The Blog Without a Face reviews horror. Books, mostly. Novels, novellas, story collections, the occasional thing that shows up in the mail with a severed something on the cover and no return address. Films too. Comics, if one is good enough to make us put the book down.
I’m Mr. November. Not The National song, though if Matt Berninger wants to sue, he’s welcome to try suing a faceless man with a Gmail account. There is no face on this blog. It melted off.
Here’s what we’re for. Somewhere right now a press in Hamilton, Ontario, or Minneapolis, or Madrid, or a guy’s garage outside Tulsa is putting out the strangest, most alive horror novel of the year. It’ll sell four hundred copies. The algorithm will never show it to you because it’s busy trying to sell you a weighted blanket or some shit. We read it. We read eighty-some horror books a quarter and then we tell you which ones deserve your weekend and which ones deserve the little free library at the end of your street… you know… the one nobody takes from.
Think of us as the friend who texts you at 1 AM “you need to read this shit.” Then “no, now.” Then “I’m not okay.” Then a photo of a page with their thumb over half of it. That friend… we’re that friend. Sorry.
What we’re looking for
Horror that’s doing something we haven’t seen. That’s the first test and it outranks everything else. Gorgeous prose about a familiar haunted house is still a familiar haunted house, and so is a gorgeous tracking shot down its hallway. A retelling is still a retelling. We want the surreal, the experimental, the grotesque, the cosmic, the politically transgressive, the fucking weird, the thing that makes you feel unsafe on your own g’damn couch. Dread without a drop of blood is killer if the dread comes from somewhere new.
Horror better be the meal, not the seasoning. If you can describe the core without mentioning the horror, it’s a thriller or a romance in a mask, and we grade what the thing is, not what the spine or the poster says. The exception is literary work where the darkness is native, where you could take out the ghost and it would still disturb you. That can score as high as anything here.
We don’t do YA, we don’t do cozy, and if the vampire is mostly there to be kissed we’re the wrong blog. Other people cover that shit better and we’d be rude guests. The mainstream mostly underdelivers. We’re not mad. We’re just reading somewhere else.
The Brutal Curve
Everything we review gets a number from 1.0 to 10.0, and the numbers sit on a curve with a mean around 6. That’s the whole trick. A 6 here is something we enjoyed and would hand you with caveats. Most things are 6s. That’s what a 6 means.
Under 5 is unfun, undercooked, or a mess. 5s have decent ideas that don’t land. 6s are clearly enjoyable with real caveats. 7s are distinctive and confident, and we’ll point at the specific choices that ruled. 8 and up is a Sinister Selection. 9 and up is rare air, and we’ll try to explain what the thing is doing at a level most work doesn’t attempt.
Three rules keep us honest. Originality caps the score no matter how good the sentences or the cinematography are. Horror has to be the engine. And the number has to match the criticisms: if the review says the pacing sags and the concept is familiar, it can’t be a 7.4, and when we catch ourselves doing it we go back and fix it. Reputation isn’t a criterion. A debut from a two-person press and the tenth novel from a name you know get the same curve.
Sinister Selections
Most of what we like, we’d put in your hands at a party while you were looking for your coat. A Sinister Selection is the one where we follow you out to the car and tap on the window. It has to clear 8.0, and the curve doesn’t give that away. Some quarters there are a handful. Some quarters there’s nothing, and we’d rather say so than pad the list.
Send us things
Publishers, authors, translators: we read ARCs and finished copies, print or digital, and we’re on Edelweiss. Small press and translated work goes to the front of the pile. Self-published is welcome; a self-published novella made Sinister Selection this year, the first ever, and we plan to be insufferable about it for a while. Filmmakers and distributors, screeners are fine, and the smaller the production the more we want to see it. Comics, same. Email TheBWAF@gmail.com. No promise of a review and no promise of a kind one. Nobody can buy one either.
Stay in touch
The quarterly Creepshow Catchup is the whole blog in one sitting: the quarter’s Selections and whatever else earned a paragraph. Subscribe and it comes to you. We’re on Instagram, Goodreads and Letterboxd, and if you want to argue with a number, the comments are open and we’re here.
