u/Sidecarlover

The Long Low Whistle by Laurel Hightower

• 173 pages (on Kindle)
• Released on November 4, 2025
• Synopsis: Our protagonist lived in a small mining town when disaster struck killing dozens of miners including her father who was blamed for the disaster. Fast forward to when she's a young adult, she's still fixated on the disaster and wanting to prove that it wasn't her father's fault. She returns to town searching for a way into the closed mine and finds a path. She teams up with a visiting group of cryptid hunters exchanging their help in obtaining an unseen security tape of the disaster for passage into the mine. The group enter the mine and find that they are not alone.
• Spoiler free review: This story doesn't waste your time. You're quickly underground a few pages in then return to enter the mine for the main part of the story around one-third of the way through the book. This isn't anything unique, but it's a well done creature feature where the characters are fighting the elements, darkness, and monsters. People get picked off while our cast tries to escape the mine. If you're looking for no frills monster horror, this is for you. My main complaint is that the ending was a bit abrupt.
• Content warning: none other than your typical monster attacks and deaths.

Denisovans by Jeremy Bates

• 292 pages (on Kindle)
• Released on September 9, 2025
• Synopsis: Dual protagonist story consisting of an elderly grandfather who served as a tunnel rat (soldiers who went into tunnels dug by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces) during the Vietnam war. The other is the granddaughter who was recently released from prison and is trying to avoid her violent ex. The pair travel to Vietnam so the grandfather can retrieve the remains of a fellow soldier killed in the tunnels during the war. There they encounter hominids that aren't as extinct as we though.
• Spoiler free review: We don't enter the tunnels until 56% through the book, which is too late for my tastes. It would have been fine if the story before that was interesting, but it's mainly our protagonists reminiscing about the past. I liked the dialog between the grandfather and granddaughter, but that's not what I was looking for. I didn't find the tunnel scenes to be particularly scary or tense. There is only a single "onscreen" human death and our protagonists are relatively easily able to run from and fight a numerically superior and physically stronger foe without much injury. The store described this as "survival horror," but I disagree with label. The front page labels it as a thriller, which I ignored when I shouldn't have. I just didn't find this particularly interesting or scary. Also, the author described the iconic Colt 1911 pistol as a revolver, which is an extremely big goof if you're familiar with firearms.
• Content warning: >!attempted sexual assault, references to prior sexual assaults, forced impregnation, kidnapping, suicide.!<
• I really enjoyed Bates' Merfolk book so much so that I ignored how mediocre his No-End House book was and the fact that I later found out he copied this from the creepypasta story without credit along with The Sleep Experiment. I believe I also heard he may have copied from other stores for his Suicide Forest book as well. After Denisovans, I think I'm done with Jeremy Bates.