Stories I Told My Dead Lover

• Author: Jo Pacquette
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: June 11, 2024
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Thank you to libro.fm for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Perfect for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link, Jo Paquette’s Stories I Told My Dead Lover contains eight searing tales of psychological horror that probe the darkest and most deeply buried parts of the human psyche.

A child is forced to grow up too soon.

A woman trusts her doctor too much.

An abandoned woman isn’t as alone as she thinks.

An idyllic holiday masks an unspeakable act of violence.

Driven, desperate, fighting for the power to choose their own fate, Paquette’s characters dare to push back at the walls that hold them in.

Come watch them burn.

This isn’t the genre that I typically gravitate towards, but there was something about the title and the summary that grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. There are multiple narrators, with a different one for each short story, and that is one of my favorite things in a book.

I rarely read short stories, but I either want stories to be longer because they were that good, or it feels like I missed something and I question my intellect. Rating this one was tough for me, because this collection of short stories had both types of stories. 

All of the stories are creative, and explore a different facet of psychological horror. From exploring a cult member’s experience to body horror to a touch of the outrageous, somehow Paquette manages to make each of the short stories both quite unsettling and uniquely fascinating. Even the stories that I didn’t quite understand and felt kind of dumb were interesting and difficult to put down. As opposed to when I had to read literature for school many years ago and the teacher had to break it down for us, and it was not a fun time for any of us. 

For some of the other stories, they were really interesting. Since they are short stories, it doesn’t give it the full depth and breadth of a novel-length story, which I’m much more used to. These didn’t feel as though the stories were finished, and I was sad that there wasn’t more to them. But … there’s me putting unrealistic expectations on short stories. They can’t be novels, even if I wish some of them were expanded to novel length. And I got the feeling that some of this unfinished feeling was intentional. Sometimes there was an ambiguous ending, and that was what contributed to the horror. 

Overall, this had some stories that I vibed with more than others, but I wouldn’t expect anything different. Everyone has different things that gives them the mental heebie jeebies, and that’s what makes this a good collection. It’s got a wide range of horror aspects, but none of them really crossed into the territory of ‘Yikes! Why am I reading this at night, now I’ll be scared.’ That’s a relief because I’m a pretty big chicken, and there’s really only one story that is taking up space in my head, and it wasn’t as much because it was scary, but because of the ending and what it means. This is a good book to discover what types of horror you appreciate more, even if you’re a bit of a chicken like me.

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