All posts by Katie Jane Gallagher

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About Katie Jane Gallagher

Author of the Beauty and Her Alien series and Specter.

Chapter Ten of The Gold in the Dark and a Writing Update!

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The tenth chapter of The Gold in the Dark drops today! This makes us a quarter of the way through the book, so there is plenty more to come. 😀 I’m a huge fan of Chapter Ten; it’s a turning point in the narrative, and introduces a crucial new character. As always, if you need to catch up on past chapters, no problem, since you can do that right here. New chapters post every other Sunday at 11 AM EST, and each chapter is also accompanied by a beautiful, custom illustration. Take a look at this week’s illustration; I’m getting some definite Edward Gorey vibes. If you’re not familiar with Edward Gorey, I’ve put a couple pictures down below for fun. You might also recognize his work from the iconic intro to PBS’s Mystery!

Anyway, enough waffling. At last, I can reveal that these illustrations are courtesy of the mega-talented Ally Grosvenor! I’ll have an interview up with her soon enough, all about how she got started with illustration, her approach to illustrating a work of fiction, her inspiration, etc.

Isn’t Ally’s work Edward Gorey-ish?

And here’s just a sampling of some of Ally’s art unrelated to The Gold in the Dark.

From the iconic game Portal.

In other exciting news, we are one week away from a cover reveal!!!!!!!!! And it is gorgeous. If you are wanting to stay up-to-date, just check back here, sign up for my newsletter, or follow me on Instagram @katiejanegallagher or Goodreads. In the meantime, have a fabulous Sunday and enjoy Chapter Ten. ❤

‘Til Death Do Us Part by Amanda Quick

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This book came to me on an author recommendation from a friend; as we browsed the romance section in Barnes and Noble, she started gushing to me about Quick’s characters and plotting. As we wandered from the romance over to the discount books, I picked up ‘Til Death Do Us Part, read the blurb, and waggled it at my friend, not even noting the author name.

“This sounds good.”

“That’s who I was talking about!” exclaimed she. “Amanda Quick!”

Oh. Maybe it was time for me to give this author a go.

And you know what, even though this may be the first romantic suspense I have ever read, I really enjoyed it! I’m quickly learning that I enjoy romance with a dominant subplot, which this book certainly has. The MC, Calista, finds herself terrified by a morbid stalker, who keeps leaving her memento mori trinkets—a tear-catcher, a jet-and-crystal ring, etc. She enlists the help of a writer of serialized detective fiction to help her identify her stalker… And, of course, they end up falling in love.

The plotting keeps you guessing, and the characters are well fleshed-out. I won’t say the prose is gorgeous, but it serves its purpose admirably, getting out of the way of the plot. As a writer, that’s a quality I truly appreciate, since I’m constantly reading books where sentence structure and word choice snag my inner editor, pulling me out of the narrative.

And the romance itself was very sweet, more about the falling-in-love aspect than the sexual aspect. I’m coming to recognize that my personal taste in romance is for less sex and more inter-character relationship building, and this book was perfect for me in that regard. As the book ended, I didn’t exactly long for it to go on, but rather wished for more of a similar thing… Which means that I will surely be picking up more of Quick’s other books!

Short Tuesday #13: “Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier” by Georgina Bruce

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This week for Short Tuesday I was on the hunt for short fiction by Georgina Bruce, who has a new short story collection that was just published this month. “Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier” is an older story, but I wanted to get a sense of her voice before making a decision about checking out her new collection. You can read the short story for free here…

The story focuses on a young lesbian coming to terms with her sexuality; she has a strong imagination, and interspersed throughout the story are vignettes from a seemingly magical book. It’s all very fuzzy and magical realism-ish, and I wasn’t in love with the vignettes if I’m being honest, since they felt pretty unconnected from the rest of the piece.

The ballroom of the Grand Hotel by candlelight is amber and sepia, drifting into darkness at the edges like an old postcard. It smells of stale water, tallow, and dust. The ruby carpet is threadbare and shiny, and the plaster has been knocked off the walls, leaving bare brick in places, water-stained and sick. But in the candlelight the room still has a certain romance.

The bits in the real world also have a floaty, unmoored feeling. I had a difficult time in the beginning of the piece getting a sense of how old the MC was; she read wayyyy younger to me at first than she actually is. The additional feminist focus had me speeding towards the end to be done with the story. I can appreciate a magical realism story with a coming-of-age focus, but once you start throwing in Patriarch Fish and horses named Andrea Dworkin, we’ve entered territory too silly and ideological for my preference. If there’s anything I can say about my taste in fiction, it’s that I never want to feel like I’m reading short stories penned by r/TwoXChromosomes power users.

“You’re an artist,” says Zillah. She shows Joy what she’s reading, pushing the book over the table.

It is Ursula Bluethunder, Zillah and Joy’s favourite comic book. Ursula Bluethunder is a radical black, woman-loving superheroine, whose mission is to establish a lesbian separatist nation with money that she steals from banks using her superior intelligence, strength, and martial arts skills. She likes hanging out in libraries, too.

See what I mean? It’s just too much for my tastes, though some might love it. So despite some pretty descriptions, this piece was unfortunately not for me.

Unhaul at the Diner

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I am not, alas, one of those bookish fortunates who has five gorgeous bookcases. I have just two, and a good amount of that shelf space is shared with my husband or taken up by old sheet music, photo albums, and general paper detritus. So by necessity I have to stay pretty conscious of the books I adopt into my collection and regularly cull those I suspect won’t be read again.

But what would maybe be a sad or painful affair becomes way easier when you know there’s tasty food at the end of the process. You see, I am lucky enough to live fairly close to Traveler Restaurant in Union, CT, which has basically the best bookish proposition of all time: come for a tasty meal and leave with up to three free books. It’s a diner/used bookstore mashup, and the shelves beside the tables are great conversation starters. You never know what you’ll find on the shelves; our previous visit introduced me to these two beauties.

So a few days ago I packed up a whole bunch of books that I don’t need on the shelf anymore, loaded up a backpack, and off we went to Traveler Restaurant!

Goodbye, dear books. You will be missed… but not that much.

The restaurant is very cute, with a yellow Lego-esque roof and flowers outside. Also, if you’re the antiquing sort, there’s an antique shop directly opposite the restaurant.

Here’s the food we ordered; I got the baked haddock with a side of mashed potatoes, and my husband got the Red Badge of Courage burger. It was the name that sold him… and all that bacon. 😛

In addition to the books, the restaurant also has signed portraits up all along the walls of all the celebrities and authors who have visited the restaurant.

Yes, that’s THE Dr. Spock.
Maybe one day yours truly will be up on the wall. >:D

And then, after we finished our meal, we started looking through all the used books! A lot of them are what you’d expect from a used bookstore—tons of older thrillers, mysteries, and contemporaries. There are also bags of romances that you can buy for cheap, and in the basement is a proper used bookstore (with books you have to pay for), selling some of the more choice offerings.

Combing through the stacks, it really hit me how much cover design has changed (for the better, in my opinion). I’ll be honest—a lot of the books were very drab-looking, which is a shame because I’m sure many of them are hidden gems. Yet I did come away with a book that I’ve been meaning to reread for a while—the last time I read it I was in middle school, and I’m pretty sure it went wayyyyyyy over my head.

So that was our cute diner meal/book donation date! I definitely recommend Traveler Restaurant for any book lovers in the area, and I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for any other bookish things to do in the area.

The Highlander Who Protected Me by Vanessa Kelly

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Here’s how this book came into my possession: I was relaying all my trials with romance to my husband last year, and the joker decided in his infinite wisdom that he wanted to buy me for Christmas the “best” romance he could find. To him, this meant two things: a hunky cover and a worthy blurb. Welp, there’s the cover up top, so we’ve clearly accomplished the first. As for the blurb, all he needed to see was that the male MC’s name was Royal, and that was enough to thoroughly tickle his fancy.

So here we are. (By the way, make sure to scroll to the bottom for a husband review.) I actually did enjoy this, though it was one of those on and off sort of reads that took me a couple weeks. The premise in vague, non-spoiler terms is that Ainsley, a Sassenach, needs Royal’s help to protect her from her vile betrothed. What I hadn’t realized at the outset is that while this is the first in the Clan Kendrick series, it’s actually not the first book of Kelly’s featuring these characters. Clan Kendrick is a spin-off series from another, so there were more than a few times when Kelly re-introduced a character or referenced a bit of backstory. This was a bit frustrating for me; as someone coming into a purported first in a series, the last thing I want is to feel like I have catching up to do—especially as the book is lengthy already, weighing in at more than four hundred pages.

The emphasis on protection and safety is interesting from a storytelling standpoint. If you think about it, these themes can be a little bit “anti-action”—and preventing something from happening isn’t necessarily as interesting as other kinds of plot structures. So it was a quieter sort of story overall, with more emphasis on character relationships and dialogue exchanges than actual plot points.

On a tangential note, the title of the book itself also never fails to make me laugh. It just doesn’t read at all “title-like” to me—more like description than anything else. Anyone with me here? 😛 Maybe I’m the only one…

In any case, I did enjoy the developing relationship between Ainsley and Royal, finding their chemistry quite good. The characters individually, too, feel concrete, with realistic personalities, flaws, hopes, and dreams. No caricatured characters here. Kelly’s writing in general is also pretty strong. The dialogue does get a bit samey after a while (how many times can characters say “don’t fash yourself”??), BUT it did teach me the gem of an expression “dicked in the knob.” That apparently means “crazy,” and I will be wasting no opportunity to employ it, let me tell ya.

Will I be reading the next in the series? Not sure about that, especially because I have some other romance TBR goals that are a bit more pressing. But I am definitely up for reading another book by Vanessa Kelly in the future, so am grateful to my husband for pointing me in her direction.

Husband Review

“Slick channel.”

Short Tuesday #12: “Bluebeard’s First Wife” by Ha Seong-nan

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This week I left Tor.com (though probably only temporarily!) for a short story by Korean author Ha Seong-nan. She has a new short story collection out, and I’ve heard good things, so I wanted to try out a short story of hers to get a sense of her style, then maybe pick up the collection. I ended up reading “Bluebeard’s First Wife,” which you can read for free here…

I enjoyed this story well enough. It’s a smooth read for having been translated, and I especially enjoyed the imagery and the sense of displacement woven throughout the story. I did feel the plot progressed in a kind of dizzying matter; the MC is suddenly engaged to this guy, and you don’t have a sense of how it all happened. They met on a plane, and then… marriage? Their relationship has the weight of a cloud, but it works for the plot and feel of the story.

Even so, I guess I was left wanting a little bit more. Everything felt a bit too flat and matter-of-fact. The repeated poem also didn’t seem to have much relevance to me… or maybe I’m not picking up the symbolism for some reason.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

With stories like these, I’m sometimes left feeling a little bit stupid. Why is this not working for me? What does the author mean by this? At the same time, I feel that if I’m not gleaning at least some of the deeper symbolism on a first read-through, perhaps the story isn’t being told successfully. In any case, I would definitely read more short fiction by this author, as I am intrigued by some of the reviews I’ve seen of her other work, but this story was just so-so for me.

Chapter Nine of The Gold in the Dark and a Writing Update!

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The ninth chapter of The Gold in the Dark drops today! If you need to catch up on past chapters, no problem, since you can do that right here. New chapters post every other Sunday at 11 AM EST. (And sometimes a little earlier, like this week!) Each chapter is also accompanied by a beautiful, custom illustration.

This week I’ve been drafting my new WIP! It’s fun to be drafting again in a painful sort of way, like I’m stretching old muscles. I’m also a bit out of my element with some of the details I need to research; a quick look through my browser history will reveal such searches such as “do landowners in Montana need elk tags to hunt on private land” and “Polish people gold rush.” As for why I’m looking these things up, that will have to remain strictly confidential for now.

There are some fun posts coming up on the blog soon, though, that I can tease with a bit more information! I’ll be doing a post soon about how music factors into my writing process, as well as about a very particular and bookish Connecticut diner. In the meantime, have a fabulous Sunday and enjoy Chapter Nine. ❤

ARC: Five Midnights by Ann Dávila Cardinal

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Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Teen for sending me a free advanced reader copy of this book for an honest review. Five Midnights debuts June 4th.

NetGalley’s a funny thing—most of the time all you have to judge a book by is the author name, the publisher, the cover, and a bit of doctored up marketing copy.*** It makes me judgey to the extreme—if I’m accepted to read the book, I’m kind of stuck with it, after all, since I want to keep my NetGalley ratio up. And if you don’t like the book, you’re left in the sticky situation of either giving a bad review or being dishonest with your readers. I always err on the side of honesty, but what I’m trying to say is that the whole ARC game is a grab bag type of situation.

Five Midnights met me halfway there—this is decidedly a three-star type of book, with bits both good and not so good. It feels very “young”; not in terms of its target audience, but in terms of the writing. Take the characters as an example: the MC, a New England transplant in Puerto Rico, has her emotions dialed up to eleven at all times. It’s an attempt at characterization that comes across as a bit jumbled; she doesn’t ever really settle as having a distinct personality. Another example is a fight that the MC has with a friend; the whole argument comes across as ungrounded, in a very “the author wants a fight here” kind of way. The pacing, too, is a bit off; a climactic scene facing off with monster stretches out over many POV switches, in a fashion reminiscent of those ten episode Dragon Ball Z fights.

But other parts are great. All the Puerto Rico setting details cannot be discounted; the author will make you feel like you’re in Puerto Rico, tasting the tastes and smelling the smell as the MC ventures from one unique neighborhood to the next. And though the details are many, they fit the book well, in a way that some other detail-heavy works never accomplish—“Yiwu” comes to mind. I appreciated the Spanish peppered throughout the dialogue (though “Hold the teléfono” maybe stepped a hair over the edge into ridiculousness). And the monster itself was interesting, since I knew literally nothing about this mythical beast.

I’d say that if the premise of the book sounds interesting, then give this a go. I’d be interested to take a peek at this author’s sophomore novel, since I suspect some of my craft complaints here might not surface in the next book.

***Speaking of marketing copy, by the way, can I pause for a minute on the word “unputdownable?” As per a review in the NetGalley description, this book is “flat-out unputdownable.” I’m starting to see this description everywhere; it was fun the first time around, but this word is just so over-the-top that I’m over it. It’s already getting cliched in my mind, and feels fake review-ish. Am I the only one??

Just a real quick reminder that Chapter Nine of The Gold in the Dark releases this Sunday at 11 AM EST! ❤

Short Tuesday #11: “The World is Full of Monsters” by Jeff VanderMeer

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This week I returned once more to Tor to look at another piece of short fiction. I was especially intrigued to read a story by Jeff VanderMeer, since he’s actually been on my radar for a while as one of the editors of The Weird. Side note that his wife, Ann VanderMeer, also edited The Weird, as well as some of the other Tor stories I’ve read for Short Tuesday thus far, plus edited this story as well, which adds a whole different layer of interesting. You can read the short story for free here…

I’ll be honest—I’m a bit flummoxed by this story! It documents one man’s interactions with an alien force that has engulfed the Earth; the narrative focuses more on the MC’s discovery of the world and the realization of what is happening than on any kind of plot. The aliens are of the parasitic variety, rather than laser gun toting sort, and the focus throughout is on the natural progression of the parasite—what happens to Earth’s flora and fauna, as well as how the parasite (called the “story-creature”) physically and mentally manifests itself in the MC.

And while I stood there in the shadows of the moonless night, beyond the street lamps, beyond the circling moths and with the nighthawks gliding silent overhead…while I stood there and pleaded, the story-creature sprouted out of the top of my skull in a riot of wildflowers, goldenrod, and coarse weeds.

There are many instances throughout where it’s difficult to get a sense of what’s happening, which adds to the story in my opinion. With a kind of Lovecraftian flair, the MC is presented with beings and creatures that don’t really make sense, and all he can do is relay what’s happening as best he can based on his human capacities. At the same time he is uncovering truths about himself; contact with the alien parasite has changed him in irreparable, unexpected ways.

I think this is the kind of story that really needs a few reads. The prose has such a driving momentum that you kind of can’t help reading onward, even as your brain is trying to parse what’s happening, so I felt like there was quite a lot I was missing. Even so, I like to think that there would be so many unknowns in the event of actual extraterrestrial contact that this story conveys that uncertain feeling exceedingly well. Who knows—maybe I’ll read through it again sometime and see how the story hits me a second time around.

When the Sky Fell on Splendor by Emily Henry

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I’m a huge fan of Stranger Things, so was immediately intrigued by Emily Henry’s When the Sky Fell on Splendor, which is obviously referencing the TV show with the cover. The alien component as well was interesting, since I’ve heard multiple people in the YA publishing sphere mention how aliens just kind of aren’t a thing for some reason, even though vampires, werewolves, mermaids, and their ilk have all had a turn in the spotlight. I #amwriting an alien book right now (lol, how cringy can I make this post? 😀 ). Even though my book’s more New Adult than YA, anything new even tangentially related to aliens right now is interesting to me, even just from a market research standpoint.

So I was pumped to read this book… and then it fell a bit flat for me. Something about the prose wasn’t connecting with me—perhaps too many details and flashbacks (oh, the many flashbacks!) that distracted from the main action. There are also too many characters in the MC’s friend group; I’d have cut at least two or three of them out. I understand that Henry was trying to illustrate how the unfortunate history of their town had influenced everyone a bit differently, but it was too many people to keep track of; I had to frequently backtrack to figure out who everyone was again. If there had been fewer characters, perhaps we could have seen more depth with the character development. A smaller, more careful approach is pretty much always going to be better than a scattershot method.

Also…

Huge, ending ruining spoiler incoming…

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It turns out there aren’t even any aliens in this book. The cover’s basically a total lie; instead we discover that the entity the characters encountered in the beginning of the book is the soul of someone in the town. This fit with the navel gazey feel of the book, but I still felt a bit lied to as a reader. If I see an alien spacecraft on the cover, I want actually aliens, dammit. Don’t give me that huge tease, then only serve up misdirection. It was disappointing, rather than surprising. That was the point at which my three star review dropped down to two, since I felt it was kind of a betrayal of the audience.

So this is a sad pass for me, despite some fun moments throughout.