I got another bingo on my Book Bingo Card, so now it’s time for some reviews. I’m making a lot of progress on this card. Not sure if I’ll be able to finish it, but for now I have five good books to talk about. This was a very horror focused line, which is not my usual thing, but I had a lot of fun. Also only one full length novel on this line, but I’ve always been a huge fan of novellas, and am happy to have a chance to talk about a couple.

If you want to know all the details of my 2025 Book Bingo Challenge, check out my Book Bingo page HERE. It’s not too late to grab a card and play along.

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Challenge: Translated From Japanese

Book: The Liminal Zone – Junji Ito

Rating:

This is a collection of four short comic stories. I’ve never encountered short stories in a visual novel/comic/manga format before, so this was an interesting experience, despite not always gelling with horror shorts. The stories included in this volume are; Weeping Woman Way, Madonna, The Spirit Flow of Aokigahara and Slumber.

Ito’s art style is simple, but really effective. All the visuals look so creepy, especially some of the haunted faces we see. Slumber had some particularly horrific looks. Despite this, nothing is gory or disgusting. Doing art that is creepy without being gross is a balance that Junji Ito does it well.

Reading the afterward, Ito describes these four stories as “ideas that I’d left unused in an old notebook of possible topics.” Once I read this, I went “Oh, that makes sense”, because whilst I enjoyed these stories, they felt like trunk stories. They were simple and short not necessarily because they were conceived as short stories, but because that’s all Ito could get out of the idea. My favourite two were Weeping Woman Way and Slumber. The other two felt more like ideas than full stories.

Challenge: Non Marvel or DC Superheroes

Book: Dreadnaught – April Daniels

Rating: 5/5

This is a YA own-voices story about Danny, a young transgender girl who receives the powers of the world’s greatest superhero, Dreadnaught. These powers also give her her ‘idealized body’, which in this case means she is instantly physically transitioned. Reading about her being forced to come out, whilst discovering her powers and looking for the big bad who killed Dreadnaught was amazing.

his book was almost impossible to put down. The combination of the hero learning plotline and Danny’s personal struggles with coming out and dealing with her transphobic parents and asshole friend was so compelling. Seeing Danny struggle with all her self-doubt despite having super-powers felt so relatable too.

This book is part of the Nemesis Trilogy, though so far only two books have been released. If I wasn’t so eager to go fill out more bingo squares, I would have dived straight into the sequel, Sovereign. Dreadnaught wraps up it’s story nicely, whilst setting up the next antagonist and making us want to see more of Danny’s personal journey.

Challenge: Has Ghosts

Book: Haunt Sweet Home – Sarah Pinsker

Rating: 3.5/5

This is the first book I read this year, and I’m reviewing it in October. I’m having trouble remembering much about this novella, which is strange because Sarah Pinsker stories are usually super memorable to me. (shout out to Pinsker’s And Then There Were (N-One) which is one of my favourite novellas.) So, yeah, I docked a bit of my score just from that, but I do remember enjoying this story when I read it.

This novella is about a young woman, Mara, who is struggling to find her place in the adult world. She takes a job on her cousin’s ghost themed reality TV show, where she helps trick the homeowners of the week into thinking that their house is haunted. Eventually though she meets another production assistant who no-one else has mentioned, and things start getting spooky.

The horror elements weren’t very scary to me, and the twist was so obvious that I’m not convinced it’s meant to be a twist for the reader. However I loved Mara’s story, and the characterization in general was great. The whole ‘backstage during fake hanutings’ part of the book was a lot of fun. This was a fun story, and the novella was just the right length to tell it in. Not one of Pinsker’s best, but still worth reading.

Challenge: Title Starts With ‘P’

Book: Penric and the Bandit – Lois McMaster Bujold

Rating: 5/5

This is the 13th book chronologically in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series. I think this is one of the easier ones to read as a standalone, since it doesn’t directly connect to any other plotlines and has Penric and Desdemona away from their family and normal work. Still, reading this novella would be more enjoyable with the background provided by the previous books.

In this story, Sorcerer Penric is travelling to an abandoned temple of some sort in the hope of finding rare books. Along the way he meets a bandit who takes him as a week, gullible man and hatches a scheme to swindle him and leave him for dead. Of course, being a sorcerer means Penric has a powerful demon called Desdemona in his head, providing him with powerful magic and extra perception. They are onto the Bandit’s schemes rather quickly, and eventually our bandit comes to realise that his intended patsy is actually one of the most dangerous people in the world.

This is just a really fun fantasy adventure, with characters that you easily connect with and an excellent magic system. Penric and the Bandit has everything I love about this series, and proves to be one of the most action-packed entries in the series. I wouldn’t recommend it as the best entry point to the series, but it is possible to read on it’s own, and the Penric and Desdemona series is a must read.

Challenge: Short Fiction Magazine

Book: Dirty Magick Magazine Jan 2025 – C.D. Brown

Rating: 3.5/5

Dirty Magick Magazine is a new, I guess a semi-prozine, created by C.D. Brown. It publishes urban fantasy, swords and sorcery, and gothic horror with a somewhat ‘hardboiled’ flavour. This particular issue focuses more on the horror, with Mark Mitchell’s story “Another Roll, Mr…?” and Laura J. Campbell’s Skeleton Flowers both being on the creepier side of urban fantasy. The other story, June 2020 Human World Orientation Meeting on the other hand is a humorous piece about Loki hosting a zoom meeting to tell supernatural creatures how to live in the human world.

This is probably one of the weaker issues of Dirty Magick I’ve read. I liked the May issue more, and not just because my story was in there. The other two stories, Emmylou Kotzé’s A Tale of Two Killers and Vanessa MacLellan’s Malcolm’s Dirty Jobs were both really enjoyable fantasy adventures.

But I’m not talking about the May 2025 issue, or even Dirty Magick as a whole. Taken in isolation, the best I can say about Dirty Magick Jan 2025 is that it is alright, and good value for money. The three stories were good, but they haven’t ended up being very memorable. To be fair though, horror/darker short stories don’t tend to click with me a lot of the time, so the fact that I did like Campbell and Mitchell’s stories is fairly high praise from me. If you like stories that lean more towards horror, or want a more gritty, hard-boiled, noirish fantasy experience, definitely check out Dirty Magick.

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With that, I don’t have much more to add in an outro. Just that I think the next row should be completed soon. Happy reading everyone.

~ Jayde