Tsundoku is a Japanese word for acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. Welcome to my weekly reading blog, Halloween Edition.
OooOOoooOOOoooOoooOOo!!!! [said like ghost]
Happy Halloween! Best holiday ever! Long live the dead!
This week, we consider my favorite horror novel from 2023, some great Halloween-y medium pieces, a perverted stoner cartoon witch, and my coveted Favorite Pile of the Week Award… goes to rocks?!
Books
How To Sell A Haunted House
by Grady Hendrix
2023, Berkley.
Need a Halloween read? How to Sell a Haunted House is perfect. I couldn’t put it down! When parents die, splitting an estate sounds like a living nightmare! In Grady Hendrix’s newest novel, estranged siblings figure out how to sell their dead parent’s house, but things are complicated because demonic puppets haunt the house! Aunt Honey says, “There’s always drama once money’s involved.” And that’s true, relatable, and scary without the puppets. The sibling relationship was perfectly rendered, how their childhood and parent traumas impacted their adult lives. I appreciated the smaller cast than Final Girl Support Group or Vampire Bookclub because Hendrix dug deep and considered family, death, free real estate, and all the excellent horror novel stuff. It’s also got a clear moral: beware of Pupkin!
Comics
Megg and Mogg are a Halloween treat! A witch, a werewolf, a cursed black cat, a boogeywoman, but they’re all normal and have relatable mental problems. You can read tons of strips on his Instagram. Plus, all the collections are on Hoopla.
But be forewarned!
These funny comics evoke a horrific sense of dread, of the hopelessness of 21st-century life, how trying to be a person who feels monstrous. Funny, vulgar, sad, relatable: it’s those good comics!
Pile of the Week
This weekend, my partner and I stranded ourselves on an island. Here, you can see a pile of rocks used to block the wind for a fire pit. Now that’s a helpful pile! It received the Pile of the Week award.
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