We’re having our annual (though not always guaranteed) spate of cold weather – some nights dipping into the 20s – and I am luxuriating in the opportunity for coziness. Florida doesn’t give us much chance for proper bundling, for heavy blankets and hot baths that steam up the bathroom, for the kind of evenings where you sink into soft clothes and don’t emerge until morning. I will say, though, that Jacksonville (being a little further north than where we were previously near Daytona) seems to provide a few more chilly days? But anyway, when the cold arrives, I seize it completely.
Here are five things making these chilly nights perfect.
BED LINENS
I finally curated the perfect combination of colors and textures for my bed, and climbing into it every night feels deeply satisfying. Earthy pastels – sage and plum and slate, colors I don’t have a proper name for but that feel grounded and calm without being boring.
The linen sheets have that particular weight and coolness that only gets better with washing, the kind that makes you want to slip between them even in summer. The quilt has pick stitching, tiny running stitches creating geometric patterns across the surface, texture you can feel when you run your hand over it. I’d been looking for something with a sashiko vibe, and this is…kinda it? Another blanket, because I am a bit extra: a paisley handblock-print cotton quilt. and the gauzy duvet on top, light but warm, slightly wrinkled in that French country-house way.
Without trying to sound dramatic, or like I’ve cured cancer or something, it took years to get here, trying different combinations, replacing things one piece at a time until everything coordinated without looking coordinated. Now, when I pull back the covers at night, the whole setup looks exactly right and feels even better, substantial without being heavy, soft without being precious.
LIGHTING
These plug into the wall and look like little candle sconces, flickering LED flames that cast warm shadows up the wall. They’re not just for night; I leave them on during gray afternoons too, that gentle glow making everything feel softer around the edges.
I also have a diffuser/dehumidifier (seen in the featured image for this blog post, on my nightstand) that I’ve pretty much totally repurposed. I never use it for humidity or essential oils; instead, I run the white noise function, a droning, celestial chanting sound that my brain finds deeply soothing, and keep the changing color mood lighting on all day. It cycles through soft glows, lavender fading into pale blue into soft amber, shifting the room’s atmosphere without being too bright or wild.
The sconces give just enough light to move around at night without jarring you awake, and together with the diffuser’s slowly changing colors, the rooms feel like they’re breathing.
COLORING BOOKS
It took me a long time to get into coloring. The idea of it made me stupidly anxious, all that pressure to stay in the lines, to make good color choices, to not mess it up. But I kind of get it now, the appeal of structured creativity where you don’t have to generate ideas from nothing. The Flower Year by Leila Duly is such a treat for the eyes, full of intricate Victorian-style etchings of flowers and birds and butterflies, each page different enough that it never feels repetitive. There are full-page illustrations and double-page spreads, little collections of single flowers with their botanical names, quotes about the seasons scattered throughout.
I work on it in the evenings, a few pages at a time, and it quiets my brain in ways that reading sometimes doesn’t. Although funny enough, I listen to horror novel audiobooks while I am doing it, hehehe!
COMFY EVENING CLOTHES
The softest greige hoodie from the Asheville Botanical Garden, heavy Adidas sweatpants that are two sizes too big, and my favorite socks in the world: the Girlfriend Socks from Le Bon Shoppe. They’re thick and cozy, crew length, perfect for padding around the house, and I think I have every color they sell.
This is not a pretty, glamorous, or sexy evening getup, but I truly do not give a shit. When the temperature drops, I want to disappear into soft fabric and not think about how I look.
HOT BATHS
I wrote about this recently, how I became a bath person seemingly overnight, how the scalding water makes me think of that Russian plumber’s observation about women preparing for Hell. The ritual of it has become essential to my evenings. Candles, magnesium flakes, onsen essential oils, bath milk, water as hot as I can stand it. I emerge red as a lobster, steaming, and immediately into those oversized sweatpants.
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Most nights around 11 p.m., I’m watching a stranger’s scalp get massaged in extreme close-up. Fingers working through wet hair, nails scratching patterns across skin, the soft scrape of a wooden comb. Or I’m watching someone’s spine getting adjusted, the therapist’s hands finding each vertebra, that moment of pressure before the crack, the satisfying pop of joints realigning. Or a woman named WhispersRed is tucking an invisible person (me) into bed, smoothing imaginary blankets with deliberate strokes, whispering that everything’s going to be okay while fabric rustles and pillows get fluffed.
Sometimes it’s ear cleaning videos where tiny tools scrape and tap inside silicone ears. Sometimes it’s someone slowly brushing their hair for thirty minutes, each stroke amplified to an almost obscene degree. I cycle through my favorites, zenheads, tokyo asmr massage, mondragon chiropractic, itsblitzz’s gentle massage work, asmr twix, little me carmie. I guess I’m hunting for the off-switch my brain doesn’t have, and these videos are the closest thing I’ve found.
I’ve been doing this for years now. ASMR videos, those autonomous sensory meridian response tingles that start at your scalp and travel down your spine when you hear certain sounds.
A lot of ASMR is someone tapping their fingernails on objects for twenty minutes straight, or whispering directly into a microphone in a dark room. That doesn’t work for me. I need the sounds to be part of something, incorporated into an activity. The click of scissors trimming hair. The squelch of shampoo being worked into a lather. The snap of a fresh towel being unfolded. The rhythmic scrape of a pumice stone on a heel. Sounds that happen because someone is doing something – usually care or grooming related – not just performing sounds for their own sake (which I’ll agree here with the haters, this is actually kinda annoying and obnoxious.)
Then, a few months ago, I stumbled across a clip from John Waters’ Serial Mom while scrolling late at night. I am pretty sure you know the scene: Beverly Sutphin is watching her son’s friend’s family through their window, eating a roast chicken dinner. The camera zooms in on wet mouths tearing at greasy meat, lips smacking, tongues working over chicken skin, throats swallowing audibly. Sounds designed to be absolutely revolting.
And I thought: …wait. I’m kind of into this?
That’s when things started to click, and all the lightbulbs went on, all at once. A cascade of realization!
Those Serial Mom sounds were the same ones putting me into a trance every night. And then: oh god, how many horror movie sounds had I been responding to this way my entire life? Freddy’s finger knives scraping metal railings. Michael Myers’ breathing behind his mask. Shower curtain rings sliding. The rhythmic tick of a clock in an empty house. Every creaking floorboard in every haunted house.
Horror had been doing ASMR before ASMR had a name.
Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. I started making mental lists of horror sounds that gave me tingles and began to wonder if other horror fans experienced this too… or if I was just weird and freaky? I started thinking about how horror directors have been manipulating intimate audio space for decades, long before YouTube ASMRtists figured out the same trick. And that’s when I knew I had an article for Rue Morgue!
P.S. The header image for this post is from a 2018 video I wish I had stumbled across when I was doing research for the piece – Lucy Hale (Aria from Pretty Little Liars, though if you already recognized her I probably didn’t need to tell you that) doing ASMR recreations of horror movie sounds to promote Truth or Dare. She stabs a pumpkin for Halloween, types “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on a typewriter for The Shining, rubs lotion on her hands for Silence of the Lambs. PLL AND ASMR! Total dream come true! Someone at W Magazine understood the connection between horror and ASMR way before I did. Dangit!
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I have put together a truly elite, like God-tier (some kind of god, anyway)-level marinade this month. Occult, arcane, infernal. Incense and resins out the wazoo. A bit of celery and moss. A lot of shadow and dark, dark poetry. All the good things.
When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.
Cloak, Alison Blickle
The Visitor, Alison Blickle
What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.
Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.
I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.
Medusa about to turn all of the men on the internet to stone, Alison Blickle
Stone Phone, Alison Blickle
Attack, Alison Blickle
Slaying, Alison Blickle
In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.
Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.
And then the work changed again.
Day Trip, Alison Blickle
Hilltop Meadow Experience, Alison Blickle
Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.
Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?
Ladies Night, Alison Blickle
Night Lake, Alison Blickle
Snow Hike, Alison Blickle
If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”
And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.
To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.
Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.
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When I was planning the final page layouts for The Art of Fantasy, I had a specific vision in mind. The chapter in question (and I thought the perfect one to end with) is titled How To Save The World, and I imagined it full of heroes, those paragons and protectors, carrying out their dynamic deeds and performing extraordinary feats.
Whether via the gravitas of a work of classical art, a fate fixed immovably in the sculpt of a stone, or in the contemporary mythology of the pages of a comic book, we identify with characters and archetypes that strive for greatness, we grow as they grow, and through them we see the potential for change in ourselves and the world around us. The fact that practically every culture has stories of heroes is very telling about the collective mindset of us humans as a whole – that the hope for and existence of a hero satisfies something deeply held within us.
The emergence of these champions, how they evolve and grow and inspire us along the way, the completion of their story – and the belief that it could be our story too, we could be heroes! – fulfills an emotional need that everyone of us clings to.
Under the Gaze of the Glorious, Andy Kehoe
The mainstays and conventional heroes are all there. What interested me most, though, was exploring visuals that challenged the familiar narrative of what heroism looks like.
On the second-to-last page, Tino Rodriguez answered that call with color and growth, with flowers blooming from blood, with transformation and healing made visible. His answer was jubilant.
But on the opposite page, on the final page, is Andy Kehoe.
The Art of Fantasy (interior) L: Tino Rodriguez // R: Andy Kehoe Art
Together Through The Shifting Tides, Andy Kehoe
Andy Kehoe’s forests are a different world. Darker and stranger. His creatures inhabit midnight landscapes rendered in deep blues and purples, shadows that are not empty but full of presence. And woven through that darkness: kaleidoscopic color. Feverish sunsets and neon black-light eclipses. Moss-green rocks and plum velvet hilltops and periwinkle mists.
Luminous skies of swirling celestial pageantry, heralding impending destruction, creation, revelation! The beauty is eerie, unsettling, living alongside the darkness. Those sunsets are radiant and infinite, but the forests are still haunted.
His figures are small, impossibly small, against this grandeur. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs, two figures standing together in the face of something vast and unknowable, witnessing together what neither could face alone.
Under The Glow Of Anomaly, Andy Kehoe
Kehoe builds a persistent forest-world across his pieces, a mythology hushed and wild, that grows and deepens. You encounter recurring motifs and figures across canvases, as if you’ve wandered into a world with complete lives beyond the frame. It’s not illustrating a fixed story. It’s creating a space where you could emotionally live, where you recognize yourself in their smallness and solitude.
The tension between the creature’s gentle rendering and the emotional gravity of what they’re experiencing—I believe that’s where the essence of the work lives. Between sorrow and terror and wonder, occupying the same moment.
The Approach, Andy Kehoe
If you do a bit of digging on the internet, you can learn the conventional details of Kehoe’s life and studies. But I prefer his version. According to him, he was raised by iguanas on the Galapagos Islands after his merchant father was killed by pirates. He was a forest demon in Romania with a beloved beetle farm. A horse brigand in Dublin. The stories we tell about ourselves shape the worlds we inhabit. And so his paintings are real in the same way his origin story is real: emotionally true, spiritually resonant, more authentic than fact.
Lost Revery, Andy Kehoe
“Prismatic Goth,” he calls himself. When you look at his paintings, you see what he means. The midnight forests glow. Shadows are full and luminous. A cosmic sky breaks into infinite color, illuminating landscapes both devastating and wondrous.
You enter these forests seeking something you couldn’t name, but have always hoped in your heart, and you find it there: recognition that others have inhabited this same space, standing in the light and the darkness simultaneously, holding both. And this recognition matters profoundly because it assures something true about what it means to exist, to witness, to stand present to both the beautiful and the desolate without flinching.
Not conquering or overcoming or winning. Just this: I’m here. I see you. I’m standing beside you, tiny and trembling, in the face of the annihilating…and that it’s the being here that matters.
Inherent Tranquility, Andy Kehoe
This is what drew me to place his work on that final page. The creatures in his forests are heroes not because they overcome anything, but because they remain present to both the light and the darkness, to their own vulnerability and the vastness surrounding them. They see and are seen. They persist in a world that’s beautiful and indifferent. And they do it without armor, without pretense, just with the quiet awareness of their own small existence in something much larger.
Together In The Maelstrom, Andy Kehoe
What does heroism look like when you strip away spectacle? What does it mean to save a world when saving involves simply bearing witness, standing present?
I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes in cinema: “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee. Here, at the end of all things.”
Kehoe’s paintings conjure this for me—creatures carrying the weight of loss and darkness, standing in light they didn’t create and can’t control, present to it anyway. Small, brave acts of witness that you are glad to be part of.
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I had such a good time with this year’s Yule collection. These scents gave me everything: spectral encounters, Wes Anderson scripts, Thomas Dambo trolls, haunted dolls, and at least two occult coffee shop romances. To share some of that joy, I’m hosting an Instagram giveaway for every single scent reviewed here. Head over to my Instagram for details on how to enter.
One Has To Be Careful (toasted oats and clover honey, crushed lemon verbena, wild carrot leaf, and white tea poured with exacting care. A dab of condensed milk on a clean spoon, a faint rustle of vetiver) You’re having a peaceful morning, enjoying your elevenses, minding your own business, and living quietly as one does when you glance out the window and there’s your weirdo neighbor again. Full setup this time: gimbal rig, ring light positioned to catch the morning sun, lavalier mic clipped to their embroidered waistcoat. They’ve arranged a tableau on their hobbit-hole’s front step – bowl of heritage grain toasted oats, bunches of fresh carrot greens still dirt-speckled, pot of fresh, lemony verbena tea steaming invitingly. “Good morning, Shire fam! Welcome back to my channel. Today we’re doing my cozy morning routine – very clean hobbit aesthetic, very second-breakfast-core.” Take after take, adjusting the angle, moving the honey pot three centimeters left. “This heritage oat situation has been such a game-changer for my wellness journey, link to the mill in my description, don’t gatekeep!” The whole scene smells genuinely wholesome despite the production: toasty grains, fresh-pulled vegetables, proper tea poured with care. They grew those carrots themselves. The oats are from their own stores. They might be ridiculously mugging for the camera, but you can’t fake roots that deep. You smile ruefully and help yourself to another slice of seed cake. Maybe a barley scone too. It’s a long time til afternoon tea!
The Woodland So Wild (vanilla bourbon, cream peony, and white carnation enveloped in a warm, protective fortress of tonka, white cedar, orris root, red amber, and leather) A memory you can’t explain the significance of, where nothing happened but everything felt inevitable and true. Late afternoon, winter, pulled over on some rural highway to watch the sunset. Purple streaking through grey, the sky bruised and soft, every shade of twilight from plum to dove, from amethyst to ash. A cardboard cup from a small-town artsy café, steamed milk infused with flowers, vanilla syrup frothed and foaming. A scarf that smells faintly of perfume, worn three days ago when the trip began. The woods beyond the guardrail are bare, sanded smooth by wind and cold, no angles or edges. Breathing winter air through cabled wool stitches, once dense and taut, now relaxed and shaped to our skin. For reasons you’ll never articulate, this moment brands itself into your soul as important. Years later, you’ll catch this scent and be back on that shoulder, cup warming your hands, light failing, everything soft and rounded and impossibly tender. Impossible that it ever happened at all.
Gloomily, Gloomily (soft grey musk, pink thistle, lavender ash, tea leaves, pale iris, grey lilac, and rain-soaked moss) “3 AM/awakened by a sweet summer rain/ Distant howling /of a passing /southbound coal train.” Jim White’s low, laconic narration, Aimee Mann’s sweet echoing lullaby. “Was I dreaming, or was there someone just lying here/ Beside me in this bed?” Lavender’s herbal whisper, threaded with cool grassy thistle. Clean linen, powdery soap, freshly laundered pillowcases, cotton worn thin and shaped to a body that doesn’t feel like yours anymore, it hasn’t in a while. Hiss and hum, signal loss between stations, the fuzzy half-awake feeling where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s dreamed. Every certainty you built your life on dissolves into white noise and snow. The quiet crisis of middle age, waking in the dark and realizing all your convictions were just incomplete pictures, inadequate attempts to understand. Everything you think you know is just static on the radio.
The Donkey’s Tail gift with purchase of Gloomily, Gloomily (a beribboned strip of French lavender, bourbon vanilla, silver thistle, grey musk, pink silk, and well-loved grey cotton) I don’t want to write a review for this, I only want to tell you this smells like an extremely fuckin’ haunted doll and also that I want twenty bottles of it. But that’s not fair, and it is also a bit lazy. So:
You dream of someone crying. soft and persistent as rain on wool.
At the antique stall, “Mourning keepsake,” the card said. “Unknown provenance.”
Her head, porcelain. Her dress, pewter silk and blush-faded ribbons, lavender stems worked through cotton.
Someone loved her into being. Someone, heart-rent,
hands shaking with grief.
Heavier than she looked. Inside, something whispered and later, the seam gave way.
Funeral roses. Brown now, petals ground to dust, packed tight into her body like prayers into a throat.
Tell me— when you wake from the dream of her crying, what do you do with all this sadness
this grief that isn’t yours?
Dismembered Noggin Bouquet(wild pansies, white honey, and frothy cream) Roses preserved in amber resin, petals crystallized to honeyed bronze. Estate sale jewelry boxes lined with yellowed velvet, gilt-edged brooches oxidized to a dusky patina. Caramelized corsage, barley sugar twists and horehound drops, unctuous burnt-sugar varnish. Your grandmother’s nosegay pressed between the pages of a 1950s etiquette book, ribbons still faintly fragrant with Helene Curtis Spray and the face powder she wore to Wednesday night bridge club, way back when getting dressed up called for gloves and a little hat, even if you were only going three blocks over to Maureen’s house for that undrinkable coffee everyone politely finished because that’s just how you did.
The Erl King’s Pale Daughter (moonlit mist clinging to skin the color of ghost lilies, pearlescent and cold, a spectral musk possessing the sheen of river water at night) There’s no cardamom listed in this scent, and there’s no cardamom here, not really. But this is what cardamom might smell like, absent its bitter spice: green eucalyptus sharpness, citrus-wood undertones, cool and aquatic, faintly aromatic. Ghostly flowers float on inky waters, musk of a moon moth, sweet and clear as a bell. This is a being who exists on a frequency you’ll never tune into. She operates in a reality parallel to yours. She has never been human. She will never be human. The concept of humanity might not register as something worth knowing. She also does not know what cardamom is. Who? She asks, eyes insectile and lunar. Glassy, unblinking, and strange.
Old Books & A Flat White (dust-soft vellum, cracked leather, and yellowed pages exhaling their ghost of vanillin, a triple shot of espresso, and a deft swirl of warm, velvety microfoam)
TRIPLE SHOT AT LOVE: GROUNDS FOR SUSPICION #1 in Rare Book Romance (CW: dangerous manuscripts, competitive bidding, caffeine as foreplay)
When rival rare book dealers Sebastian and Margot both find themselves at Café Arcana hunting the same impossible alchemical manuscript rumored to transform gold into the perfect cup, they agree to a temporary truce. The barista, fair Ophelia, has been counting on exactly this. The moment they trust each other, they’re hers. She serves them a dark demonic brew roasted at temperatures summoned from the ninth circle of hell, and they settle in among brittle manuscripts and ravaged bindings reeking of forbidden knowledge and dust older than empires. As ancient pages whisper their mysteries and Ophelia’s brews grow dangerously, addictively potent, they realize she isn’t just making coffee. She IS the manuscript. She’s been waiting 300 years for the right combination: two rivals stupid enough to think they could possess her, arrogant enough to deserve what’s coming, and desperate enough to stop competing and start copulating. I mean collaborating.
“Finally, a love triangle where everyone WINS and also maybe loses their SOULS” (Occult Romance Weekly) “The chemistry is UNREAL and so is the coffee and I haven’t slept in 48 hours” (#BookTok)
The Crumpet-Fanlight Expedition (austere polar musk, vegan ambergris, and white tea combine to make a genteel, frigid perfume as bright and sharp as the first crack of glacial ice) A lime on an ice floe, wearing sunglasses. Pale juice, cold-zapped. Sun on snow, blinding white. The lime casts no shadow but casts a circle in salt. The lime is simultaneously freezing and thawing, bright. Sharp. Frozen, broken things having a good time at the end of the world.
Eviscerated With No. 7 Crochet Hook (delicate antique lace, with a hint of powdered violet, plum brandy, and gleaming aldehydes) Violet wallpaper in the hallway, plum velvet drapes in the parlor, lavender silk sheets on the bed. Lilac gloves laid out beside the mauve hatbox. An amethyst brooch pinned to her orchid-colored blouse. She arranges the iris-patterned teacups just so, checks her reflection in the mirror framed in wisteria wood. The aubergine carpet muffles her footsteps. In the kitchen, eggplant preserves gleam in glass jars on a pristine countertop Her tools rest in a mulberry-lined case: the No. 7 crochet hook polished to a shine, sharp as surgical steel but delicate as the hyacinth lace she crocheted last winter. She does beautiful work. Precise. You can barely see the hole hooked into the throat of the corpse on the floor. When she’s finished, she washes up with thistle-scented soap, changes into her indigo dressing gown, and sits down to crochet something new. Maybe a shroud.
SPECIMEN CLASSIFICATION: CRYSTALLUS SINGULARIS Observed December 21st, 1927, Miskatonic ValleyProfessor Elias Wentworth, Department of Crystallography
Upon first observation, the specimen presented geometries of such singular and cyclopean complexity as to defy conventional Euclidean classification. The primary hexagonal structure, while superficially conforming to known ice crystal morphology, revealed upon closer examination a fractal recursion of nameless intricacy, each branching arm subdividing into ever-smaller iterations of impossible precision. The coloration proved equally anomalous: not the expected translucent white, but rather a frosted sage of spectral luminescence, shot through with veins of glacial verdure and gelid chlorophyll that seemed to shift and multiply when viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens. The effect was not unlike peering into dimensions of space hitherto unknown to mortal science—angles that should not exist, proportions that violated natural law, yet arranged with such terrible beauty as to inspire equal measures of awe and incomprehension. Most disturbing: the specimen exhibits a menacing quality I cannot adequately describe. Fresh. Chilly. Herbal citrus notes emanating from its crystalline surface.
Further study req—
[ARCHIVAL NOTE: The above entry represents Professor Wentworth’s final coherent observation. He was discovered three hours later in his laboratory, having etched hexagonal patterns into the laboratory walls, floors, and his own flesh. He remains under care at Arkham Sanitarium, where he continues to mutter about “the geometry” and refuses to look at snow. The specimen in question melted without incident. —Dr. H. Armitage, University Librarian, 1928]
Christmas Lustre (amber-illuminated roasted chestnut, cardamom, caramel, and allspice) Thomas Dambo’s wooden trolls spend their days in the elements, rain-soaked, moss-creeping up their knuckles, lichen settling into the grain. By nightfall, they’re sodden all the way through, rotting slowly like any forgotten sculpture left to the weather. But they have a place to go when darkness falls, a sanctuary no one else knows about. Inside, the air is warm and impossibly dry. Cured wood, glossily lacquered, polished and gleaming. Spices whisk and whirl—cardamom and allspice, toasted and bronzed and blistered. A warmth that draws the damp, straight through to heartwood. They settle in, creaking and groaning, and feel a glow kindling in their hollow chests, the feeling inside when you’re finally, finally home.
Amber Incense & Honey Cakes There’s a sticky corner table at the back of a small pub in a smaller village, perpetually tacky with spilled beer and the grease from fried dough glazed with honey. The locals know not to sit there. Behind it, a door no one mentions, wood so dark it disappears into the paneling. You notice it only because you’re looking for the toilets, and when you push it open (it shouldn’t open, it’s locked, surely it’s locked) stone steps spiral down and down. The air changes. What was beery and yeasty above becomes something else as you descend, deeply jeweled amber, glassy and glossy and translucent, resinous incense burning in cones. You’ve stumbled into ceremonies held for gods older than the village, older than the church that tried to bury them. The fried dough smell follows you down, mingles with the sacred smoke. Someone’s brought crullers as an offering. Someone always does. Hands place a crown on your head, syrupy, sacred, dripping with golden light. The cruller king of winter. The village keeps its bargains. The gods collect their debts. Tomorrow they’ll find crumbs where you stood.
Christmasween(candied orange peel, mulled cider, smoked myrrh twirling through a cranberry garland, balsam resin and amber-drizzled pumpkin, smoldering hearthwood, and the soft honeyed glow of dripping beeswax) A lost Wes Anderson screenplay wherein Little Red carries the remnants of her Halloween candy to grandmother’s house for Christmas. The contents: six tangerine-orange circus peanuts (slightly stale), twelve lemon sherbets wrapped in yellow cellophane, three jammy strawberry boiled sweets the color of fresh arterial blood, and one spiced pumpkin confection shaped like a small gourd. She encounters the wolf at precisely 2:47 PM, seventeen meters past the old balsam grove where the snow is deepest and wettest and most tactically advantageous.
Act I: The Decoy. The basket drops in slow motion. Candy scatters across white snow in a perfect radius—citrus orange, sherbet yellow, strawberry red, pumpkin amber. The wolf’s pupils dilate, furry nostrils flare. He has, Red notes with satisfaction, a documented weakness for sugar. This was always part of the plan.
Chapter Two: Infrastructure and Positioning. While he inhales the scent of lemon sherbet (his favorite), Red moves through the balsam with the efficiency of someone who attended Camp Hemlock, Summer 2019, Wilderness Survival Track. Her supplies: three beeswax candles (ivory, hand-dipped), one ball of cranberry garland (crimson, 6.5 meters), hearthwood kindling, and a small tin of smoked myrrh resin she’s been saving for exactly this scenario. The tripwire is string between two symmetrical trees. The kindling arranges itself into a small, controlled pyre.
Part III: The Immolation. The wolf collects circus peanuts in his mouth like a child. He doesn’t notice the garland at ankle height, stretched taut and gleaming. The fall is spectacular—all four legs, perfect cartoon arc. He lands directly in Red’s carefully constructed fire pit, which ignites on impact. The smoked myrrh makes it ceremonial. The beeswax makes it beautiful. The spiced pumpkin treat, crushed beneath him, makes it smell like Halloween and Christmas happened simultaneously in the same terrible instant.
Grandmother receives her Christmas candles at 4:32 PM. Most of them, anyway. Red keeps one as a souvenir, amber-drizzled and slightly singed.
Need more Yule scents? Have a peep at my Yule reviews from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021, and a single review for 2019, though I could swear I have several years’ worth of BPAL Yule reviews floating around out there. And I know this because…
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about a year behind (maybe two? le whoopsie) with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
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This year, I worked on challenging the monkey’s face. I did good. I lost 30 lbs. I did not do this with drugs, although I kinda wish I had the option, because I am sure it would have been less agonizing. I lowered my cholesterol, kept myself off blood pressure medication, and can actually squat again. This is very big, as I haven’t really been able to squat in a decade. I became someone who fills their day with movement. I began incorporating “mobility exercises.” I ate chia pudding. It felt like a gullet full of tadoles. Still, I think I can do it again. Amazingly, I became, without even trying, someone who loves an evening bath. Maybe related to the tadpoles? Unclear.
I wrote a book this year. I became a (print!) magazine columnist! I stopped using TikTok altogether. I stopped ordering out for dinner so often. Seriously, we have only ordered out twice this year, or at most three times, and once was when I was sick, so I am not even sure that counts. I cook dinner every night, whether I want to or not. A lot of this involves having made a bunch of beans, or soup, or curries, or some such earlier in the week, so the work was already done for me…but you know, sometimes it’s not even about the work, right? Sometimes you just don’t want beans or curries or soup or what you already have on hand. I ate the beans anyway.
And somewhere between the beans and the baths and books (I only wrote one, but I read 150 of them!) I also acquired things. And rediscovered some things! This is my annual accounting of those objects: practical things that became rituals, frivolous things that became essential, all the small, material anchors of another trip around the sun with me and my magpie brain, forever seeking the next perfect weird thing.
WEARABLE DELIGHTS
This year’s clothing acquisitions fall into two distinct categories: comfort and declaration. Soft pants for cooking dinner and lounging at home; t-shirts and sweaters that announce exactly where my interests lie. There’s no middle ground here, no versatile pieces that could go either way. I’m either prioritizing the body I’m actively maintaining or wearing my obsessions literally on my sleeve. The Beginning of the End sweater gets maybe two weeks of wearable weather in Florida, but I bought it anyway because sometimes a thing is too perfect to be practical about.
Three pendants acquired within months of each other, all from small makers whose work leans toward the symbolic and strange. A mandrake root, the eyes of a martyred saint, Hermes’ staff – symbols of knowledge, perception, and protection. I layer them together or wear them singly depending on mood and neckline. They’re talismans in the most practical sense: I’m a writer who traffics in the weird and macabre, so I might as well have some backup from the symbolic realm.
My desk has always been a place I want to sit because I’ve made it that way. This year’s additions include scented highlighters for marginalia, the loveliest smoothest writing pens, and some Liberty print journals for perfume notes, book quotes, and writing ideas. The Mariage Frères incense is a rediscovery from years ago; the lotus burner is new, a gift. Simple upgrades for reading and writing, nothing fancy. (Except also some very fancy antique and candles!)
Remember being 20 and running out of things, not knowing if you could afford more? A four-pack of toilet paper, a bag of rice, whatever small necessity you’d miscalculated? This year I leaned into the unglamorous pleasure of abundance: buying coffee and pumpkin seeds and chickpeas in bulk, stocking a case of frozen dumplings because they’re hard to find. It’s boring to be excited about having backup provisions in the cabinet, but the security matters. Also here: recipes I made repeatedly – practical weeknight solutions, pure indulgences, and little things that elevate an ordinary weekday afternoon.
…and having actual Icelanders from Iceland telling me that my Hjónabandssæla is absolute perfection. (Note, I added strawberry jam in addition to rhubarb most recently and it was even better!)
BEAUTY RITUALS
This is the year I became more embodied. I really tried hard to treat myself as a body that needs tending rather than just a vehicle for my brain. The evening baths turned into ritual. Extensive skincare for face, hands, body. No makeup though; that’s still a bridge too far, ha! I bought fewer perfumes this year but more intentionally: the most expensive bottle I’ve ever owned, a dupe of something almost equally unattainable (but which I would never purchase the original anyway) and something that dethroned my 20-year favorite despite having backup bottles in reserve. All deliberate choices, nothing impulsive or collected just to collect.
I stopped using TikTok this year and replaced it with slower, more deliberate content. Vinyl-only music mixes curated by someone with impeccable taste. Scalp-scratching ASMR when I needed to turn my brain off completely. Japanese lifestyle channels documenting quiet domesticity – one following a couple’s elaborate seasonal cooking, another tracking a solitary woman’s routines in what looks like a Tokyo apartment. All of these feel like watching someone else live intentionally, which somehow made my own attempts at intentional living feel less arduous.
Small household objects that make daily life slightly better, that make breakfast feel special, that turn coming home into cozy magic, something that makes Florida summers bearable, nice even. Nothing here cost much, but each one solved a small problem or added pleasure to routine tasks.
I save most of my horror viewing for October, which means belated discoveries from the 80s and 90s alongside newer finds. Body horror that’s both gross and audacious, atmospheric European folk tales, crime dramas about broken people investigating cold cases and small-town secrets, a new series about isolation versus hive mind. I wonder if there’s a through-line here – people trying to maintain their sense of self while investigating what corrupts or destroys others? Detectives working through their own trauma, unlikely partnerships under impossible circumstances, what it costs to remain human.
Pluribus (I have only watched 1.5 episodes of this so far!)
LITERARY OBSESSIONS
I read a lot of books this year. Southern Gothic swamps and sentient blobs. Medieval nuns and teenage witches. Academic satire and existential dread. Mysterious pregnancies and identity crises. Body horror and emotional isolation. Suburban ennui and uncanny transformations. Catastrophic friendships and women who are their own worst enemies. These are the ones I’m still thinking about (or more accurately, that I actually remember.)
I don’t even need to mention Florence – she’s on everyone’s list. Mine too, of course. This year’s listening spanned Japanese folk inspired by bioluminescent creatures and carnivalesque electro-disco, Swedish goth songcraft with church organ and avant-garde saxophone, experimental ambient soundscapes and dungeon synth. Nothing here sounds like anything else here.
This section circles back to the challenge of the monkey’s face. Small changes that accumulated into something larger, new routines and rituals opening up in ways that used to feel impossible. Reaching toward others, realizing I need connection and community, even when it’s not my first instinct. Some of these are already habits, others are still just possibilities waiting for me to be ready. Change is hard, and my resistance to it makes it harder, but this year proved I’m capable.
-Instagram’s algorithm kept serving me fitness content I didn’t ask for (overstuffed gym guys, ab-obsessed former dancers, Ozempic-faced mommy bloggers turned supplement-shilling wellness coaches, I hate all of them with a passion) – so I cherry-picked exercises out of spite and built my own little programs, scattered throughout my day, building strength and moving my bod between other tasks. I especially like the idea of doing 5-10 squats every time you use the bathroom (I pee A LOT!)
-Tuesday and Friday nights alone with my thoughts, a small glass of whiskey, and Alice Coltrane while Ývan plays D&D with the lads.
-Weekends spent entirely in the kitchen – bread rising, vegetables chopped for the week ahead, jars of pickles lined up on the counter, nothing to do but cook and prep and let the hours disappear.
…alternately, Saturdays with friends, binging Eurovision and Andor with one, crafts and cocktails with another, or just catching up in each other’s company, letting the afternoon disappear.
-Monthly catch-up chats with a peer who writes in the same niche space. Someone who gets the weird obsessions, the struggle to articulate why a thing matters. If you know how hard IRL calls are for me, you get how big a step this is, and I am very glad and grateful for it.
-My sisters and I moved our Facebook chat to another platform, and suddenly we’re talking much more, daily check-ins, random thoughts, the kind of constant low-level contact that’s good for the heart.
…So what’s the thread connecting gnome doormats and afternoon tea and Swedish goth and sentient blobs and evening magnesium baths and an obsession with Japanese stationery? I guess it’s just…me?
What about you, then! What made your year? What are the weird little objects sitting on your desk or shelf right now that you reach for without thinking? The albums you kept coming back to, the recipes you made on repeat, the books you’re still thinking about? Tell me what you collected this year, what made ordinary days feel less ordinary, what small thing brought you unexpected pleasure when you needed it most.
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The final Trinkets & Treasures newsletter of 2025 is currently winging its way to your inbox! This month: books about bodies and hunger, a perfume like bandaged amber and bitter cardamom, and a collection of lovely little things that elevate mundane routine and ordinary tasks into small moments of beauty and enchantment. You can read it in the browser if you have no intention of subscribing, and how dare I even suggest it. Or but hear me out, you could just subscribe.
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The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan Metal band Queen Carrion returns to an Oregon cabin a year after their lead singer Brynn vanished in the woods, only to encounter fungal body horror weirdness that begins infecting and transforming them one by one. The premise had real potential – mycelium horror meets heavy metal in the Pacific Northwest, which should have been catnip for me – but Kaplan tries juggling seven different POVs while jumping between timelines, and it just never found its footing. The first half had some unsettling body horror and atmospheric moments that held my interest, but around the halfway point, it started dragging, and I found myself losing momentum as the characters kept making baffling choices (staying in a cabin with no reviews feels like extremely questionable judgment). What could have been a tight, nasty little horror novel needed serious trimming. I kept hoping it would pull itself together, but instead it just kept going and going until I was exhausted and resentful of the whole story and everyone in it. Publishing March 10, 2026
The St. Ambrose School for Girls by Jessica Ward A scholarship student with bipolar disorder navigates the toxic social hierarchy of an elite 1990s boarding school, where the relentless bullying from queen bee Greta Stanhope becomes entangled with her struggles to distinguish between reality and her own unraveling mental state. This isn’t the thriller the marketing promised, but rather a slow, heavy character study about mental illness and teenage cruelty that happens to include a death near the end. I found myself completely absorbed anyway. Ward’s portrayal of severe bipolar disorder felt convincing and unflinching (the way Sarah’s illness becomes its own unreliable narrator, the long dissociative tangents, the constant questioning of her own credibility), though I understand why some readers found those sections exhausting or distracting. I picked this up last year, bounced off after two chapters, then tore through it in one sitting this time; I think if you go in expecting a twisty dark academia thriller you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re prepared for something darker, sadder, and more interested in Sarah’s internal landscape than in plot mechanics, it’s pretty compelling.
Portalmania by Debbie Urbanskiuses portals, sometimes literal sci-fi gateways, sometimes metaphorical escapes, to explore asexuality, difficult marriages, and the desire to be someone other than who you are. The stories share recurring characters and situations that feel like variations across parallel dimensions, which creates an interesting structural concept but also leads to a sameness that became overwhelming for me by the midpoint. I appreciated the unflinching examination of topics rarely explored in fiction (asexuality in conflict, coercive sex in marriage, the unglamorous reality of parenting neurodivergent children), and a few stories like the witch one and the AI replacement service really worked for me. The collection has ambition and Urbanski’s prose has real power, but ten stories covering such similar emotional territory felt like too much; I kept wishing for more variety or a tighter selection of maybe six or seven pieces instead of revisiting the same themes and character dynamics repeatedly.
Dollface by Lindy Ryan A masked killer starts slashing through a New Jersey suburb, targeting PTA moms one by one, while horror writer Jill tries to figure out who’s behind the murders before she becomes the next victim. Jill’s juggling her codependent relationship with her sister Kitty, trauma from her mother’s death, pressure from her editor for new pages, and desperately wanting to fit in with the Brunswick PTA despite her horror movie t-shirts and Final Girl coffee mugs. This had potential as a campy suburban slasher and the unhinged neighbor Darla (who calls everyone “dear” despite being maybe in her forties, which cracked me up) was mildly entertaining, but the killer and the twist were so obvious from very early on that I spent the rest of the book waiting for something I’d already figured out. Publishing February 24, 2026
Needle Lake by Justine Champine Fourteen-year-old Ida, neurodivergent and living with a congenital heart defect in the tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington, finds her quiet world upended when her charismatic sixteen-year-old cousin Elna arrives from San Francisco for the winter. Elna introduces Ida to shoplifting, drugs, and a kind of reckless confidence Ida has never experienced, but after the cousins witness a man drowning in Needle Lake on Christmas Eve, their relationship shifts into something darker and more complicated. I kept expecting some big dramatic reveal or confrontation that never materialized, only to realize in the final pages that the real story – Ida’s gradual understanding of herself, Elna, and their family’s secrets – had been unfolding quietly the whole time through Campine’s gorgeous, atmospheric prose. The pacing felt uneven (the ending rushed after so much careful buildup) and I wanted more resolution, but I found myself completely absorbed in Ida’s voice and the way she navigates a world that doesn’t quite make space for someone like her.
The Mad Wife by Meagan Church I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from this 1950s housewife-slowly-unraveling story, but it turned out to be more slow-burn domestic drama than psychological thriller, following Lulu Mayfield as she struggles after giving birth to her second child and becomes fixated on her new neighbor Bitsy while everyone around her dismisses her concerns as hysteria. This was on the lesser side of fine for me. There were two twists I didn’t see coming – one genuinely heartbreaking, the other feeling like it tried to tie everything up with a neat medical explanation that somehow answered too much and too little at the same time – and while the exploration of women being gaslit and dismissed by doctors resonated (because yes, that still happens), the whole thing felt like it pulled its punches when it should have leaned into the bleakness it was building toward.
Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton Thea’s third baby Lucia is born with a full set of teeth, grows at an alarming rate, and announces she wants to eat her brother, which would be horrifying enough without Thea also grappling with dark memories from her own childhood and wondering if she’s passed some monstrous inheritance down to her daughter. I liked this even though it got weird and nonsensical; Moulton uses the “monster baby” setup as an extended metaphor for intergenerational trauma and maternal anxiety, and it works until suddenly it doesn’t (maybe? I can’t decide?) veering into bizarrely fantastical territory that seemed like it was aiming for catharsis but left me uncertain whether it resonated the way it was meant to. The dark humor against the heavy themes worked for me, and I appreciated how short it stayed (173 pages) rather than dragging the metaphor out past its usefulness. It’s inventive and original in ways that don’t stack up predictably, which I found compelling even if I’m still not sure how I feel about where it all went.
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein When Dayna (39, unemployed, recently dumped via Reddit) agrees to help turn a decrepit LA mansion into an influencer hype house, the job comes with a complication: Becca, the tarot card reader who used to live there and amassed a huge following, has vanished. The mansion has a strange history and seems to exert its own influence on the young creators living there, while Dayna navigates her complicated past with Craig, the owner who she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years, gets involved with Jake, the last person to see Becca, and teams up with nineteen-year-old Olivia to investigate what happened. I actually really liked this despite some baffling character choices; Dayna was weirdly out of touch for someone who’s only thirty-nine, considering I’m 49 and more plugged in than she seemed to be at the start, but then she’d suddenly have these confident, on-point ideas about how things should work and just run with them immediately. Her observations about visibility, aging online, and the cost of being seen were pretty sharp, but Stein seems to borrow from Gothic fiction (a crumbling estate, a mysterious disappearance), without fully embracing it ….this is more a decaying mansion with Wi-Fi than a brooding psychological mystery (though at some point the mystery stopped feeling like much of a mystery anyway.) I had a good time with it anyway.
They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran In the aftermath of devastating hurricanes, Vietnamese-American teen Noon and her grief-stricken mother navigate the waters around Mercy, Louisiana, where a red algae bloom has transformed the landscape and mutated sea creatures into something grotesque and unrecognizable. Noon’s mother refuses to leave, convinced her dead husband and son have been reincarnated as sea creatures, leaving Noon feeling invisible – not enough as a daughter, not enough as a person, despite being alive and right there. When the town’s local thug forces them to hunt down whatever creature is lurking in the swamp and sends his daughter, Covey, along to keep watch, Noon is navigating grief over her lost family, trauma from an assault, rage and self-loathing she can’t shake, and the growing sense that she might be undergoing her own monstrous transformation. I wanted to like this more than I did – there were so many elements I appreciated (the body horror, Vietnamese mythology, the metaphor of monstrous transformation as response to trauma and alienation from one’s own body) but they didn’t coalesce into an enjoyable whole, feeling sluggish and scattered instead. I really like Tran and their ideas though, so I’m glad I read it and will always pick up more from them.
The Haar by David Sodergren Muriel McAuley is eighty-four and has no intention of leaving her Scottish fishing village of Witchaven, not even when an American developer shows up planning to evict everyone and build a golf course. A mysterious fog bank called the Haar rolls in from the sea, bringing something ancient and monstrous with it that becomes Muriel’s unlikely ally, and what follows is equal parts gore-soaked revenge tale and surprisingly tender love story. I think if I hadn’t been listening to the excellent narrator on audiobook, this wouldn’t have kept my interest – I went in expecting atmospheric dread and creeping horror, but got something that felt more romantic than frightening despite all the visceral violence. I genuinely liked Muriel as a protagonist, and I can appreciate love and sentimentality and grief all tangled up with body horror, but this didn’t work for me as the horror story I was hoping for. Viewed as its own strange hybrid thing, maybe it’s actually pretty great, but I kept wishing I could split it apart – give me the story of the town being bought up by a rich developer with one stubborn old woman refusing to sell, or give me the ancient entity lurking by the sea, but mashing them together left me wanting each piece to breathe on its own.
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison After her mother Alex dies, influencer Clio Barnes inherits the childhood home where Alex claimed a demon lived, specifically obsessed with Clio – claims that got Alex stripped of custody and labeled crazy. Clio’s sisters want nothing to do with the place, but Clio sees house-flipping content gold and begins renovations, only to discover her mother might have been right as she finally reads Alex’s out-of-print book about the possession. I liked parts of this: the sister dynamics felt real, the book-within-a-book structure worked was neat…but something was missing, like I wanted more of who Alex was before the house, more about how young Clio might have interacted with the demon, just more demon in general. What I actively disliked, though, was Clio herself, the bratty baby sister with her “I do what I want! Deal with it!” energy who dismisses her sisters’ legitimate trauma as manipulation while seeing dollar signs everywhere. I know that’s intentional character work, but I have a real problem with people who act like that (maybe because I’m an oldest sister), and her behavior grated on me so much it overshadowed basically everything else Also, blueberry bagels are Clio’s favorite, which just cements my dislike of her – sweet bagels are garbage, and if you want a round baked good with a hole to be sweet, just admit you want a donut already and stop dragging the poor bagels into it. They should be savory and loaded with fish and onions and terrifically smelly, as god intended.
The Salvage by Anbara Salam A Victorian shipwreck containing the remains of Captain James Purdie – a celebrated explorer who’s achieved near-cult status among the islanders – gets towed from Arctic waters to the remote Scottish island of Cairnroch in 1962, and marine archaeologist Marta Khoury arrives to salvage what’s inside. On her first dive down, she photographs artifacts and bones, but when she returns days later to retrieve them, everything’s gone, and she’s certain she saw a dark crouching figure in the wreck – which feeds right into the guilt she’s already drowning in from something terrible in her recent past. The Cuban Missile Crisis and a historically brutal winter strand her on the island, where she’s treated with suspicion as an outsider and has to navigate complicated relationships with Sophie (her boss/husband’s assistant, sent ostensibly to help) and Elsie, a local hotel worker she grows close to. I loved this, even though the 1960s Scottish island setting confused me initially since it’s not territory I usually encounter. The wintry atmosphere is spectacularly done and while many readers thought it dragged when the village freezes over and everyone’s scrambling for survival, I genuinely enjoyed watching the female friendships develop and spending time with these flawed, complicated characters navigating their various guilts and desires. The romance worked for me despite not usually wanting love stories in my ghost stories, though I’ll admit the casual attitude about the relationship didn’t feel entirely realistic for early 1960s Presbyterian Scotland.
The Search Party by Hannah Richell Max and Annie Kingsley invite their old university friends and their families to their new Cornwall glamping site for a trial run, but the reunion sours when the kids fight, the parents take sides, old resentments surface, and someone vanishes just as a massive storm rolls in. The setup had potential (isolated location, secrets, missing person, police investigation told through multiple timelines), but nothing about it really landed for me beyond people having predictable meltdowns in expensive tents. The one character I felt for was Kip, Max and Annie’s adopted son who has selective mutism and gets treated poorly by basically everyone. I finished it easily enough, but now all I can recall is a blur of dramatic confrontations and bad weather without any real sense of why I should have cared.
Smile For The Cameraby Miranda Smith A reunion documentary brings the cast of cult slasher Grad Night back to the original Tennessee cabin location twenty years later, where they’re all hiding a terrible secret from the original shoot. Ella Winters, the movie’s final girl, finds herself navigating old resentments and cast drama before someone dressed as the movie’s killer finally starts picking off cast and crew members, which raises the obvious question of why this revenge plot waited two decades to kick in. I finished this easily enough and found parts of it entertaining, but the fictional movie Grad Night itself sounded incredibly dull (kids go to a cabin, kids get killed, there’s a final girl, the end), and there’s a weird twist that felt like it came out of nowhere and was never properly addressed in a way that made sense.
Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Kinsey leads a research team at a remote desert outpost where they discover a strange, grotesque specimen buried in the sand, which she breaks quarantine to bring inside, and the longer it stays the more everyone starts unraveling because this thing is searching for a host and making everyone weirdly, aggressively horned up Gailey commits fully to the strangeness here (Kinsey is sexually attracted to viruses, for instance), and while I generally find smutty stuff boring and would rather read about literally anything else, this was so boldly weird that I actually had a good time with it. The timeline jumps between present action and character backstories disrupted the momentum when I was invested in what was happening now, but overall, this was short, strange, and entertaining.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline HarpmanForty women live locked in an underground cage with no sense of time, no understanding of how they got there, and only the vaguest memories of the world outside. The sole exception is our narrator, a young girl who remembers nothing before captivity and has grown up entirely within the cage’s fluorescent, timeless hum. When a moment of chance and a sliver of ingenuity allow them to escape, the world they emerge into is far stranger and more desolate than anything they imagined, and the girl becomes both witness and sometimes interpreter—to a landscape devoid of answers. It’s part eerie survival tale and part philosophical unraveling, as the women wander through an empty world not knowing whether they’re the last people alive or simply the most forgotten. I loved this, even though the starkness of its setting, bleak plains, abandoned structures, and a world stripped to its bones, initially felt so spare I wasn’t sure how much emotional attachment I’d find. But the atmosphere is astonishing: quiet, unsettling, and strangely luminous, especially in the scenes where the women try to rebuild some kind of life with almost nothing to anchor themselves. I was captivated by the narrator’s loneliness and the way she tries to make meaning inside a reality that offers none. The sadness is constant but beautifully rendered, and the final pages left me equal parts hollowed out and grateful. I think I’m drawn to stories like this, and even to books as seemingly different as Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Boxcar Children (which probably sound ridiculous as comparisons, but hear me out), because I love narratives about people figuring out how to survive and build something from almost nothing, finding small moments of comfort and connection in a world that’s fundamentally indifferent to their existence.
The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry The abandoned house on Jessie’s Chicago street has been there her whole life, crouched and waiting, and she’s the reason her little brother Paul disappeared inside it when she dared him to go in as kids. The book follows Jessie over decades as she grows up on that same block, builds a life, and watches darkness spread from that house until eventually her own son vanishes into it and she has to confront what’s been festering there all along. I’m always here for a creepy haunted house story and loved the neighborhood friendships and support system around Jessie, but this never quite worked for me, despite wanting it to. What started as fairly standard supernatural coming-of-age/grief horror suddenly veered into something oddly fairytale-esque at the very end, a bizarrely fantastical pivot that fell awfully flat.
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson Vietnam vet Duane Minor is bartending in Portland in 1975, trying to stay sober and raise his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, when he crosses a vampire named John Varley, who retaliates by murdering Minor’s wife and sending what’s left of their family on a vengeful pursuit across the Pacific Northwest. This has a gritty 1970s noir feel and reads more like a crime thriller than typical vampire horror, which I appreciated, and while it wasn’t weird or extraordinarily wild in any way, I can say I’ve never read another vampire book quite like it. I think that uniqueness comes from getting Varley’s perspective, along with Minor’s and Julia’s, watching all three of them from different angles as the hunt unfolds. The grief and rage driving Minor and Julia felt raw and devastating; their bond developed naturally over the course of the book, and the whole thing was brutal and emotionally gutting without feeling manipulative about it. This was an utterly satisfying read and exactly what I want from horror.
Night Watcher by Daphne Woolsoncroft Nola Strate hosts a late-night radio show in Portland about hauntings and cryptid sightings, but when a caller describes something chillingly similar to her childhood encounter with a serial killer called The Hiding Man, she becomes convinced he’s back and targeting her (yet somehow does absolutely nothing to keep herself safe in ways that stopped feeling like character behavior and started feeling like the author needed her to be a reckless moron for plot reasons.) This could have been so good, but I was deeply disappointed by how it turned out, starting with the fact that the author telegraphs early on exactly how the killer is accessing his victims, which removes most of the tension. The writing felt simultaneously over-detailed about mundane things (kombucha, coffee, endless mentions of Powell’s Books to remind you we’re in Portland) and strangely flat when it came to actual character development or emotional stakes. When the killer is finally revealed, it’s someone so random and disconnected from the story that you’re left thinking “oh, that’s just dumb.”
Self Care by Leigh Stein Everyone’s got a favorite trashy genre, and for the past few years, this has been mine: something about wellness and social media and influencer culture, sometimes through the lens of a thriller, sometimes presented as sad girl/weird lit fic, but there’s something so garbagey junk food about it that I can’t get enough of. This one follows the female cofounders of wellness startup Richual as they struggle to balance their feminist values with profit margins while their company implodes from various scandals, including sexual misconduct allegations against a board member and a PR nightmare when COO Maren Gelb tweets something terrible about the President’s daughter. I flew through it and enjoyed the specificity of the brand-dropping, the absurd self-care products, the performative wokeness, and the way it captures how these companies commodify feminism while exploiting the people working for them. The ending felt abrupt and left me wanting more closure or comeuppance for certain characters, but overall, this scratched the exact trashy itch I was looking for.
The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer Macy Mullins is broke, grieving her father’s death, and desperately trying to provide for her younger sister when she takes a caretaking job she finds on Craigslist that involves following mysterious rituals at an isolated Oregon Coast house to prevent some incomprehensible evil from escaping. My stress levels while reading this were off the charts—poor Macy just could not get her shit together, screwing up the instructions at every turn in ways that left me frustrated with her and for her. The plot veers into such bizarro territory that some readers will absolutely be put off, with that meandering weirdness that made me think of the r/nosleep community, and when I looked it up, I realized that’s because Kliewer was a writer there. The dread and tension were real, but I closed it feeling like it was almost good rather than anything approaching actually great. Publishing April 21, 2026.
The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church. The premise here involves haunted audio tapes from an abandoned RAF base that caused an experimental artist to murder his entire family in 1983, and decades later, true crime podcaster Cally Darker decides to investigate. The writing had serious weird/gross/annoying problems throughout: at one point, Cally is using sex to distract her boyfriend, but the narration tells us she wasn’t trying to distract him anymore because she was “genuinely enjoying herself.’ I find this extremely doubtful, classic man-writing-women garbage. At another point, Cally puts on a pair of gold harem pants. Gold harem pants. Seriously? What! At least two completely different interview subjects both use the word “benighted” in the span of about two chapters, and aside from that, these two very different characters spoke almost exactly the same. The same wry, sardonic tones, similar turns of phrase, etc. I don’t know that I could let that go in a book I was actually having a good time with, but in this one, it was exceptionally egregious. And the villain was such an over-the-top incel caricature that I wanted to throw the book every time he said “pretty Cally Darker.” By the end of this, I think I was hate-reading it.
Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir Unnur reunites a lost black cat with its owner Ásta, a local woman who seems a bit vulnerable and squirrelly (we soon learn why); Unnur agrees to keep the cat temporarily, which leads to an unlikely friendship between the two women. I tore through this in one sitting—it’s a quiet little book (gruesome but not bombastic about it) that leans more thriller than horror, and I liked it better than Knútsdóttir’s last one. The friendship felt genuine, and I was really invested in watching Unnur transform from someone living a bland, isolated life with a terrible married boyfriend into someone who actually cares about another person, especially once it becomes clear Ásta is in an abusive relationship and things take a violent turn. Short, focused, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Publishing May 26, 2026.
Too Close To Home by Seraphina Nova Glass This is the first Seraphina Nova Glass book that didn’t quite work for me, which surprised me given how much I’ve enjoyed her other work. An upscale lakefront community is thrown into chaos when a car bomb explodes at the annual Labor Day party, killing the wrong person, and the story follows three suburban moms, Regan, Andi, and Sasha, whose lives are all tangled up in the aftermath. I love Glass for that close-knit, neighborly intimacy and the way she weaves community together, but this felt too sprawling and ambitious, with so many plot threads (bomb threats, missing persons, messy divorces, resurrected husbands) that I never found my footing. The three women were so interchangeable that I struggled to keep them straight well past the halfway point, and while everything technically came together at the end, the resolution felt both over-the-top and underwhelming. I missed the warmth and tight focus of her other work. Publishing April 14, 2026
Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard Starting over is hard enough without your new house hiding someone else’s deadly secrets, but that’s what happens when Hannah moves to 1 Delaney Row under a new name, trying to escape her past. At first her situation stressed me out because it reminded me of Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive—desperate woman, creepy house, creeping dread—but thankfully the book doesn’t bloat like Nevill’s did, dragging on for 600 pages. The dual timeline structure following two women whose stories eventually converge around the house worked well enough, but the mystery’s resolution felt unfairly convoluted: when a barely-there neighbor character suddenly becomes the keeper of crucial secrets the whole story hinges on, it doesn’t feel earned, it just feels like information was withheld arbitrarily. Readable enough, but that resolution soured whatever goodwill I had toward the book. Publishing July 28, 2026
Nothing Tastes As Good by Luke Dumas A clinical trial for a very experimental weight loss product promises miraculous results, and retail worker Emmett Truesdale, over 300 pounds and desperate for change, enrolls only to discover the side effects include lost time, overwhelming (and alarming) cravings…and a possible connection to people who were cruel to him now disappearing. You could tell this was written by an actual fat person who has experienced actual fat person struggles, from the way society treats Emmett to the constant bullying to the self-loathing, all of it felt authentic in ways that made parts of this horribly relatable, even when other parts were gross and cringe. Emmett’s childhood trauma around his weight happened in his own home, where he should have been safe and protected, which adds another layer of devastating realism to his character. The social commentary on fatphobia and diet culture isn’t subtle, but I appreciated the inclusion and found myself caring about Emmett despite knowing things weren’t going to end well for him. The ending went a bit over the top, but this worked for me more than it didn’t. Publishing March 31, 2026
The Lamb by Lucy Rose A mother and daughter live isolated in a cottage by the forest, their quiet life interrupted only by strangers who knock at their door seeking shelter, strangers they consume after feeding and caring for them. When Eden arrives during a snowstorm, everything rapidly shifts in ways both tender and terrible. Mama becomes utterly besotted with Eden in a way she never was with Margot, desperately in love, while what she’d given her daughter had always been something fraught with resentment and possession rather than genuine affection. Eden seems to care for Margot while also returning Mama’s passion, leaving Margot nowhere to belong, and whether Eden’s arrival was accident or design is never quite resolved (though in a story this dreamlike and fairytale-esque, do we even question where new entities come from?). This was weirdly beautiful and terribly, monstrously sad, told entirely through Margot’s childlike perspective.
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My latest column for Rue Morgue Magazine is out now! Well, it’s the November/December issue, but my copy only just arrived today!
In The Tiny Murderers In My Garden (Are Really Bad At Murder!) I explore finishing Sarah Maria Griffin’s recent offering, Eat the Ones You Love – a novel narrated by a carnivorous orchid plotting to devour its beloved florist – and the immediate urge to acquire tiny potted predators of my own. Spoiler: Baby the orchid’s predatory scheming is a lot more dramatic than the reality of bog water maintenance and humidity checks.
Turns out that bringing horror home just means learning about distilled water requirements and obsessing over light exposure while Patty and Selma (my venus flytrap and pitcher plant) laze about in the Florida sun, proving themselves more decorative than dangerous. Pick up the issue to read about scheming and scandalous blooms, the uncanny oppression of overwhelming greenery, a shocking confession about a beloved horror classic, and the anticlimactic reality of actual carnivorous plant ownership.
P.S. I was also thinking about naming them after The Duras Sisters, Lursa and B’Etor.
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