Gothic Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Wonder – Emma Donoghue

April 7, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Emma Donoghue turned her talent for writing horrifying domestic psychodrama to 19th century Ireland for The Wonder, a story inspired by the real-life cases of Fasting Girls. A young English nurse is sent to a small Irish town, charged with verifying a “living wonder” – an eleven-year-old girl who claims to have eaten nothing for months on end.

The nurse is Lib Wright, a woman widowed at a tender age who went on to train under Florence Nightingale caring for injured soldiers during the Crimean war. Lib alternates shifts on “watch” over the girl (Anna O’Donnell) with a Catholic nun, whom she doesn’t entirely trust to apply the same scientific rigor. Together, they observe every moment of the girl’s existence, waking and sleeping, to confirm that she consumes nothing but a few teaspoons of water each day.

Lib starts the job with a firm belief that Anna is a trickster, secreting food in some way and presenting herself as a “miracle” for the attention (not to mention the money). And yet, despite her best efforts, Lib can’t find any evidence to support that hypothesis. The Wonder turns into a mystery of sorts, with Lib turning every stone looking for an answer – how is Anna surviving without food? And, before long, Lib starts asking an even more important question: why?

Lib’s natural skepticism of Anna’s claims is exacerbated by the religious divide between them (English Lib being a Protestant with very little faith, while Anna and her family – and her whole town – are devout Roman Catholics), not to mention the class differences. On many occasions throughout The Wonder, Lib is forced to confront the blinders of her own privilege. I’m really impressed with how Donoghue managed to bring together so many weighty themes in such an apparently simple story: sitting watching a girl not eat turns into an interrogation of English colonisation, the emergence of nursing as an independent discipline, and the clash of science and faith.

Naturally, given The Wonder‘s conceit (watching over a starving child), readers should be prepared for instances of self-harm, child neglect and abuse. The historical nature of the setting hopefully puts it at a step removed enough to make it palatable for readers who might otherwise struggle with that kind of content, because it’s a really fascinating read.

Read The Wonder on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Wonder:

“Long, boring. Florence Nightingale is probably rolling over in her grave right now.Don’t waste your time reading this book. Amen” – Cassie MORETZ
“Her only goal seemed to be selling books and getting glowing praise from others on the liberal left” – Amazon Customer

Dark Places – Gillian Flynn

November 4, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Having read and reviewed Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, it’s high time I completed the trifecta, don’t you think? Dark Places was her second novel, first published back in 2009.

The story follows Libby Day, a woman who – as a child – was the sole survivor of a family massacre in a small town in Kansas. Flynn kind of buries the lede with the start of her story. It’s not the opening line of Dark Places, but this sentence jumped out at me from the first page and I reckon it should’ve been: “I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders.”

For the most part, the story unfolds in the present day, twenty-four years after the massacre. Libby completely bucks the “perfect victim” stereotype (as you’d expect for a Gillian Flynn protagonist). She’s rude, she’s mean, she steals things just because she can, and she’s happy to sell off mementos of her family tragedy for cash if it means she doesn’t have to get a job. And yet, you can’t help but like her – she’s funny.

In the hopes that they’ll pay her for her insider knowledge, Libby falls in with a group of amateur sleuths. They have all kinds of theories about what really happened on the night of the massacre, and they’re not shy about telling Libby – to her face! – that her own memories of what happened when she was a child were manufactured by narrow-minded cops with preconceived ideas. They do indeed end up paying Libby to track down people who might have valuable information, like a girl who accused her brother of sexual assault and Libby’s alcoholic estranged father. As Libby undertakes these mercenary investigations, she realises that maybe the murderinos are onto something after all.

The ending of Dark Places – the “truth” of what happened to Libby’s family – is a bit convoluted, but it does fit together if you’ve paid close enough attention throughout the story. It’s a smidge less believable than Flynn’s other novels, but I attribute that mostly to the compressed timeline; the reader will have to stretch a little to truly accept that all of these events coincidentally occurred on the same day in 1985.

I want to offer my standard trigger warning for a truly awful dog death, and quite a bit of animal mistreatment that will make any sensitive reader recoil. The human murders are violent and bloody, of course, but they recede in comparison to what happens to our four legged friends.

I do like how Flynn wove in the tangible impact of the Satanic panic, and the confirmation bias of cops seeking that explanation for violent crimes back in the ’80s, and then, in the present day, the exploitation of tragedy by amateur sleuths (intentionally or otherwise). Mostly, though, I found it was a relief to read about a victim who didn’t Come Out The Other Side Stronger. Libby’s not here to make anyone feel inspired about overcoming hardship. So, if you’re sick of saccharine heroines, Dark Places is the perfect antidote.

Read Dark Places on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Dark Places:

“I absolutely loved Gone Girl, but this book made me want to bathe in holy water after I read it.” – BTaylor14
“If you like devil worship you might like it.” – Amazon Customer
“Her characters are hateful and gross. Who makes a character named Diondra??” – Novel Experts
“If you like drugs, devil worship, white trash characters, slutty girls ,horrible graphic animal brutality, and reading about a mother and her girls being chopped with an ax, stabbed, and shot.. Then this book is for you!” – Amazon Customer
“Graphic, pornographic, idiotic drivel. Finished because I wanted to know “whodunnit”……no other reason” – B. King

Bunny – Mona Awad

September 23, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Imagine a group of Popular Girls – a la Mean Girls or Heathers – who invite you to one of their parties, then promptly begin performing blood sacrifices and dark magic rituals. That’s basically the conceit of Mona Awad’s 2019 break-through novel, Bunny, so it’s not hard to see why it immediately developed a huge cult following.

Samantha Mackey is completing her MFA at a small New England liberal arts cottage, and she’s the outsider in her workshop class. The rest of the participants are Bunnies, a hyperfeminine clique of young women with wealth and pretty privilege in spades. Samantha’s only friend is Ava, a punk chain smoker who resents the university and the Bunnies and just about everything else – and that’s about all I can say without spoiling Bunny altogether.

So, consider this your warning: spoilers to follow, because it’s no fun (not to mention nearly impossible) to talk about Bunny without them.

There’s no way you’ll believe me, but I swear this is true: one of the first notes I wrote down as I was reading Bunny is “Ava gives imaginary friend vibes?”. It was just that something about the way she and Samantha interacted, and the absence of any interactions with third parties, felt so insular. Samantha is bitter, paranoid, and cynical, and it made sense that she would create an imaginary friend that indulges and encourages these tendencies. I thought that was a flight of my own fancy, reading too much into a side-plot that Awad hadn’t really intended as anything more than a contrast with the Bunnies, until things took a turn at the end of Part One and I realised I was on the right track after all.

Samantha is invited to join the Bunnies at one of their parties, and she can’t resist peeking behind the velvet curtain. Once she’s initiated into the group, they let her in on their secret: they capture the rabbits that plague the campus and, through a process of dark magic not clearly described (but clearly aided by numerous drinks spiked with hallucinogenic drugs), transform them into boys – only, they don’t call them boys, they call them “Drafts” or “Darlings”, as little nods to their literary pursuits. When the Drafts don’t work exactly as intended (none of them have functioning penises, which is a major pain point), they chop them to pieces with an axe and start again.

This leads me to another weird thought I had about mid-way through Bunny – and this might seem over the top, but bear with me. I couldn’t help but read it as a kind of prescient parable for the proliferation of AI. The monstrosity of creation, the blurring of the lines between reality and surreality, right down to the deformity of the Drafts’ hands (“hands are hard, Bunny”) – it all seemed eerily prophetic for what has unfolded over the past eighteen months.

Anyway, I would highly, highly recommend Bunny to fans of Lakewood by Megan Giddings (though I’d imagine that the Venn diagram of readers is basically already a circle) – it might also be good for readers who loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt and wanted something a little punchier and sexier to read next.

Read Bunny on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Bunny:

“This book is garbage. Don’t waste your time and money. I would rather have read a textbook about how textbooks are written.” – Jennifer
“I read this book and felt my frontal lobe slip into a glittery void while whispering “Bunny… Bunny…” like I’d been possessed by a cupcake.” – Get Your Tinsel In A Tangle
“I seriously felt like I needed more of my antipsychotics while reading this.” – Andrea Davis
“A take out menu would be more compelling and authentic” – patti whisler

The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires – Grady Hendrix

June 10, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Despite the fact that I am still recovering from the trauma of reading My Best Friend’s Exorcism (that poor dog!), I decided to keep the faith with Grady Hendrix and give another one of his books a go. The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires isn’t a sequel per se, but it is another book set in the same universe of sorts (Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1990s). This time, Hendrix tells a scary supernatural tale from the point of view of the parents, rather than the teenagers.

The story kicks off when a group of maverick suburban housewives abandon the Literary Guild of Mt Pleasant (none of them have time to read the boring classics prescribed by the domineering founder) and form their own book club – one where they read trashy true crime and pulpy horror fiction. It’s really the only source of fun and joy in Patricia Campbell’s life; she spends the rest of her time caring for her elderly mother-in-law, trying to coax a smile out of her moody teenagers, and cooking dinner for her workaholic husband.

Patricia finds herself wishing there was some danger and excitement in her real life, not just on the page. She gets more than she bargained for when she meets her newly-deceased neighbour’s nephew, James. He’s dashing and clever and ever-so-charming – but Patricia starts to suspect that there’s something dark lurking beneath his good looks and charisma.

She’s spot on, of course. James is a vampire, preying on children. If only someone – anyone – would believe her.

Hendrix positions The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires as a book about women burdened by their responsibilities to others, versus a man who is only responsible to his own appetites and desires. I see it also as a story about the power of women working together, in ways big and small – whether it’s checking up on an old friend you haven’t seen in a while, or helping her hide the body of the vampire she just decapitated.

Hendrix directly addresses both race and gender in a way that’s pleasantly confronting (over and above the stomach-churning horror that he writes so well). The vampire initially targets the children of Black women in poorer communities, clearly figuring that no one would miss them or pick up on the fact that something is wrong. He doesn’t reckon on the interconnectedness of motherhood; even though the Black women are the employees of the white women of the book club, and the relationship is complex with power imbalances, the fact remains that they are all mothers who care deeply about the fates of all children. The white women, even in their position of relative privilege, face horrific mistreatment at the hands of their husbands, and are dismissed as silly and hysterical when they try to draw the men’s attention to the real and present danger in their neighbourhoods.

So, if it’s not already clear: even though Hendrix styles The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires as a horror-comedy, as he has done with his other novels, it’s actually a novel of surprising depth and insight. That’s not to say it’s not scary or gruesome. Hendrix loves a creepy rodent-related scene – this book has two, and they’re both deeply disturbing (if you’ve read Horrorstor, you’ll have a good idea of what you’re in for). The ending also isn’t neat, and the resolution comes at a cost for the characters involved. So, if you’re up for a complex, horrifying read with comedic elements, this is the book for you.

P.S. (with minor spoilers): the dog in this one, a cocker spaniel named Ragtag, faces needlessly gory trials and tribulations… but eventually dies a sweet and painless natural death at the very end of The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires. I still cried, of course, but I wasn’t anywhere near as traumatised. Hendrix is headed in the right direction on that front.

Read The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires:

“Patricia is annoying. Friending the “vampire” seemed a bizarre reaction to getting her earlobe bitten off.” – DeeLynnQuint
“Everyone in the reviews said this was a scary creepy book and what I read was some stuck up housewives with a not so there book club and a perv vampire only attacking young black children.” – Kenya Laughlin
“Looking at Hendrix’s other books he appears to write about women a lot. Maybe he should take a break.” – Lindsay B
“This is a book for anyone who watched ‘Buffy’ and thought “I wish this show didn’t have any heroes, but just focused on the petty, awful adults who tried to pretend there was nothing wrong in town and gaslit anyone who tried to point out the monsters.” Which is okay as a horror novel premise, but calling this a “charming testament to friendship” is like calling a dumpster fire an EDM festival.

I gave up 3/4 of the way in, so there is still a mild chance the main character wakes up out of her fog and realizes she is surrounded by awful, irredeemable people, goes on a roaring rampage of revenge at how she’s been mistreated, burns the entire horrible neighborhood down and ends up starting a new happy life designing carnival floats in Rio . I don’t have the time or strength to find out. Each chapter has been like being hit with a sock full of sand.” B. Rust

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil – John Berendt

February 25, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

John Berendt has one of those careers that sounds just too good to be true. Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil was his very first book, a non-fiction novel about a murder in Savannah, Georgia. After an initial print run of just 25,000 copies, it went on to become a New York Times Best Seller and stayed on the list for 216 weeks. That’s one of the longest runs of any book in the list’s history, and the title has become synonymous with contemporary immersive true crime writing. Way to knock it out of the park on his first swing!

It’s all the more surprising for how significantly Berendt departs from traditional true crime structure. Truman Capote also wrote about a murder in the American South, using the techniques of fiction to evoke place and emotion for the reader, but he stuck to the standard formula in other ways (i.e., getting the reader hooked by putting the grisly murder up front). Berendt takes a very different approach.

The first 200 pages of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil comprise a series of character sketches about the city’s residents, and some fun facts about its history. If you hadn’t read the blurb (and, presumably, lived under a rock), you’d actually have no idea that this was a book about a murder until the very final page of Part One.

When you finally get there, the central crime is the murder of Danny Hansford (a loud-mouthed, somewhat-unstable, male sex worker) by respected antiques dealer Jim Williams. Williams ended up going on trial for murder no fewer than four times, with various technical hiccups and new revelations requiring a re-examination of the evidence before a brand new jury. He was eventually found not guilty and acquitted, but only by a jury from a different county who had no prior knowledge or personal investment in the case.

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil is keenly observed, and skillfully written – and surprisingly funny, at times. It also feels strikingly progressive in its politics. Race plays a major role in how Berendt depicts Savannah society, which would undoubtedly cause a storm of controversy online if published today. Likewise, one of the side characters is a trans woman/drag performer, and he describes her tenderly, referring to her with the correct pronouns throughout (it’s not that hard, folks).

It did strike me as somewhat convenient that, in Berendt’s telling, a journalist for Esquire decides on a whim to hang out in Savannah for a while (on-and-off for eight years, all told), and just so happens to get to know the main figures in a crime story months before it plays out. And it turns out, my spidey senses were spot on. I read later that Berendt manipulated the timeline and manufactured the circumstances of a couple of scenes to make it read that way.

In reality, he didn’t arrive in Savannah until six weeks after Williams had been convicted of Hansford’s murder and released from jail pending his first appeal. I suppose it’s up to you whether that impacts your feelings about the book; personally, I don’t mind a bit of creative license if it makes for a better story, and Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil is definitely that.

Berendt is a little defensive about it, though, maybe because he’s been asked about it so many times. “I felt that was a legitimate license to take,” he said. “The book is 99 percent true and 1 percent exaggeration.”

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil isn’t so much about the murder of Danny Hansford as it is where the crime fits into Savannah society and the people impacted by it. It’s an interesting way of telling a story, even if it means that the story loses some of the tension and propulsion a reader could rightfully expect from classic true crime. It’s the story of a period in Savannah’s history where a crime happened to take place, more so than a story about a crime that happened to take place in Savannah.

Berendt did such a good job that Savannah became a tourist hot-spot. The year before Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil came out, Savannah received about 5 million visitors who spent $600 million in the city. Twenty years later, those numbers were up to 12.5 million and $2.2 billion, respectively. Having read the book, I can see why – even though Berendt makes you feel like you’re there, there’s an inevitable pull to go and check out this ‘garden’ for yourself. The scene of the crime (the Mercer house) has actually been turned into a museum, where you can take a 35-minute guided tour, examine antiques from Williams’ private collection, and pick up a souvenir at the gift shop. No kidding!

My favourite Amazon reviews of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil:

“He successfully turned a magical city into a stagnant cesspool.” – Reagan
“The story just didn’t interest me. Too many depraved people acting fairly stupid in my opinion.” – Renae
“This book is awful. Don,t read it unless you like filth.” – Tom Lowes
“All I knew of this book was that it was about a murder. Throughout the first half of the book, I kept hoping the next new charachter introduced was the murder victim. By the time Danny was killed, I was hoping some type of nuclear explosion went off and killed everyone in that pretentious, egomaniacal, worthless town. I still hope it happens. Every day was a struggle to get through this crap. When I was done, I couldn’t say I learned anything, except never to go to Georgia.” – jesco123