April Recap: Slashers, Short Stories, and Shudder

I fully intended to publish the next installment of my Stephen King series this week, but I spent most of Sunday asleep! I wasn’t under the weather—just forced into temporary hibernation by my tired brain and body. So, we’ve got a slight switch up: We’ll return to King next week, and today I’ve got a roundup of my April media diet.

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive in.

The good news: April was a stellar month for media in my world. The highlight of my month was shopping my town’s thrice-annual library book sale. My friend Samantha Ladwig (Narrative Sea, The Cut, Tin House, and many other places!) met me there and we scoured the shelves for treasures. She found an eight-disc set of remastered Universal monster movies for me; I bought us a shared copy of The Crow Girl and promised to report back on whether it’s super-gory.

I also picked up 1988’s Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (which looks fun and hopefully campy) and a sealed (!) Nancy Drew PC game from 2008. Overall, I spent $22 supporting the library, raked in some dopamine, and got outside on a sunny day.

It’s definitely spring here on the Olympic Peninsula. Bunnies have been hopping around and chasing each other through our weedy garden, which means tiny baby bunnies will be here soon. Overhead, bald eagles soar and flirt and scuffle. Our barred owl is back for the first time in a year, perching on the fence with razor-sharp talons as our beloved yard mole scurries for cover under the deck. The deer watch me take out the trash, unphased as they nibble on tall grass in the field across the street.

Also: There’s a lot of really, really bad shit going on in the world right now. I don’t write about it directly here, but please know that I care deeply and am worried right alongside you. I hope you’ve been able to find small moments here and there to spend time with art or nature or the people you love most.

With that! Here are some books and movies I think are worth your time.

Books

The September House by Carissa Orlando

I wrote about The September House in my post for Independent Bookstore Day, but I’m going to double down here and say that it’s truly one of my favorite haunted house novels. Orlando draws on her career in psychology to weave a story that truly messed with my expectations. In a world that tries to force us to choose between haunting-as-metaphor and haunting-as-haunting, Orlando asks: Why not both?

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

In the afterword of his final installment of the Indian Lake Trilogy, Jones admits that he wrote this novel in a chaotic bout of procrastination between the series’ second and third books. Maybe it’s because I knew that going in, but to me, Teenage Slasher had a propulsive momentum of a story that just needed to be told.

Our hero, an aimless teen named Tolly Driver, survives a slasher attack at a pool party—only to become a slasher himself, through a series of events beyond his control. Jones is a fast, funny writer and a true slasher fan, and this book is generally more whimsical than somber. But beneath the slasher rules and the strange powers that come with Tolly’s evolution, there is a moving and tragic story that really forces you to reflect on everything and everyone you’d lose if this happened to you.

I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf

Kristóf is one of my favorite writers; her Notebook trilogy genuinely rewired my brain. Because so few of her books have been translated into English, I was surprised to find this slim volume of short stories at the bookstore. I Don’t Care is like a concentrated extract of the cruelty and transgression that make her later works so potent. The stories are also extraordinarily short, sometimes just a page or a few paragraphs. An unsettling, vivid read.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

I picked this novel up at last October’s library book sale because its striking cover caught my eye. (I’m shallow sometimes!) I wish I’d read it sooner. Croft spins a layered, ironic story about a group of translators who gather for a summit, only for their beloved author to abruptly disappear.

In the novel, an American translator translates the Spanish translator’s recounting of the mysterious events surrounding this disappearance. (Is there a more elegant way to explain that?) These layered narrative voices create a slippery grasp on the truth—if such a thing exists—and there are so many moments that genuinely made me laugh as Croft’s characters take swipes at each other in the text and accompanying footnotes. This is a book for anyone who digs post-modernism (me), particularly if you enjoyed Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (non-horror)

After a few false starts, I finally finished my first experience with The Artist’s Way last month. (Shoutout to Maya for being my partner in this endeavor!) This book is somehow more than the sum of its parts; I can’t quite figure out how Cameron managed to break through my resistance to self-help, but she really did. After finishing the 12 week program, I flipped back to the first week to see just how brutal my inner critic was, and I was shocked to discover how much my conversation with myself softened.

My favorite line arrived during Week 6, which focused on spending money. “Recently, I bought myself a horse for the first time in a decade,” Cameron muses. OMG Julia!! I scrawled in the margin.

Movies

Footprints on the Moon (1975)

I’m in my giallo era, so this movie—described on Shudder as a “criminally underseen giallo”—was an instant play for me. In it, a translator is plagued by a strange recurring nightmare that seems to infect her waking hours. One day, she goes to work and discovers that she has completely lost her memory of the past three days. We watch as she retraces her steps, unraveling the mystery in a nearby beach town where she briefly and unknowingly took on another persona. What did she do? Who did she become? And most of all, why?

Alice, our heroine, has an almost androgynous style that I found refreshing. She’s allowed to be furious rather than accepting, impatient rather than motherly, abrupt rather than coy or flirtatious. This is a stylish, beguiling, subversive movie that I hope will lose its criminally underseen cred soon!

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

I almost never rewatch movies—there are too many to see!—but on a very tired night, I did indulge in a rewatch of my favorite Argento movie. It was just as visually beautiful and compelling as the first time. Like many giallos, Crystal Plumage is a bloody murder mystery with an interesting premise: What if you witnessed something important during a crime, but you can’t remember what? I love this movie for its sprawling but tightly detailed narrative, which juggles red herrings and cryptic clues with seemingly effortless ease. The cinematography is striking, with brightly lit spaces offering high contrast with the pitch-black shadows where killers lurk and bodies are hidden.

Revenge (2017)

Prior to last month, The Substance was the only Coralie Fargeat movie I’d seen. I’m not keen on rape revenge movies generally, but this time I knew I’d be in good hands. (Tarantino WISHES he could write like this!) When her married lover’s friends crash her romantic getaway, Jen is plunged into a nightmarish chase through the desert in pursuit of payback. Will she manage to turn the tables on her attackers and escape with her life?

Although Revenge is thematically quite different from The Substance, the two films share a similarly heightened, stylized reality that bends time and space to make way for a narrative that somehow feels more true for its fantastical elements. I’m fairly certain no human body has ever contained as much blood as Fargeat spills, but I sure do love the visuals.

Also: There’s a prolonged and disgusting chewing scene, an apparently recurring theme. If you hated/loved the infamous shrimp scene in The Substance, I can absolutely promise that your misophonia will be activated again in this one.

Horror in the High Desert (1-3)

I’ve skipped past these movies for years, but I was painting my nails one afternoon and decided, why not. I was completely delighted by how much I enjoyed the first movie and watched the rest within the week! This indie franchise uses found footage and mockumentary interviews to recreate a TV true crime show à la Cold Case Files. It’s an easy watch that draws you in with natural, true-to-life acting and steady pacing. But each installment also culminates in a truly gripping extended found footage scenario that I couldn’t look away from.

The Nun (2018)

It’s not every month that JD Vance kills the Pope, so watching a Catholic-centric installment of the Conjuring series felt right in April. All the Conjuring movies are a little too normie for my taste, but I was surprised to see how much people on Letterboxd truly hate this one. I thought it was fine! Whatever! I’m not sure how much more of this franchise I will watch before moving on to something else.

825 Forest Road (2025)

I love the Hell House LLC series so much, so I was excited to see Stephen Cognetti’s new movie on Shudder. Unfortunately, I did not think this was good. Do you remember Bates Motel? The production value and storytelling in this movie was about on par with that—it felt like a prematurely canceled made-for-TV series with too-clean sets and too many characters. There were so plot points that went nowhere, contradicted themselves, or didn’t add up. For example: Why on earth is one of the main characters a content creator who livestreams herself sewing?! It was a miss for me, but I’m still looking forward to Hell House LLC: Lineage, which is coming out in theaters this August.

Scare Me! illustrations by Sam Pugh