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It must be challenging to write a story that attempts to straddle two different genres. Like yeah, I get that you want these characters to get freaky in their downtime, but I'm still distracted by the serial killer that we just established is still on the loose! Girl, this isn't the time for all that!

At heart this is a police procedural, which is an interesting premise for a gay romance given the... lets say complicated relationship between the gay community and the police historically. That is touched upon here, and I respect August's "change the system from the inside" goal, but it sure made him seem like a purely fictional character and didn't remind me of anyone in the community I know. But as far as suspension of disbelief goes, I've certainly had worse asked of me.

We avoid some of the more egregious tropes like the female best friend who exists solely to play matchmaker and the middle-aged protagonist who somehow is only just now discovering an attraction towards other men, and for that I'm thankful. But I think that's more a function of the plot really treating this first and foremost as a cold case murder mystery that starts heating up again with fresh killings with the same MO. Yeah our two leads have chemistry and are paced well, but I almost kinda wished only one of them was gay. It would've allowed more focus on August's pursuit of justice for his community without getting distracted with his moving-past-grief sidequest.

Also, I hate that (spoiler) one of the main antagonists targeting gay men was in the closet himself, and that a perfectly set-up, "How's your head?" joke wasn't followed up with, "Haven't had any complaints." It was right there...

I waited for the first irl snowfall of the winter to begin this book to really get myself in the right mindset for some chilling tales. I wish this book could have met my enthusiasm halfway by being good.

I'm no stranger to short story collections, but I tend to opt for single-author books rather than anthologies because I find the latter tend to have a wider spread in quality between entries. Not really the case here (unfortunately). While I concede that each of the 13 stories (at least they got that right) clearly met the prompt of a central theme about cold temperatures and the scary things that can lurk in them, most simply didn't hold my interest. Entries that didn't feature supernatural elements felt like they were trying too hard for shock factor, and the ones that did were so camp they made me roll my eyes. Maybe each author was constrained by a limited wordcount (they all had pretty consistent lengths at least) and would have fared better with slightly more breathing room. I don't know.

I will at least call out my three favorites: Saturn by Frederick Street (excellent use of a title to instill dread if you know your Roman mythology), The Final Report on the Gerrard Report by Matt Dodge (I'm always a sucker for epistolary set in the Arctic Circle), and Cold Case by Neil Williamson (was not expecting a noir/detective case set in Scotland to slot into a collection like this so neatly). I won't say these three are strong enough to carry the book as a whole, but I wouldn't mind reading them again in a few years.

Sometimes I wonder if an author is making a protagonist unlikable on purpose to make a point, or if they're not even aware they're doing it. Though I guess if you wanted to tell a story with multiple different high and low points, it would be convenient for your main character to be an unintentional dramatic conflict generator.

It's important to contextualize this book in 2025 vs when it was first published in 2009. 16 years has felt like a century in terms of acceptance of gay rights, and a book with this much caution and secrecy wouldn't be written the same way today. And maybe that's coloring my perception of the overall work and I would've enjoyed it more had I read it when it came out, but it still serves as an interesting time capsule for the culture.

Simon is a self-deprecating pessimist with no filter, and even his closest friends who act as important supporting characters in this plot are absent for long stretches because even they need a break from him (no such luck for the reader). But for some reason they, as well as our love interest Declan, see something in him that I did not that makes them keep coming back. From Declan's perspective, I guess I can see the appeal for a closeted AFL player at the peak of his career seeking out a partner who isn't starstruck and worships the very ground he walks on like the rest of the general public does. But the initial stages of the relationship felt very rushed to me and seemed to hinge on a dangerously thin: "I just like you."

There are interesting themes underneath the plot here: the challenges of dating someone in the closet while you're out, dating a celebrity when you're not, dating a professional athlete and getting blamed for their poor performance on the field, how involved a friend should get in a new relationship to prevent people from getting hurt. Turns out that's all really hard. And while some of the ups and downs and twists and turns are due to external forces such as the tabloid press, Simon does share a fair amount of the blame for the drama that goes down in this book. He does ultimately clear the air with Declan for as happy an ending two men could get in that era, but part of me can't help wonder if that was the best outcome for both of them.

I'm sure this love letter to the 1980's would've landed better for me if I, you know, had any memories of that decade. But I don't, so this felt a lot like your uncle regaling you with crazy stories from his high school days, complete with a soundtrack of song names doubling as chapter titles.

I don't know, this one just kinda washed over me and nothing stuck. Possession stories never really captivate me and they aren't my favorite subgenre of horror, but I've definitely read worse than this. While this didn't really read as YA to me in terms of tone and content, I'm just generally not interested in teenager protagonists. And I definitely don't enjoy media that reminds me what being in high school was like, which is horrific in a whole other way.

Still, it felt earnest and clearly was a labor of love on the author's part in a way I can respect. There are some eerie scenes and if you're not bothered by animal death or discussions of rape/casual bigotry, maybe you'll get more out of it than I did. At the very least hopefully we can agree that the paperback version has excellent cover art.

I do appreciate when I walk away from a book on a subject I previously thought I was well-informed about with just a little more knowledge than I had going into it. Sure, a lot of this book will be familiar territory to your garden variety eurocentric history buffs, but there's still some trivia nuggets buried in here to make it worth your time.

For me, it was the focus on how the first parliaments (as we recognize them) formed in northern Spain at the beginning of the Reconquista, a handful of decades before all that Magna Carta business. I also took for granted that the current conclave system for selecting a new pope was just how it was always done, which is decidedly not the case. Also came across a fun anecdote about a 1791 election in Québec that was open to "all" property owners over the age of 21. "A man entered the polling place only to be told that he could not vote because his property was in his wife's name. Red-faced, he was ordered to bring her to the polls, since she was the qualified voter in their family."

The last third of the book focuses on the post-1945 era of "monitory democracy," which kind of lost me for a bit. The author was arguing that in a new age of watchdog agencies and other NGOs democracies are held more accountable than ever and are appropriately responsive to the desires of the people they govern over. It's hard for me to accept that at face value when the state of democracy across the world seems so precarious at the moment with hardly any heads of state boasting approval ratings in the black. There is discussion about rising competition from autocratic top-down nations, but not as much prognosticating about what the future of democracy might look like for my tastes. Still, an overall concise summary of the central subject that I can confidently say this is exactly what it says on the tin.