october 2025
happy fall to you and to me! it has actually felt fall-like here this month, an exciting departure, and i have been glorying in the crisp chill in the air each morning. this has made partaking in autumnal delights even more attractive than usual! a small sampling include attending the preview of a play called “Witch” (excellent), a chili throwdown (delicious), and my first ever trip to an apple orchard (marvelous).
read: All of Us Murderers by K.J. Charles (2025). A new KJ Charles is always a treat, but one that’s set in a big old house? And murders are happening? Well, that’s a treat for me specifically. As gothics go, I think this could have been more vicious (which is something that is well within her wheelhouse), but I enjoyed it nevertheless. She well and truly traps these men in a murderhouse. Hooray :) Ebook preordered from Amazon.
film: The Thing (1982). I had the chance to see this on the big screen so I sucked up my fear and finally watched it. SO glad I waited for a cinema viewing—sitting in a packed theater and screaming with everyone around me was the ideal Thing experience, I think. John Carpenter really good at making movies??? Buoyed by this realization, I also watched Christine (1983), which is comparatively soooo goofy. But still a good time! I think a car should get to do a little murder, as a treat.
read: Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman (2025). I love a vacation murder mystery, and this one starred a woman in her 60s, which was up my alley too. I wish I’d liked it more! Lippman has a long-running series about a P.I. in Baltimore, and this book is that P.I.’s employee Mrs. Blossom’s time to shine. I’ve never read any of it, but it felt like Lippman was trying to make up for possibly many years of letting Mrs. Blossom be a punchline (often to a fat joke) with one book. She’d definitely done her homework (Aubrey Gordon gets a mention in the acknowledgments), but it’s still an awful lot to expect from a single book. I did enjoy the mystery, however. Library ebook.
watch: Passenger (2024). Started this thinking it was a village murder mystery and ended up with something much weirder and wilder. Starring Wunmi Mosaku (lately of Sinners), this is about a town where odd things happen just beneath the surface, and the detective who suspects they’re there (and who nobody believes). Mosaku is the element that makes it really work, and I am hoping against hope that she’ll be back for another series as it ends in a cliff-hanger.
read: Recipe for Trouble by Dylan Morrison (2025). I loved Dylan’s first book (and his fic!), so I was eagerly awaiting this. I enjoyed it a lot, but it didn’t land quite as well for me. Recipe for Trouble follows Ben, a video editor, who edits a disaster of a video for a friend and ends up half of a cooking show team with Pete, a hot chef who panics as soon as a camera is on him. I loved Ben as a character and I really loved the book as a love letter to New York City. Some of the stakes in the book didn’t feel high enough to me, and the order that events played out at the end also didn’t totally work. Still a real good romance, though. Ebook preordered from Amazon.
games: Ghost of Yotei (2025) & Powerwash Simulator 2 (2025). October has also been a great month for much-anticipated sequels to games I loved. add in last month’s Hades 2 release and I’ve been a pig in slop. I’m still playing them (and really enjoying taking my time), but thus far both Ghost of Yotei (follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima) and Powerwash Sim 2 are giving me exactly what I wanted more of from the first games. I love to be catered to.
read: The Bewitching by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, read by Gisela Chípe (2025). Of the previous works by Moreno-Garcia which I’ve read, this is my favourite by far. It jumps between settings, telling the stories of Alba, a woman in Mexico in 1908, Minerva, her great-granddaughter in Massachusetts in 1998, and Beatrice, an author who Minerva is researching, in 1934. Each voice was distinct and their stories overlapped without being too repetitive (although true to form I enjoyed Minerva’s time in the late 90s best). The horror was quite good, and I really loved that Moreno-Garcia stuck firm to the Mexican and not the American witch traditions. There’s also some enjoyable library and archives use, if you are me or like me. Library audiobook.
read: Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton (2023). Speaking of period fantasy books with juicy library bits! This book has been on my list for ages, and it took a friend reviewing its sequels this week to finally inspire me to read it, but as it’s quite a fall-ish book, I didn’t mind the delay. It follows Sam and Ulysses, an archivist and a grad student/magic detective in Madison, Wisconsin, 1969. The sense of place in this book is wonderful, and the fact that Ulysses can literally communicate with buildings just deepened that. I also really appreciated that Ulysses, who can see and speak with ghosts, just goes along with it even though it often really sucks for him. Ebook, bought a while ago, likely from Amazon.
watch: Murder Before Evensong (2025). Have been loving this series (which Robyn and I mostly refer to as “priest murder”) about a village priest in the late 1980s who becomes involved in a murder investigation after a man is found dead in his church. I love the period setting, and the cast is really great. I find it more realistic yet no less kind than something like Father Brown.
read: Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie (1969). A local museum has a periodic Agatha Christie book club that some friends and I like to attend, and the book this month was appropriately Hallowe’en Party. It’s a Poirot mystery, and quite a late one, and far from Christie’s best. That said, I enjoyed discussing it. It’s always nice when a book club book leaves you with plenty of material to talk about. In spite of the title, it’s less about Halloween than it is about gardens, with some truly lovely prose to that effect. Vintage paperback.
film: Frankenstein (2025). Putting a cap on my spooky month, I caught Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on the big screen last night. Highly recommend doing so if you have the option—GdT does not skimp on visuals. This is a good movie, I think! Jacob Elordi (who previous to this I knew only as “a boy who folks find cute”) as The Creature knocked my socks off. Who knew! I do think it could have been weirder. It felt a bit like GdT with the volume slightly muffled. Still a rec for sure.
Dog & Cat:
