Dark, literary horror, read aloud. Narrated criticism from The Second Read and the magazine’s original dark fiction — for listening in the dark.
Reading the feed…
May contain spoilers for You Weren't Meant to Be Human. Content warning: pregnancy and forced gestation, abortion and its criminalization, suicidal ideation and self-harm, sexual coercion and abuse, and graphic violence including the death of an infant. Ash on Andrew Joseph White's adult debut (Saga Press, 2025): a worm-hive in Appalachia, a mute narrator named Crane, and a slim, brutal novel that builds three hundred pages toward a single unforgivable mercy, plus the deeper cuts to read after.
May contain spoilers for Grief Eater. Ash reviews Emma Osborne's debut novella Grief Eater (Interstellar Flight Press, 2026): a zombie story that is really about an unloved childhood, a monster who can taste the love inside everyone she kills, and the question of whether there was ever any in the people who made her.
May contain spoilers for Hokum. Ash on Damian McCarthy's Hokum (2026) — a beautiful, well-acted haunted-hotel picture that mistakes its own evasiveness for depth, plus the deeper cuts to read after.
May contain spoilers for both films. Obsession and Backrooms, seen a week apart — two films about coming apart, and what the gap between them says about where horror is going. The first dispatch from The Second Read, Deep Cut Magazine’s criticism, narrated.
