Engaging and immersive. A recommended purchase for collections where darker women's fiction is popular.

I read this right around the same time I was also reading Other People's Clothes by Calla Henkel, which ended up being a very good double feature. The haziness, the characters, the uneasiness. All of this was very, very good. Right up my alley.

The type of book I've been needing right now. Captivating, shadow-like characters and plots. Everything is unexpected and the author, Kiare Ladner, is here with you along the ride. Ladner is fixated on displaying a long, long, long tunnel of madness that gets darker the deeper it goes on. Nightshift tells the age-old story of "what if I just picked up another job so my dream could come true one day?" and turns it into a worst case scenario. I loved it. I couldn't stop reading it once I began.

NIGHTSHIFT is another book I've read lately that takes place in the most recent fin de siècle*, which romanticizes T9 texting and Web 1.0. There's something to that, an urge to go back but not too far back. To right when it all got too hard. The narrator is looking back on this time too - the POV of herself at 20 is her looking back on it, at 40. So there's the extra mistiness on top of the reader's own. I dunno if the author is "old enough" to write this. Even typing that out I felt gross. Who am I to judge? I ain't written a single novel! Age is just weird. I hate getting older.

*One of my aliases is "Fantasy Clay," which no one understands but cracks me up every damn time. As do "Grown Didion" and "DJ Payne Pill Yums."