This novella has a simple boy-meets-girl plot, but the love story is wrapped in some sinister forces befitting a horror story. It’s a testament to the skills of author Josh Malerman that this tale somehow successfully navigates between a quaint story of mild-mannered ghosts and the gruesome gore that seems to always find young lovers near lakes. We first meet James, a teenager who works in his father’s hardware store, just before he meets Amelia, who comes to buy a hose but forgets that when James asks her on a date. Through short, fast chapters written from each teenager’s point of view, we see how nervous and awkward the two feel about themselves and their date as they head out on a canoe to explore a lake. The first lake is connected to a second, and the second is connected by some kind of drainage tunnel to a third. This hidden lake is not as attractive as the first two except for the fact that is deserted, and James and Amelia discover their common ground–a shared interest in exploration. While paddling about they discover the house at the bottom of the lake. It is fully intact, furnished and ready for…

I picked up Feedback completely fresh to the Newsflesh series. So fresh, I didn’t even realize it was a series and started reading completely innocent of Mira Grant’s universe of bloggers fighting for life, liberty and the American way against a backdrop of the zombie apocalypse. The minimal zombie action in the beginning was a bit surprising, but I did not lose interest before the biting and moaning got underway, and now I understand why the book was structured that way. Grant was reorienting audiences of other books in her series to the perspectives of her new central characters. Zombie action blogger Aislinn “Ash” North is the central character providing POV for the band of bloggers we follow throughout. Ash is Irish, loud and lovely. In this frightened America people are still reeling from a zombie rising that decimated society some 25 plus years before, Ash makes her living by filming and writing about her own zombie-baiting adventures in the great outdoors. Her partners include Ben North, her news blogging husband, Audrey Wen, fiction writer and Ash’s lover, and Mat Newson, a genderfluid person who does makeup tutorials and handles IT. While all the central characters are fully developed with…