“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ~ John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Cheers, my fellow readers, and welcome to the list of books that did their best to shatter my world in 2024, each one special in its own right, each one deserving of all the accolades I can heap upon it. I read a lot of what could be considered dark and bleak novels this year, each one of them impactful.
I’m not sure what 2025 will bring—who among us is?—but may the new year be abundant with unsurpassed stories and defiant, irrepressible joy.
Best of 2024 ~ PART I
Death in the Spires by KJ Charles: Charles is a masterful storyteller, never more so than when she’s pulling strings and weaving a dark mystery out of them. Death in the Spires is a brilliant story of the illusory invincibility of dreams and the powerful provocation of betrayal. KJ Charles has crafted such a compelling story of carefree youth, unbridled jealousy, and the hubris of privilege wrapped in progressively darker academia and shrouded in secrets that continue to haunt a group of former friends long into their adulthood.
The Shabti by Megaera C. Lorenz: Everything spooky and spectral in The Shabti is connected to an artifact that’s oozing its bad vibes all over Professor Hermann Goschalk’s students. So what’s an Egyptologist to do when he needs a professional opinion about dark mojo? He acquaints himself with a Spiritualist.
Hermann wears his heart fully on his sleeve, and while Dashiel (the erstwhile spiritualist) doesn’t want anything to do with what’s haunting Hermann, it’s not long before he’s hooked on both the haunting and the kind and earnest professor. The Shabti is as sweet and sincere as a story featuring an ancient homicidal spirit can be.
Fever by Jordan L. Hawk: Jordan L. Hawk does the supernatural so brilliantly. His characters, their worlds, and his voice absorb readers into the story and don’t let go until the final words put paid to whatever danger and mayhem has unfolded along the way. Fever is as much about the treacherous landscape of its setting, the extreme isolation and the cloying danger, as it is the euphoric dream of striking it rich, and then the slow, creeping dread that someone, something, wants these trespassers dead. Discovering what that thing is, is a terrible, beautiful thing. Hawk captures the sense of time and place in Fever, with the misdeeds and misfortunes of long-ago people who desecrated Native and First Nations lands in search of untold fortune. An obvious wealth of research went into the Klondike gold rush and the fever pitch of those who risked life and limb, starvation and the brutal landscape, to fulfill their lust for material wealth.
Cranberry Cove by Hailey Piper: Hailey Piper does dread so awfully, beautifully well. The darkest corners become the hiding place for what her characters fear. The shadows are full of unspoken terrors. The silence holds secret horrors. And an abandoned hotel, Cranberry Cove, keeps those secrets close and its victims closer.
The evil done in this short novel is becoming of its genre, which the author serves up in her usual way. The monsters are gruesome and gluttonous. They feed on fear and thirst for reparations for a promise left unfilled. Excellent stuff if Horror is your thing.
How We End by LM Juniper: LM Juniper metes out the fear in a perfect contrast to the strong emotions that come with loss and a growing bond in How We End. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and nothing at all feels fine as readers are thrust into a post-apocalyptic dystopia rife with flesh eating spores and mutating zombies that are the source of all the chaos and danger in this world the author has built. I’ll cut straight to the chase: it’s perfection for Horror loving fans. This world is giving The Stand meets The Last of Us meets The Walking Dead set in and around modern London where those who are fortunate enough to still be alive, so far, are barely outrunning death while seeking answers to a cure (a la I Am Legend).
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle: Chuck Tingle takes on Hollywood, queer-baiting, queer happy endings, Artificial Intelligence, and proving that love is real (of course) in Bury Your Gays. He does it bloody, he does it brilliantly, and he puts some familiar tropes under his microscope too. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book. What I got was so much more than I expected. This is a statement book, its messages eloquent when Misha finally speaks out loud and clear—queer characters are wanted, needed, celebrated, multi-faceted, and everyone belongs. Representation matters to folks who just want to be seen and heard.
Ghost Flower by Jessica Conwell: Conwell gives voice to a world and its characters filled with danger and wonder in which a force—an angry all-knowing, all-seeing primal being of immense power—is held captive in the deepest, darkest forest. This book. This glorious, gorgeous, gut-wrenching book. Ghost Flower is ethereal. It’s dark. It’s bleak. It’s sweet and charming. It’s a source of anguish and filled with magic, danger, betrayal and sacrifice. There is loneliness and friendship. There is falling in love and discovering family amongst the detritus of what was once someplace called civilized. Or, if not civilized, the town of Rook Lake certainly mimicked it. For a while.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane: Marisa Crane delivers such a thought provoking, disturbing, and emotional story in this, her debut novel. Like so many books, it may not be to everyone’s taste, especially if you’re looking for something light and uncomplicated.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself isn’t categorically a horror novel, but if you pay attention to its themes, with a real-world focus on a future that isn’t outside the realm of current discourse, it’s decidedly horrifying and is unsubtle about it. The kid is the hero of this story. She is precocious, she is anarchy, she is curious, she is good trouble in a pint-sized body. She is a raised fist, an uprising in the making against the status quo, working toward a more just and equitable future, while the other kids at school are eating paste. That is, when they aren’t bullying her.
All the Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper: Piper once again does what she always does so powerfully: tells a horror story that stirs the imagination with dark imagery while also offering an abundance of heart and passion to her characters. All the Hearts You Eat is chilling while, at the same time, painful. One of the greatest surprises in this book is who becomes the heroes. This unexpected but beautifully executed turn adds more than a few touching moments within the terror.
Vivid narrative, intriguing characters, dark souls and local mythology define this story in a way only Hailey Piper could breathe life into it.
Skeleton Crew by Jordan Castillo Price: This being the fourteenth book in the PsyCop series, it’s impressive (but not really surprising) that Price still has a few tricks up her sleeve to avoid Vic and Jacob becoming mere accessories to the paranormal or simple fixtures of the urban fantasy setting.
After more than a decade and a half of the paranormal keeping the agents on their proverbial toes, they’re still learning new things about themselves, and each other, without a single bit of it feeling repurposed or extraneous. JCP continues to tap into her extensive imagination and uses it to its full advantage to pull readers back into the PsyCop world, book after book, with fresh new adventures. Or misadventures, whatever the case may lead to. Skeleton Crew is as close to a locked-room thriller as this series has come yet—at least, in my recollection—but the claustrophobic atmosphere has absolutely nothing on the mounting evidence that the characters are confined underground with something that could conceivably become their eternal undoing.
That does it for Part I. Stay tuned tomorrow for the rest of the best!
The Novel Approach Reviews 
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