Blog

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you wonder whether you've been telling yourself the wrong stories about your own life.

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden is the kind of novel that restores your faith in literature's ability to illuminate what it means to be human.

Roxy Cumberland is barely keeping her head above water while trying to make it as an actress in New York. With bills piling up and opportunities proving elusive, she takes a job performing singing telegrams. Unfortunately for Roxy, her first assignment involves dressing up as a giant pink bunny and delivering a rather explicit song to a wealthy Manhattan lawyer on behalf of one of his former conquests.

Ali Hazelwood has built an entire literary empire out of highly intelligent women, emotionally constipated men, and workplaces vibrating with unresolved tension, and Two Can Play slides neatly into that lineage. This time, though, the setting shifts from laboratories and academia into the world of video game development, painted as a landscape of crunch culture, professional rivalry, creative obsession, and people surviving almost entirely on caffeine and bad sleep schedules.

A lot of what happens here takes place in the mind rather than in space. There are still battles, still stakes, but they feel different. It's quieter, in a strange way and more abstract. It took me a while to settle into that, and I’m not sure I ever fully did.

Momentum is a strange kind of power in fiction. Some novels persuade slowly, almost imperceptibly; others seize you outright, pulling you forward with such force that resistance feels pointless. Along Came a Spider belongs, unmistakably, to the latter. It is not a novel that lingers at the edges of a reader’s attention—it insists, from its opening pages, on being followed.

And yet, that ambition is part of what makes Lost Lambs worth reading. It is not content to remain contained, to limit itself to the familiar satisfactions of the family novel. It wants to connect private disintegration to something systemic, to suggest that the instability within the Flynn household is not entirely separate from the structures surrounding it.

King Sorrow is less interested in what begins than in what continues. Joe Hill’s novel follows six friends bound by an occult pact that refuses to remain in the past, unfolding into a quiet, sustained study of responsibility, complicity, and the weight of carrying something forward.