wendy in the wild

The first book of 2025 was technically finished on NYE 2024, but I’m counting it for 2025.

Ancestor is written by Scott Sigler. It was originally published as a podcast in 2006 before being released as a novel in 2007. In 2010, it was republished as both a novel and a podcast. I haven’t delved any further into the “Siglerverse” (yet), but there are some crossover characters that appear in other stories.

As someone who grew up reading Jurassic Park (which may have been the first ‘adult’ book I ever read), I can’t talk about Ancestor without mentioning the similarities to Jurassic Park. Both have well-founded criticisms of capitalism, though I would argue Jurassic Park emphasizes it a bit more (although unfortunately, the anticapitalist message has been overshadowed by the “Life finds a way” tagline, especially in pop culture).

I first heard about Ancestor in the r/horrorlit subreddit, and while the last quarter of the book has some horrifying elements, I’d argue it’s more of a thriller; at points I was getting tired of the science and waiting for the people to start dying. If it’d been pitched more like Jurassic Park, I think my expectations would have aligned better with the actual book. Not to say I didn’t like it: I certainly did, and I’ll probably look into getting the printed version of the novel one day.

The second book I read in 2025 was Thor by Wayne Smith. It was a short book, so I finished it within a day.

Like most of my books, I found this one on r/horrorlit, as it’s often recommended for people who want to read werewolf books and/or books where the dog doesn’t die.

And the dog doesn’t die!

However, I can’t say I enjoyed the book as much as I thought I would, mostly because I wasn’t expecting to get into the 90s view of dog ownership and wolf pack dynamics (for those of you who may not know, the ‘alpha theory’ was based on captive, unrelated wolves and has been debunked for wolves in nature, AND hitting or smacking your dog (or otherwise using aversives) is not actually the best way to teach them). I could rant about this nonstop, so I’m just going to stop there. I did find the perspective of Thor a fun change of pace from a typical human narrator, and I do want to do some additional research to see if any of it is backed up by science.

That being said, the main reason I wanted to read the book was because the dog doesn’t die (again, he doesn’t), but another animal character dies in a rather gruesome way, which wasn’t mentioned in any of the posts/comments I skimmed before reading the book. I can’t say I enjoyed that at all.

Right now, I’m reading Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, and will probably finish it within the next week or so.