Welcome back to a Director’s Cut Review. Today’s book

under the knife is A Veritable Household Pet by Viggy Parr Hampton.

Title: A Veritable Household Pet

Author: Viggy Parr Hampton

Page Count: 336

Genre: Horror

Subgenre: Domestic, Medical

Themes/Tropes: Lobotomies, Sisterhood, Loss of autonomy, Mental health, medical abuse

Series? No but also 😉

Setting: 1960s/70s

Other Works by this author: A Cold Night for Alligators, Much Too Vulgar, The Rotting Room

Let's talk about this book. As always, I'll do my best to keep this review spoiler free for you all.

The book follows two sisters as they recall their tragic upbringing. Darla developed emetophobia--the fear of vomiting-- at a young age. By age eleven her parents were unable to handle her any more, so her father decided a lobotomy was the next step. This set off the chain of horrible events that follow in the book. Darla nearly died after the lobotomy--which at this point in time were nearly unheard of being practiced by medical professionals anymore. Her sister, Ellie, wound up having to care for Darla often due to the lack of effort her parents applied to the "new" Darla.

The story is told in alternating Povs. Decades later, Darla has asked Ellie to transcribe her life. After the lobotomy, Darla was never able to write again. She wanted a record of what she could remember. Ellie adds in her own thoughts and memories as she transcribes Darla's words.

This story is beautiful yet tragic. The feeling I got while reading this book reminded me of Tiffany McDaniel's The Savage Side. This book is brutal. It doesn't shy away from tragedy.

I can see some people not wanting to label this as horror. But to that I say this: Horror is subjective. We all perceive things differently. What scares me may not scare you. This book focuses on "real" horror. People had lobotomies done against their will. Many were never the same after the procedure. This book shows the tragedy of this horrible procedure that was once labeled a cure for neurosis. I'm a firm believer in the scariest kind of horror is the kind that happens everyday.

In this book we see parental negligence. We see medical professionals abuse their power. We see a young girl lose her autonomy. We see a girl have to make sacrifices and help raise her sister--a job her parents should be doing.

I'll drop a few content warnings here: Rape, Murder, Suicide.

I gave this book 4.5 stars.

Be sure to check it out when it releases on 1.28.26.

You can preorder the book down below. Be sure to check out more of Hampton's work! She is a fantastic writer.

Hi everyone! Here are the books I’m thinking of reading in January! Per usual, we will pick one fantasy and one thriller. Each member can vote twice, one for each genre! Voting will end on the 31st

Hey y'all,

The Children of Diaspora Book Club is BACK! I've decided to choose the books for January and February so we can show some Bindery releases the love they deserve.

Our January read will be Orange Wine by Esperanza Hope Snyder. Esperanza Hope Snyder was born in Columbia and immigrated to the United States. The novel takes place in 20th century Columbia.

Our February read will be Dust Settles North by Deena ElGenaidi. Deena ElGenaidi is Egyptian-American and the novel takes place in Cairo during Arab Spring.

Check out the links below for a full synopsis. If you choose to purchase through these links, I may also receive a small commission.

XoXo - Rae

I finally had a chance to sit down & pull together my reviews for the books I read in November, so let's jump right in! I read 6 books by and about Black, Latine, and Indigenous queer folks. I was really in my anthology bag this past month, which means I have plenty of new to me authors to check out! Here are the books I read and my reviews of each:

This horror anthology has a lot of fantastic stories within! One of my faves is "The Brides of Devil's Bayou" by Desiree S. Evans which is about a girl named Aja who returns to her family home in Louisiana for her 19th birthday despite the alleged curse on her family.

All of the stories are captivating and perfectly creepy! Some have sci-fi elements or magical realism, while others feed on modern experiences like "Black Girl Nature Group" and "Queeniums for Greenium!"

This is a great book to add to any collection.

Scout's Honor is a dark yet playful paranormal story that is great for folks who have ever wondered what it would be like to have a girl scout-esque organization in which girls take down monsters feeding on human emotions. The plot was original and I loved the way Prudence thought about her role as a former ladybird scout as she trained the newbies. Her compassion and instinct to hold onto humanity made her a worthy MC.

There were just a couple of things that made this book a bit hard for me to enjoy sometimes: the pacing and repetitiveness. It felt like the story spent a bit too much time on world-building and not much on the chemistry between Prudence and her boyfriend. There were also times when I sped up the audiobook to get through the slower/repetitive dialogue.

I recommend this book to teens (and anyone else) who is intrigued by this review!

We Belong is a beautiful addition to my (small, but mighty) collection of graphic novels! Many of the stories are filled with community, love, and joy. I love that there are plenty of stories that don't center around hardship and take place in queer-normative worlds or spaces. More of this, please!

Although a few of the stories were hard to follow, I think this is a solid anthology. Each story/piece includes a brief artist/author bio, which is great for those of us who like to follow artist's work online.

I recommend this book to folks who love visual arts and/or need to see Black queer folks thriving.

Love After The End is a fantastic anthology that should be a must-read for lovers of Speculative Fiction!

I absolutely loved almost every story in this book, which is impressive because I usually don't favor anthologies as they tend to lack the space to explore their themes as much as full-length novels.

It felt so good to read queer-normative stories that center resistance and community.

My fave stories are How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls by Kai Minosh Pyle and Seed Children by Mari Kurisato.

Skyn by Nikki Payne is a humorous and sexy take on dystopian sci-fi!

Fawl is a regular degular woman who spent her life living in the Underground while dreaming of feeling the real sun on her skin. When her ex leaves her for her stepsister, Fawl is devastated & angry. They’d been working to get the money/upgrades to leave the Underground together for years & suddenly her future is ripped away. Not one to give up so easily, Fawl agrees to spy on an Elite family of emotionless cyborgs to finally touch some grass. In a twist of events, she ends up married to one of the sons, who happens to have an obsession with her skin.

I love Nikki Payne's writing because her characters always have hella funny & relatable internal monologues. There's jokes, philosophical questions, super sexy scenes, & a revolutionary heart. I think this is one of my fave stories from the After The End project.

Taken is a wild ride from the start!

Rhen is an artist who was recruited to be a part of a project to re-establish/repopulate the Earth after the devastating fall of civilization. Each of the participants were placed in pods programmed to wake them after 11,000 years. Our MC wakes up early thanks to a malfunction in the system. She faced w/ a couple of choices: Live out her life alone in the bunker or take a risk by leaving. Rhen decides to leave & finds out that there are some humanoid creatures who take her w/ them. She has an undeniable attraction to one of them & they're bound to one another, but she can't quite leave her old life behind just yet...

This novella was very entertaining to me! I think Rhen is funny & the storyline is clever. Spice-wise, I'd say this is about 3.5 out of 5 chili peppers. If you're looking for a fun, short, and steamy monster romance, you should pick this one up!

2026 is the year of the brain and that means that we are reading more non-fiction!

You know that I love a challenge, so I created this one on Storygraph!

The challenge is to read a total of 6 non fiction books written by Indigenous authors. If you've already read a book, you need to reread it in 2026 for it to count.

I've added just a few Indigenous non-fiction to this post for you to check out and many more on the challenge page itself.

If you plan on buying any, please shop from the attached books below. I earn a small commission for each book you purchase (whether I listed it or not!)

So I heard you're looking for books to pre-order in preparation for 2026?👀

So you may have heard about pre-orders and you may have heard WHY its important but let's get into it a bit more, in a summarised manner! I will attach the resource of why you should pre-order the books, especially by marginalised authors who depend on these numbers to release more books, get a larger marketing budget (or a decent one), and show that there is a readership for their books!

THE GRAPHICS ARE ALL THE WAY IN THE BOTTOM WITH A BOOKSHOP.ORG UK AND US SHOPS to browse through and HERE is a goodreads list of all the available SWANA books too so you can add it in your TBR!!!!

Why are pre-orders important?

Thank you to authors who continue to educate us readers and the community on why Pre-orders are important! As someone who has been learning this throughout the year and advocating for it,

1. It shows publishers that we, as readers and well buyers, are interested in the books BiPOC authors are publishing

2. The more the book sells (yes, as a pre-order) the more marketing effort goes into it

3. It alerts bookshops, book subs...etc. that the book is doing well and they should stock more of it (this is so important because it shows it'll sell if they do buy it AND this allows more reader to find the book)

4. It helps the authors hit a best seller list (which does wonders for the author and the book)

In a world where SWANA authors make up less than 1% of the trad pub world (thank you to Jananie from Boundless Press for sharing this stats on threads, check her Bindery page out in here and check out Dust Settles North by Deena which was one of the SWANA 2025 releases) we need to continuously share and advocate for the authors who are here now and show that we want more of them!

So, what SWANA books are we pre-ordering in 2026?

Here's a list and attached to this blog post are the books you can click on to pre-order easily if you're in the US or access my bookshop.org list and get clicking! If you're in the UK, here is the bookshop.org list for you guys but some books are missing so I have added the link to get them elsewhere (some are affiliate).
Keep in mind, for some of the books, it is too early as they're not on the list YET but I will update and let you guys know when it is!

Here are the ones missing from bookshop.org:

• Our Ex's Wedding by Taleen Voskuni: Amazon (UK)

• Where No Shadow Stays by Sara Hashem: Amazon (UK), Blackwell's (UK)

• In the Country I Love by Alaa Al-Barkawi: Amazon (UK)

• Everything Comes back to you by Jackie Khalilieh: Amazon (UK)

• Letters from the Last Apothecary by Bita Behzadi: Amazon (UK)

• Ungodly Chaos by Selma Soren: Amazon (UK)

• Bashir Boutros and the Forgotten Realm by George Jreije: Amazon (UK)

AND FINALLY, here are the graphics of the list:

Thank you for subscribing to Chanterelle Solace and Ifrits & Ink! Please do consider joining as a paid member to help us become an imprint and support/uplift marginalised authors in the future for either $5 or $12

Isle in the Silver Sea reads as both a love letter to storytelling and a clear warning about its dangers. The tension between those two truths gives the novel its emotional depth and its political urgency, especially within a sociopolitical moment shaped by propaganda and misinformation, where stories flatten people into symbols and demand obedience rather than truth.

Through a folkloric structure built on stories within stories, Tasha Suri examines how narratives preserve worlds while also trapping those forced to live inside them, revealing how easily repetition hardens into destiny and how often survival requires questioning the version of the story everyone else insists on telling.

The novel follows Simran, the Witch, and Vina, the Knight, the latest reincarnations of an ancient tale known as The Knight and the Witch, a story the Isle depends on for survival, a story meant to be reenacted across lifetimes, a story whose ending demands love followed by mutual death for the supposed good of the land. Both women understand their roles with painful clarity. They know the shape of their future before their story even begins. They know devotion leads to destruction. They know resistance has never worked before.

Yet this time, something fractures. Other incarnates begin dying early, something once thought impossible, and the rules that once felt immutable begin to show seams. As Simran and Vina work together to unravel what has been woven into the Isle itself, the book transforms from mythic tragedy into a meditation on agency, inheritance, and refusal, asking whether preservation without consent deserves to survive at all.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths lies in its worldbuilding, which resists excess while achieving depth. The Isle, a magical and unsettling reimagining of an Arthurian England, feels alive rather than decorative. Magic, witches, fae, monarchs, and knights exist not as spectacle but as consequences of a system sustained through repetition and belief. The land breathes. The land remembers. The land demands performance. Colonialism and racism exist beneath the Isle’s polished myths, acknowledged not as background detail but as structural forces shaping who belongs and who remains “other,” even across lifetimes. The Isle does not feel neutral. It feels invested. It feels hungry.

The characters move through this world with a reverence that feels intentional. No one exists for convenience. No one feels disposable. Every choice carries weight, and when characters leave the narrative or change shape within it, the outcome feels earned rather than imposed. Vina, disciplined and bone deep in her sense of duty, begins as distant and fatalistic. Yet, her vulnerability emerges through family wounds, emotional disconnection, and an almost resigned acceptance of annihilation as purpose. Simran, sharp, protective, and shaped by unkindness, burns with defiance and love in equal measure, carrying both fury and care in every decision she makes. Their dynamic balances yearning with grief, attraction with dread, desire with the knowledge of what desire costs.

The romance refuses cynicism. Love in this book is treated as sacred, whether romantic, platonic, familial, or found, and every expression of it carries tenderness and risk. The yearning between Simran and Vina feels vast and consuming, shaped as much by fate as by longing, and their connection highlights how love becomes both refuge and rebellion within systems built to control. Found family, cultural memory, and reconnection to place weave through the narrative, offering grounding even when biological or historical ties remain complicated or painful. Within a genre where sapphic relationships often absorb harm for narrative effect, this book insists on devotion, care, and mutual recognition as worthy and necessary.

At its core, the novel interrogates narrative authority. The Isle survives by enforcing stories. People survive by obeying them. Identity becomes performance. History becomes script. Those born into incarnations inherit meaning before choice. This framework mirrors lived trauma, where stories assigned by family systems, institutions, and culture shape identity long before consent enters the room. The book understands how repetition trains belief, how silence reinforces harm, and how questioning the story threatens collapse.

This theme resonates deeply with therapeutic work. Clients often arrive carrying stories forged under fear, shame, survival, or control. Those stories feel immovable because they were learned when safety depended on belief—therapy challenges narrative ownership. Therapy asks who wrote the first version. Therapy slows the pace enough for revision. In that space, people rewrite. They rebuild. They reclaim. They move from symbol back into personhood.

Isle in the Silver Sea embodies this process through its structure. It refuses a single authoritative version of events. It honours multiplicity. It treats context as essential rather than optional. It shows how healing restores complexity rather than simplicity, how truth expands once silence loosens its grip.

The novel also interrogates assimilation and preservation, revealing how desperate adherence to tradition risks stagnation and collapse. By reworking foundational British myths, the story exposes the fragile line between honouring history and suffocating beneath it, mainly when survival depends on perfect reenactment rather than growth.

Beautiful and sharp, inevitable yet surprising, this book lingers because it understands something essential. Stories shape worlds. Stories shape people. Stories preserve and destroy. The power lies not in abandoning narrative, but in reclaiming authorship, and in choosing who gets to speak, who gets to live, and who finally gets to decide how the story ends.

Reminder for our book club meeting on 12/30 at 8:00pm EST.

Link will be posted here and on the discord!

We’re voting on our January book club pick a little later than usual because I got distracted during the holidays 🤭 We have three great options lined up! Vote here on Bindery by Sunday, December 28th and check the Discord on the 29th to see who our giveaway winner is this month. Can’t wait to start the new year with you all!

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Genre: Epic Fantasy (Series)

Blurb: An orphan’s life is harsh—and often short—in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game—or die trying.

To Ride Hell’s Chasm by Janny Wurts

Genre: Epic Fantasy (Standalone)

Blurb: When Princess Anja fails to appear at her betrothal banquet, the tiny, peaceful kingdom of Sessalie is plunged into intrigue. Two warriors are charged with recovering the distraught king's beloved daughter.

As the princess's trail vanishes outside the citadel's gates, anxiety and tension escalate. But was the high-spirited princess taken by force, or did she flee the palace to escape a demonic evil?

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

Genre: Sapphic Romantic Fantasy (Standalone)

Blurb: In a Britain fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.

Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen's court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other?

Hey y'all,

I know it's been a while. The holiday season and work turned me every way but lose in December so I'd like to show my appreciation for this community by hosting a flash giveaway of the Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife by Deston J. Munden book box.

If you'd like a peek into what's in the box, check out this unboxing I did a little while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgLTjEZVvpc

To enter, all you need to do is comment here what you're most excited to read in 2026!

I'll reach out to the winner on Sunday.

XoXo - Rae

I don’t usually read two horror novels back to back unless I’m actively trying to lose sleep, but Blood Like Ours and The Villa, Once Beloved turned my brain into a haunted buffet terror on one side, creeping dread on the other, and me in the middle, hungrily flipping pages like someone who absolutely should know better.

Stepping into Blood Like Ours felt like being dropped into the desert night with my heartbeat thrumming loud enough to attract predators. Waking up on a morgue table? Already too much. Realizing you now crave blood with the same desperation you feel for your missing daughter? That’s a whole new category of nightmare. Rebecca’s feral love for Moonflower twisted, brutal, and utterly unstoppable had me cheering and recoiling in the same breath. And Moonflower herself? Alone in the wilderness, starving, half-monster, half-child, wandering into danger with the innocence of someone who still hopes to be saved. Every chapter felt like holding a lit match next to gasoline.

Then there’s the FBI chase, the shadowy whispers inside the Bureau, and the two brothers who seem to know far too much. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to hug someone or hide behind the nearest piece of furniture. Maybe both.

And just when I thought I couldn’t handle more tension, I stepped into The Villa, Once Beloved and immediately regretted it in the best possible way. The moment Sophie walked into the decaying grandeur of Villa Sepulveda, I felt that deep, cold “something bad happened here and might still be happening” shiver. The family dynamics alone could power a telenovela, but throw in a possible demon, a matriarch with secrets thick enough to choke on, and a landslide trapping everyone together? Oh, I was thriving.

Sophie’s outsider perspective made the villa feel even more claustrophobic; she's trying to understand her place in this tangled legacy while the house itself seems to breathe around her. Every heirloom felt like it could whisper. Every argument might birth a ghost. And every family revelation made me say, out loud, “Oh no. No no no.”

Reading these two books together was like taking a guided tour through the many ways family can destroy you emotionally, psychologically, occasionally with fangs and folklore. And honestly? I loved every second of it.

⚡️Thank you Erewhon Books, Hell's Hundred, Stuart Neville and Victor Manibo for sharing these books with me!

❔️So now I have to ask: If you found yourself trapped overnight in either A a haunted colonial villa full of generational secrets B the desert with a hungry, half-vampiric stranger who says they know your nickname, which setting are you choosing to survive?