October reads

 Lots more books read in October, due to a week of vacation in a place with no TV or internet, and actually getting them posted timely here, due to getting my shit together somewhat.

• Night Shift by Stephen King.  A re-read of his first collection of short stories because I didn't want to start in on my horde of library books until vacation started.  You know how I feet about his short stories.  You should probably read them, this one or Skeleton Crew to start.
• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy.  Reviews seem to think it's akin to a lovechild between Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, which I guess I can see.  I found it weird and not entirely cohesive, plus I didn't like either of the main characters.
• Fever House by Keith Russon.  A couple of enforcers sent around to collect for their boss end up with a severed hand that incites madness, bloodthirsty killing and uncontrollable rage.  The hand makes its way across the city, wreaking havoc.  This is supposed to be a sprawling horror/crime novel and sprawling is right - the interconnections didn't really interconnect for me and the ending is a clear set up for the sequel.  Didn't care for this one all that much.
• Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.  At this point, I'm on a roll with books I don't love.  When Abby's mother-in-law dies, she goes all in to save her husband, fight the mother-in-law's ghost and create the perfect family for herself.  The gross parts are fun and it's definitely got some funny parts - but again, I just didn't like the protagonist.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  In which we switch gears from horror to fantasy.  Piranesi lives in a labyrinth world, ruled by tides and populated only by him, birds, statues and dead bodies.  This is a weird one, with ruminations on knowledge and belief, but I did like it.
• You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (which sounds like a pseudonym to me, which is fine).  A young adult slasher in book form: a bunch of kids who work at a live action haunted house, set up like a summer camp in a slasher film, actually find themselves face to face with a masked killer on the last night of the concession.  It was cute, I guess, and pretty murdery.  But also pretty light-weight.
• The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs novel!  Maisie is hired by American parents to track down the English nurse their son fell in love with during WWI, before he was killed.  But it looks like he was killed by his own men ... Good one.
• Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib.  Todd, single father and English teacher, gets gaslit by a former high school bully, Jack, after a chance (?) meeting at the beach.  Jack insinuates himself into Todd's life and things escalate A LOT from there.  This is like two totally different books and ends up going completely off the rails.  I sort of liked it until I definitely didn't.
• A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Back to Maisie Dobbs, who does an undercover job  for the British Secret Service as a professor in Cambridge, as Europe rolls inexorably towards WWII.  I am so glad I found out about this series - I do love British murder mysteries.
• A History of Fear by Luke Dumas.  University of Edinburgh graduate student Grayson Hale achieves notoriety when he murders a fellow student and then claims the Devil made him do it.  The novel is from the POV of Daniela, a reporter, as she goes through the evidence after Hale is found dead in his cell, reading Hale's memoir and adding her own comments and portions of third party interviews.  Twisty, slow burn, unreliable narrators.  Pretty good.
• The Songs of Trees by Davie George Haskell.  What ho - non-fiction!  Haskell visits a number of trees around the world over a period of years, commenting on their connections to the life around them: fungi, bacterial colonies, other plants, communities of animals, indigenous people, the owners of the corner bodegas.  Everything is connected, in this increasingly fragmented world.