š My Pink Horror TBR + a Fun Audio Romance
Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book.
Amelia Hruby:Hello and welcome or welcome back to Pleasure Reading. This is a podcast all about the pleasure of reading where I, Amelia, your host and fellow book lover, share curated book lists, some fave recommended reads, tiny book chats, which are yet to come, and today a bookish TBR, my list of books I want to read on a particular theme. Throughout the fall, I have been curating a very special little book list for myself that is honestly like very niche and maybe no one cares, but I'm excited about it. And now that spooky season is in full swing, I'm gonna tell you all about these books. So I have collected what I'm calling my Pink Horror TBR, and I plan to read all of these books over the next 6 to 8 weeks.
Amelia Hruby:And maybe I'll do an update on what I thought about them afterwards if folks want that. But for today, I thought I would just tell you a little bit about how I brought all these books together, what each one is about, and which ones I am most looking forward to reading. Before I get into my pink horror TBR, I also wanted to share a little tip, a little fun thing that I've been enjoying in my bookish life lately, which is a audiobook exclusive from romance author Ali Hazelwood. So Ali Hazelwood is a New York Times best selling author. She's a very popular romance writer whose first and, I think, most popular book is The Love Hypothesis, which is a really fun, nerdy science romance sort of thing.
Amelia Hruby:She also, this year, put out a book called Bride, which is a werewolf vampire romance that will be coming up in the next episode of Pleasure Reading. And I'm mentioning her today because just, I think, 2 weeks ago when I'm releasing this, she put out a new audiobook exclusive that I have been loving. So it's called 2 Can Play. You can listen to it on Spotify. If you have Spotify premium, it's included in your subscription, or you can purchase it anywhere audiobooks are sold.
Amelia Hruby:And it's a really quick, fun enemies to lovers spicy romance that features 2 characters, Viola and Jesse, and they are both video game designers. And Jesse is Viola's arch nemesis kind of in her mind. His behavior to her is totally polite or whatever, but she has kind of built up this idea of why he doesn't like her based on a few things that she overheard him saying. And when their respective studios have to work together to create a video game based on her all time favorite book series, she is in sort of forced close proximity with Jesse, and everything untangles from there. So I'm a fan of Ellie Hazelwood, but I certainly have not read everything that she's written.
Amelia Hruby:And, honestly, I'm not a huge fan of audiobooks. I don't listen to a lot of books on audio. I think because podcasting is my full time job, I don't have a lot of time for other listening. But this one clocks in at 4 and a half hours, which is super short for an audio book, and I'm now about 2 thirds of the way through and just really, really enjoying it. So if you have any fall chores coming up and you need an accompaniment for a few hours, highly recommend 2 Can Play by Ali Hazelwood.
Amelia Hruby:It is an audiobook exclusive right now. I believe that there will be an ebook version coming out next year, but it's just a fun little snack of a book that you can play in your AirPods as you do other things, and I wanted to recommend it before we dive into today's topic. So as I've already mentioned, this episode is about my pink horror TBR. And if you are tuned in, I'm guessing that one of your first questions is, Amelia, what is pink horror? And what it means to me right now in this moment is horror books that have pink covers.
Amelia Hruby:So I went to Barnes and Noble recently, which is definitely a bookstore I frequent in my town that does not have so many independent bookstores. And when I was there, they had a nice little horror display, and I noticed that many of the covers of these books were pink and that most of the ones that were pink seemed to be written by women. And I was like, oh, cool. We're doing horror for girls. Got it.
Amelia Hruby:Got it. Got it. But as I read the descriptions, I was like, okay. But, actually, this is, like, really for me. Like, I really wanna read this.
Amelia Hruby:And I ended up taking home, I think, 4 horror novels with pink covers that day in September and then collecting one more in October and building this pink horror TBR for myself. So today, I wanna tell you about these books, and I wanna know if you've read them. If you have, please head to my website, send me an email, tell me what you thought of them, and maybe I will report back in the future about what I thought once I actually read them. So let's dive into the TBR. These are in no particular order.
Amelia Hruby:I am just gonna share the title of the author, what the book is about, why I'm excited to read it, and we'll go from there. The first book on my pink horror TBR is Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias. This book was originally published in Spanish and translated by Heather Cleary and here is the synopsis. In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea.
Amelia Hruby:In the short desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships, with her difficult but vulnerable mother, with the ex husband for whom she still harbors feelings, and with the boy she nannies whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows, even if staying it means being left behind. I feel very aware that maybe nobody wants to read pandemic literature, but it's not a no for me. And I think I felt particularly drawn to pink slime because at the beginning of 2021, I watched a sort of thriller horror movie called The Pink Cloud that was a Sundance pick that year, and it had a very similar premise to this book. And as we were living in lockdown and I was watching this movie that was released in 2021 but made in 2019 before the pandemic, it just really had me reflecting on how prescient it was and how much I felt there kind of was to gain from sitting with these depictions of plagues and pandemics and crises while experiencing them.
Amelia Hruby:And similarly to the pink cloud, pink slime was written before the COVID 19 pandemic. It was written, I think, in, like, 2017, and it's only now being translated into English. So there's just something in this for me that feels prescient, feels present, feels important to reflect on, and there's also something in the pinkness of it that is drawing me in. So that's Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias. I can't wait to read it, and I will be thinking about that movie, the pink cloud, the whole time.
Amelia Hruby:I'm pretty sure. Okay. 2nd book on my pink horror TBR is Guillotine by Delilah s Dawson. This book was just released in September of 2024, and it's set to some degree in the world of fashion magazines and publishing, which, of course, is always, like, an immediate draw for me as a lifelong lover of The Devil Wears Prada. So let me read you the synopsis so you can be in on the story.
Amelia Hruby:Thrift fashionista Des Lane doesn't want to date Patrick Ruskin. She just wants to meet his mother, the editor in chief of Nuvo Magazine. When he invites her to his family's big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she's certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route. When they arrive at the enormous island mansion, Des is floored. She's never witnessed how the 1% lives before and all their ridiculous unnecessary luxury.
Amelia Hruby:But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn. For decades, the Ruskins have made their servants sign contracts that are basically indentured servitude. And with nothing to lose, the servants have decided their only route to freedom is to get rid of the Ruskins for good, Dot dot dot. So that's where the synopsis ends us, and I am really intrigued by this story overall. I feel like it's giving a bit of blink twice, the new movie that came out this year.
Amelia Hruby:I also think it has something of, like, the menu in it. So I guess with both of these first two books, there are, like, horror film references I have that make me excited to read these stories. And with guillotine, actually, there's a blurb on the front from t kingfisher that calls it glass onion meets saw. So I think that there's gonna be some great glass commentary, privileged commentary, and, hopefully, like, an overall fun bloody time in this book. Okay.
Amelia Hruby:Onto the 3rd book on my pink horror TBR. This one is called the night guest by Hildar Knutstader, which is an Icelandic name that I'm not sure I'm pronouncing correctly. But this book was translated into English by Mary Rabenet Kowal Kowal. Also, not sure if I'm saying that correctly. And I think the premise of this one is super cool.
Amelia Hruby:So let me read you the synopsis with yet again the caveat that I do not know how this main character's name is pronounced, and I may get it extremely, extremely wrong. Eden is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but physicians dismiss her symptoms and blood tests don't reveal any causes. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same. Have you tried eating better, exercising more, establishing a nighttime routine?
Amelia Hruby:She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step counting watch, but nothing helps. Until one night, Eden falls asleep with the watch on and wakes up to find she's walked over 40,000 steps in the night. What is happening when she's asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won't anyone believe her?
Amelia Hruby:I am so excited to read this book. I think its premise is really interesting. I'm like, what if the monster is burnout all along? It feels a little bit like Night Bitch meets maybe, like, fight club? I don't know.
Amelia Hruby:I can't wait to see how this mystery will unfold. And if you've read it, like, don't tell me till I've actually read it. So the first three books, again, on this pink horror TBR have been Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, Guillotine by Delilah s Dawson, and The Night Guest by Hilder Knutstader. And I'm really loving that 2 of these have been translated into English. I appreciate translated literature in general, but I especially think when we're talking about horror and we're digging into our deepest fears, it's so interesting to see how that translates cross culturally.
Amelia Hruby:Because sometimes the things that we're afraid of are so culturally specific, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're, like, deeply human. And so I really like to read translated horror to see, like, how does this land with me? How does this hit for me? And, honestly, sometimes it's like a total miss.
Amelia Hruby:Sometimes I'm like, that was not scary. I don't get it. Or sometimes I'm like, I think the translation really missed something here. And then other times, it is, like, my favorite. And I am like, woah, that went so much deeper, darker, more raw, whatever for me.
Amelia Hruby:I'm thinking particularly there of Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Basterika, which really blew my mind earlier this year in terms of translated horror that, like, haunts my dreams. So we've got 2 translated novels in our first three books on the pink horror TBR. Now let me tell you about the last 2 on this list. So number 4 on my Pink Horror TBR is Youth Juice by E. K.
Amelia Hruby:Satou or maybe that's Safew. Again, not so great with the pronunciation, but this is a pseudonym for the author Erin Meyer. And this book feels like it would fit right in with my girl boss book list horror edition. So let me read you the synopsis so you know what it's about. From Sophia Banyan's first day on the storytelling team at Heeb, a luxury skincare wellness company based in New York's trendy SoHo neighborhood, it's clear something is deeply amiss.
Amelia Hruby:But Sofia, pushing 30, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn't care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence and a cure for her brutal nail biting habit. She finds it all and more at Heeb and with Tree Whitestone, the company's charismatic founder and CEO. Soon, Sofia is addicted to her new lifestyle, especially youth juice, the fatty soothing moisturizer Tree has asked Sofia to test. But when cracks in the company's infrastructure start to worsen and Sofia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youth juice, she has to decide how far she's willing to go to stay beautiful forever.
Amelia Hruby:So, yeah, this one definitely feels like it's got a bit of the natural beauty by Ling Ling Quang vibe. Maybe meets, like, a sort of Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho situation. And I think it is pretty, bloody based on this, like, big drip of blood on the cover and the blurb from Rachel Harrison that says this novel is a blood smeared mirror. So I am really excited to read it. I haven't read a lot of, like, slasher books, but I'm intrigued to see if this will get that bloody or not.
Amelia Hruby:And I think that the general, like, setting of sort of affluent wellness company with skin care products gets maybe taken down from the inside, like, that's just an extremely me coded plot. Like, the first episode of this podcast was a list of books about girl boss influencers, and I think this could be right at home on that list as well. So very excited to read Youth Juice by E. K. Sattu this season.
Amelia Hruby:And that takes me to the 5th and final book of this pink horror TBR. So unlike the others, this one is a short story collection. It's called The White Guy Dies First, 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power. And this was edited by Terry j Benton Walker with so many amazing contributors. I'm gonna read their names in case you're familiar with some of the ones that I'm not.
Amelia Hruby:So contributing to this collection, we have Farida Abike Iyamide, Caelin Bayron, Kendar Blake, HE Edgmon, Lamar Giles, Chloe Gong, Alexis Henderson, Tiffany d Jackson, Adiba Jaigirdar, Nasim Jamnia, Mark Oshiro, Karen Strong, and Terry j Benton Walker, who is the editor of the collection. And this book really feels like an ode to, I wanna sort of say, like, horror for outsiders, which really means, like, horror for non cis white males. Right? The white guy dies first is the name of the book. And while I haven't read the stories in the book yet, what I know from just quickly perusing a few is that it's really pushing back against the sort of final girl or final white guy tropes and the, like, overwhelming evidence that we see, especially in the history of horror films, where the black characters or BIPOC characters or promiscuous female characters are killed off first as a sort of cultural moralizing about the fact that those people don't survive in our society.
Amelia Hruby:And so I love that this collection faces that head on, and I also love that each of the stories has a sort of different horror genre or trope that it's taking on. So we've got a story about killer clowns. We've got a story about the paranormal, cannibals, the occult, the slasher. We have a found media story, a post apocalyptic survival story. We've got body horror.
Amelia Hruby:We've got home invasion, demonic possession, haunted house, nature's revenge, and we've even got Alexis Henderson writing a southern gothic story. So this collection just looks so exciting to me. The list of authors is so diverse. It's openly critical of white supremacy in horror culture, and I cannot wait to read it. I think I'm gonna do a little, like, 13 days of Halloween, read a story a day sort of thing.
Amelia Hruby:And if you wanna do that too, make sure you go ahead and get your copy of The White Guy Dies First. Send me an email. Tell me which ones are your favorites. I would love to hear from you about this collection. So that's it.
Amelia Hruby:We have now gone through all 5 books on my pink horror TBR. Just to recap, they are pink slime by Fernanda Trias, guillotine by Delilah s Dawson, the night guest by Hilder Knutstutter, youth juice by EK Satu, and the white guy dies first edited by Terry j Benton Walker. I feel like I need to just, like, stop this episode so I can go start reading immediately. But before I do, I also wanna remind you of that super fun new audio novella from Ali Hazelwood. It's called 2 Can Play.
Amelia Hruby:You can find that linked in the show notes as well as links to all of these books. For everything in the Pink Horror TBR, I have included links to my bookshop. So if you make a purchase through those links, I will receive a small affiliate payment that I just take as a little thank you for the book rec. I will also link my website in the show notes and my contact page. So if you do wanna reach out about anything that you're hearing that I'm reading on the show, you can click the link and reach out to me directly there.
Amelia Hruby:I would love to chat with you about these books, and I think I'm going to get to reading. I'll be back next week with a curated recommended list of creature features, scary and non scary editions. Until then, it has been a pleasure reading with you today. Here's to your next best book.