My Favorite Books of 2024

I decided to do a quick update on my favorite books that I read in 2024 in, more or less, chronological order of when I read them.

This novella about lust, deception and murder was a re-read for me, but it's just still so startling in it's immediacy and I still find it's depiction of sociopathy deeply disturbing.

Went on a bit of a noir lit kick; this story of desperate people participating in a marathon dance contest is probably the bleakest book I read all year. Unremittingly grim with an incredible ending.

A corrupt investigative journalist is assigned to track down, well, himself in this fantastic mystery-thriller that is also a sharp satire on the journalism industry and an existential meditation on the way the big clock (aka time) is running out for all of us.

This book tracks the journey of a con-artist from the small time to the big and it's even better than the great movie adaptation from Guillermo del Toro; the main character is one of the great loathsome protagonists of all time and an amazing ending.

This almost 600-page epic is a multigenerational horror story of supernatural forces at play in a troubled Argentinian family set against the backdrop of Argentina's tumultuous political and social upheavals; bracing, deeply disturbing, beautifully written and translated.

The best graphic novel I’ve read in ages. A psychological portrait of a young woman with dreams of domestic bliss slowly coming apart at the seams; chilling and haunting.

The second novel in this great series of Brother Cadfael mysteries has a great premise based in real historical events; great mystery, great historical novel.

Part ghost story, part historical novel, part twisted romance, all morphed together into a beautiful meditation on grief; and all in less than 200 pages. Probably the most beautiful prose I encountered all year.

Phenomenal horror anthology with stories that demonstrate the wild span of horror sub-genres; one of the best anthologies I’ve ever read with only a couple of stories that were less than fantastic.

Methodical, beautifully written, deeply thoughtful time travel story that manages to have a completely unique sense of meditativeness and also surprising plot twists.

With this one completed, I’ve now read all five of Sarah Langan’s novels and she’s one of the most underrated authors ever in my opinion; this harrowing and incredibly scary book revolves around a cursed apartment building and it definitely kept me up for a few late nights.

Suspenseful & creative tale of a young woman and her encounter with a group of African immortals; great character work.

Often hilariously funny satire of academia and the university experience, this murder mystery also features surprisingly insightful exploration of mental disorders.

Superior even to the gripping film it inspired, this noir novel is a compelling, disturbing and ahead-of-its-time portrait of a misogynistic and rage-filled serial killer.

Closed the year out with a classic I’d never gotten around to before; Rosemary right up there with the best examples of a man writing a woman in all of literature; fast-paced, bracing, compelling even when you know what happens next.

Well, there we go; if I kept proper count, I read 45 books in 2024 and those are the 15 best. There were more that I liked or even liked quite a bit or found interesting, but these are kind of my top tiers, the ones I really loved.

Smile 2 (2024) - Parker Finn

It’s always hard, and basically always silly, to try to compare a sequel to an original in an up-and-down “which one is better?” contest. I’ll just put it out there that I think some things here are better than the original and there are other things that I think the original did better. But one thing that you kind of have to bring up at the beginning of a review of Smile 2 is the degree-of-difficulty discrepancy.

I’m not going to rehash what I said in my previous review, but I’ll just remind you of the bottom line when it came to my expectations for the movie: my expectations were that the first movie would be mediocre, generic and not very good. Going in with those expectations, I got blown away. Going into Smile 2, my hopes were sky(e?)-high. Smile 2 didn’t have the advantage of surprise on its side, didn’t have my low expectations working with it. So, Smile 2 has a way harder task right from the beginning. And did it blow me away? Well, no, because I knew what the first film was and I knew what writer-director Parker Finn was both up to and capable of. But it did the next best thing; it lived up to the first movie for me. I was not disappointed in the least.

Smile 2 delivers a tense, dread-soaked, often terrifying and anxiety inducing experience. Like the first film, it is anchored by a brilliant, fully committed lead performance, this time from Naomi Scott as pop superstar Skye Riley. I loved that the movie didn’t just replicate the first film’s main character. I genuinely think the difference between the two main characters is one of the strongest things so far about this franchise. Whereas Sosie Bacon’s performance as Rose in Smile gave us a character that was broken by trauma in a way that led her to go inside herself, Scott’s performance in this film is an explosive volcano. Rose would retreat inward and it was the vulnerability and suffering of that performance that was so disturbing to me; Skye, on the other hand, expresses her helplessness in rage. It's not that she doesn’t show fear and vulnerability at times, but the moments that hit the hardest for me were the moments when Scott would erupt in anger, screaming or breaking things. And while Bacon found Rose’s pain in stillness, often curling in on herself or freezing in place, Scott throws herself around this movie like a weapon, flinging herself down hallways at a dead run, careening into walls like a caged animal.

And, in many ways, she is caged. This movie continues the theme of exploring trauma established by the first film, but it broadens it out in a compelling way by making itself also a movie about celebrity or superstardom. Scott’s Skye is a woman that has been broken by the music industry and the crushing weight of fame. The portrayal is of a woman already collapsing under the pressures of her life before the evil entity enters her life. She’s on the raw edge, ready to collapse already, and I think it’s interesting that her rage fits into stereotypically “diva” behavior at times, screaming at her back-up dancers for being out of place during a rehearsal, refusing to go into rehab, etc. At one point, she refuses to wear a particular outfit because, as she puts it, her scars will show through. She’s talking about the physical scars remaining from her car accident, but she’s also kind of not. By contextualizing all of this behavior into a horror film, I think the movie is trying to say something deeper about the way women celebrities are perceived. I couldn’t help but think of Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, his fantasy on Princess Diana, while watching this movie; like this one, that movie was interested in contextualizing the behavior of a famous woman by letting us really understand the immense pressure of her life and I’ll go to bat for Spencer being a horror movie of its own kind. Smile 2 has the same claustrophobic feeling, the same feeling of reality slipping out of hand and a similarly striking lead performance.

Anyway, all things considered, Smile 2 is a worthy successor to the first film, executing some things better and widening its thematic lense. I’m not sure there’s anyone here as good at the creepy smile as Caitlin Stasey was in the first movie and the biggest jump scare in this one isn’t as good as the laptop jump scare in the first one, but it is pretty good. Most of all though, I’m just glad they didn’t just repeat the same things. Whichever one might be your favorite or “the best,” the truth is that they are excellent companion pieces and that’s good enough for me. Two phenomenal horror movies when I wasn’t even really expecting one? Well, now I am smiling. 4 stars.

tl;dr – fantastic horror sequel expands on the themes of the first film in fascinating ways and delivers solid creeps and scares; features a phenomenal lead performance. 4 stars.

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