FINAL BOY

My name is Andrew, and I have a To-Be-Read problem. Maybe I can share it with you?

Final boy is the name I’ve given to this, from the final girl horror trope of slasher films (think Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, Neve Campbell in Scream) of the protagonist who is pursued by the killer and ultimately finds their voice and courage and faces them down.

I love reading and I also love talking / typing about reading, so this is going to be a blog about just that. I tend to veer on the enthusiastic side, so the books that I write about are going to fall more into the ones that I love, or if I don’t love them at least what is interesting to me about why I didn’t, rather than just negative reviews.

At the moment, what I read mostly is fantasy and manga but I’m getting back into sci-fi and horror, which I used to read a lot of of a few years back and both are really making me feel excited about reading.

It isn’t a unique thought to me, but horror is certainly going through a renaissance where the range of choice of what you want from your horror reading is wider than it has ever been, and it is also then easier to stay away from the stuff that you don’t want or the things that go beyond giving you a scare or make you feel uncomfortable and into being an unpleasant experience.

Back when I was first reading horror, it used to be that you had rows on row of books with black spines and the titles and author embossed in big silver letters on the front and it would either be Stephen King, or people who wanted to be the next Stephen King. And now it is way broader than that and people who maybe thought they didn’t like horror or were done with it as a genre have a world of amazing stuff to dip into and find what is right for them.

I’ve got a few books that I want to write about in the early days of the blog and then we’ll just see where that takes us – so expect some reviews soon of “Brother” by Ania Ahlborn, “My Heart is a Chainsaw” by Stephen Graham Jones, The Expanse series by James SA Corey and Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series.

Almost certainly I’m not going to confine myself to just this sort of stuff, so it will be pretty much anything that I get enthused about.