A young man is called back from the overwhelming, limitless city to his rural Scottish hometown, which is ruled by piety and inflexibility. His claustrophobic community and rigid father gradually give way to glimmers of hope for new beginnings and self-actualization. Cal is fresh out of art school, deeply in debt, and desperately poor, staying on acquaintances' couches, cleaning buildings (and being cheated out of most of his modest pay), and dipping in and out of soulless tr

This 1000-page fantasy novel is intense, brutal (significant trigger warnings are warranted), extremely dark, and not at all a universal recommendation. I struggled with and was also fascinated by the fact that in its original form, the story was Harry Potter fan fiction about Hermione and Draco. The structure and timeline is intriguing and illuminating. This beast of a fantasy novel (it's 1040 pages) tracks a healer and alchemist suffering from significant memory gaps throug

The corruption and dark underbellies throughout, the lurking folklore figure that seems to signal death and destruction, and the despairing community history of missing women set a brooding, ominous tone, yet Salt Bones often felt like a young-adult mystery. The reveal is immensely disturbing and makes various characters' sinister suspicions feel more than warranted. Jennifer Givhan's mystery-thriller-horror novel Salt Bones made it onto multiple best-of lists for 2025, and

Bunny begins with an outcast main protagonist in a MFA program who's infuriated by her twee fellow seminar students. It builds into an increasingly unhinged, intriguing phantasmagoria, equal parts dark nightmare and outrageously silly absurdity. I was intrigued by the sound of We Love You, Bunny , the sequel to Mona Awad's novel Bunny , so I went back to first read this book. Samantha is a scholarship MFA student at the progressive Warren University in New England. An outside

I loved my first T. Kingfisher read. This was dark, sometimes wryly funny, haunting, and intriguing, and the resolutions to the...

Bardugo's rich world-building sets the scene in Spain during the Inquisition, as a scullery maid with magical abilities is thrust into...