It’s been a good while since I’ve posted a reading update. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading, though! And it turns out, my spring had a fairly strong slightly supernatural theme (with one outlier).
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo • ★★★★☆
I’d been putting off reading The Familiar for a while. A book set in Spain during the Inquisition? No, thanks! I’ll be depressed elsewhere.
But I’m glad I caved. In The Familiar, Luzia, a servant in a not-so-prominent household, can perform milagritos to help manage her work. Maybe that’s lightening the load on her way home from the market or cleaning something quickly. It’s also removing the char from a loaf of bread – the miracle that gets her found out by her employer.
Eventually, Luzia is brought to the Spanish court to compete in a secret tournament with other potential miracle workers. The entire time, Luzia has to walk several fine lines. She can’t let on that she knows the woman who is actually her aunt, a figure in Spanish court; she shouldn’t show her feelings for Santángel, a familiar; and she definitely should not perform any miracles that would make her look like a heretic – or expose that her family is Jewish.
This book was wonderfully full and a new era and place for historical fiction for me.
House of Splinters by Laura Purcell • ★★★★☆
There isn’t a Laura Purcell book out there that I haven’t absolutely devoured. When I discovered that The Silent Companions, her first major gothic release, got a prequel, I needed no further convincing.
House of Splinters gives the origins of the weird wooden cutouts that haunt a home in The Silent Companions. I still find the idea of them moving around and looking uncannily real very scary. I wouldn’t say it was as good as the original, but certainly worth a read. It was wonderfully atmospheric and captivating for any fans of gothic stories, old haunted estates, light witchcraft, and ghosts.
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis • ★★★☆☆
A few things about The Hounding: I do not think it can be called horror or suspense or even Gothic (despite how it’s often described), but it butts against all of these genres in the slightest of ways. All this to say that if those are your typical genres (like they are for me), The Hounding will help you stretch a bit.
In The Hounding, a group of sisters are accused of transforming into a pack of dogs after superstitious villagers hear howling and even claim to see them shapeshift. Are they actually shapeshifters? Is this just The Crucible with dogs? Who knows?!
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister • ★★★★☆
It’s been a few months since I finished The Bog Wife, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. I think it might be one of my most intriguing reads. Because I cannot stop thinking about it, I have to write about it, so SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Bog Wife follows the reclusive Haddesley family in remote Appalachia. The family patriarch and his children all live in their collapsing family home together. They very rarely leave the property; instead they obsessively tend to the bog, rehash their family history (more than ten generations of Haddesleys have lived on a bog – some overseas, many in Appalachia). The bog is their thing. The family is their thing. Their weird family history book written in old French is really their thing.
So when the patriarch begins to decline, his children begin the ritual of essentially feeding him to the bog. That means they have to call the one escaped Haddesley home. She returns and the family watches their dad sink into the bog (DARK).
Then the eldest son, Charlie, has to perform a ritual and dig up a wife from the bog. That’s where every Haddesley matriarch is from. WILD.
But the bog doesn’t produce a bog wife. The whole family is confused. The second son, Percy, thinks that he probably should have killed Charlie because Charlie can’t have children and continue the family line. But the rituals only work with the oldest living son.
And then Charlie discovers that the family’s legacy is pretty much a farce. There are no ten generations of Haddesleys on the property. It’s five at best. But then where did their mother come from? Who is the woman who just floated up from the bog?
It’s a lot! It’s Shirley Jackson! It’s The Village by M. Night Shyamalan! It’s something else entirely.
Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller • 🎧 • ★★★☆☆
Here’s the outlier of the season: A celebrity memoir that’s as far from dark and ominous as it gets. But that’s what makes it fun!
During the tail end of my maternity leave, I started watching Somebody Somewhere on HBO. I had plowed my way though a lot of TV during nighttime feedings to keep myself awake. Somebody Somewhere soon became a show I wanted to watch rather than one that I would watch just so I wouldn’t fall asleep holding our baby.
This was very much due to Hiller’s performance as Joel. The character was so real and joyful. And then I realized I’d seen Hiller in a few other shows, like the season of American Horror Story that I never finished and as a flight attendant in an episode of 30 Rock. After seeing his Emmy speech in 2025, I was totally charmed by Hiller.
So I got the audiobook from the library (which has a fantastic cover), and enjoyed his story. He talks about persistence, loss, compromise, and eating a lot of Tate’s Cookies. It was mostly light and fluffy, but I think he wrote about the loss of his parents very well as well as his foundation of faith (which isn’t something I typically love, but I do like his perspective).
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