Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl

I had a very mixed response to Gone Girl, and a decidedly see-saw reading experience. It features two strong and very distinct authorial voices, both rendered with considerable verve, and these initially drew me in. But I quickly grew impatient with long lags between broad hints (not nearly subtle enough to be called foreshadows) and

Bill Loehfelm: The Devil She Knows

Loehfelm’s noirish suspense novel revolves around a memorable trio of characters. Maureen Coughlin is tough, canny, and proud. She’s in a dead-end waitressing job, struggling mightily to make ends meet. She’s a little hard to like and makes some poor choices, but Loehfelm gets the reader well inside her head, so even her worst behavior

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions. The first thing I noticed

Stephen Gallagher: Plots and Misadventures

The twelve stories comprising Plots and Misadventures span nearly twenty years of Gallagher’s career and encompass horror, dark fantasy, noirish suspense, and dark science fiction. The newer material generally stuck me as among the strongest, a circumstance I’m always happy to report. The collection opens audaciously: the story “Little Dead Girl Singing,” which certainly sounds

Jennifer Egan: The Keep

The Keep had me enthralled within the first handful of pages, and held me that way throughout; I devoured it in a single day, almost literally in a single sitting. It’s a tricky book to discuss without giving the wrong things away, but within the first chapter the reader has clues that the relationship between

Dave Zeltserman: Small Crimes

I ran across the elevator pitch for the third of Zeltserman’s “Badass Gets Out of Jail” books and thought it sounded more than a little Charlie Huston-esque, so I checked out the first in the series, Small Crimes. Turns out it’s not the same badass — each book starts with a (different) felon being released

Catherine Jinks: Evil Genius

About a quarter of the way through Evil Genius I was pretty sure I had it sussed: a dark parody of the Harry Potter series. By then titular genius Cadel Piggott, who by early adolescence is well down the path leading to an eventual Antisocial Personality Disorder diagnosis, has been packed off to the Axis

Karen Novak: Innocence

Karen Novak’s creepy suspense novel Innocence impressed me on several levels. It has some vividly drawn characters, and a twisty plot that managed to surprise me more than once. It has an unusual structure, employing shifts of narrative perspective and chronology to build dramatic tension. And Novak’s prose evinces both an eye for interesting detail

John Harwood: The Seance

I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer‘s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if

Charlie Huston: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

I didn’t read any of the jacket copy before starting The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, so all I knew about it to start was second-hand information that it had received a lukewarm response from Huston’s fans. And admittedly it was the first of the Huston novels I’ve read that didn’t snag