As Yet Untitled

Is anyone else looking for something not-quite-horror to read this fall? Because I have a little something for you. Natasha Wittman's Wolves and Men delivers sufficient creepiness, action, and nature scenery (which for some reason I always associate with fall) to keep you feeling frisky and leave you with a satisfying read. One of my very favorite things about reading books is seeing characters that like books as much as I do. For me, it just adds a whole new level of intimacy with the main character and I have also discovered a lot of new reading material by seeking out books that my favorite protagonists had read. This might be why I ultimately enjoyed Natasha Wittman's work. In Wolves and Men , the protagonist is a brainy, highly troubled poetry major who not only uses the wilderness to sort out her problems, but frames her experiences amid the myriad books she has read and loved over the years. This is a novel that is rich in literary allusion, and no slouch when i...

Contemporary Americans live in a fascinating time. A time when audiences are notoriously hard to trick, surprise, or frighten. Authors everywhere are enduring a constant struggle to keep readers on their toes and shock them with a twist ending they never expected. This struggle is nicely battled in Becca J. Campbell’s novel, Foreign Identity , where suspense and horror are balanced with genuine human emotion and an overwhelming sense of mystery. The novel is, in short, steeped in the unexplainable, bringing to mind some of the most entertaining episodes of The X-Files and psychological suspense movies like Shutter Island . In Foreign Identity , the two heroes (a man and a woman) are thrown unceremoniously into a horrific maze of vaguely familiar circumstances, which they must work together to put in context.   The characters are very real entities, with real, human problems that are eked out in front of the backdrop of an eerily perfect landscape. This setting throws the...