I’ve always used books as a way to escape the mundane—preferably into something weird, unsettling, or slightly blood-spattered. As a kid, I jumped straight from Gertrude Warner’s Boxcar Children to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. By the end of elementary school, I was a die-hard Stephen King fan. That probably explains a lot.
I’m Monica, a collection development librarian (they/them) who was the first in their family to go to college which meant I had no idea how to plan an education—I just knew I liked books. So I majored in English, which led to… well, not a lot of job listings for “good at reading.” I bounced through print shops and newspapers, even spent a year typing obituaries for grumpy funeral directors. Eventually, I went back to school and earned a master’s in book publishing. I had internships with indie presses, landed my first publicity gig, and for a moment, it looked like a shiny career in publishing was taking off.
Then the economy tanked. Publishing jobs vanished. My best friend got sick. And suddenly, the plan unraveled.
Shortly after that I became a mom, which led to a lot of hanging out at the library which led to my first part-time library job. And, strangely enough, all those weird jobs, random skills, and years of obsessive reading added up to something. I wasn’t just good at library work—I loved it. Like most librarians, I drank the Kool-Aid and never looked back. Eight years of entry-level work later, I took the plunge and got my master’s in library science.
These days, I’m a collection development librarian. That means I buy books for a living. Think of me as a pirate sailing the literary seas in search of strange treasure. I don’t write literary criticism, and you won’t find me dissecting sentence structure or wringing my hands over craft. As a former publicist and a writer myself, I know how hard it is to get a book into the world. I’m not here to nitpick. I’m here to connect books with the people who will love them.
I think of myself as a book matchmaker. Every reader is like a plant: thirsty for something specific, even if they can’t quite name it. And every book has a reader, and maybe that reader is you!.
Me? I love libraries. If a book is set in a library, there’s an 80% chance I’ll read it, and a better-than-average chance I’ll like it. I read mostly genre fiction. I like sci-fi, horror, mystery, and I gravitate toward books that are weird, obscure, and even a little unseemly.
This blog is a much simpler mission than my day job: connect readers like me to the strange, enthralling, and genre-bending books they crave. If you love strange horror, unhinged detectives, or speculative fiction with teeth, this might just be a comfortable corner of the internet for you.
Occasionally I’ll drop in some behind-the-scenes librarian secrets. Because maybe you’re the kind of person who does like to know how the soylent green is made?
A note on the use of AI: This will likely become a longer post at some point, but it should be known that although I am not anti-AI, I do very much value the work of artists. That is why all the art on this blog (with the exception of my profile image) was created by a real human. I am a big fan of certain writing tools that rely on LLMs, but I do employ human editors too.