Audely Bensen Writes

One of my friends from high school is a huge horror reader, and mentioned to me one day that she'd been listening to thew new Rachel Harrison book on audiobook. Of course, the next day I spotted Play Nice on the New Books shelf at the library and had to scoop it up.  There's a very narrow slice of horror that I enjoy, and Rachel Harrison always nails it on the head. This book was a fun read with several semi-likable characters. At the same time that I read it, I was also re-reading Donald Maass's The Emotional Craft of Fiction, and it struck me at several points in the novel just how often Harrison nailed the emotional cores of her characters and placed their reactions as primary to the advancement of the plot. I supposed that's what makes her horror so compelling - it's not the gore, or the physical fear, but the raw ugliness of human emotion and the way that it ties us together anyways that makes her books so great. 

As with most of the books I've read this year, I picked up The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst on a whim at the library. I didn't realize it wasn't a stand-alone novel until midway through the book, while in conversation with a friend about how much I was enjoying it. I also didn't know until after I'd finished reading that it was sold by my Futurescapes main faculty, who I met the very weekend I read this!  Overall, I thought this was a really fun, escapist book. Like Hart & Mercy, it has a strong romantic plot that felt more like a cozy romance than what I'd expect from romantasy, even though it is definitely a fantasy novel.  At times I found myself skimming over some of the setting description to arrive more quickly at the emotional core of the story. I suspect this is a downside of a cozier version of romantasy: the world-building isn't central to the plot, so it's easy enough to skip without losing the thread of the story. That makes ...