Proud of what I was able to get through, even with moving to a new state smack dab in the middle of it all. Horror was my main squeeze for the year, but definitely went down some other rabbit holes. I was going to do a play-by-play but lost all steam, so here's some cursory thoughts
Dream Story (1926)Arthur Schnitlzer
Really surprising how closely Kubrick stuck to this for Eyes Wide Shut. Can see how this kind of story could simmer away with the guy for several decades, unlocking a greater sense of paranoia than the original ever aspired to.
What Moves The Dead (2021)T. Kingfisher
Extended riff on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher from a modern perspective which steadily becomes its own thing. Fungal curiosity & gender fuckery are invited to dine alongside a smooth gothic tale. Really loved this iteration of Madeline. Poe kept her at a ghastly distance, more a figure for Roderick to possess and obsess over. But here she has this whole character driven deal and opts out of our whole "limits of existence" thing :)
Found: An Anthology Of Found Footage Horror Stories (2022) Andrew Cull, Gabino Iglesias, ed.
And over here is Exhibit A for Anthology That Hits all the way down! Charmed and chilled by the whole concept and implementation, lot of fun with this one.
Mythago Wood (1984)Robert Holdstock
Apparently really influential and a total unknown to me. Was most immediately reminded of what Susanna Clarke later dips into with her Piranesi. Some pretty interesting tangents on mankind's assemblages of storytelling and lore... ha, and also (inadvertently?) the English male ego.
Summer Sons (2021)Lee Mandelo
I think this one went for my throat more than usual. A really visceral haunting, but most of the story is complicated by a protracted tension of repressed desire and slow-burning self-acceptance. Excellent. (Too protracted for some readers, judging from a few of those reviews, but sometimes a character just has to move forward at their own impossible pace.) Did this mostly as an audiobook, a rare thing for me; narrator Will Damron and his Southern twang did a great job setting the scene!
Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories (2019)Neil Christopher, Kelly Ward, Grace Shaw, Kathleen Keenan, ed.
The cold and the dark and the living in it, dealing with it, and having to reckon with it. Exciting work
Mapping the Interior (2017)Stephen Graham Jones
Of the four Jones books I read "Mapping..." may just be the finest dread work of the whole bunch for me, and possibly even with the rest of the year's reading. And hearing him speak at a 2022 event prompted me to also seek out "The Least of My Scars" (2013); one of the kinds of things a writer just has to disgorge from time to time, saying he was not in a good way and even lost weight in the writing of it.
A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2003)László Krasznahorkai
Brain expanding/contracting shit, left me in a pleasant muddle. Enters a poetic space more often than not. I'd made it not quite halfway through his more famous Satantango before having to give up; had been planning to pair it with the massive 7 1/2 hour film adaptation from the 90's. Maybe can re-adjust the headspace, try again this year?
Ego Homini Lupus (2019)Gretchen Felker-Martin
Brutal stuff and I aimed to fester in it-- almost a kind of scouring/purifying effect with the descriptive horror. Like Herbert West once said, "Birth is always painful."
Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War (2015)Susan Southard
Concise and heartfelt, expanding upon a narrative where Hiroshima often gets the most international attention. Searing look at the (ongoing) effort of existing alongside a Western world forever trying to justify its actions.
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (2020)Les Payne, Tamara Payne
An incredible multi-decade work, finished posthumously by Payne's daughter and fellow researcher. Read through several books in tandem, including the "The Autobiography of..." which Les Payne originally wrote in conversation with Malcolm X, and to which this acts as a kind of immense companion piece and follow-through, contextualizing so much, fact-checking like hell, and rounding out the subsequent years and their revelations. Powerful, potent stuff!
Piercing (1994)Ryū Murakami
Read through a couple of his books for the first time and any one of them could be under the spotlight. (There's also a separate conversation to be had about what the hell is even going on with many of the international cover designs, lmao!) The violence, the dark humor, the social/cultural "surgery" being undertaken... I may be a little smitten by it all and also on edge. Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies are both next, wish me luck!
Sacred and Terrible Air (2013)Robert Kurvitz
There's no official release as of yet, this was the very recent fan translation. Pretty remarkable! Very dense and layered... an all-encompassing feeling. You really get a sense of Disco Elysium's world being hashed out here, and also makes me wonder how thoroughly lost I'd have been without my play-through of the game to ground me. Reader perspective is floating. Time is batted about, sometimes sentence to sentence. So much of that world being filled in, but almost in a free-form manner.