It’s time to check in: How was the year in books for you, dear reader? Now that we've approached the conclusion of 2024, it's time to reflect on the year's embarrassment of literary riches—and now we’re here to spread the gospel about our favourites.
The best books of the year took us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offered visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it was an outstanding year for memoirs; new outings from luminaries grabbed us by the heartstrings and refused to let go. In the nonfiction space, some of our finest intellectuals released titles that helped us make sense of our changing world, from the culture-flattening force of algorithms to the future of work.
Here are the best books of 2024.
Lauded as “the first great incel novel,” Rejection opens with a bang: In the first of its several linked stories, titled “The Feminist,” an aggrieved young man details his youth spent “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his 20s.” In the brutal and brilliant character studies that follow, Tulathimutte paints scorching portraits of lonesome outcasts: a depressed woman spiralling over her unrequited crush, a start-up bro seeking his other half, a gay man going to shocking lengths to pursue his convoluted fetish, and more. Flayed open by the author’s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl.
Anna Williams-Bonner, the widow of the best-selling novelist at the center of The Plot, takes center stage in Korelitz’s enthralling chaser, The Sequel. After her husband’s supposed suicide, Anna enjoys collecting his royalty checks as a famous literary widow, but when she pens her own runaway best seller, trouble follows. Soon enough, she begins to receive mysterious excerpts from a novel she never expected to see again—a novel no one can know about. In a twisty-turny quest to contain her secrets, Anna hunts down her anonymous tormentor, but much to her frustration, the dead don’t want to stay buried. Much like The Plot before it, The Sequel revels in lambasting the literary ecosystem, but this time there’s a winking metafictional glee about sequels as a form. Through the narration of this unforgettable antiheroine, a deliciously nasty storyteller, Korelitz delivers a ripping good read.
Ten years after the conclusion of his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with a surprise fourth volume that puts the weird in “Weird Fiction,” to delightful effect. At once a prequel and a sequel, Absolution shades in some of the previous volumes’ dark corners, but rather than provide answers about Area X, a coastal wilderness colonised by something alien, it poses new questions. In Part One, set two decades before Area X’s formation, a team of government-funded biologists introduce alligators to Florida’s Forgotten Coast, with disastrous consequences; Part Two is a potboiler investigating the ongoing aftermath, still tormenting locals 18 years later. Part Three contains some of the liveliest writing in the series: Recounting the first expedition into Area X, it’s the story of Lowry, a foul-mouthed self-styled “hero” with his own ulterior motives. Surreal and Lovecraftian, packed with cascading cosmic horrors, Absolution shows a singular mind at work.
As we embrace new digital experiences, what embodied truths do we lose? That’s the aching question at the center of The Extinction of Experience, a roving investigation of the threat technology poses to our social and cultural norms. Rosen writes about the danger of “mediated” experiences curated by data-hoarding megacorporations—for example, we check the weather on our phones instead of stepping outside to sense the temperature. “In these new worlds, we are users, not individuals,” Rosen writes. “We are meant to prefer these engineered user experiences to human reality.” But don’t mistake this book for a hand-wringing polemic against change; rather, in each disappearing ritual, Rosen highlights the deeper loss to the human psyche, as in the connection she draws between the end of cursive writing instruction and a measurable loss to children’s cognitive skills. Rigorously researched and elegiacally told, The Extinction of Experience is a compelling reminder that “go touch grass” is more than just an Internet punchline—in fact, it’s a human imperative.
“You can’t give back what already belongs to someone,” writes Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle in this powerful history of land theft in Oklahoma, spanning more than 200 years of atrocities committed against the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole). Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller, Nagle traces the connections between key inflection points, from the Trail of Tears to a small-town murder on treaty lands. More than a century later, that murder would lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Indigenous rights to Oklahoma land. Through the checkered history of this one state, By the Fire We Carry tells a broader story about the ongoing fight for justice and tribal sovereignty among Indigenous Nations. Detailed and impassioned, it’s a gripping corrective to the historical record and not to be missed.
At 17, Ciment began a sexual relationship with her drawing teacher, who was 47 and married with two teenage children. In 1996, she published a memoir of their unconventional marriage called Half a Life; now, nearly 30 years later, the widowed author throws a stick of dynamite at that book. In her new memoir, Consent, Ciment reconsiders her love story, disassembling the careful mythologies she’s constructed around her early years. In Half a Life, she insisted that she initiated the first kiss; looking back decades later in the pages of Consent, she remembers how her husband pulled her into a kiss when she hung back after class to ask a question about careers in the arts. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” Ciment writes. “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Unflinching and bravely told, this postmortem of a marriage is one of the gutsiest books of the #MeToo era.
Indiana Jones meets Star Wars meets Nietzsche in this thrilling galactic heist packed with existential thought. Kitasei’s nail-biting story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, once the galaxy’s most notorious art thief, who now lives a quiet life as an Ivy League archivist. When a dead explorer’s journal materialises at the archive—one that promises to lead her to “the grail,” an artifact with the power to open portals to other solar systems—Maya is forced out of retirement. But she isn’t the only one searching for the grail, and if it falls into the wrong hands, interstellar travel could become impossible. Maya’s quest across the stars is a space opera of the highest order, rich in breakneck pacing and memorable alien accomplices, but it’s in the quest for moral clarity that The Stardust Grail really soars. As Maya journeys from planet to planet, Kitasei offers a profound allegory about the dangers of colonisation, taking this rousing romp to the next dimension.
When 30-something Lauren returns to her London flat late at night, she finds her husband waiting at the door. There’s just one problem: When Lauren left the house, she was single. She quickly discovers that her attic is generating an endless supply of husbands; as soon as one goes up, another comes down, and her life re-forms around him. At first, Lauren wonders which husband she can live with for now as she seeks a suitable plus-one for an upcoming wedding; then, which husband she can live with forever; and ultimately, which version of her life and herself she can live with. In this warm, wise, and bittersweet debut, Gramazio delivers a moving meditation on the paradox of choice in modern dating (and modern life).
In Wayne’s latest novel, we see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for a luxurious summer: In exchange for tennis lessons, he’ll receive free lodging on Cutter’s Neck, a gated oceanfront community for the grotesquely wealthy. But Conor has student loans to repay, so when a sharp-tongued divorcée offers to pay twice his hourly rate for more than just tennis lessons, he can’t help but acquiesce. Soon enough, he tumbles into an erotic affair that challenges everything he thought he understood about sex and power; meanwhile, he falls for a young writer. As Conor’s double life spins out of control, one horrifying mistake threatens to punish him for his trespasses among the elite. Gutsy and shocking, The Winner is a palm-sweating thrill ride through the lives of America’s winners and losers alike.
In a series of immersive reported vignettes, the Financial Times’s AI editor takes readers around the globe to investigate the technology’s damaging effects on “the global precariat.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive-policing program that stigmatises children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already-meagre wages. Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Fair-minded but unsparing, Code Dependent is the most lucid reporting yet on a fast-growing human-rights crisis.
Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging us to seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld, you’ll be ready to start your “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.
In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behaviour of earthlings (for instance: “human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracised by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how, sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.
Set in 1895 at the border between Texas and Mexico, The Bullet Swallower centers on Antonio Sonoro, the scion of a moneyed but deplorable family living in Dorado, Mexico. After a train robbery gone wrong outside of Houston, a shoot-out with the Texas Rangers leaves Antonio’s brother dead and Antonio horrifically disfigured, earning him the nickname “El Tragabalas” (the Bullet Swallower). Antonio’s quest for revenge against the Rangers takes him through the heart of the Texas badlands, where he weighs his violent impulses against the opportunity for repentance. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative set in 1964, Antonio’s grandson Jaime, a Mexican movie star, transforms his grandfather’s story into a feature film, hoping to redeem the Sonoro name. Linking the two narratives is the mystical stranger Remedio, a reaper of souls guiding the Sonoros toward the light. Rich in lyrical language, gripping action, and enchanting magical realism, The Bullet Swallower augurs a bright future for the new frontier of westerns.
One of our finest practitioners of the short-story form delivers her debut novel at last—and what a novel it is! The Book of Love is a phantasmagoric door stopper rich in characteristically Link-ian pleasures, like the collision of the mundane and the magical. In a coastal New England town called Lovesend, four teenagers investigate how three of them died, only to be resurrected by their music teacher (to whom there’s more than meets the eye). Then Lovesend is transformed by magical happenings as the veil between this life and the afterlife is ripped away, leaving our young heroes desperate to hang on to the real world. Enchanting and immersive, The Book of Love is a landmark achievement from a writer who never stops surprising us.
Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Assembled in a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Presented together in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.
In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was 13 months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfilment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here and finds exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.
Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealise the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Indigenous history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.
In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First her apartment was burglarised and her jewelry stolen, then one month later her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together; “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.
In this stirring sequel to his breakout novel, There, There, Orange tells two linked stories: One centers on a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, Jude Star, who’s taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and forcibly stripped of his identity and culture. The other traces his modern-day descendants in Oakland, reeling after the powwow shooting that ended There, There. In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Indigenous characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.
Cunningham’s sensitive and sophisticated roman à clef centers on David, a 20-something Black man working in a minor fundraising role on an upstart senator’s presidential campaign. The author, who worked in the Obama White House, is clearly writing about an Obama analogue (this eloquent Black senator “project[s] an intimacy that was more astral than real”), but connecting the dots between fact and fiction is the least interesting reading of Great Expectations. As a young father and a college dropout, David struggles to relate to the privileged world of political palm greasing. As the campaign burns toward the White House, Cunningham spins a wise coming-of-age tale about power, idealism, and disillusionment.
In this provocative debut novel, Greer delivers a Frankenstein for the digital age. Sexbot Annie is the perfect girlfriend for her wealthy human owner, Doug. Programmed to please, she cooks, cleans, and adjusts her libido to Doug’s whims. But Annie is an “autodidactic” robot, meaning that she’s always learning and changing. As she experiences jealousy, secrecy, and loneliness, she becomes less perfect to the loathsome Doug and ultimately flees to meet her maker—with dangerous results. Annie’s painful journey of becoming is a poignant parable for the age of AI; it’s a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us.
James centers on a seminal character from American literature—and yet, seen afresh through Everett’s revelatory gaze, it’s as if we’re meeting him for the first time. Blasted clean of Mark Twain’s characterisation from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved runaway Jim emerges here as a man of great dignity, altruism, and intelligence. The novel opens in Hannibal, Missouri, where Jim teaches enslaved children to run their speech through a “slave filter” of “correct incorrect grammar,” designed to pacify white people. Then the story settles into Twain’s familiar grooves—on the run together, Jim and Huck raft down the Mississippi River, facing danger, separation, and charlatans aplenty. Along the way, Jim imagines verbal sparring matches with dead philosophers, falls in love with reading, and begins to pen his own story: “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” he writes. And so he does. On the road to freeing himself and his family, Jim becomes more self-determined than ever. Clever, soulful, and full of righteous rage, his long-silenced voice resounds through this remarkable novel. Subversive and thrilling, James is destined to become a modern classic.
Originally published on Esquire US
Pop music is supposed to be popular, right? So we shouldn’t be surprised when the biggest artists actually do turn out to be the most interesting and acclaimed. But it doesn’t always work out that way, so when music from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish is lauded by critics, Taylor Swift has the biggest tour of all time, Charli XCX levels up to superstar status, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan shoot into the stratosphere… well, at least it makes life easier for Grammy Award voters.
Speaking of the Grammys, you might recall that it was only a few years ago that their (since-dismissed) top honcho said that women needed to “step up” if they wanted to win the big prizes. We now live in a world where Spotify’s top five most-streamed albums of the year were all by women. Music may never have truly faced its #MeToo moment, but it’s pretty remarkable how dramatically the power has shifted.
Not that pop in the 2020s is all good times, as struggles with anxiety and racism and sexual identity ripple through so many of these mega-projects. And 2024 had plenty of extra-musical darkness, too, from the chilling and seemingly endless accusations of abuse against Sean “Diddy” Combs to Liam Payne’s gruesome death to the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef, which definitely added some listening excitement but got creepy as it plunged deeper into the pedophilia allegations.
If the genre’s defining figures right now are Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, and Shaboozey, something bigger is going on. Other than a single from Billy Joel, his first new music in decades, the surviving boomer icons (the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen) were all on the road but had no 2024 releases. Or maybe that territory is covered by biopics now; this year, we got Dylan and Bob Marley movies, with subjects from Springsteen to Michael Jackson to Linda Ronstadt currently in the works.
And out of that, somehow, it turned out to be a pretty great year. The albums that made it to the top represent a wide range of styles (sometimes impressively diverse on the same record) and the continual blurring of genres in a shuffle-and-playlist universe keeps pointing to a fascinating future. Trying to guess where it’s going? Good luck, babe.
She said it when she announced the project: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” Still, the battles raged on, the Grammys said yes, the CMAs said no. But the category debate actually did matter, because what Ms Knowles pulled off with Cowboy Carter was something bigger than just a genre exercise; it’s a consideration and commentary on American music across a broad spectrum, a triumphant and far-reaching statement and a joy to listen to. Remember that it’s only part two of a trilogy examining and reclaiming Black musical traditions. I’m dying to know what comes next.
The surprise of the year. For those of us who kinda sorta knew Carpenter as a one-time Disney star and as the other woman in Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 masterpiece “Driver’s License,” the range, humour, and sophistication of these twelve songs was a revelation. “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” were the irresistible smashes, but a song like “Juno,” simultaneously evoking ‘60s and ‘80s pop, is built like a tank, stuffed with hooks and one-liners (“God bless your dad’s genetics,” “I showed my friends and we high-fived/Sorry if you feel objectified”) and somehow turns getting knocked up into an irresistibly flirty metaphor.
One day in July, an unlabelled vinyl album was quietly slipped into the bags of all purchases made at Third Man Records’ stores in Nashville, Detroit, and London. It turned out to be Jack White’s sixth solo album, and online instructions to “Rip it!” and share soon followed. The album got a more proper release a few weeks later and rather than a toss-off, it was an unexpected triumph. White’s last few records have had their moments, but they’ve also suffered from trying a bit too hard; No Name places him firmly back in the scorching, sparse garage-blues territory he staked out with the White Stripes.
Robert Smith said that the Cure’s first album of new material in sixteen years would be the band’s “most intense, saddest, most dramatic and most emotional” ever. It’s a lot to live up to, but Songs of a Lost World doesn’t disappoint. The eight gorgeous, atmospheric, sprawling songs, most of them familiar from the Cure’s recent tours, are more melancholy than bleak, and while there’s not a lighthearted “Friday I’m in Love” or “The Lovecats” to be found, the deep sense of commitment and yearning in “A Fragile Thing” reveal the unwavering passion of a band that remains entirely true to itself.
I’m not sure if Johnny Blue Skies is an alter ego, a band name, or just a loophole that allows Sturgill Simpson to work around the retirement announcement that followed 2021’s The Ballad of Dood and Juanita. After moving to Paris in search of himself and watching his influence take over the country charts (Zach Bryan, Chris Stapleton), Simpson has emerged with a gorgeous, expansive set of self-reflective songs, revealing both humour (“Scooter Blues”) and deep introspection (“Who I Am”). He also reassembled his killer 2010s band, and the sound—dipping into ’70s country-rock and soul and tilting toward psychedelia—may be Simpson’s most alluring yet.
There’s only a glancing mention or two of Drake on GNX, but the year’s defining beef gave K.Dot the fire to fight for old-school rhyme skills, his hometown of Los Angeles, and his place in hip-hop history. (Shout-out to whoever out there said this is the first time someone followed up an album about going to therapy with an album that was even angrier.) Some were disappointed that this surprise release (apparently a surprise even to his label) didn’t have the thematic scope of To Pimp a Butterfly or Mr Morale & the Big Steppers, but the gunslinger mentality showed that comparisons to Tupac, who’s sampled on “Reincarnated,” are more apt than ever—Lamar has that same kaleidoscopic effect, encompassing poet, outlaw, activist, loudmouth, and introvert.
What’s immediately apparent on Billie Eilish’s third album is the sheer musicality. It’s the most range, stylistically and vocally, that she’s displayed so far. After the electro-goth of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and the intimacy of Happier Than Ever, she (and her increasingly impressive collaborator/producer/brother Finneas) leap from the acoustic ballad “Wildflower” to the explosive twist in “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” often shifting gears and genres mid-song. It’s a striking display of boldness from the two-time Oscar winner, whether that means more singing and less of her signature whispering or going with the queer anthem “Lunch” as the first single. Remember that Eilish is still only 22 years old; just think of the places she’ll go.
The latest indie-rock sensation lives up to the hype. After three albums and work with the bands Wednesday and Waxahatchee, North Carolina native Lenderman hits his stride with a record that wears its influences on its sleeve (Neil Young, early Wilco, Jason Molina’s Songs: Ohia) but creates something distinctive and affecting. With a sharp eye for character and detail—playing an Ozzy song on Guitar Hero gets turned into a moving metaphor—and impressively sharp guitar playing, Lenderman’s songs might feel raggedy, but everything is in its right place.
Is Niger’s Mdou Moctar the greatest living guitar hero? Quite possibly—the soaring, screaming, psychedelic solos on his seventh album are unlike anything rock ’n’ roll currently offers. During his 2023 North American tour, a military coup back home made it impossible for Moctar to return to his country, and he resorted to a GoFundMe to enable the band to stay in the United States. Out of this incident comes Funeral for Justice, his most political album yet, excoriating both the impact of colonialism on African nations and the corruption of the local governments. You don’t have to speak the language, though, to understand the rage and confrontation in Moctar’s hypnotic, blazing fretwork.
Coming barely a year after her impressive debut, Lucky, these 14 songs prove that Megan Moroney is for real. She blends classic country wordplay and twang with the language and details (and anxiety) of a young woman in the 2020s. A title like “No Caller ID” risks sounding dated fast, but instead Moroney creates a truly distinctive and specific point of view. The catch in her voice will slay you, and the closing “Hell of a Show”—just verse, chorus, and out, barely a minute and a half—seals the deal.
Originally published on Esquire US
There’s a long-standing theory that in times of real-world strife, readers lose their appetite for fictional horrors. That has never been true. The carnage of pulp magazines only gained popularity after the world wars, while Vietnam and the end of the hippie dream led directly to The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and the ascendency of Stephen King. And now our freshly unstable world is proving fertile ground for the growth of new budding nightmares.
So far, 2024 has been brimming with fantastic horror stories. I’ve done my absolute best to curate a list of the must-read titles released up to this point. The most promising element of the list below is in the breadth, depth, and variety of the darkness at play. Unlike previous “golden” eras of horror, there is no dominant trend. Rather, horror writers are digging their own grim tunnels into territory old and new. Retro haunted-house stories sit alongside extreme body horror. Whimsical horror comedies work in tandem with serious political subcurrents. Horror is not just responding to the perma-crisis we’re all living through; it’s providing respite and escape from it. Horror teaches as much as it terrifies. It heals as much as it hurts.
This list contains titles from the whole spectrum of the genre. There are stories to satisfy the most bloodthirsty tastes, and some that will lead the uneasy on their first forays into the shadowy end of the library. Stay with us, because we’ll be updating the list as the year continues.
Enjoy. It’s good to be scared.
In 2023’s Fever House, Keith Rosson brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. It’s a dense, punk-inflected pressure cooker of street violence, shady government shenanigans, and diabolical magic. The sequel, The Devil by Name, is both more of the same and something quite different. Following the broadcast of Fever House’s cursed audio file, the zombie-esque menace has spread beyond Portland. A reluctant group of survivors are pulled into a confrontation with a rogue government agent and a rising demonic power. Rosson continues to trace the spreading ripples generated by the first book’s cliff-hanger ending but replaces the tight, real-time focus with a nightmarish road trip across a broken America. It’s a bigger story, more relaxed and sprawling in the telling, but with the same unpredictable energy and flights of comic-book excess. My advice: Read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic.
Very early in Sacrificial Animals, there’s a scene that warns us Kailee Pedersen is not screwing around. The cruelty of a foxhunt reverberates throughout the novel, hanging over Nick and Joshua’s reluctant return to their Nebraska farm, where their father has called them to witness his dying. All of the tension between father and sons can be traced back to that early brutality, but Pedersen’s Gothic anti-pastoral is twisted further by the presence of Joshua’s wife, Emilia, whose Asian heritage allows a late injection of Chinese folklore into midwestern horrors. Pedersen draws on her own childhood as a Chinese adoptee growing up on a farm, and the authenticity shows. Restrained and ornate though the prose may be, Sacrificial Animals is savage in its details and saturated with dread.
Pay the Piper is Daniel Kraus’ second posthumous collaboration with the great George Romero. As in 2020’s The Living Dead, Kraus worked from notes to complete Romero’s vision, but this time around—perhaps freed from the weight of the filmmaker’s undead iconography—Kraus’ feels like the driving imagination of the story. The plot centres on Alligator Point, a town as mired in injustice as it is in swampland. It’s a classic small-town horror setup, with personal histories and enmities that reach far back into history and entwine with the presence of the Piper, a shape-shifting, child-killing entity who appears sparingly but with startling violence. There are surface-level comparisons to be made to well-known horror stories (most obviously, Stephen King’s IT), but Kraus couldn’t write a derivative book if he tried. Symbolic sceneries, Cajun patois, and the fey charm of Pontiac, Kraus’ nine-year-old protagonist, combine into a satisfyingly eccentric take on local monsters and ancient histories.
A Laird Barron collection is always a reason to celebrate, and this one has been gestating longer than usual. Not a Speck of Light, his first collection of stories in eight years, cements Barron’s standing as the contemporary horror writer most adept at meshing cosmic high strangeness with muscular noir—like Jack London dabbling in the Lovecraftian mythos. Stories contain eerie entities attracted to disaster sites; meanwhile, a cyborg war dog reflects on its immortal war against humanity’s many enemies, and in “The Glorification of Custer Poe,” we meet a Confederate soldier pursued by his own grizzly sins (and yes, that’s a pun of sorts!). These are some of the more easily resolved stories in the collection; others you may have to read slowly, or more than once, to fully grasp their slippery logic. This is the magic of Laird Barron: He provides too many pieces of the jigsaw and an excess of possible pictures to assemble. It’s our job to find the one that works. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the collection’s penultimate story, “Tiptoe”—the best horror story I’ve read in many years.
A fellow master of concise, uncanny horrors, Mariana Enriquez returns to the short story, following her experiment with maximalism in 2023’s Our Share of Night. The new collection’s title story refocuses the grim real-life fate of Elisa Lam, who’s become a subject of online speculation after her body was found in a hotel water tank in 2013. In lesser hands, such a story could be a travesty of exploitation, but Enriquez has made her name in exposing the mistreatment and brutality meted out to women, often deploying horror as a sheer gauze pulled across the very real violence of the world. Other stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People range from the allusive and elusive to the grimly physical. “Face of Disgrace” literalises the notion of faceless victimhood, while “Hyena Hymns” features a haunted dress that imposes the wounds of historical torture onto the wearer. The best stories, however, concern children. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” depicts a macabre game played among the shells of abandoned appliances, and in “Black Eyes” Enriquez repurposes another famous piece of Internet lore in the attempts of two suspect children to penetrate the fragile safety of the narrator’s car. Chilling, grotesque, and slyly funny, A Sunny Place for Shady People is the author’s return to what she does best—and better than most.
Liminality is having a bit of a moment in horror: The Backrooms is clipping TikTokers out of reality, Silent Hill 2 is back with better-rendered mist, and films like Skinamarink and The Outwaters are setting film festivals achatter. Into this zeitgeist strides Sofia Ajram with a big literary “hold my beer.” Her debut novella traps the suicidal narrator in a limitless subway station. Is this impossible space real? Does it exist as an externalisation of his internal mental state or as an allegory for depression? And what, if anything, is in there with him? Coup de Grâce is equal parts fun and frantic desolation. In her references to early online folklore and a late metafictional flourish, Ajram speaks to horror’s uber-contemporary fascination with trauma and mental health but also to the current vogue for ’90s and ’00s nostalgia. Like all good liminal architecture, Coup de Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.
Rachel Harrison has a special knack for reconfiguring horror tropes as a reflection of post-millennial angst. She’s worked with witches, werewolves, cults, and now, with So Thirsty, she’s come for the vampires. When risk-averse Sloane and her hedonistic friend Naomi cross paths with a band of vamps, they’re forced to confront the realities of an immortal life lived in the shadows. It’s not all bad news, though—there’s passion, freedom, and friendship to be found once the ticking clock of a normal life comes to a halt. Harrison blends two traditions of vampire fiction into one story: There’s gore and violence aplenty but also eroticism and romance. Linking both strands is a pointed observation on female aging in contemporary culture. It’s a sex-drizzled, blood-soaked treat, but like all of Harrison’s fiction, it has something angry and urgent to say about the conditions of reality.
Novellas are great, but too often they leave me wanting more. More character, more plot, more incident, and more emotion. Rest Stop is a full serving of all those ingredients in just 150 pages. By the time Abraham is locked into a gas-station bathroom by a homicidal maniac, we already know about his unrequited love, his conflicted Jewish faith, and his fragile relationships with friends and family—and we’re only a few dozen pages in! It’s a bravura feat of efficiency that leaves Cassidy plenty of room to eke out Abraham’s torment at the hands of his googly-eyed assailant. What follows is part creature feature (arachnophobes beware!) and part Beckettian character study. My point is that Cassidy packs a whole damn story into Rest Stop, without a word wasted. This is what a novella is supposed to be.
It’s 1962 and Jemma Barker has answered a strange invitation to leave Chicago for New Orleans, to take up employment in the mansion of the reclusive Duchon family. Once she arrives, she finds a Halloween advent calendar of Southern Gothic delights: ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, family secrets, and incestuous desires. Simmering beneath it all is the more awful and persistent trace of colouirism, which Sandeen is clear to distinguish from the genre’s more often tread and binary treatment of prejudice. Heavy as the theme is, This Cursed House is never less than absolutely fun. It’s self-aware but never self-conscious and Sandeen pauses the breakneck pace only to ensure that you have a moment to fully grasp the secrets buried in its lineages and family trees, like Wuthering Heights transposed to the Big Easy. It’s such ripe Gothic that if you squeezed it, I’m half convinced blood-red juice would stain your hands.
This novel may open with a woman in a nightgown fleeing a creepy asylum, but The Redemption of Morgan Bright is far from a traditional Gothic chiller. When Morgan inveigles her way into Hollyhock Asylum, she’s seeking answers regarding her sister’s mysterious death. Once inside, she’s assaulted by punishing systems of control and the oppressive presence of another personality inside her own head. Is she mad? Has the system made her so? Or is something else going on? (Spoiler: It’s option three.) This novel provides a chilling twist on the unreliable-narrator trope, as well as a contemporary restaging of Nellie Bly’s exposure of psychiatric cruelties. Panatier nods often to the past (the warden is named Althea Edevane, a name dripping with Victorian Gothic menace), but within the asylum walls, echoes of antiquated maltreatment go hand in hand with future-punk exploitation. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’s only for the worse.
Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’s defences. In All the Fiends of Hell, he’s done it again but on a broader apocalyptic canvas. Granted, we only see the British portion of Armageddon, but that’s more than enough. Following a night of mass abduction by otherworldly forces, a few weak, sickly survivors are left alone under a crimson sky. Well, not alone exactly—there are also hideous monsters who can only be seen in the ruby-red light. We join an everyman and two children on a desperate race to the ocean, carrying the last, lingering shreds of forlorn hope. But hopelessness is the point of the novel, whose central question is: What keeps us going when nothing good remains? All the Fiends of Hell is an especially grim and very British Armageddon. It’s The Road as envisioned by Ken Loach. It’s also Nevill’s best book in some time.
The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’s Americana. It turns out to be much stranger than that. When old friends reunite in their hometown, an inevitable showdown with their past quickly tips into the surreal. Weird ash falls from the sky, basements become liminal spaces, and a grid of hairy wires is discovered just beneath the surface of the town. Amid all of this craziness, Malfi does what he does best: He creates fully fleshed-out characters and pitches them into uncomfortable and very realistic situations. Small Town Horror defies assumption. It’s no nostalgia trip back to a rosy childhood, nor is it an ode to friendship. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”; in this novel, Malfi asks why the hell you would want to.
What a showcase 2024 has been for the imaginative range of LP Hernandez! One of his two entries on this list, No Gods, Only Chaos is a collection of stories ranging from dark fantasy to creature feature, containing some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. Each story is an act of ventriloquism. Whether Hernandez is adopting the dust-bowl drawl of “From the Red Dirt,” mouthing Gen Z idioms in “The Last of Our Kind,” or exploring the broken mind of a neurodivergent killer in “The Bystander,” he obscures himself entirely within his characters and narrative voices. "Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection and even darker than its title suggests. It’s an utterly shocking piece of fiction, though not without a trace of void-black comedy. Maybe memorable is too mild a word. Unforgettable, incurable, bedeviling… it’s a story that leaves a stain. Anyone looking for a truly exciting new name in horror fiction will find something here to love or flinch away from.
There are two major strands of anxiety in Tremblay’s work. One is the psychological ambiguity of his characters; the second is his appetite for experimentation and self-awareness. Horror Movie is the most effective balancing of the two since the author’s landmark A Head Full of Ghosts. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake. Any dissonance between the two accounts is further complicated by a full reproduction of the original script—and kudos to Tremblay for coming up with a screenplay that evolves from a parody of art horror to a genuinely disturbing piece of work. There’s plenty of meta commentary about horror cinema (including one agonizingly extended scene that’s just begging for a bold director to adapt), but Tremblay hasn’t forgotten to include moments of crowd-pleasing savagery, torture, and dismemberment. It makes for a book that equally thrills the head and the gut.
There have been plenty of nostalgic horror novels in recent years, but few have captured the laconic charm of the eighties and nineties paperback boom quite like Lost Man’s Lane. The elevator pitch would be “Boy takes a summer job as the assistant to a private detective and helps solve a supernatural crime,” but that’s really only one element of this long, meandering tale involving rattlesnakes, rock climbing, young love, family dynamics, and unusual friendships. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow, even if it seems unlikely. There’s a lazy pace to his plotting, more reminiscent of a sprawling bildungsroman like The Goldfinch than any contemporary horror fiction. Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they” used to write. A big swing of a book, best enjoyed in a hammock with ice-cold lemonade.
Speaking of nostalgic horror, King’s latest collection of short stories reads like a homecoming. Most of the dozen stories feature a callback or a thematic link to his expansive bibliography; they also vary significantly in length, from the two-hundred-page crime nightmare “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to razor-sharp shorts like “The Fifth Step.” The shorter stories read like nasty little jokes that would be comfortably at home in King’s collections from the seventies and eighties, while “The Dreamers” is proof that he’s still more than capable of a writing a full-blooded nightmare to equal Revival or Pet Sematary, complete with Lovecraftian hints of things lurking beneath the wall of rationality. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality. It’s evident in the horror of “Rattlesnakes” (an unexpectedly haunting pseudo sequel to Cujo) and in the gentler man’s-best-friendship of “Laurie.” The closing story stands above all, though. “The Answer Man” packs a whole human life into eighty pages, mundane but with occasional glimpses of the mystery beyond. It’s a story only King could write, and we should all be grateful he has.
Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. It is 1840, and the orphaned, biracial Orabella subsists on the cusp of spinsterhood before gambling debts and plot conventions lead her into marriage with the devilishly appealing Elias Blakersby. So far, so retro, and much of the reader’s early comfort is due to Orabella’s familiar discomfort in her new home. However, once the story settles in the gloomy Korringhill Manor, Coles defies expectations. As Orabella endures long nights locked in her quarters, interspersed with animalistic revelries and dreams of meat, the faux-Victorian framework collapses into fragments and fever dreams more recognisable from modernist fiction. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. I could not, hand on heart, say that I’ve grasped all the implications and secrets of this book or its strange household, but the disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.
Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age memoir about the making of a serial killer—it shouldn’t work. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho. But the difference between the two books—and the difference between Stephen Graham Jones and Bret Easton Ellis—is emotion. Patrick Bateman was a dispassionate automaton; I Was a Teenage Slasher’s Tolly Driver is a sympathetic outcast and a victim of fate. Ellis wrote to make a point; Jones writes to tell a story and to move the reader. At different moments, we’re moved to laughter, because Jones is very happy to push toward parody or comic-book excess, but at others, especially in the novel’s later stages, we’re more likely moved to tears. If there’s any concern that Jones had nothing left to say about slashers in the wake of his Indian Lake Trilogy, this book puts it to bed. I Was a Teenage Slasher is somehow ridiculous and grounded, affected and honest, horrifying and heartfelt, all at the same time.
Valencia grew up on the West Coast and lives on the East Coast, but her debut collection is fixated on the desert states. In Mystery Lights, the American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird, between horror and beauty, and between speculative and literary fiction. A young girl lost in a cave system meets the mutants who call it home. A newlywed couple’s marriage is founded on—and tested by—their shared sensitivity to ghosts. A corporate wellness retreat (look away, Gwyneth!) is a site for occultism and monstrous transformation. The collection is published by Tin House, which should set expectations about the stories’ literary leanings, but Valencia is not afraid to dip a toe—hell, her whole foot—into the speculative uncanny. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights.
The follow-up to the crunching 2022 hit The Devil Takes You Home is, in some ways, more of the same. Once again, Iglesias casts the grit and gore of street violence against a cosmic backdrop, and he doesn’t hold back from prolonged, brutal beatdowns. However, whereas Devil felt like an assault on the reader’s spirit and good mood, House of Bone and Rain alleviates the bleakness with moments of camaraderie. Rather than one man on a mission, Iglesias sets a group of young, wild friends against the bigger fish responsible for the murder of one of their mothers. The violence is harsh and unflinching but refreshing in its honesty. As one of the heroes says early in the proceedings, this book is not about “the macho bullshit we were raised on.” Instead, House of Bone and Rain is a lament for young, dumb men and the codes they feel pressured to live by. It’s not all human tragedy, though. In a delightful nod to Lovecraft, it turns out that there are even bigger fish playing their part from just offshore…
Each entry in the Clown in a Cornfield trilogy has been bigger and stranger than the last. What began as a sociopolitical spin on the teen slasher became, in the second volume, a commentary on nostalgia, disinformation, demagoguery, and the events of 6 January (among other things). Now, in The Church of Frendo, Cesare caps his project (so far) with a novel that asks questions about religion and the myth of America itself. This all sounds very grand, and rest assured, Cesare packs in plenty of grind-house violence and folk-horror traditions—he even finds a spot for professional wrestling and Juggalos. Just the list of ingredients in this short blurb alone should give you some idea of how madcap and unexpected this book is. Indeed, the idea behind Clown in a Cornfield is so audacious that it’s difficult to believe Cesare could extend it over three volumes and stick the landing. Yet he does. The Church of Frendo is the unpredictable climax to an inimitable trilogy and proof that making horror political doesn’t make it any less fun.
I rarely consider nonfiction titles for this list but Bogutskaya’s treatise on the state of horror is a must-read for anyone seeking a refreshed perspective on the genre. Focused predominantly on horror movies released in the past decade, Feeding the Monster is a worthy successor to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and other canonical studies. It’s written with the critical rigour of an academic review but invested with all the humour and personality of the smartest blog posts from back when the Internet was fun. One minute Bogutskaya is discussing the symbolic function of hunger in horror or debating the overuse of trauma narratives; the next she’s telling us about her childhood memories of Freddy Krueger or explaining how horror helps her frame an agonizing memory of a hospital visit. It’s the perfect balance of the personal and the political with which to survey a genre that has always ricocheted between those two poles. Read it and you’ll feel smarter the next time you watch a horror movie, while the extensive watch list in the appendix will ensure you have plenty to see.
Really good haunted houses are few and far between. These days, the spirit-infested home too often falls into high camp or is put to such elevated metaphorical purpose that it forgets to actually be scary. The House of Last Resort has no such problem. When Tommy and Kate relocate from the US to a drowsy Italian village, it’s supposed to be a better life. Of course, their new abode makes a mockery of this well-being kick. The titular house comes complete with hidden rooms, hallucinations, and a historical entanglement in the Catholic Church’s struggle against some very persistent demons. Golden draws on the very best of seventies and eighties pulp-horror influences, with hordes of rats, ambulatory corpses, and a grand diabolic finale. But he makes time for quiet moments of chilling intensity, including a kitchen-table conversation that ranks among the most disquieting scenes of the year. The House of Last Resort is horror that goes hard but never forgets to be fun. It’s the author’s finest novel to date.
If you watched the climbing documentary Free Solo and thought, Okay, climbing a nine-hundred-foot cliff face without a rope is scary but you know what it really needs? Murder ghosts!, then Kiefer’s debut will scratch your itch. This Wretched Valley follows four intrepid fools into the deep Kentucky woods, where they plan to map and climb a brand-new ascent. Of course, like any backcountry worthy of a horror fan’s time, their chosen ground is saturated with bloody history. It doesn’t take kindly to interlopers, either, particularly these vain, self-absorbed numskulls. There are comparisons to be made to Scott Smith’s adventure-horror classic The Ruins, but most crucial is Kiefer’s absolute lack of mercy for her characters. For much of the book, you gleefully anticipate their foreshadowed deaths, but the manner of their end is so brutal and so desolate that you can’t avoid a creeping empathy. Kiefer has stared you down. She has more belly for this than you. She wins.
Lebbon’s most recent novels serve as a loose thematic trilogy, connected by a focus on high-octane adventure and a backdrop of quickening climate disaster. However, whereas Eden and The Last Storm were genre-splicing affairs, Among the Living goes full-bore on the horror, pitting an uneasy assemblage of climate activists and mineral excavators against a viral threat long buried in the Arctic tundra. This is no mere illness, though. What Lebbon conjures up is an intelligent disease, able to control its hosts’ thoughts and behaviour, creating a paranoiac trap in which the characters cannot even trust their own motivations. It’s easy to think of comparisons—The Thing, The Last of Us—but Lebbon brings a flair for action scenes and his experience with endurance sport, propelling the story with unexpected physical and psychological dimensions. Fast-paced, compulsive, suitably horrifying: Among the Living reads like Michael Crichton having a particularly bad dream.
If you’re familiar with Canada’s Nahanni Valley, you’ll know that wilderness has a history and lore thick enough to fill several novels. Seriously, you should take a Wikipedia dive; thank me later. All that mystery is buried in the substrata of In the Valley of the Headless Men, but Hernandez’s excursion resembles the surrealism of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, though less cold and less austere. Hernandez has a particular gift for the details of grief: the final sip of a dead mother’s lemonade, a lost child’s sock tucked safely in a purse; each is a small totem of heartbreak. And though the flesh of his novella is pared to the bone, somehow he still accommodates a trio of characters—each with their own arc of loss and redemption—on a shared journey to some ineffable, elusive truth. As for what else waits there, I shan’t tell you. it’s best you decide for yourself… and I’m still not sure that I even really know.
What if an entire neighbourhood became a ghost? Not just the people but the buildings and the street itself? And what if three girls escaped that fate, then returned twenty years later to see what remained of the homes and families they left in that sunlit purgatory? It’s a concept high enough to give you a nosebleed, but Kiste reins it in masterfully, never worrying too much about the mad logic of the situation. Instead, she centres the story on more mundane forms of haunting: the dark gravity of memory, family, and trauma. The Haunting of Velkwood reads like a literary double negative, a brand-new thing emerging from the overlap of Twin Peaks’ suburban uncanny and the melancholy nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides. Kiste doesn’t shy away from these references (David Lynch is everywhere in Velkwood), but she’s still written one of the most original—and downright strange—novels of the year so far.
Before turning to fiction, Hull wrote the screenplay for Glorious, a cult horror movie about an eldritch entity invoking apocalypse through a glory hole in a public-bathroom stall. Though not a sequel of any kind, Hull’s debut novella shares much of his movie’s grindhouse DNA. It also has a hole of its own in the titular Mouth: an inexplicable toothed orifice in the ground inherited by Randy, a good ol’ all-American drifter. Randy’s attempt to satisfy Mouth’s hunger forces him into a partnership with Abigail, a young woman with secrets to keep and vengeance to seek. Mouth comes in handy there. The novella is rapid and raw and unburdened by plot complexity, but there’s something so endearing about both the book and its innocent monster that you can’t help but cheer them on. Imagine Roger Corman’s take on Frankenstein and you’re somewhere close to Mouth’s goofy charm.
King Nyx is at the softer end of the horror colour chart. There are no ghosts or demons, and there’s barely any blood (though there are life-size marionettes to haunt your dreams). Instead, Bakis has crafted a compelling period mystery centred on the island home of a wealthy tycoon whose wives just keep dying before their time. When a young woman accompanies her husband on a personal writing retreat to the island, everything seems immediately off. The couple are quarantined in a private cabin. She sees strange bearlike figures in the woods and finds mysterious notes aplenty. All the oddity suggests something very wrong is going on in the Big House. It’s all wonderfully bizarre, but buried beneath the novel’s gothic veneer is an interrogation of supposed male genius, balanced so precariously on the shoulders of unremembered women. King Nyx is one of those thrillers that smuggle real substance into their scares without ever taking on a lecturing tone. It’s also a great gateway novel for readers who would usually shy away from horror’s excesses.
Graham Jones made this list in 2022 and again in 2023 with the first two instalments of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Now, with The Angel of Indian Lake, he absolutely sticks the landing. In this third and concluding volume, we return to the bruised and bloodied town of Proofrock, Idaho, for a final confrontation between Jade Daniels and the many monsters in her past, her present, and her head. Just as in the preceding books, Angel begins in the cold chaos of violence and metatextual references, which slowly coalesce into something human, heartfelt, and, by the end, emotionally overwhelming. Unexpected bodies rise and fall, and at no point could even this seasoned horror reader rest easy that the absolute worst would not come to pass. The Angel of Indian Lake is an almost indecent success; Jones should not have been able to guide this freewheeling, snowballing mass of story home. But he does. And like its now-iconic heroine, it remains defiant and unbowed to the end.
As I’ve covered elsewhere, horror has not traditionally been kind to characters of colour. Evans and Fennell’s anthology is sure to become a key text in the Black horror renaissance working to correct that injustice. The stories included here share one crucial characteristic: Each features a young Black female protagonist who must survive—but otherwise, it’s a sprawling survey of horror’s various subsections, every one refreshed by the Black female gaze. LL McKinney’s “Harvester” is nightmarish Americana about a very unusual cornfield. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “TMI” is an of-the-moment technophobic satire about privacy and identity, while Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou” offers old-school Southern Gothic of the finest stripe. The Black Girl Survives in This One may be billed as young-adult literature but stories like Monica Brashears’ “The Skittering Thing” are pure adult-grade nightmare fuel. The best of them pose a question that underlies the entire anthology: Is surviving the same thing as having a happy ending?
This has been a pretty bleak and bloody list of stories so far. Let Ryan pour some sunshine into your TBR. Bless Your Heart is the tale of the Evans women, a matriarchal dynasty who runs the funeral home in their small, quaint corner of Southeast Texas. Unfortunately, the dead in their town don’t always stay dead, forcing generations of Evanses to moonlight as ghoul killers. During a particularly bad infestation of undead, the elderly Ducey (horror’s best octogenarian for a good while), her daughter Lenore, and her adult granddaughter Grace must deal with the problem while indoctrinating young Grace into their clandestine guardianship. The word that immediately springs to mind is charming, as this novel has plenty of local colour and turns of phrase. However, what elevates Bless Your Heart beyond pastiche is Ryan’s willingness to revel in full-on gore and to follow through on some genuine, last-minute emotional stakes. This was announced as the first in a series of novels, and I can’t wait to see—and try to work out—what’s going to happen next.
In the few years since LaRocca burst onto the horror scene with Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, he has steadily grown a reputation for wielding disgust and excess to singular effect. This new collection contains four novelettes, each spinning around twin themes of obsession and harm. In the title story, an estranged daughter goes home for her father’s funeral, only to discover truly hideous secrets in her family home. “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn” may go off in a batshit-crazy direction toward the end but the central conceit of a self-harming cult with a penchant for broken glass evokes the very best of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood body horror. It’s the closing story, though—on the surface the smallest and most superficial—that really got under my skin. “Prickle” presents a vicious game of one-upmanship between two elderly friends that takes the book to a gleeful, capering conclusion. It shows that beneath his coat of many nasty colours, LaRocca has a very good (and very dark) sense of humour.
I talk a lot about “fun” horror—the kind of horror that tries to scare you, for sure, but makes the process entertaining, enjoyable, a romp, rather than a raid on your psyche. This is exactly what Thorne delivers in Diavola. As with Christopher Golden’s The House of Last Resort, Thorne transports the reader to a tiny Italian village for some very dysfunctional family drama, though any loving central relationship is replaced with the hilariously maddening repartee between Anna and her siblings. Their scratchy dynamic is a grounding contrast to the supernatural goings-on, revolving around a tower in their villa that should not be opened. Shocker: It’s opened, and craziness ensues. Diavola is a gothic gem, as full of sharply observed characterisation as it is genre tropes. I read it in two sittings and even now I’m not sure if I was supposed to laugh as much as I did. Pack this for your next holiday and avoid talking to your own family.
The Underhistory may be the most intriguing horror novel of the year so far. It’s a blend of ghost story and home-invasion thriller in which a group of criminals descends upon a haunted house in the middle of a guided tour. That’s enough of a concept to set the novel apart but Warren fully commits to a structural conceit that exposes how the architecture of houses and story are one and the same. Each chapter is titled after the whimsical name that the elderly guide, Pera, has given to the rooms of her home. While she takes her customers through the details of the house—all the while trying to placate and manage the bad men in their midst—she also reveals her own gothic history, embedded in the peculiarities of each room. Gradually, we learn that Pera is far more capable than we (or her assailants) imagine her to be. And her house is a very bad place to invade. The Underhistory reads like Shirley Jackson or Catriona Ward at their most gothically playful. It’s a wholly unique intellectual exercise and a deeply compelling page-turner.
Malerman’s Incidents Around the House is [...] a deeply discomfiting, imaginatively ripe, yet ruthlessly efficient novel in which eight-year old Bela is targeted by a malign presence in her home. This “Other Mommy" hounds the girl with a request to “go into your heart.” What follows is a chase narrative of claustrophobic terror that almost transcends articulation. Glimpses of Other Mommy are elusive to the point of impressionism (she has long, hairy arms and “ slides across the floor”). What does this mean? What is she? We never know, as we are only ever given the compromised perspective of a frantic child or a terrified adult. It’s as if Malerman has channelled something into the very sentences of this novel, something that is so much greater than the sum of its linguistic parts. Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.
Originally published on Esquire US
Although I do not believe that 2023 will go down as a stellar year for anyone – I asked six friends and they all agreed – there is something I cannot stop thinking about: Cannes 2023. We got The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, May December, How to Have Sex, Perfect Days. There was Killers of the Flower Moon. There was that gay Western with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. And best of all – and yes, I really mean best – we got our first peak at The Idol, The Weeknd’s HBO critical darling (ha, ha) gone too soon. If the Oxford English Dictionary ever need to update their definition of “halcyon” – is that something they do? – they could just use two words: Cannes 2023.
Which leads us to the 2024 festival, its 77th edition, which takes place in a few weeks. This year’s jury is headed up by Greta Gerwig, former indie darling who last year managed to turn a toy franchise into an Oscar-nominated film (though missed actual gold: shame!). It’s probably not going to be quite as starry as last year’s affair – though, as evidenced by my introduction, what chance did it have? – but there are a few promising projects.
You can read the full list of in-competition and out-of-competition films here, but we have picked some highlights.
All eyes are on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, about an architect who rebuilds New York following a disaster. The film, which Coppola has been working on since the early Eighties, stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emanuel and Aubrey Plaza.
Barry Keoghan dropped out of Gladiator II (led by Esquire cover star Paul Mescal) to star in Bird, directed by Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Fish Tank) alongside the recent star of gay open relationship drama Passages, Franz Rogowski. And his Saltburn co-star and erstwhile Elvis, Jacob Elordi, will star in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, which is based on 2021 novel Foregone. It’s about a an American leftie who heads to Canada to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.
Yorgos Lanthimos, fresh from a victory run with Poor Things, is back with Kinds of Kindness, an anthology film starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, possible tortured poet Joe Alwyn and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn from Hunter Schafer. Tortured politician Donald Trump is the subject of The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, which follows the businessman turned politician’s early years. The dubious honour of playing the former president goes to Sebastian Stan and Succession’s Jeremy Strong co-stars.
Sean Baker, the American director behind the heart-stealing The Florida Project, returns with Anora, a New York rom-com about… well, who knows actually? Details are under wrap apart from the cast which includes Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood). Elsewhere Italian director Paolo Sorrentino returns with Parthenope, starring Gary Oldman. We don’t know much about that one either though the film’s title takes its name from a siren in Greek mythology (could be helpful to know for a pub quiz?).
David Cronenberg is premiering The Shrouds, a horror film with Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce and Diane Kruger. Cassel plays a widower who invents a machine to connect with the dead. If movies have taught us anything, that will surely have zero consequences. Another horror, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, sounds interesting thanks to its cast alone: Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley.
The biggie premiering out of competition is George Miller’s Fury Road prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Anya Taylor-Joy takes on the lead role while Thor’s younger brother, Liam Hemsworth, joins in on the desert fun. Will Kevin Costner’s western, Horizon: An American Saga, be as fun? Who knows but its cast, which includes Costner, Sienna Miller and Luke Wilson, will surely give it a go.
And what will follow up Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex in the Un Certain Regard category? By title alone, I am excited by On Becoming a Guinea Fowl from Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni. It is a family comedy-drama set in Africa and has already been picked up by A24 for international sales.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Say what you want about the Academy Awards, but the ceremony always gives us something to talk about. It’s damn near impossible to fill a room with celebrities without something batshit happening—and this year did not disappoint.
The Oscars kicked off with a stellar monologue from Jimmy Kimmel. Rest assured, the comedian covered a ton of ground, including Greta Gerwig's snub, Madame Web's failure, and Robert Downey Jr.'s presumptive Best Supporting Actor win. (Spoiler: RDJ did, in fact, take home the award.) The ceremony began with Da'Vine Joy Randolph winning Best Supporting Actress for her turn in The Holdovers.
The star thanked everyone who encouraged her to act. "I didn't think I was supposed to be doing this as a career," she said. "I started off as a singer and my mother said to me, go across that street to that theater department. There's something for you there—and I thank my mother for doing that. I thank all the people who have stepped in my path and have been there for me, who have ushered me and guided me. I am so thankful to all you beautiful people out there."
Randolph's win was the first of many historic feats this year. For her work in Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone was the first Native American woman to earn a nomination for Best Actress. Meanwhile, for the first time in history, three of the Best Picture nominees (Barbie, Anatomy of a Fall, and Past Lives) were directed by women. Elsewhere in the ceremony, Cillian Murphy won Best Actor for his performance in Oppenheimer, Emma Stone nabbed Best Actress for her chaotic turn as Bella Baxter in Poor Things, and Oppenheimer took home the Best Picture trophy.
So, what's the temperature of the fans at home? Thanks to Ryan Gosling's delightful rendition of "I'm Just Ken," a bit involving a nearly-naked John Cena, and a mercifully on-time ceremony, consensus is that the Academy put on damn good show. Here are the best reactions to the 96th Academy Awards.
Originally published on Esquire US
As award season steadily marches on with the 66th Grammy Awards, the entertainment fodder for us mere mortals watching from home only piles up. Taylor Swift makes history with most Album of the Year wins (four) (still, yawn), Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish lead with 'Flowers' and 'What Was I Made For' respectively, and Skrillex gets recognised for Best Dance/Electronic Recording (wait, dude's still around?).
Apart from those headlines, here are some key moments that the Internet's been buzzing about.
While accepting the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, Jay-Z had a couple of notes to raise about the system in an overall humorous speech.
“I don’t want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won Album of the Year," he said of his wife Beyoncé, who looked on in the audience with an expression two notches down from a Chrissy Teigen meme, "So even by your own metrics, that doesn’t work. Think about that. The most Grammys. Never won Album of the Year. That doesn’t work.”
The rapper/producer went on to deliver some hard truths about the nominations, but also acknowledged that music is subjective. It's giving "Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you", but he might just have a point. Last year, Beyoncé became the most awarded artist in Grammy history with only one win in a Big Four category and Renaissance was snubbed. Altogether, the power couple have each been nominated six times for Album of the Year but never took it home.
Never knew we needed a Grammy for audiobooks, but here we are. As host Trevor Noah points out, “They’re really hard to twerk to, but they’re still great.”
Another notable new category would be Best African Music Performance, which 22-year-old South African singer Tyla made history for winning. With the number of times we heard/saw 'Water' in 2023, this makes sense.
We don't know why but let's just roll with it.
Less of a weird thing and more of a good one, the singer-songwriter gave a rare live performance of her timeless classic alongside Luke Combs in a duet rendition (you may have heard the latter's cover). The hit first won Chapman Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1989.
Shortly after winning Best Rap Album (Michael), Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance, (Scientists and Engineers featuring Andre 3000, Future and Eryn Allen Kane), Killer Mike was booked for “misdemeanor battery”. The 48-year-old rapper was escorted out in handcuffs after an alleged physical altercation backstage. Way to celebrate a win.
It's time to fire up your Oscars ballots, folks. On Tuesday morning, Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid announced the nominees for the 2024 Academy Awards.
Surprise, surprise: Oppenheimer led the field with 13 nominations. The film about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was recognised for Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Original Score, Makeup & Hairstyling, Editing, Sound, and Production Design.
Meanwhile, Poor Things exceeded expectations with 11 nominations, while Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon garnered 10 nominations. In what's easily the biggest shocker of the morning, Barbie failed to break double digits at this year's Academy Awards, with just eight nominations in total. Though the film was nominated for Best Picture, director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie were both snubbed from the field. However, Ryan Gosling was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, America Ferrera was tapped for Best Supporting Actress, and Gerwig earned a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Other big winners include American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Maestro, Past Lives, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest. They'll compete against Barbie and Oppenheimer for Best Picture. Paul Giamatti and Cillian Murphy will square off in the Best Actor race, alongside Maestro's Bradley Cooper, Rustin's Colman Domingo, and American Fiction's Jeffrey Wright.
Leonardo DiCaprio's exclusion from the Best Supporting Actor list may come as a shock, but the actor has always had a strange relationship with the Academy Awards. Remember, he had to fight a bear in 2015's The Revenant to finally win the coveted award. With Margot Robbie out of the Best Actress race, this year's awards-season mainstays—Flower Moon's Lily Gladstone and Poor Things' Emma Stone—are now joined by Maestro's Carey Mulligan, Nyad's Annette Bening, and Anatomy of a Fall's Sandra Huller.
Elsewhere in the field, Best International Feature Film nominations included Wim Wenders's Perfect Days (Japan), Society of the Snow (Spain), The Zone of Interest (UK), The Teacher's Lounge (Germany), and lo capitano (Italy). Anatomy of a Fall—which is up for Best Picture—and France's other critically acclaimed film of the year, The Taste of Things, both fell short. Many Best Documentary Feature titles came as a surprise, including nominations for Bobi Wine: The People’s President, The Eternal Memory, Four Daughters, To Kill a Tiger, and the timely 20 Days in Mariupol.
In the Best Animated Feature competition, Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Pixar's Elemental, Netflix's Nimona, and surprise international contender Robot Dreams will duke it out. As for Best Original Song, Barbie's "I'm Just Ken" and Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made For?" will battle it out for the golden statue. They'll see competition from "Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)" from Killers of the Flower Moon, "It Never Went Away" from American Symphony, and "The Fire Inside" from the Eva Longoria-directed Flamin’ Hot.
Other snubs include the performance of May December, which received praise for Charles Melton, Natalie Portman, and Juliane Moore's turns, only to walk away with one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The Color Purple also received just one nomination for Best Supporting Actress (Danielle Brooks). Ferrari, Asteroid City, Priscilla, Napoleon, AIR, Bottoms, Origin, and All of Us Strangers were completely excluded from the final list of nominations.
The 96th Academy Awards will air on ABC on March 10, with Jimmy Kimmel hosting for the fourth time.
Originally published on Esquire US
Tech nerds, how are we feeling about 2024? Are y'all freaking out about all the new things and dohickeys that are getting released at CES? Sorry if that sounded like I'm talking down on CES, it wasn't meant to be. However, I'm just a lowly tech editor who is a little bit sick of everything that everyone seems to be freaking out about. We're at a point where there's so much tech that most of the things we hype up are, honestly... not that great.
We've got tech in our hands, tech over our eyes, tech in our homes, tech on our kitchen counters, and tech in our bedroom. Even our paper notebooks are tech-enabled. Hell, we're using tech to wake us up instead of the sun. So where is any one person meant to keep up with all the tech that actually matters? Right here.
I've kept an eye on the early-year releases, and I've kept tabs on what is actually moving the needle for me. Is the new tactile iPhone keyboard from Clicks moving the needle for me? Not really. Is the Apple Vision Pro moving the needle for me? Yes, absolutely. What I'm trying to say is that this isn't a list of little releases. This is where Esquire dot com is keeping track of the biggest, most groundbreaking tech of 2024—everything you should buy or keep an eye on in the future. It's still early doors, so there's a lot of preorders and speculation. But, as the year rolls on, we'll keep this list updated with all the best new tech of 2024.
We got a sneak peak at Apple's biggest innovation in a long time last year. Officially launching on 2 February, this seems to be Apple's next big bet. The focus is less on making a toy and more on making a new type of personal computer. The powers that be in Cupertino obviously see this as a desktop and laptop replacement. We'll see how well they deliver.
Ever looked at your TV and wish that you could, see through it? Me either. But once I saw LG's new entertainment play, I was... slightly more convinced. Move it around (it's wireless) and place it in direct sunlight or in front of a mirror (no glare). It's a weird bet, but I can definitely see it growing on me. LG's transparent OLED TV is scheduled to hit the market in 2024.
Per usual, there's going to be a new iPhone. Whether or not it'll be a big jump from the 15 Pro remains to be seen. The iPhone 15 Pro had a lot of initial fanfare (from myself included), but its stumbled out of the gate a little bit. The biggest innovation has been the titanium build. We'll see where Apple goes this year.
For my money, Samsung is the top Apple competitor, with a much deeper catalog than the Googles or Motorolas of the world and a great suite of foldables. No disrespect to those two, but Samsung does so much it makes for a lovely little ecosystem. As there is every year, there's going to be some fort of upgrade on Samsung's flagship smartphone. Will it be enough to leapfrog Apple? Not in America. But, it could be a big year for Samsung.
Since being the first big company to do the whole VR thing, Meta has sent out a bunch of flops. The Meta Quest 2 was just a novelty gaming device. The newer Quest 3 and Quest Pro aren't anything to write home about either. But, Meta has confirmed plans for a new, more affordable VR headset in 2024. We'll see if it actually catches on this time around.
Another big rumor in Apple world is that there might be a foldable iPad on the horizon. If it happens, it would be the company's first foray into the foldable market and surely a dress rehearsal for a foldable iPhone. Still, it's a massive if. Don't hold out for this one.
At CES 2024, Samsung gave us an update on one of its best weird little projects. Ballie, an R2-D2 type personal assistant was introduced at CES 2020. This time around, Samsung made the little guy bigger and gave him a projector.
Wait, so what is this thing?
Sorry. "Alexa on wheels," is how I would describe Ballie. He'll be able to follow you around, tell you the weather, answer phone calls, and project onto whatever flat surface you can find. Don't hold out hope though. This is more of a speculative project from Samsung. I wouldn't expect to see it on the market in 2024.
Originally published on Esquire US
Clearly, this is not a comprehensive list. There are possibly hundreds of new hotels opening each year, but 2024 marks openings that may be first of the brand in the region, like The Singapore EDITION was for Asia Pacific in 2023. Otherwise, portfolios in cities that make so much sense that we're excited to see how the rendition turns out. Here are a couple to put on your travel radar.
The edgy hospitality brand continues its expansion in the Southeast Asian market following two openings in Thailand. Located on Orange Grove Road, The Standard, Singapore will feature 143 rooms and is one of the rare ground-up hotels constructed within prime Orchard area.
Amanjunkies can look forward to the second half of 2024, where the brand will open in the Thai capital's embassy district. The unconventional skyscraper features 52 suites and 50 residences across 36 levels, as well as an infinity pool at its peak.
The boutique accommodation finds its thoughtful concept matched with the traditional landscape of the heritage city. Set to open the first half of the year, Six Senses Kyoto arranges its 81 rooms around a courtyard. From onsite spa to meeting rooms with fireplaces, guests can certainly expect a ryokan-style welcome.
The two prominent towers take aesthetic inspiration from coral reefs surrounding Qatar seas and comprise 155 guestrooms and suites, 162 serviced apartments and 276 residences for rent. The ultra-luxe destination will have a total collection of ten lifestyle outlets, including its signature Manor Club.
Alongside the recently opened One&Only Aesthesis, Athens, the second Greek outpost occupies 65 hectares worth of beachfront on the Cycladic island of Kéa. With private pools, terrace, courtyard and fireplace for each villa, the resort also offers private homes with nearly 360-degree views of the Aegean sea.
After the original in Naples, the sibling will open in spring by the city's Piazza del Popolo. In a palazzo dating all the way back to the 17th century, the hotel is also one of the last projects from the late Zaha Hadid, whose architectural touch you may observe in the furnishings and lashings of Italian marble.
Due to open this autumn, the hybrid hospitality pioneers of extended stay is developing the acquired historic property in a 145 room aparthotel across seven floors. The 18th century mansion on the Latin Quarter will see 1000 sqm of social spaces under a restored glass atrium.
On the heels and within the vicinity of Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park, the sister hotel will sit its 50 rooms and suites in Hanover Square. Besides a rooftop bar and urban spa, amongst its lifestyle offerings is the first namesake restaurant of Chef Akira Back to open in UK.
