I made a whole bunch of stuff as presents this year. We have a cross stitch with a goth literary theme and an embroidered deer skull with decorated frame.

I also crocheted four scarfs for my nieces and sister in law. Though I only remembered to take pictures of two.

Another big month for reading. Lots of fun stuff too!
 
The Twisted Ones, by T. Kingfisher
Continuing on my horror kick, I read Kingfisher’s other horror novel. This one takes place in rural North Carolina. Middle-aged Mouse goes to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, a house filled with 40 years of hording, she comes across the diary of her grandmother’s husband that indicates that the house is menaced by something wicked that lives in the dense forest that butts up against the home. Soon Mouse discovers that the house is connected to an other-worldly force and she may be in danger. It’s hard describe this one without really getting into it. Weird, uncanny, and frightening, this was a good one to give just enough of a scare. I liked it better, by a little bit, than The Hollow Places.
 
Faith Taking Flight, by Julie Murphy
I love Julie Murphy and I love the superhero Faith, so this origin story should have been right up my alley. It wasn’t quite. It’s a good origin story, but not well paced and the action seemed like an afterthought. It was a fun read and would be a great introduction to those who haven’t come across the comics. The fact that Faith is an unapologetic plus-sized superhero makes me want to introduce everyone to her stories, I just don’t think this book is quite the one to make people interested.
 
Rules for Being Dead, by Kim Powers
Set in the 1960s in a small Texas town, the story follows ten-year-old Clark after his mother dies mysteriously. It also follows his mother’s ghost as she watches over her kids. She doesn’t know what happened to her either. Clark’s mother had loved the movies and had imparted her love of films to her sons and it’s through that lens that we see Clark’s growth over the year following her death—his alcoholic father, his sympathetic new stepmom, the world at large. This is a lovely story, but terribly sad. Not usually my thing, but I really liked it.
 
Wide Open, by Deborah Coates
This one has been on my shelf for awhile, I think it was a present. Hallie Michaels has returned home from Afghanistan to attend her sister’s funeral. Due to an injury she received in battle weeks before, she can now see dead people, including her sister. Her sister, and several other ghosts of women, haunt her and she realizes she must find the truth behind their deaths. Part murder mystery, part fantasy, with a lot of love for the South Dakota landscape, this was a fine potato chip read.
 
Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix Harrow
Reread. This is an ambitious book and it thoroughly achieves its goals. I loved it even more the second time.
 
The Vanishing Stair, by Maureen Johnson
The Hand on the Wall, by Maureen Johnson
The sequel and conclusion to Truly Devious, which I read in October. Together all three books make a really great story. The current mystery and the 1930s mystery line up surprisingly and delightfully, and I found the ending to be well done. The three books together are worth a read, but make sure you have them all ready to go. The cliff hangers in the first and second books are no fun if you have to wait.
 
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This book has been a bestseller this year and was on my anticipation list from last year. Turns out there are several Moreno-Garcia books on my TBR list. Also, horror. Still reading all the folk horror I can find (which isn’t much). This was a fun read full of crumbling mansion, and a storied family with oh-so-many skeletons in the closet. Noemí is a great main character—stubborn with something to prove, yet contradictory and naïve. This was not as scary as I hoped it would be, but it was pretty creepy. Definitely recommend.
 
The Best of Me, by David Sedaris
I listened to this one. Sedaris’s latest book is a selection of his work that he likes best. I’ve only listened to Sedaris read his stories and I can’t imagine reading them. His voice and delivery are so unique to him that it would be weird, to me, to read them in print. This audio was long, but definitely worth it.
 
Wrapped Up In You, by Talia Hibbert
A short novel by Hibbert, who I love for her Brown Sisters’ series. This is a Christmas tale about two long-time friends who’ve always been attracted to each other but have never said. Sweet and sassy, it was a lovely palate cleanser.
 
The Saint of Wolves and Butchers, by Alex Grecian
The opposite of a palate cleanser was this book. I picked it up a year or so ago to give to my mom but decided to read it first. We get present POV takes from Kansas State Trooper Skottie Foster and Nazi hunter Travis Roan as he is on the hunt for a rumored former Nazi living in Northwest Kansas. Then there is the story of Nazi officer Rudy Goodman from when illegally enters the U.S. up until present time where he has become the mystical healer of a church of his founding. It’s a thriller and paced really well. Not my usual read (there are a lot of those this month) but perfectly good. Probably would be a favorite for those interested in thrillers.
 

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
Cluny Brown, by Margery Sharp
 
I read The Little Stranger because I was looking for a good scare. I felt the book was more sad than scary, since the scary parts are related to us through an unreliable third party. It’s set a few years after WWII in a rural county in England. The story, recounted by Dr. Farady a few years after the events, is about the Ayres family and their crumbling estate, Hundreds Hall. Dr. Farady’s mother was once a servant at the house, and in the family’s twilight years he comes to the house as their doctor. Over the course of the book, we witness the demise of each member of the family.
 
Doing some research at work about Margery Sharp, the author of The Rescuers (the book the Disney movie is based on), I found that she wrote a lot of contemporary fiction and it sounded delightful. I found Cluny Brown as an ebook from the library. It was a sweet book, with a poignant message. The story follows Cluny Brown, a 22-year-old woman who was raised by her plumber uncle. She’s considered strange because she does what comes to mind, despite money or class. Her uncle sends her into service for a family in Devonshire to learn her place. It is 1938 as Britain is on the cusp of war. (The books was published in 1944.) Working as a maid, Cluny’s disregard for class boundaries and her vivacious personality lead her making friends of all sorts across class divides.
 
On the surface, these two books have little in common, besides the old manor house and landed gentry in the country. They were written 70 years apart by women, one writing contemporary fiction, one writing historical fiction. The thing that, in my mind, brings them together is the themes of a dying way of life, class boundaries, and respectability.
 
Dr. Farady, even as he becomes close to the Ayres family, is always conscious of the class boundary that exists between them. When he becomes engaged to Caroline, the daughter of the family, he is blinded to the other things going on by his rising star. It is very apparent that he is obsessed with being respectable and aligning himself with a storied family. A family with a long history that no longer owns most of their land, who have no money, and only pride.
 
For Cluny Brown, the landed family she works for feel like their way of life is fading and they hold on desperately to their respectability. Cluny doesn’t give a thought to respectability and, even when her fortunes change for the good, likely doesn’t understand it. But that’s what confuses the family she works for. That’s the only thing they understand.
 
I feel like Sarah Waters must have been familiar with Cluny Brown. A subtle melancholy of a dying way of life runs just below the plot in both books. For both Cluny and Dr. Farady—both from working class backgrounds—their story hinges on respectability. For Dr. Farady, it is his life’s ambition, even if it is attached to a something no longer relevant. For Cluny, respectability means nothing if it means living life in a closed and measured way.

Truly Devious, by Maureen Johnson
This was highly recommended by a couple of my coworkers. A YA mystery, it is set in an exclusive school—fully paid for and invite only—in Vermont. Since it started in the 1930s, the school has been shrouded in a mystery of the founder’s kidnapped wife and child. Stevie is accepted to the school and her goal is to solve the 80-year-old mystery. This book did live up to its reputation. However! It ends on a cliffhanger and that drives me nuts. I don’t care if a story is a series, but each book should be its own story. I’m waffling on finishing the other two books in the series.
 
Bruja Born, by Zoraida Córdova
This is the second in the Brooklyn Brujas series. The story follows a family of Latina witches, with each book taking on the story of one teenaged sister. This book is about the oldest sister, Lula, a healer who, in trying to resurrect her boyfriend after a terrible bus accident, creates a host of undead. This book was all right. I like the first one better because we went to a magical world and this one is in regular old Brooklyn. Not to say that it didn’t have good worldbuilding, it did, but the setting didn’t intrigue me as much as in the first book. Still, the series has been worth reading.
 
The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher
I’ve been on a kick to find books that are scary … in a certain way. In my research, I’ve found that the type of horror that I like is Folk Horror. This is a book that was just out in October. I started listening to it, but was so into it, that I needed to read it fast, so I bought it and tore right through it. Kara, newly divorced, goes to live with her uncle who owns a museum of the unusual—taxidermy, skeletons, etc. She loves it there and has always felt like it was a safe space. Then one day, while her uncle is healing from knee surgery, she finds a hole in the wall on the second floor. With her friend, the barista who runs the coffee shop next door, they open the hole to reveal a different world. What follows is uncanny, creepy, and deadly. And so much fun.
 
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells
Not out until next April is another novella in the Murderbot Diaries series. I got my hot little hands on a galley for it! This novella follows Exit Strategies and is before the novel, Network Effect. While this story doesn’t have the immediacy of the other novellas and novels, it was still a lot of fun. Set on Preservation Station not too long after its arrival, Murderbot helps to solve a murder (unheard of in Preservation territory) at the behest of Mensah. I seriously can’t get enough of this character.
 
The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood
This is a novella by an English author first published in the early 1900s. It is the inspiration for The Hollow Places and a well-regarded early piece of horror (believed to have influenced Lovecraft). It definitely has some creep factor going on, but it is so vague as to not be really scary—reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw. The story follows the narrator and his companion, known as the Swede, on their canoe journey down the length of the Danube river. They come to a part that is entirely remote and they camp on an island in the river that is covered with willow trees. After a short while, they begin to get a nervous feeling blamed on the wind. But after a day on the island, they know that there are other forces at work against them.
 
The In-Between, by Rebecca K.S. Ansari
A middle grade scary story. I really enjoyed Ansari’s first book that came out last year, The Missing Piece of Charlie O’Reilly. It’s plot was really different and surprising. This book’s plot wasn’t quite as twisty, but I think I liked it even more. Cooper is angry that his father left their family. Jess misses her dad even while dealing with diabetes. They team up for the first time in a long time to discover the mystery of the girl who lives in the newly renovated house next door, with the help of a mysterious new kid. This is kid horror-lite at its best—things are not what they seem! The other things I liked about it was the portrayal of divorce and Cooper’s anger. It’s rare that you get a young character who is truly angry. I felt like that made both main characters more real.