Book Review – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Horror of Repair: Reimagining an Uncanny Classic

October 13, 2026 No Comments

Robert W. Chambers’s visions of the future anticipated some things that have not yet come to pass, including personal booths intended for suicide. (Readers of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s graphic novel Providence will also be familiar with the structures in question.) The title of one of his best-known works points to one of the things he predicted perfectly: The Repairer of Reputations. Nowadays there’s an entire industry dedicated to this; potentially industries, depending on whether you consider online reputation management and crisis PR to be distinct or interwoven.

Book Review, Books, Featured

Six Ridiculous Questions: Alex Behr

October 1, 2026 No Comments

The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.

Book Review, Books, Featured

“Flyboy in the Buttermilk” Will Make You Want to Be a Better Writer

September 23, 2026 No Comments

There are many reasons to pick up Greg Tate’s recently-reissued Flyboy in the Buttermilk, beginning with the fact that it’s a triumphant, wide-ranging collection of nonfiction and cultural commentary. Add in the presence of introductions by both Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib, each of whom does an excellent job of pointing out why Tate’s work mattered when at the time it was written and continues to matter, and you have the makings of a classic returning to print.

Book Review, Books, Featured

This Anthology Charts Katherine Dunn’s Influence on Horror

September 1, 2026 No Comments

The last decade has seen an increase in works from Katherine Dunn’s archive seeing print, from her ruminations on profanity to a posthumous story collection. Dunn’s bibliography covers a lot of thematic territory, and while Geek Love is her best-known work, it’s far from her only book worth discussing. Also notable about Geek Love: among the accolades it’s received is a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award.

Book Review, Books, Featured

Baltimore Nightmares: On “Fetty On the Switches”

August 25, 2026 No Comments

Some horror stories play on primal fears and anxieties; others work by creating monsters so unsettling the reader will have no choice but to flinch. David Simmons’s stories often pursue a third path: creating a profound sense of a world where nearly everything has gone wrong, like a trap door carved in morality that you can’t avoid.

Book Review, Books, Featured, Food

On the Enduring Appeal of Pasta

August 18, 2026 No Comments

In a culinary landscape often crowded with over-complicated techniques and hard-to-come-by ingredients, Jacob Kenedy’s Pasta Tricolore arrives like a breath of fresh, Mediterranean air. It isn’t merely a cookbook; it’s a joyous, technicolor love letter to beloved Italian cuisine.

Book Review, Books, Featured

Fact, Fiction, and “Fights!”: On Scott McClanahan’s New Book

August 6, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been reading Scott McClanahan’s work for a long time — long enough to know that Fights!, his new novel, is not his first book with an exclamation mark in the title. (That would be Stories V!.) But there’s also something about Fights! that made reading it substantially different from the experience of reading McClanahan’s other work. And maybe that’s why I’m writing this, which is less of a review and more a case of me figuring things out using […]

Book Review, Books, Featured

A Technologist’s Nightmare: On Paul Tremblay’s “Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep”

July 29, 2026 No Comments

From reading the first fifty or so pages, a reader might be left with two key impressions of Paul Tremblay’s novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep. The first is that it represents something of a return to Tremblay’s crime-fiction roots, albeit with a science fiction twist; the second is that, as the title suggests, it’s an homage to Philip K. Dick. Both are true, up to a point, but this book also represents something of a genre-straddling sleight of hand.