Author: Daniel O'Malley
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

If you are in the market for a seriously fun fantasy novel, you could do far worse than The Rook.  Think super-secret organization designed to protect Britain from paranormal threats. O'Malley writes with great humor and heart, keeping the reader fully engaged.

Author: Josh Malerman
Rating: 5 Stars
Review By: Shana

Malerman's debut novel certainly does not come across as a rookie endeavor. Instead, it is an excellent blend of SF and horror, playing on uncertainty and fear of the unknown and unseen. Our main character is a young woman named Mallory, and from the first chapter we know she is facing some unfathomable danger in a world both familiar and dissonant to our own, where venturing outside requires blindfolds, and a trip on a river holds both promise and dread.

Author: Spencer Kope
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Review By: Shana

This was a nicely done FBI procedural with a twist - one half of the "Special Tracking Unit" masquerades as a man tracker but actually has something of a paranormal power to track people by their unique "shine" (an aura or essence that is particular to each individual). Known as "Steps," very few people know the true source of his amazing tracking ability.

Author: Matt Ruff
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

Lovecraftian themes, and their attendant horror, are put to supremely clever use in this book, where the supernatural has to struggle to be as terrifying as the realities of living as an African-American during Jim Crow times.

Author: Liz Jensen
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

Another book in the long line of horror and horror-adjacent stories that casts children as antagonist, monster, an inscrutable and malevolent force.  

Author: Stephen King 
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

​King ties up this trilogy well, with most loose ends taken care of but not in too pat or too convenient a way. The trilogy began as somewhat standard mystery fare, with retired police detective Bill Hodges unable to fully walk away from an unsolved case. Over the course of the trilogy this became more than just a game of cat and mouse between Hodges and the main antagonist (of course, at any given point the reader was unsure who exactly was the cat). The cast of characters expanded and gradually a supernatural aspect was introduced. In this third book, the inexplicable mixes with the classic mystery/private investigator mold, with just a tinge of the horror King is well known for.

​Imagine a world where magic is everywhere but most people don’t see it. Feels fairly typical, doesn’t it? Like any of a host of fictional landscapes where the fantastic and the mundane are side-by-side, but only those with special powers are fully aware. Such stories are usually largely bright and cheery, and often driven forward by non-adult characters. And should the tale stray into darkness, the conflict is often resolved by the triumph of good (think Harry Potter and its predecessors). The darkness is there and important, but not typically overwhelming. You get some excellently crafted stories that skew a bit older and a bit more serious, like Lev Grossman's “The Magicians” (which I am embarrassed to admit I have yet to finish), with magic as a costly thing, requiring serious study and perseverance, and plots that cannot neatly resolve into good versus evil. 

Author: John Connolly  
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

​What if the only thing standing between the Devil (aka, the Great Malevolence) and the destruction of the world was eleven year old Samuel Johnson and his trusty dachshund, Boswell? John Connolly (yes, THAT John Connolly) answers the question aptly.  

Author: Marcus Sakey 
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Review By: Shana

​Another rousing thriller from Sakey, but this time instead of SF twists it is the paranormal that makes a crime procedural something more. It appears to be present day and a sniper is terrorizing Chicago. With the body count in the upper teens and no solid leads, we meet two FBI agents (Will Brody and his supervisor, Claire McKoy) who are struggling to track the killer. Also par for Sakey's course is that these two characters are falling in love and that they are equally capable in a fight. The twist here is that when one of the characters falls victim to the sniper they find themselves in some sort of afterlife, known by its denizens as the Echo. 

​Author: Scott Hawkins
Rating: 3 Stars
Review By: Shana

​This book started out promisingly enough, with Hawkins doing his best work in the introduction.  It grabs a reader immediately with a face first plunge into discomfiting strangeness tinged with the echo of violence.  Carolyn, our main character, wanders down a highway barefoot and bloody, and we first hear about the librarians of the eponymous library.  It doesn’t take much insight to realize that this must be no ordinary library and no ordinary librarians.  Hawkins introduces the various librarians, who feel suitably different from “normal” characters. You feel things are alien and unsettled and wrong. Interludes that flesh out the librarians, their studies, and the enigmatic and threatening Father are the best parts of the book.