentieth-century Gothic. Apparently, this was not well-reviewed, but I think it's actually under-rated.
I read a lot of comics in December, and Ain't No Grave was the best of the lot. Ain't No Grave is a horror Western about a former bandit who's dying of consumption; unwilling to die now that she finally has a life worth living, she goes on a quest to kill Death so she has more time with her loving husband and young daughter. The art in Ain't No Grave is phenomenal--there were a bunch of full-page illustrations that took my breath away. The story is also top-notch; what's not to love about a descent into an underworld with murder balladeers, riverboats where the damned gamble, and many tense shootouts.
For some reason, the end of December found me in a Western mood, so I really enjoyed Alex Grecian's Red Rabbit, a Western horror novel that charts its own course through the Weird West. There are a lot of moving parts to Red Rabbit: a duo of cowboy buddies meandering their way through the West; an accused murderer fleeing the law; a witch hunter who may or may not be good at his job; a schoolteacher rallying around a lost little girl; a demon that is causing carnage everywhere it goes; a witch with a bounty on her head; a ghost wandering around trying to help his former wife. And yet, it never feels like too much, and everything comes together into a really satisfying tale. I didn't find the horror elements to be over-the-top--this isn't a "Splatter Western" by any stretch--but the mix of mundane concerns and folk horror-esque supernatural elements was just about perfect. Will I read the follow-up to Red Rabbit? Absolutely.
Every December I try to read at least one spooky Christmas read; this year, my pick was Brom's Krampus: The Yule Lord. When a down-and-out guitar picker living in a trailer park gets a surprise visit from Krampus's minions and Santa's magic sack, he gets drawn into a world of madcap holiday violence. There's drug runners, crooked cops, guns guns guns, mythological creatures who love beating ass, honky tonk hoe downs, and all manner of tomfoolery up in here. I was absolutely not expecting this to be such a romp, but god damn it sure delivered. This ain't A Christmas Carol, that much is for sure.
I've never really been much of a superhero guy, but the Jekyll and Hyde dynamic with Bruce Banner and the Hulk has always intrigued me. Since Age of Monsters really leans into that theme, and adds a bunch of Southern Gothic-flavored monstrosities into the mix, this might just be the ideal Hulk comic for me. (Thanks for the recommendation, Mike.) This is one of the few modern superhero comics I've found where I actually like the art and the writing seems focused on, you know, actually telling a story. I'm interested enough in this title that I'll probably keep reading just to see what future volumes bring to the table.
This may be my Pratchett—training sensibilities speaking, but if your life goals involve ‘KILL DEATH’ you might just be more of a Problem than a Solution.
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, I cannot be sure that you’ve not read this series already, but the MEERKABAH RIDER stories of Mr Erdelac offer an intriguing slant on the Weird Western (I’m being only slightly facetious in describing them as ‘FIDDLER ON THE ROOF as directed by Sergio Leone’).