J. Federle

Just admiring my new bookmarks from Lorrie Ness today! 🤩 The perfect combo of haunting, eerie, and lovely.

It’s a revision weekend for me. I’m digging back into my sci-fi romance. To rescue his little brother, a spy has to pose as a bounty hunter, and a pretty soldier has to pose as his “bounty.” It should be a simple mission… but when a traitor adds a few zeroes to the fake reward, the pair have to fight off competing bounty hunters as they race toward an unfriendly world.

Revision is always a full-brain thing for me. I can’t get much else done if it’s a revision day! Nothing helps like a quiet cafe and a good latte.

📚 Do you have a favorite bookmark at home? What’s your weekend read?

Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os

"I can’t look you in the eyes for too long without feeling the need to confess. I stop pacing and kneel in front of your co**se. You’re an altar that only I know to worship at."

Holy hell, five-HUNDRED stars.

This story is psychological, wrapped up in the reeling mind of our unreliable narrator. It’s tender, sensitive, dizzying at times, and delightfully contemporary.

What brought this book next level for me was the parallel between our main character's trauma and the events in the woods outlined in the journal. It's absolutely elegant. (I ramble more about it in my Goodreads review.)

While I loosely expected paranormal botanical or eco-horror from the cover, I think Decomposition Book is way more adjacent to grief horror. We're talking about coping with devastating betrayal and loss of control. It's interested in how recovery (or at least processing) is its own kind of rot and release and rebirth.

“None of this is mine. The tuning fork has been shoved right in my ear canal, and something slick and wet drags over the wound on the back of my head.”

Morsel is a cool little horror blend of several sub-genres.

I picked Morsel up for the botanical horror, especially since it’s set in Appalachian nature, which usually implies some isolation horror too. It’s not *exactly* that, although it’s got some of that?

Picture a wild tussle with cult-y MLM weirdos that sometimes stumbles through drifting clouds of botanical horror. Those clouds, though, are incredibly effective and do a lot of work to keep things unsettling, not just chaotic.

Voice-wise, I think it’s giving Kingfisher’s Twisted Things? Eerie and weird, but filtered through a main character with a lot of sass and pluck. You’ll go from searing riffs on the bu****it of capitalism to properly atmospheric moments, darkly lyrical dips into a mysterious, hungry forest-voice.

I’m not usually much for cult stuff. But the humor and great pacing, plus the foreshadowing of the entity to come, really outweighed my general dislike of cult leader monologues and bullying (which were almost always undercut anyway by our savage main character).