Favorite Books of 2021

It’s that time of year, when I put together my favorite books I’ve read. I mostly read horror--it's the genre I write in, after all. But this list includes multiple genres. These are in no particular order.

My Heart Is A Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Absolutely no one who knows me will be surprised at this book appearing on the list. I’ve recommended this to just about everyone I know, even non-horror fans. I was The Weird Kid at school, into horror fiction even as a child (to much confusion from my parents.) This book spoke to me on a deep level, to the point I hugged my Kindle several times while reading it.

I admit I’m not too familiar with slashers—the tropes, yes; the movies, no. (Being blind makes watching movies hard.) So the sections of Jade’s essays provided context for things I’d have otherwise missed. This is a gory slow burn of a novel, and I loved every minute of it.

Quiet in Her Bones, by Nalini Singh

This. Book. This book made me feel seen.

I struggle with memory issues, and this book blew any “here’s what it’s like” explanation that I could give out of the water. I normally see "memory loss" as a plot line and put the book down. Why I kept going with this one, I'm not sure.

But I'm so glad I did.

It’s a fantastic mystery, sure. But the part of the book that left me both in awe and crying, was how Aarav’s memory loss was portrayed. It remains one of the best portrayals of the sheer terror that comes with memory and mental health issues I’ve ever seen. There scenes where he's writing everything possible down were both frightening, and I was also like "oh yeah, I remember those days. It sucked, dude, you have my sympathies."

Nothing But Blackened Teeth, by Cassandra Khaw

I found this in horror Twitter, where I mostly hang out online. The cover caught my eye first, and I love haunted house stories.

This is a fantastic, creepy-as-fuck little novella. There’s a particular scene in the book that’s stuck with me, and I find myself thinking about it even though I read the book several weeks ago.

And the “okay, you go to protagonist shit” line made me laugh.

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty

This is a classic horror novel that I wrote an essay about over on my Patreon [link]. While the essay is about losing faith, and how The Exorcist reflected those emotions back at me, it's just a really amazing book overall.

I tried reading it earlier in 2020, and put it down because I couldn't get into the writing style--it just wasn't what I expected. I didn't expect dense, flower-y prose from a novel about demons.

But I picked it back up this past year, and loved it. Once I wrapped my head around the writing style, I flew through it in two days. Part of that was a family vacation, so I spent some time at the beach reading about demons.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, by Eric LaRocca

“Hey Eric,” I wrote on Twitter, not long after finishing the book, “what the fuck was that?”

That was a compliment, by the way.

Things Have Gotten Worse… can be summed up in two words: queer and gross. I flew through the book in one evening, glued to the page wondering if this could get any worse.

It could, in fact, get much worse

I’m not sure if it’s a Cows level of nasty, but it’s up there in the “grossest horror novels I’ve read” category.

Highly recommend, if you have a strong stomach. It also inspired me to do a riff on "Goodnight Irene" involving a tapeworm, so yeah. It's. Something.

Those are my top books of the year! I'm surprised most of them are horror, except for the one mystery. I did read a number of romance novels this year, but I guess horror won out.