Emily remembered seeing a documentary once about strange foods, and in it, they spoke of ortolan buntings: tiny, vulnerable songbirds who were captured and put in limitless darkness, their response to which was to gorge themselves on seeds and grain, which doubled their size. The birds were then drowned in brandy, marinated in what killed them, and later roasted and eaten. When eating the sad little brandy-drowned birds, diners covered their heads with cloth so that God could not see their cruelty.

from Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig

Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

This book was so perfectly fall, it's hard to describe how happy it made me. It is a story of a man who finds an heirloom apple tree and decides to graft it onto other apple trees in order to regrow the heirloom varietal. However, in classic Chuck Wendig style, this is not really about apples. This book is about the evil incarnate in humans, and how this apple changes them. The tale was clearly well-researched, and the characters were so interesting and I found myself in many of them as well. As someone who loves the idea of apple-picking and tasting interesting and new apples, but also how they came to be in our country, this book was the perfectly spooky fall / Halloween book to read and at the perfect time as well. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for something to scare you just enough this fall!

This ebook was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm spending the evening curled up with a spooky book (Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig). Will I stay up late to finish these last 200-ish pages? Probably. Will I be made at myself in the morning for not going to bed at a reasonable hour? Most definitely.

My Best of 2023: My Top 10 2023 Books

1. Boys in the Valley (Philip Fracassi)

2. The Ferryman (Justin Cronin)

3. Don't Fear the Reaper (Stephen Graham Jones)

4. Small Mercies (Dennis Lehane)

5. Black River Orchard (Chuck Wendig)

6. Spin a Black Yarn (Josh Malerman)

7. The Night House (Jo Nesbø)

8. Sister, Maiden, Monster (Lucy A. Snyder)

9. The River We Remember (William Kent Krueger)

10. How to Sell a Haunted House (Grady Hendrix)

Note: This is out of the 42 2023 releases that I read throughout the year.

Thank you all so much for reading/sharing/etc. Here’s hoping 2024 is full of good things and great books!

Happy New Year!!

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

October 9, 2023:

The old-fashioned looking font on the cover does this book a disservice because it really is a fully 2023 novel (down to examples not of how teens text each other, but how an adult thinks teens still text each other but that's besides the point). If you follow this author on social media, you might know that he is obsessed with apples. This guy knows so much about rare heirloom (rareloom?) apple varietals and he's very passionate about them, so when I heard that he was working on a book centered on that knowledge, I got hyped about this months-to-years in advance. Not to project onto the author, but I think he was hyped too. This is written with a vaguely anticipatory air, like this book is supposed to be his... masterpiece? Passion project? Love letter to his special interest? For that reason, I wanted to enjoy this more. I wanted to suck it down greedily in a weekend, or else savor it bite by bite, but in reality it just took me a really long time to struggle through it. It's... challenging to read. Don't get me wrong, I loved all the apple lore! It was just hard for me to get into, and it's for sure not the book's fault. There were spooky vibes, a spooky guy with a spooky smile, class traitorship, an emotionally abusive lesbian marriage, and, best of all, a sex-positive portrayal of ethical nonmonogamy & kink! I appreciate all of that. I just felt removed from it for reasons I can't pin down. Maybe I need to take a break from books.

Something I like but will likely be divisive about the writing is the inclusion of written intrusive thoughts. Italic text will interrupt a paragraph which will then continue, substituting the intended rest of the sentence in place of the harsher but truer italicized text. To take my own words for example, my earlier sentence might have been written like this:

This is written with a vaguely anticipatory air, like this book is supposed to be his masterpiece passion project.

It reads like distressed jeans. Distressed writing. Though I do like it, I think it was 1) very overused in this book, and 2) used indiscriminately among characters. In my opinion, it would be more effective to use this more exclusively in the point of view of characters that are more likely to have intrusive thoughts. Although everyone has them, not everyone has them equally, after all.

Overall, I don't think I can give this a fair number. I fear a score based on my net-enjoyment of the reading experience will undervalue the things it has going for it, and there's really nothing wrong with it either. But it would also be disingenuous to overrate a book just because I think I should have liked it more.

?/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

Cleaning the slate, i.e. 2023 in review

I set a humble goal (via the ever trusty and gentle-pressuring Goodreads) of reading 48 books in 2023. As of today, December 29, 2023, Goodreads tells me I have read 59 books. And I’ve got 10% left in the one I’m reading now so I will hit 60 books this year. Yay me! And before I get too confident, I’m setting the goal for 2024 at 48 books too. Four books a month is entirely doable without…

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Weekly Roundup 11.10.23

Another week, another weekly roundup. I like how that sounds. This week I’ve got another bunch of things I’m interested in, watching, reading or whatever. In other words, If I like it, it’s probably something I’m going to talk about this week or in the near future. What can I say? I like to share. But before I get to the (more) interesting stuff I just wanted to mention I’m currently writing this…

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Bookish Travels---October 2023 Destinations

I saw this meme on It’s All About Books and thought, I like this!! So, I decided to do it once a month also. Many thanks to Yvonne for initially posting this!! This post is what it says: Places I travel to in books each month. Books are lovely and take you to places you would never get to. That includes places of fantasy, too!! Bon Voyage!! Please let me know if you have read these books or…

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I would not survive this book because even knowing the premise I wanted to try one of the apples since like chapter 0.

#REVIEW: Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig

This is going to look kind of weird on the page, but having done the usually done thing and started this book review with a high-res copy of the book cover, let me now pivot and … embed a YouTube video: The episode that clip is from aired in April of 2000. According to Wikipedia, Stephen King has written thirty fucking books since then, and I own nearly all of them. But King is 76, and it is…

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Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

"Bad apple spoils the bunch. That's the saying. Ben Franklin said it a little different: The rotten apple spoils his companion."

Chuck Wendig's Black River Orchard is a creatively creepy and oh-so-wonderfully weird horror book about apples. Yeah, sure, it's also about the cult-like nature of small town living, dreams like cement shoes and the American divide, but mostly it's just an incredibly well told, effectively eerie, and super f*ckin' weird horror story about the outlets of evil... in the form of evil apples.

This is a long and detailed book. In addition to spending time with very well-defined characters and a story that thankfully gets every bit as weird as I'd hoped it would (and then some), you're going to learn a shit ton about apples. Hell, you'll learn so much about apples that you're going to want to go right out and visit your local orchard. But then you'll continue reading, shit's going to get even weirder, and you're likely going to find yourself never wanting to bite into another apple again. The idea of the crunch of a ripe apple - the tart crispness of its skin, the sweet juiciness of its flesh - will creep you the f*ck out.

Thankfully, Wendig's prose is once again so insanely readable. The way he brings us into this small town and the lives of this impressively large cast of characters is seamless and superbly paced. The way he brings to life both the world of apples, in general, but especially the mythology behind the (Harrowsblack) Ruby Red Slipper, is extremely detailed, richly informative, and (somehow) never once anything near dull. He tells a story of a man trying to bring to fruition his father's dream to the point that it becomes his own obsession. And how that man's own innate evil tendencies are stoked by a deep seeded external evil growing in his own backyard.

But, while the entirety of this book is an atmospheric, enjoyable ride, it's the final act that unleashes the next-level weird that makes this (easily) one of My Favorite Books of 2023. It's expertly paced and satisfyingly plotted and cinematic to the point where the awesomely grotesque body horror in its downright fantastic climax will be sure make your stomach churn. Thanks for sharing your weirdness with us, Chuck! Now I dare you to get weirder...

9/10

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

so i'm constantly collecting names for characters (i have a list). i'm reading the book of accidents (chuck wendig) and earlier today i was like oh huh nate would be a nice name... hmmm

last january, i started a novel. it is uhhh 130,000 words and only half done (i think). i was going to have a subplot with a character leaving her crappy fiancé, but i was barely spending any time on that subplot, so i switched it to EX-fiancé who she realizes was crappy over course of the novel. and i also changed his name -- he was originally named nolan, but during my brief stint in childcare, a kid i ended up close with was named nolan, and i didn't feel right about using his name for an antagonist. so when i made the edits, i renamed Crappy Fiancé

guys. i completely forgot til i randomly opened my draft.

i renamed him NATE

i loveeeeee chuck wendig. i love that guy. writer of all tiem. i love you chuck wendig