Someone's in the Attic, by Andrea Mara

 Andrea Mara works in the eerie space between the ordinary and the creepy. In Someone's in the Attic, these two realms intertwine, sometimes in alternation sometimes all at once. The ordinary life of a family recently returned to Dublin after abandoning a life in California,  is fraught with reestablishing old friendships (a frequently funny, sometimes suspenseful part of the narrative) plus a series of TikTok videos showing their house being invaded through an attic hatch by a stranger dressed like a ninja. We the reader know more about the threat this figure poses than the characters do, but they are pretty freaked out themselves. At some points, as a reader I wanted the creepy part of the story to progress a little faster, but the ordinary life of the family is also entertaining: So I would highly recommend this not-quite-a-horror story and social comedy.

Arms & Legs, byy Chloe Lane

 Chloe Lane's narrator, Georgie, tells a dark and frequently funny story that progresses in a spiral rather than a straight line. Her language, in Lane's novel Arms & Legs, gathers together a corpse in the Florida forest, exploding eggs, cops and creepy neighbors, controlled burns, and love and desire (not. necessarily at the same time), difficult relationships, and most of all the voice of Georgie, brutally honest with herself and yet open to hose strange creatures, other people.  Georgie is an instructor in a north-central Florida university that sounds a lot like the University of Florida, but this is not a college novel, and though sometimes satirical it is not cerebral: Georgie's language is very physical as well as metaphorical: her own body and its relation to her husband and. her lover is specific and concrete. Lane's novel is dark enokugh to be thought of as "noir," and includes a disturbing, grisly (to use Georgie's word) corpse, a police investigation (th0okugh conducted in the shadows of the narrative. So not a conventional crime novel, but a lyrical, honest portrayal of Georgie's mental, physical, and emotional struggles: as well as being highly entertaining, since Georgie's voice is always elliptical as well as entertaining.

Stuart Neville, Blood Like Mine

Stuart Neville's writing career began with a sort of political ghost story, Te Ghosts of Belfast, and since then his work has gone from crime fiction to horror, sometimes emphasizing one genre's conventions and sometimes another. In his new Blood Like Mine, he lures a reader in with a character-driven crime story, a mother and daughter on the run, and then shifts suddenly into a high energy horror story still character driven, making the conventions of (spoiler alert) the vampire and zombie tale toward something new. His monster is an original take on the monster as icon, increasing in intensity as the story goes along. From the point where the horror tale bursts into full bloom, the book is relentless, striking, and impossible to put down. Highly recommended, even if you don't usually go for any of the horror genres that Neville touches upon (and stretches to his own ends) here.