book review Archives

Gila!

Monster Mayhem Author: Les Simons In the beautiful world of giant, oversized monsters run amok through unprepared humanity, the 1959 movie The Giant Gila Monster was always one of my personal favorites. I discovered it on a cheap DVD set, late one night, cuddling in bed and watching a literal cheesefest of B-horror movies. I fell in love. It has everything you want from a movie so ludicrous that it’s good. I needed more. I needed a book length epic of giant Gila Monsters eating people (because really, who DOESN’T need that in their life.) Enter Gila! by Les Simons [...]

Frances Carden2025-08-23T18:56:09-07:00August 23rd, 2025|Tags: B-movie, book review, Gila, Gila Monsters, horror, read, reading|

Salvation Day

“The world not as it is, but as it is meant to be.” Author: Kali Wallace The House of Wisdom is half legend, half nightmare. A once mighty exploration vessel, it orbits now in space, abandoned, all its inhabitants dead, the victims of a virus that spread and killed indiscriminately. There was only one survivor – a lone child named Jaswinder Bhattacharya – who was shot into space in an experimental vessel. And he has said nothing all these years. Flashforward ten years. Jas is an adult man now, traveling on a spaceship with his childhood best friend (and would-be lover) [...]

Frances Carden2025-08-17T14:59:44-07:00August 17th, 2025|Tags: book review, horror, read, reading, Salvation Day, sci-fi, science fiction, space, space horror|

Dead in Long Beach, California

“All humans would eventually try anything to feel more than nothing.” Author: Venita Blackburn I came to Dead in Long Beach, California accidentally, through an Audible sampling that ran automatically after my previous book finished. The sample was only a few minutes, but I was hooked by the dark lyricism and the idea. In Dead in Long Beach, California Coral arrives with groceries at her brother’s apartment to find him dead, the result of suicide. She pockets his cellphone and then, as she devolves into complicated grief, starts answering his messages as though she were him. She talks to his girlfriend. [...]

Frances Carden2025-08-11T10:14:26-07:00August 11th, 2025|Tags: book review, grief, literary fiction, read, reading|