Happy Sunday, peeps! I’ve not long wrapped up streaming for today so I’m pretty low energy. Why not run through the best of what I have read this year so far? If I’m not reviewing, I gotta share those thoughts somehow! Will include quotes from my Goodreads reviews.

5 – Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry

I’ve wanted to read Kagen the Damned since adding it to my upcoming releases post, back when I did those.¹ The cover is gorgeous and the blurb intrigued the hell out of me. The one thing I didn’t know until I read it, however? It’s high fantasy horror!! I really want to find more horror set in high fantasy worlds. Kagen? Well I won’t spoil where it goes, as I had that spoiled for me and I think that can be a kinda cool twist. That said… it does draw on lore from a setting we are very familiar with in the modern age, and while super cool… it is also a touch immersion breaking. But to hell with it, I loved it. It is grimdark though so content warning for sexual assault.

it’s a damn good story and a world that I just want to devour. It’s dark and gritty, it’s got that mythic quality to it I always long for in my epic fantasy, with lost civilisations thousands of years in the past and strange forces the people have forgotten about, and of course, a hearty lick of cosmic horror.

4 – Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Now here’s a book I have had on my Kindle for literal years. I can’t even remember why I started collecting Joe Hill books, I had Heart Shaped Box, 20th Century Ghosts, and Nos4R2 on my Kindle and Horns in a box somewhere. Early in 2023, me and Rini started madly devouring books. It’s rare that our hyperfixations line up so it was really nice, and we decided to buddy read this book! So naturally this did increase my enjoyment of the book, because I read it with my best friend and we got to discuss it as we read, but it was also an interesting story that took an interesting angle and went down an interesting path. I just liked it!

I loved all the symbolism Hill used throughout, and the character growth and development. It even brought me to tears by the end, which I didn’t expect. Especially as I actually found by halfway through my reading mood switched hard from horror to high fantasy so I had to just keep going to get it finished at that point. Loved it though. Joe Hill is a great writer, so I’m looking forward to NOS4R2 and Horns, which I also own!

3 – The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

This was one of the horror books that came out in 2023 that I didn’t hear of until people were wrapping up their best of 2023 reads. To be fair I don’t often keep up with what’s releasing, only seeing things here and there. I struggle to keep up with news sites, blogs, Youtube, all of it. So those round-ups are always great to catch the books I missed that folks think are worth checking out. The Reformatory is a supernatural horror, sure, but despite the ghosts, this is a book about the horror of racism within 1950 Florida, the height of Jim Crow. It is a ride from start to finish and let me tell you, I don’t often enjoy reading from the perspective of children, but Robert and his sister? Amazing. All the side characters, too. It’s just incredible and now I gotta go find everything Tananarive Due has ever written.

It’s no surprise that in a book about a haunted Reformatory School for Boys, the ghosts are not the scariest part. I was so sad to leave these characters behind, I wanted so badly to hear how the rest of their lives went. But it ended at the perfect time, in the perfect way. I truly think this book would make for a great movie.

2 – Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

I started reading Starve Acre because I really do prefer to read a book before watching a movie than the other way around, and Starve Acre is coming to our screens very very soon, starring Matt Smith. I absolutely adore folk horror and I didn’t want this to be one I put off to “read the book first” as I so often do.² At 166 pages, it reads very quick. We’ve got parents living in the boonies dealing with their overwhelming grief after the death of their only child, a seance of sorts, and a mystery within the land they own as part of their property. It’s weird, as all good folk horror tends to be. And I did not write much on Goodreads for this one.

Very quick read! Very good, too. Lovely piece of folk horror that analyses parental grief.

1 – The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Now, hear me out. Naithin has recently brought up my ‘Sanderson? Not a Fan‘ post in the Blaugust Discord recently and I’m calling this my official retraction. I decided to give Brandon Sanderson one last go. And I remembered adoring The Way of Kings, so that’s where I needed to turn. I’d read the first two in the Stormlight Archive however my memory is so bad I could only remember bits and pieces, so if I was to continue the series, I really had to do a reread. The audiobook narrator didn’t do it for me so I pulled out my unwieldy paperback and dug in. I was so surprised at how much I fell back in love, how varaciously I read all 1,001 pages, considering how sure I was that he wasn’t for me any more. Stormlight is so thick with detail, the worldbuilding and magic systems incredible, the unfolding mysteries and just what is going on I have to know!!

So yeah, The Way of Kings is still a firm favourite of mine, despite my changing reading tastes. I’m going to be continuing this read soon… ish. And perhaps I’ll dip a toe back into the rest of the Cosmere, see if perhaps it was just the wrong reading mood, or perhaps Stormlight is all I can do. Who knows. But I sure am a fan of Sanderson, in my own way.

I enjoyed the book even more this time around (bare in mind my memory is terrible so it was moreorless like reading for the first time), I’d even go so far as to call it “masterful”.

And that’s my 5 best books of the year so far! Have you read any of these? What are your tops thus far? I need to know!

1. Kinda miss doing them, honestly, but I’d spend like 3 entire days getting them done and that’s just too much. [↩]
2. Still haven’t gotten around to finishing up Game of Thrones… [↩]