Cracking Spines by Jason Cavallero
Cracking Spines (September 2025)
Reviewed by Dave Simms
Guides to horror books are great. Sometimes they’re a little cute, fancy, or obviously biased towards the freshest faces in the genre. All are fine, and some are incredibly done. This reviewer has gone through most of them and many are entertaining, sometimes, readers need a no-frills approach to their book addiction searches.
Jason Cavallero is a different beast entirely. Besides performing in a heavy metal band and playing drums for the New Orleans Saints, he lives and breathes horror fiction. It’s not something he picked up because it was cool or to help friends. Horror is IN his DNA. He devours over 200 books a year, but that’s likely an understatement.
The key thing is: he does this so the average horror fan doesn’t have to.
Yes, that means he talks about the “bad” books, but for the vast majority of readers who can’t afford thousands of dollars on books every year, we need a book like this one.
Is it fancy? Nope, although it has an awesome cover by the amazing Kealan Patrick Burke. Is it cute and nice? Not quite — but that’s the point. Cavallero wastes little time getting to the point here.
He ranks novels and collections in several sections, from the typical (Dead Stuff, Vampires, Ghosts, and Folk Horror) to more obscure subcategories, making this a must-have reference book for anyone who’s a horror fan or someone who wants to be.
The rankings are smartly set up and explained, as he takes his time with the treasures of horror, whether it includes the well-known or the hidden gems that most people wouldn’t know about unless they scour the review sites (like this!). That’s the best part of the book for this reviewer, reading about the books that should be widely read.
That’s the downside of the genre: many of the amazing stories that are published by small presses (which are the lifeblood of the genre) are pushed into the shadows. Cavallero lives in those shadows and fights the beasties there to cull the best and avoid those that are over-hyped.
If one is in need of a guide, which should be most of us, Cracking Spines is easily worth the purchase and I know that my copy has copious notes and annotations already. It’s that useful.
Recommended for any horror lover.
