2022 Horror Must-Reads, Part 2: The Re-Frightening

If, like me, you grew up rabidly consuming ’80s fantasy films like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, you need to read The Shadow Glass. Jack used to love his father Bob Corman’s critical flop turned cult puppet fantasy film The Shadow Glass. That is, until his relationship with the film, and his father, soured. Estranged from his father for years, it’s only after Bob’s death that Jack, reluctantly, returns to his childhood home and the memories he buried there. When the creatures that populated his father’s film and Jack’s childhood adventures suddenly come to life, and insist that they need Jack’s help in saving their world, he finds himself catapulted into an impossible adventure to save both the fictional world of Iri and our world from certain destruction.

I have loved every single Alien book that I have thus far picked up with my greedy little hands, and Castro’s Aliens: Vasquez is definitely no exception. Jenette Vasquez was a secondary but unforgettable character in Aliens, and I can’t think of anyone who could have done her life story better justice than Castro. But Aliens: Vasquez isn’t just about Jenette and how she came to be on the ill-fated Hadley’s Hope mission. It’s also about her two children, now grown, who — though their lives have now gone in drastically different directions — also find themselves on a distant planet facing down the same chitinous nightmare creatures their mother did battle with so many years ago.

The hard part of this list wasn’t deciding “if” to include an Eric LaRocca book so much as “which one,” given that he’s had three amazing books published in 2022. But going back through my notes from this year, I realized I’ve yet to sing the praises of You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood on The Fright Stuff, and that’s not an opportunity I want to miss. This was the first of LaRocca’s books I ever read, and I’m so glad I started here. There’s a strange, Gothic-y, gloomy but gorgeous, dreamlike quality to this novella within a novella that instantly fascinated me, and I’ve been auto-buying ever since. To say anymore would be to give too much away! You’ll have to go see for yourself.

Gosh I love this book. I know the phrase “unputdownable” is overused, but I honestly was glued to my copy the whole time. Burn Down, Rise up is an unforgettable, action-packed rush of a horror book, where history and urban legend collide with deadly force. Fifteen year old Raquel’s life has just been upended by a violent attack that left her mother in a coma and infected by some unidentifiable mold-like substance that is slowly killing her. At the same time, Cisco — the cousin of Raquel’s crush Charlize — has disappeared and eye witnesses have identified him as the person who attacked and infected Raquel’s mother. Together, along with two other teens, Raquel and Charlize must venture into a world of ghosts and brutal histories, chasing an urban legend that may hold the key to saving their loved ones. But only if the girls can survive the Echo Game.