• Mad Hatters and March Hares - (edited by) Ellen Datlow

I’ve read other short stories collections edited by Datlow (all horror based ones) and have enjoyed them. This anthology was fine. I liked Mercury - Priya Sharma, All the King’s Men - Jeffery Ford, Run, Rabbit - Angela Slatter, In Memory of a Summer’s Day - Matthew Kressel, and (most of all) Sentence Like a Saturday - Seanan McGuire. I was bored by a lot of the other stories though. And the final story made me way too sad and not in a good mood “this is so good” kind of way. Meh ratings.

• A House With Good Bones - T. Kingfisher

I enjoyed this one more than The Hollow Ones. I felt like the writing was more grounded and she really seemed to know what she was talking about with all the entomology stuff. I also didn’t roll my eyes at her character’s inner monologue. Probably helped that this one was a fat woman (which she is) and not a quippy gay man (which she isn’t). Hollow Places had more ultimately scary stuff (with the monsters “undoing” the humans in horrific ways) but this one was just written so much better. It still felt frivolous a bit and not necessarily something I would recommend to another reader, but I definitely enjoyed it and read it very quickly.

• I Was a Teenage Slasher - Stephen Graham Jones

Surprisingly, this has been my favorite Jones book so far. I almost stopped reading it at the beginning because it felt too similar to other slasher type books of his that I have read but then he switched everything up by making the change into a slasher because of an infection and suddenly I was very very interested. He still rambled too much and repeated himself way too much but ultimately the story was interesting and new and compelling in surprising ways.

• The Starving Saints - Caitlin Starling

Oh yes, this was a good one. I can already tell that I want to reread it some day. I read a lot of it right before going to sleep, so there are definitely plot points that my tired brain missed. But it was beautiful and creepy and gay. I wish that it had gotten more explicit with the gay stuff but it was still great.