Strange Houses, by Uketsu

Posted on June 7, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 14 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! More or less on track. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

My reading this book was a moment of true serendipity! I happened to be wandering my local Barnes & Noble and was in the horror section when I happened to see the cover of Strange Houses (2025), by Uketsu.

The thing is: I don’t think the book was supposed to be in that section — it looked like someone had just dumped a book that they had planned to purchase, as there was also a Harry Potter book behind it. But the cover caught my attention and then the description of the book grabbed me. Less than 8 hours later, and I’ve read the whole book and am blogging about it — that’s how much it captivated me!

Strange Houses technically falls into the mystery/detective genre I believe, but the book definitely has incredible horror elements and it was weird enough to appeal to me.

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What is an “optical skyrmion?”

Posted on May 25, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Preparing to write the final section for the second edition of my Singular Optics textbook that happens to be on, you guessed it, optical skyrmions! I thought I would try writing a non-technical explanation first to straighten out all the concepts in my head.

One of the big evolutions in the field of optical physics over the past twenty years has been the introduction of the mathematics of topology into almost all aspects. This has led to a lot of interesting phenomena in optical wavefields themselves such as optical vortices, optical knots and optical Möbius strips. (What is “topology?” We will come back to that in a moment.)

In the past decade, a lot of research has focused on a different sort of topological feature that can arise in optical wavefields, known as a skyrmion. The name comes from Tony Skyrme, who first introduced this topological feature in a paper1 in 1961 as a possible model of a nucleon. Optical physicists, having drawn lots of inspiration from topology previously, began investigating the possibility of having skyrmions in optical wavefields in 2012 and there has been an intense amount of research since then.

So what is a skyrmion, what is an optical skyrmion, and for that matter, what is topology? Settle in for a lengthy post as I try to walk through all of these concepts! The discussion will be non-mathematical and as non-technical as I can get, but we will have a lot of ground to cover.

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Blood Type, by Bechko, Sorrentino and Stewart

Posted on May 23, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 14 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still keeping a decent pace. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

If you’re really familiar with horror, you’re probably familiar with EC Comics. It started in 1944 as Educational Comics but was rebranded in 1950 as Entertaining Comics and began its famous run of publishing horror, suspense, science fiction and crime fiction. Tales From the Crypt is an EC Comics creation, and so if you enjoy that sort of horror, you know what you’re getting from EC.

EC Comics was largely focused on reprints of its classic works from the 1970s to the mid 2010s. It is only recently, in 2024, that the brand was given a full revival with new works being released.

It so happens that one of my internet friends Corinna Bechko wrote one of the recent 2026 releases, Blood Type, with art by Andrea Sorrentino and colors by Dave Stewart, and I had to read it!

This volume collects the four issues Blood Type #1-#4 as well as some additional material from Epitaphs From the Abyss #3.

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Atacama, by Jendia Gammon

Posted on May 17, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 13 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still keeping a decent pace.. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve been internet friends with Jendia Gammon for quite a few years now, have read some of her first science fiction novels, and have kept an eye on her career with interest! She has more recently been in a publishing boom with works coming out in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and even a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I decided it was time for me to fully catch up on her writing and we did a book swap — I sent her my popular science books and she sent me a few of her recent books. My first choice to read was her speculative thriller/horror novel Atacama (2025).

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Cork balls, Edwardian magazines, and optical physics

Posted on May 11, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Okay, let’s look at a really cute physics demonstration that I found in a really unusual place and which has unexpected connections to optical physics! The demonstration in question is set up as follows: attach a string to a 1 inch diameter cork ball, and swing the ball into a stream of falling water from a tap. The result? The ball feels almost magnetically attracted to the stream of water! A photo of my attempt at this is shown below.

Note that the string is at an angle. If it were free to swing, one would expect the ball to fall out of the water till the string is vertical. In fact, one might intuitively expect that the ball would be forced out of the stream of water, but instead it is held within it!

In case you think this is a trick of still photography, here is a gif of the phenomenon.

As we will see, this trick has been around for quite a long time, and it is not only a great nonintuitive demonstration of some fundamental physics but can be used to illustrate a really important technique in optics!

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The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

Posted on May 3, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 12 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! I’ve basically rallied and caught myself up. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Social media is a really good place to encounter authors and works that are new to you! Recently, I came across Hildur Knútsdóttir’s book The Night Guest (2025) through her Bluesky account and was intrigued to read a horror story set in Reykjavík, Iceland and written by an Icelandic author!

And I’m glad I did! The Night Guest is a short and fast-paced novel that manages to build up an incredibly amount of dread over its 224 pages.

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An interview with author Ramsey Campbell!

Posted on April 25, 2026 by skullsinthestars

I’ve posted many times on this blog about the work of Ramsey Campbell, and he is not only my favorite horror author but one of my favorite authors of all time. In my opinion, his ability to build a sense of subtle dread in the mundane aspects of modern life is virtually unmatched, and his stories are some of the few that have genuinely unsettled me when reading them.

I recently received a complimentary copy of his recently reprinted novel Incarnate from Flame Tree Press, and the publisher also offered me the opportunity to do an email interview with him, which I jumped at the chance to do — once I decided I had some interesting questions to ask! In this post, I share the full interview, which was a delight to do!

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The Lost Village, by Camilla Sten

Posted on April 23, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 11 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Largely caught up at this point. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I am a sucker for stories about old creepy abandoned places. An abandoned mine, an abandoned house, an abandoned ship, an abandoned village: all literary catnip for me. So when I came across Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village (2022), I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.

Sten is a Swedish author and The Lost Village apparently first appeared in Swedish in 2019 and was translated into English in 2022. The book was a critical and international success, launching the career of the now prolific Sten.

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What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

Posted on April 13, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 10 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Catching up a bit now. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Sometimes I don’t even remember when or why, exactly, I bought a book to read! After purchase, they get put on one of several “to read” piles throughout my house and I very often lose track of them for a while. While tidying up this weekend, however, I happened across What Stalks the Deep (2025), by T. Kingfisher, and it seemed like a perfect read for the weekend.

This is the third book in the Sworn Soldier series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night, which I haven’t read. You might wonder why I started with the third book, and I wondered too when I came across my copy again, but then I read the book blurb and I understood: it’s about people venturing into a mine that may be haunted!

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Dead Astronauts, by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on April 11, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 9 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still running a little behind but not catastrophically. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve long been a fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s writings. His 2009 horror science fiction novel Finch is one of my favorite books of all time, and his Southern Reach trilogy is one of my favorite trilogies of all time. I haven’t read anything by him recently, however, so I decided it was time to check out his 2019 novel Dead Astronauts.

Dead Astronauts is a sequel to VanderMeer’s 2017 novel Borne, with the same setting (kind of — more below) but different characters. I had read Borne when it first came out and only dimly remembered it but feel I can safely say one doesn’t need to read Borne to follow the newer book (kind of — more below).

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