2016: The Story So Far – Third Quarter

Back in July I did a list of my favourite books of the year so far, and as it’s now October time for another update.

For the months July through September, I read a total of twenty eight books.

So, in the order I preferred them when I wrote the list ten minutes ago (and, of course, it may be subject to change), here’s my top thirteen books for 2016 so far, with new entries shown in bold:-

The Pleasure Merchant – Molly Tanzer (Lazy Fascist Press)

The Sea of Blood – Reggie Oliver (Dark Renaissance Books)

The Night Clock – Paul Meloy (Solaris)

Ventriloquists – David Mathew (Montag Press)

Horrorology – Edited by Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books)

The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eight – Edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books)

Singing With All My Flesh and Bone – Sunny Moraine (Undertow Publications)

A Song of Shadows – John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton)

Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed – Edited by Joseph Nassise & Del Howison (Tor)

The Madness of Dr. Caligari – Edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Fedogan & Bremer)

Skein and Bone – V. H. Leslie (Undertow Publications)

The Sadist’s Bible – Nicole Cushing (01Publishing)

Paper Tigers – Damien Angelica Walters (Dark House Press)

It breaks down as five novels, three collections, four anthologies, and one novella. Undertow Publications is the only publisher to appear twice on the list.

By my count, nine of these books weren’t first published in 2016, including those in the top five spots, so it is a ‘best of Pete’s reading in 2016’ rather than ‘Pete’s best of the year’ (a not too subtle distinction) and, of course, I only read a fraction of what gets published.