Recently Read #19In which fall considers making an appearance, I delve into Irish horror, and finally break up with an author
At long last, it is beginning to cool down around here so I can finally start to think of fall as a thing that just might happen after all. As I write this, the windows are open, a scented candle is burning, and Portishead is playing. Bring on those autumnal vibes. 
A walk in the park
In my ongoing quest to actually read the books I’ve bought, I picked two things from my own shelves and finished them off this week. The first was Maria Tureaud’s gothic horror debut, This House Will Feed. In County Clare, Ireland, during the Great Famine of the late 1840s, Maggie O’Shaughnessy has lost everything but her life, and even that hangs by a thread until Lady Catherine offers a chance at having a real future. She whisks Maggie out of the workhouse and into her aging manor, promising to give her a cottage and land of her own on one condition: that Maggie poses as Lady Catherine’s long-dead daughter Wilhelmina so she can receive her widow’s pension and continue caring for the villagers who live on her lands. Maggie wants nothing more than to live long enough to take vengeance on the man who spurned her and destroyed her family, so she agrees to the bargain and throws herself into the role. But the longer she plays the role of Lady Catherine’s daughter, Maggie realizes that nothing is at it seems in this house and there is far more going on than Lady Catherine let on. As old memories begin to resurface in Maggie’s mind, she learns that the house hides a dark power that calls for blood and sacrifice. The best horror novels use their supernatural elements to shine a light on the real horrors that affect us. In this case, Tureaud uses elements from Irish legends to emphasize the depth of despair the Irish people faced during the Great Famine. Maggie’s family, while not well-to-do by any means, was getting by until they were forced off their land and died, one by one, from hunger and despair. Maggie herself is motivated to survive by sheer spite-- a good decision on Tureaud’s part, because it is hard to imagine a naive gothic waif surviving the famine and facing the dangers in Lady Catherine’s house. Yes, she begins her journey into adulthood as a hopeful young woman who assumes the best of those around her, but she quickly learns better, becoming stronger and smarter for it without losing her ability to care for others. Though it didn’t lean into the gothic register as much as I had hoped for, This House Will Feed is an excellent debut, and if her next book improves upon the first, then Maria Tureaud will be a compelling new voice in Irish historical horror.
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower is a series of short epistolary novels detailing the life of Emma M. Lion, a young woman who has just returned from a miserable three-year stint as the companion to an awful old woman and hopes to live a comfortable if simple life in the beloved home her father left her in his will. All is not as she left it, however, and Emma finds that the quiet life with her books and maybe a cat may not be possible after all. Instead of bemoaning her fate, however, she rages in her journal, then hitches up her skirts and proceeds to figure out what her next steps will be on her way to make the life she wants. I hadn’t heard of these books until this summer, when several friends picked it up and were immediately hooked. I purchased the first three volumes from a local indie bookshop and finally read the first one this week. I was immediately charmed by Emma’s clear, practical voice, her sharp sense of humor, and her ability to brush herself off and get on with it in the face of adversity. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and I hope Emma will be able to get a cat at some point.
In other bookish news, I have decided I am done with an author whose works have had a peculiar hold over me, even though I think they’re terrible. I read Ava Reid’s The Wolf and Woodsman in January, 2022. It was Reid’s debut novel, and I thought it was a decent start for a young writer. I didn’t read anything else of hers, though, until she published Lady Macbeth in 2024. I like the occasional Shakespearean remix, so I decided to check it out. I didn’t have high hopes for it, but I wondered if it might exceed my low expectations. Reader, I hated it. I thought it was overwritten and under-plotted, while my Scottish friends found its portrayal of Scottish history, culture, people, and the landscape to be thoroughly offensive thanks to the descriptions of the land as a barren place and the people consistently described as barbaric. We all wondered how a book published in 2024 could somehow be more misogynistic than a play from 1606. Morbid curiosity drove me to read A Study in Drowning and its follow-up, A Theory of Dreaming, and I found both to be undercooked stories based more on vibes and aesthetics than the story of national myths and who gets to tell them that Reid seemed to have been going for. And because I apparently don’t know when to give up, I read an advance copy of 2026’s Innamorata in December last year. Though Reid billed the story as gothic grimdark metafiction, I found it to be a stultifying slog through endless descriptions of side characters’ clothes and far too many discussions of the main female characters’ beauty. The plot disappeared around the 15% point and made a few, half-hearted attempts to reappear now and then before properly emerging in the final ten pages to end it all in a cliff-hanger. Of the 200 books I read in 2025, Innamorata was the worst. Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson, because I requested and received an advance copy of Reid’s autumn release, Winterveil, a book billed as a YA spy thriller featuring a bunch of teenagers tasked by the government to lead the charge against communism in an alternate timeline where the Cold War persists into the 2030s. I made it to the 40% mark and threw in the towel. Winterveil is ridiculous when it isn’t boring, features a cast of snobby rich kids (and one poor kid from West Virginia) who I didn’t care about at all, is set in a school that purports to be teaching diplomacy and political science skills but the students spend most of their time gearing up for a high-tech Pokemon-knockoff. I don’t know how you make teen spies boring, but Reid managed to do so. I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to make fun of this book in my group chat (beyond my bafflement at the Blue Ridge mountains being described as ‘stygian’). And so I have declared an end to my journey through the works of Ava Reid. What started out as a promising career in the darker edges of fantasy has turned into a collection of books that have been declining in quality and are growing ever more focused on vibes and aesthetics over substance. If Reid were to take a few years off from writing, focus on her health and wellbeing, and reduce her social media presence, she might be able to revive the quality of her books, but I don’t think that is going to happen. And so I bid her work farewell. There are much better things out there, and I’m tired of wasting my time on bad books. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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