Dan Hanks: "The Way Up Is Death" (ARC Review)

Title: The Way Up Is Death [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Dan Hanks [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Multiverse, Thriller/Mystery
Year: 2025
Age: 18+
Stars: 4.5/5
Pros: Inventive and cinematic; hard-hitting yet moving and ultimately hopeful.
Cons: Given the large cast of characters (and the very nature of the story), not all of them get to be sufficiently developed.
WARNING! Blood and gore, dismemberment, torture, near-drowning, human combustion/explosion, body horror, eye horror, rat horror, death of a loved one.
Will appeal to: Those who are in for a wild, brutal yet poetical adventure/mystery that doubles as a reflection on humanity, life and the future.

Blurb: When a mysterious tower appears in the skies over England, thirteen strangers are pulled from their lives to stand before it as a countdown begins. Above the doorway is one word: ASCEND. As a grieving teacher, a reclusive artist, and a narcissistic celebrity children’s author lead the others in trying to understand why they’ve been chosen and what the tower is, it soon becomes clear the only way out of this for everyone…is up. And so begins a race to the top, through sinking ships, haunted houses and other waking nightmares, as the group fights to hold onto its humanity, while the twisted horror of why they’re here grows ever more apparent – and death stalks their every move. (Amazon)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Angry Robot for providing an ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

MORE TO IT

This book's premise is impossible to resist if you're the kind of reader whose mantra is "the weirder the better", but I'm here to confirm that, if you take a chance on TWUID, you won't regret being lured in, and you'll end up getting more than you bargained for. The short-and-sweet version of such premise: thirteen everymen and women from the UK (or just passing through) are pulled from their lives and forced to ascend an impossible tower in the skies, all while trying to fathom the how and (especially) the why in the process. From videogame settings to spaceships, from haunted houses to tropical beaches, a series of equally impossible locations (but ones that are somehow tailored to the travellers' past experiences) have the characters play a deadly game of escape rooms, of which they have to figure out the rules as they go. Exciting, isn't it? But if you tend to need a little more meat on your stories' bones, or if the cosmic horror premise and the content warning list left you on the fence about giving TWUID a chance, there are a couple more things you need to know. One: for a book that sheds so much blood and put its characters through the wringer, Hank's latest is surprisingly comforting and life-affirming. Two: for a book that relies so much on nightmarish experiences and frantic escapes, and even comes close to jumping the shark a couple of times (one of which quite literally 😂), TWUID is (also) surprisingly deep, so that you end up forgiving it for not making you care more for its characters (more of that below) or not giving you all the answers (if you're the type of reader who needs them, because to be honest, they're NOT the point here). [...]

Mallory Pearson: "Voice Like a Hyacinth" (ARC Review)

Title: Voice Like a Hyacinth [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Mallory Pearson [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Contemporary
Year: 2025
Age: 14+ (technically a NA book, but it can be read by mature teens. See the WARNING! section though)
Stars: 5/5
Pros: Immersive, visceral, gorgeously written.
Cons: Quite dark, if ultimately hopeful.
WARNING! Blood and gore, sexual harassment, self-cutting (during a ritual), alcohol and drug abuse, vomiting, near-drowning, fire, death/animal death. On a psychological level: codependency, high-stakes competition, familial pressure.
Will appeal to: Those who feel a pull towards visual arts (especially painting). Those who love a story that crosses the space between all-consuming friendship and queer love.

Blurb: Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another’s muses - so close they have their own language and so devoted to the craft that they’ll do anything to keep their inspiration alive. Even if it means naively resorting to the occult to unlock their creativity and to curse their esteemed, if notoriously creepy, professor. They soon learn the horrible price to be paid for such a transgressive ritual. In its violent aftermath, things are changing. Jo is feeling unnervingly haunted by something inexplicable. Their paintings, once prodigious and full of life, are growing dark and unhealthy. And their journey together - as women, students, and artists - is starting to crumble. To right the wrong they’ve done, these five desperate friends will take their obsession a step too far. When that happens, there may be no turning back. (Amazon)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: this title was up for grabs on NetGalley (in the Read Now section). Thanks to 47North for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

LEVEL UP

Eight months ago, I reviewed Pearson's debut novel We Ate the Dark. Despite the abundance of purple prose, I liked it quite a bit, noting that there was "a robust dose of lyrical writing peeking from under the sometimes intimidating similes" and that "Pearson has the makings of a good writer, if only she can rein those similes in a bit. Then again, this is a debut book, so maybe she still has to hone her craft" (the second quote comes from my reply to a fellow blogger's comment). It turns out I was right on both counts - and the Goodreads average rating agrees with me this time. On a content level, Pearson's sophomore novel draws on the same main theme of her debut ("female friendship and queer love and the liminal space between the two"), but ups the ante by setting her story in a small, yet competitive art college, and steeping it in codependency and obsession, both with the art and the friendship. In the same guise, though somehow in reverse - by way of subtracting instead of adding - the author sticks to the poetical, luscious writing she employed for her first novel, but prunes it of all the (often overdone) metaphors and craft her prose into a thing of beauty. The result is a terrific book (in more than one sense) that only goes to show how much Pearson has grown as a writer, while staying true to her signature style. [...]

Offbeat Offline: December 2024

Welcome to Offbeat Offline, where I bring you up-to-date with what went on in my life during the month just gone, give you a sneak peek of my next shenanigans, and share my favourite posts of late!

What happened last month to yours truly? A whole lot of nothing LOL. It was a totally uneventful month, which, when you live the life I'm living, you learn to be thankful for. My reading and reviewing improved (thanks to mini reviews 😁). That's pretty much it...

2024 Wrap-Up: In Which I Struggle, but Get the Work Done

Hello my beauties!

Welcome to my last post of the year, where I will wrap my 2024 up. I'll preface this post by saying that I made some small changes to my usual yearly-recap format: I got rid of the Events and Memes, Author Interactions and Discussion Posts sections, since for the last two years they've been a huge "I've got nothing" waste of space where I explained how I had only participated in a handful of Tell Me Something Tuesday rounds, hadn't gotten the chance to beta-read anything new, and hadn't written any discussion posts (bar the TMST ones) in ages. I introduced a new section called Extras though, so that, from now on, I can either put any non-review-related content in there or say "I've got nothing" just once 😅. I also redesigned the Numbers section (now renamed Stats), hopefully making my stats less darn confusing easier to navigate (I also added some categories, like backlist reviews or rereads...). And I customised some vectors from Iconpack and Uxwing to create new section headers! The This Year in Blogging, Stats and Goals images come from Iconpack, the Reviews, Extras, Life and Holidays Hiatus ones from Uxwing. (And yes, I know the contours aren't perfect, but they were originally PNG, and I had to convert them to GIF to make the background transparent, which created problems I wasn't in the mood to fix).

So, without further ado, here goes my 2024 recap...

Pt. 1: This Year in Blogging

As of today, I've been blogging for 12 years and a couple of months!

This year was another tough one, life-wise, and it impacted my blogging - but on the other hand, the blogging itself was my only escape from the hardships of existence...so I managed to find a balance and stay afloat keep up with my schedule. I was never not in the mood for reading, but I often found myself dragging my feet about the reviewing part...Anyhow, even with three month-long hiatuses, I was able not only to write 52 posts (virtually one post a week), which was my original goal, but to reach a total of 54...small victories, right?

I titled last year's wrap-up "In Which I Bend, but Don't Break". I titled this one "In Which I Struggle, but Get the Work Done". Can you see a pattern? 🤷‍♀️ Then again, "get the work done" has more of a determined angle, because more than ever this year I had to make a conscious effort to keep up with this blogging gig, and I succeeded, and I feel like a superheroine now (just kidding, but it's a good place to be).

This is what happened on Offbeat YA during the year, broken down by number of posts, books I reviewed, other bookish content/activities...plus an off-blog, real-life section!