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Book List: 2021 Favorites

Monster Librarian’s staff reviewed over 100 books in 2021. These included fiction, nonfiction, anthologies, short story collections, poetry, novels, graphic novels, and novellas of all kinds, for adults, teens, and middle graders, both traditionally and independently published. While many excellent books came our way, the following titles received the designation of “highly recommended” from our reviewers. With the exception of seven books on this list, these can all be purchased from our storefront at Bookshop.org.

I really hope that you will choose to support Monster Librarian by making your purchases though our storefront at Bookshop.org. or through the links provided with publication information in our reviews. We received almost no funding this year and were lucky to cover our hosting fees.

 

 

Novels:

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
Lakewood by Megan Giddings
Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman
Seeing Evil (Cycle of Evil #1) by Jason Parent
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo
Neptune’s Reckoning by Robert J. Stava
(Con)Science by PJ Manney
Final Girl by Wol-vriey
The Between by Ryan Leslie
Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons
To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini
Devil’s Creek by Todd Keisling
The Deep by Alma Katsu
Goblin: A Novel in Six Novellas by Josh Malerman
The Burning Girls  by C.J. Tudor
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

 

Young Adult:

Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare
Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales by Soman Chainani

 

Middle Grade:

The Girl and the Ghost  by Hanna Alkaf
Root Magic by Eden Royce
The Year I Flew Away by Marie Arnold
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston

 

Graphic Novels:

Road of Bones by Rich Douek and Alex Cormack
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (vols 1 and 2) by David Avallone, art by Dave Acosta
The Shape of Elvira by David Avallone, art by Fran Strukan (issues 1-3) and Pasquale Qualano (issue 4)
The Masque of the Red Death: Fine Art Edition by Edgar Allan Poe

 

 

Collections:

Coralesque: And Other Tales to Disturb and Distract by Rebecca Fraser
From the Depths: Terrifying Tales by Richard Saxon
Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies by John Langan
Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes
Grotesque: Monster Stories by Lee Murray

 

Anthologies:

Attack From the ’80s edited by Eugene Johnson
Howls from Hell: A Horror Anthology edited by HOWL Society
Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror edited by Joanna Roye and G.G. Silverman
Wicked Women: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers edited by Jane Yolen and Hilary Monahan
Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities, and Other Horrors edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

 

Poetry:

Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken. by Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, and Angela Yuriko Smith
A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh
Cradleland of Parasites by Sara Tantlinger

 

Nonfiction:

Cult Cinema by Howard David Ingham
Encyclopedia Sharksploitanica by Susan Snyder
The Devil and His Advocates by Nicholas Butler
Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre by Alison Peirse
The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films by Kelly Florence and Meg Hafdahl
1000 Women in Horror: 1895-2018 by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi by Sandra Niemi
Writing in the Dark by Tim Waggoner
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on January 4, 2022 by , Reply

15 Years of Monster Librarian

It is hard to believe we’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. My husband Dylan, the original Monster Librarian, posted the first reviews on January 1, 2006, just three months (and a couple of days) after our first child was born, because what better time to take on a gigantic project than when you have a newborn.

He founded Monster Librarian because at the time, he was working an internship at a branch of the Indianapolis Public Library as part of completing his master’s degree in library science, and he found that the librarians there didn’t know anything about the horror genre past Stephen King and had no interest in putting in the effort to learn more about it. At the time, much of the horror fiction available was also being published only by small presses not listed in the databases of major wholesalers like Baker & Taylor, Follett, and Ingram. It required a commitment for librarians to seek out publishers and order individual titles, and the books could be expensive ( I was working as an elementary school library media specialist at the time, and Baker & Taylor provided a 40% discount. That’s a big deal for a small budget). As a longtime horror reader who started building his collection as a teenager by haunting his local used book store, the indifference the librarians had to the horror genre was something her felt he needed to do something about.

At the same time, I was working with elementary kids who were asking me for scary books while sitting on an awards committee for my state library association’s children’s choice award. The way that was supposed to work was that we read all nominated books, then met to choose a representative sample of 20 books that would cover all genres. The genre I had to fight for was horror. It went beyond indifference– some committee members actively disliked it. I had done research into reading engagement while working on my MLS and one thing Dylan and I both agreed on was how important it was to hook kids and teens with what researcher Stephen Krashen calls “home run books”. So many kids and teens get hooked through scary stories and horror that he felt it was important to reach librarians and advocate for the horror genre for readers. This was his passion and he posted reviews even after he became ill and through five years of painful migraines and chronic, life-imparing pain, until just before he died in 2014. I think he’d be delighted to see all the positive changes that have occurred in the horror genre and in librarians’ attitudes and knowledge of the horror genre and scary stories for kids since the site was founded in 2006.

I love seeing the diversity growing in the genre. There is still plenty of room for growth, but wow, things have changed a lot, and mostly for the better. I think Dylan would love to see it.

I would like to make sure we are providing useful information to you. Monster Librarian is an all-volunteer effort and I need to make sure we are at least covering our hosting costs and postage. That costs about $200  every year and we almost didn’t make it this year. Without your support, either through purchasing items through Monster Librarian’s store at Bookshop.org or contributing through Paypal, we will struggle to continue our work, and after this long at running the site, I’m not sure what I would do without it! Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll be back again soon!

 

Posted on January 1, 2021 by , Reply

Please Help Monster Librarian Out!

As anyone who visits us knows, Monster Librarian is all volunteer-run. While we are an Amazon affiliate, Amazon hasn’t paid out anything since 2014. A few months ago we also became an affliate of Bookshop.org, which looks like it might eventually pay something out, but still not enough to cover our expenses. Covering our hosting fees and postage costs about $200 a year. If we wanted to do more than we already do, we would have to raise more.

It has been our policy since the site began in 2006 that Monster Librarian does not accept paid advertising (with the exception of our relationships with Amazon and Bookshop.org)  in order to eliminate any doubt about bias in our reviews, which we work to keep honest and objective in order to best serve our audience of librarians and readers interested in learning more about and reading in the horror genre.

So I ask that if you can, that you help us out by contributing financially. Monster Librarian is an LLC, so your contribution is not a tax deductible donation, it’s simply a way to support the work we are doing.  We are now more than halfway through the year, and we are well below where we need to be just to keep going at the bare minimum. If  you think what we are doing is important enough to contribute and you’re already directly reading the blog,  click on the bright red “contribute” button in the sidebar on the right. If you are reading this on our Facebook page, you can just click on the “Shop Now” button, which will bring you to the Monster Librarian blog, and if you scroll down a bit, you will see the red “contribute” button.  Just click on the button and that will take you to Paypal.

If you’d like to see Monster Librarian continue, or even stretch further, we really need your support. Thank you.

 

Kirsten Kowalewski, Editor.

 

Posted on August 13, 2020 by , Reply
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