Because I’ve decided to expand the scope of my “2015 Favorite Reads” series to include a few chapbooks and standalone novellas, I’m going to include Xs For Eyes by Laird Barron, published by Bizarro Pulp Press, an imprint of Journalstone.

This book is a hell of a lot of fun – much faster, leaner and pulpier than much of Barron’s work. Further good news is that Barron and the publisher Journalstone appear to be interested in releasing more installments of the adventures of the Tooms brothers.

On Goodreads I said:
The most demented “teen adventure” book you’ll ever read. This reminded me a bit of Barron’s The Light is the Darkness, with the same breathless pace, and a similar focus on larger-than-life events happening just under the surface of a world that mostly resembles our own. It even has a character named Navarro, like Conrad Navarro in The Light is the Darkness. Other familiar Barron characters like Mandibole also appear. This story was a kick-ass, high octane blast of fun.

Xs For Eyes on Goodreads

Xs For Eyes on Amazon

Xs For Eyes on Journalstone

The Incoming Tide by Cameron Pierce is one of my favorite reads of 2015 in the Collections category. This is such an unusual book, both refreshingly simple and affectingly, surprisingly deep. It combines very short stories, poems and prose poems in a little slip of a volume, easily read in one setting. But the size of The Incoming Tide is no indication at all of how much wisdom, perspective and emotion it contains.

On Goodreads I said:
A charming, wonderfully sensitive and mature collection of poems and very short stories about fishing, rivers, beer and life. I loved every page of this.

The Incoming Tide on Amazon

The Incoming Tide on GoodReads

I’m going to kick off my “Favorite Reads of 2015” series with the oldest book to make the list. One of my favorite reads of 2015 in the “earlier books I first read in 2015” category was We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

For some reason, I thought I had read this before… maybe because I’ve seen so many people talk about it. After a few pages, I was wonderfully pleased to discover this was actually unknown territory, and I was in for a first reading of a book that I ended up loving like mad. Shirley Jackson is just so, so damn good! The slow reveal of past events that led up to the family’s situation at the beginning of the novel is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever read.

Much as I also love The Haunting of Hill House, I could see myself revisiting We Have Always Lived in the Castle even more frequently. This is one of the best and most memorable books I’ve encountered in the past five years.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle on GoodReads

We Have Always Lived in the Castle on Amazon

We Have Always Lived in the Castle on Wikipedia