Gone girl: Liz Moore traces the fallout from a rich teen’s disappearance at a summer camp in The God of the Woods
Structurally, Moore’s novel flits around in time and perspective.
Joyce Carol Oates continues a late-career hot streak with a collection of subversive suspense stories
Oates's pervading theme across her entire career involves an investigation into the nature of consciousness and the mysteries of personality.
High spirits: Food and travel writer Evan Rail examines the story of a counterfeiter who trafficked in fake bottles of one of the world’s most notorious tipples
What is most fascinating about Rail's story is not so much the forger, but everything surrounding him.
“The children of the night. What music they make!” First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula continues to exert an outsized influence on popular culture
Vampires, it would seem, are everywhere in our culture.
Forever young: In youthjuice, E.K. Sathue skewers the beauty and wellness industry with a twisted satire
Sathue's novel is the fist release from the Soho Press horror imprint Hell's Hundred.
Bestselling author Stephanie Wrobel talks about plotting, the difference between suspense and surprise, and the influence of one of cinema’s masters on her latest novel
"I don't think any of us are 100% good or 100% bad. And I think it's kind of boring to portray characters that way."
Welcome to the rat race: Fifty years on, James Herbert’s first novel retains its pulpy ability to shock and offend
The one area that literary craft does get elevated a bit beyond a pulp sensibility is in the East London setting.
Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan bridges the gap between pulp horror and the paperback explosion of the ’70s
Russell was an executive editor at Playboy, where he published such canonical writers as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson.
In Maeve Fly, CJ Leede rewrites American Psycho with an L.A. setting and a female narrator
Leede's great sleight of hand is in her ability to make us feel something for Maeve.
Latin American shivers: Mariana Enriquez’s latest collection locates the uncanny in the lives of women and marginalized Argentinians
The twelve stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People, ably translated by veteran collaborator Megan McDowell, hold their social subtexts more or less on their metaphorical sleeve.