11/01/2025 - Danielle's Dark Corners
- Danielle Yvonne
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Happy Saturday! I hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween! I can’t believe it’s already November. Luckily, we’re starting the month off really strong with three phenomenal books. Spoiler, they’re all five stars!
LOONEY!
By Stephen Kozeniewski and Gavin Dillinger
"Walk down the street.
Disregard the marijuana cigarette-smoking Crock O. Dial t-shirts or the Canyon Carl-urinating-onto-a-disliked-motor-vehicle-brand bumper sticker knock-offs which, were they themselves legitimate, would add an estimated $7 billion (that’s billion with a “B”) U.S. to the Kooky Studio coffers, and how often do you see the beloved characters of your youth?
My estimation would be: quite often.
Quite often indeed."
Wow. Wow. Wow. This book was something else. I love it when a book makes me question if I’m on drugs, the book is on drugs, or if it’s a combo of the two. And LOONEY! did just that! It is well over 300 pages and an absolute descent into madness… or is it?!
The fact that this is a collab is also impressive as hell because I truly had no idea when I was reading one author’s writing compared to the other, they matched each other's energy perfectly, and it was well seamed together.
There were a lot of WTF’s? There were a lot of chuckles. There is a really solid and deep story within the whole thing as well, which for the length of the book… I hardly see something like this done. I also think it could be difficult to execute, but these two are just simply brilliant with it.
This is definitely at the top of my 2025 reads, and I really need more people to go grab and read this, so I have people to talk to about it. Easy recommendation to all horror readers!
SYNOPSIS:
When beloved cartoon characters come crawling out of her TV, army recruiter Gabriella Harman expects a zany romp instead of the hellish nightmare that follows.
One night, haunted by her memories of Iraq, Gabriella downs a stomachful of pills and booze. When her favorite cartoon characters, the Kooky Toons, start crawling out of the TV, she assumes she is hallucinating.
But soon Gabriella finds herself locked in a battle of wits and wills with Herman Hyrax, the world-famous, wise-cracking mascot of the Kooky Korporation. Herman is more than just a stinker, though. He may be a monster, a demon, a god, or something entirely more unwholesome.
Is Gabriella’s descent into a world of cartoonish violence and psychological torment real? Or has she simply gone…
LOONEY!?
Amazon: https://a.co/d/2b27cxy
KARA-KUN FLIP-KUN: TWO HIROSHIMA TALES
By Tom Bradley
"The bomb-baby almost never speaks. But when he does, he speaks no Korean and less Japanese than a mishmash of In-do-European and Hamito-Semitic languages. This is because the snooty natives have always shunned him like botulism. Only foreigners ever try to talk to Kara-kun.'
I am embarrassed to admit that Bradley is a new-to-me author. Why is that embarrassing? Because this author’s writing is damn near perfection. This book was incredible at every level possible. Genius, truly. It’s a two-part novel, and it’s a girthy one, sitting at about 400 pages.
Everything about this book, from the plot to the writing style, was beyond unique and exceeded any expectations I could ever have. I genuinely had such a good time reading this, and while I am typically a fast reader, I really took my time with this book so I could soak it all in and enjoy every page.
The way it had a serious tone but was also witty and had chuckles sprinkled throughout… Gosh, it’s actually hard to even explain. This is one of those books I really need people just to trust me on and take a chance on. It is that well done.
SYNOPSIS:
This two-part novel is set in Hiroshima, fifty years after the fact. The title character of Kara-Kun was in utero at the moment of the atom bomb’s detonation, and is mentally deficient, like many such “bomb babies.” His hobby is disrupting weddings at the cathedral. Not surprisingly, Kara-kun disappears soon after spoiling a Yakuza wedding...
In Flip-Kun, an American is being stalked through Hiroshima by “hit-missionaries” from a certain American pseudo-religion, whose patriarchs have declared a western-style fatwa on his head.
“A wicked imagination…sheer invention…” (The Daily Yomiuri)
All-new Deluxe Edition! Featuring a special bonus giant-size Critical Appendix by the author, in which he takes a wakizashi to the umbilicus of the Nipponese tertiary education system!
Amazon: https://a.co/d/e4D4hPM
AN EXTINCTION VARIABLE
By Christopher Besonen
"She was grasping at her throat frantically as if she wasn’t getting air, but her sternum proved otherwise. It was rising and falling but it was like her brain wasn’t registering it."
Yikes on several bikes! This book is wild! A page turner, for sure. I couldn’t read it fast enough. It was a one-sitting binge read for me. It would be easy for me to be biased based on the author and him being a fellow UDH reviewer with me… but bias isn’t needed here.
Besonen can tell a hell of a story, and curate characters that I both loved and loathed. The overall plot was horrifying in every way possible, but for me, the real horror was that I could actually see it happening. It is nowhere close to out of the realm of possibilities. I had anxiety the entire time I read this. Then there was a little plot twist that happened, and I was a whole lot of HELL YES’S and a few HELL NO’S!
I recommend this to all horror readers. Especially if viruses/extinction, etc., are your preference. It sits at about 125 pages and truly is a GREAT story and told REALLY well!
SYNOPSIS:
After a massive earthquake devastates The Great Glen Faultline, a virus is unleashed that rushes humanity towards extinction.
Godless: https://godless.com/products/an-extinction-variable-by-chris-besonen?_pos=1&_sid=bfc9e53bd&_ss=r
Amazon: https://a.co/d/2jf5JUR
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