1. the haunted forest tour, james a. moore and jeff strand this was my second-fastest dnf of 2023, coming in at a meager 17%. “but jenny,” you may ask, “how can you say a book is bad if you only read 17%?” i went into this book hoping for a really fun monster horror. after a forest suddenly sprouts up in new mexico—and by “suddenly,” i mean fast enough for trees to impale the citizens of the town it consumes—, it quickly becomes a tourist attraction owing to the inexplicable abominations living within it. the prologue hyped me up with its stephen king-esque tone, but the story quickly became crowded with new character after new character piled onto the tour bus, complete with their individual backstories. maybe the pace could have been forgiven, but not the wildly offensive fat hate that was apparently integral to the story. it was the character of neal whistler that made me dnf and add both authors to my never again list. we first meet neal on page forty-two, as he is tantalized by a half-snake woman and her great breasts outside the window of the tram. it’s important to the authors to point out that he is thirty-four and a virgin, owing to the “ugly truth” of his “fifty-four inch waistline.” in order to truly grasp the essence of the character, we must hear, within paragraphs of his first appearance, about how he was humiliated and rejected by a girl in high school, the time his fat ass blew out the seat of his pants at work, and how he planned to “become a better man” through dieting. neal survives until page fifty-eight, when he stubbornly refuses to sit down in the face of an impending collision and his “obese” body and “immense weight” cause him to human cannonball through the bus, cracking seats and injuring other passengers until he is finally pronounced dead by someone checking the pulse in his “flabby” wrist on page sixty-four. both of these gaping, infected anal fistulas masquerading as authors can get in an incinerator and turn it the fuck on. cw: gore, misogyny, and the authors have a real fucking problem with fat people that they need to write about in their journals and not published fiction.