This review was first published in and is reposted with permission of Shelf Awareness.
Every good slasher needs a nail-biting sequel as clever as the second entry in the Indian Lake trilogy. Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians; Night of the Mannequins) follows My Heart Is a Chainsaw and brings back Jennifer Daniels (formerly known as Jade) in Proofrock, Idaho, four years after the Independence Day Massacre. Accused of multiple crimes related to those events and cleared of everything except damaging federal property, for which a deal has been struck on the condition she stay out of trouble, Jennifer has started a new life. No longer will she be the slasher-movie superfan, laden with guilt for what happened when her slasher dreams came true. But just as she returns to town, a convicted serial killer known as Dark Mill South escapes nearby. Now Jennifer and Letha, whom Jennifer was once convinced would be the "final girl," destined to take down the last slasher, must use all their combined slasher-movie knowledge to get one step ahead of the new killer and back up whoever the new final girl might be. But Dark Mill South knows the slasher playbook just as well as they do.
Like the first in the series, Don't Fear the Reaper is a gory romp full of gallows humor. This second novel, a love letter to the slasher genre, continues to interrogate its clichés and raise questions about who is and isn't allowed to be a heroine. Readers will be eager to see what's in store for book three. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A haunted house acts as a physical embodiment of transphobia, racism and fascism in Tell Me I'm Worthless, the brutally dark debut from Alison Rumfitt. Alice is a transgender online sex worker whose life has been spiraling out of control since a night she spent in a haunted house three years ago with her friends Ila and Hannah. Alice and Ila have radically different memories of that night, although both remember a traumatic event taking place. Hannah never came out of the cursed house ("Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home," the house tells her, once she's inside); Ila has since become wildly transphobic; and Alice is struggling with the feeling of a malevolent presence in her house that sometimes takes the form of a racist pop star on a poster she only hung up to cover a mark on the wall. The two agree that in order to have any hope, they have to go back to confront the house and what happened to Hannah.
This is a raw, wrenching work of gothic horror that explores how fascism can metastasize, with a particular focus on its effects on marginalized communities in the United Kingdom. Readers who want to be aware of trigger warnings should definitely investigate before starting the novel: Rumfitt confronts an impressive range of potentially traumatizing subjects in a short work. Those who are up for engaging with the novel will be rewarded for the challenge and be eager to see more from this talented first-time author. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A student seeking to reinvent herself at university discovers that the clique she thinks is her chance might be even more dangerous than the secret she is trying to outrun in The Things We Do to Our Friends, Heather Darwent's tantalizingly sinister debut thriller. Clare arrives alone in Edinburgh with a focus as much on escaping an incident in her past (not disclosed until late in the novel) as on her studies. She knows she'll need to make connections with the sort of people who represent what she would like to be, and an encounter at the bar where she works with an unusually friendly group of privileged students, led by beautiful queen bee Tabitha, changes everything. It is not long until she even finds herself with an invitation to join them on a holiday to Tabitha's mother's house in France. Once there, Tabitha presents Clare with a business proposition, and when Clare hesitates to agree, she discovers that the others know about her past.
Darwent slowly metes out details of Clare's past as well as hints about her future--Clare retrospectively narrates, chapter one opening with "I've decided to look back and make some kind of sense of it all"--as Tabitha takes her project in increasingly darker directions. Readers will be on the edge of their seats with this gripping story of codependency and obsession, and fans of Kate Lowe's The Furies and J.T. Ellison's Good Girls Lie will devour this--and eagerly await more from Darwent. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library