Might I suggest Reincarnated with my Smartphone?

Okay, I got one. A single-volume horror story:

MC is an overworked office worker and moves into a “free” house in the country to get away from the stress of Tokyo city life. Winding down and adapting to the slow life in the countryside isn’t easy and unusual sounds and movements outside the room scare him at night. He befriends the locals, helps out an elderly couple tending to their vegetable garden, and gives a young kid who gets bullied at school some helpful words. But the country sounds at night still keep him from any relaxing sleep and the ghostly silhouettes he sees in looking at his house are getting more.

The people start to act strange around him and the elderly couple tells him that they are afraid for him and they make some vague comments about the woman who lived in this house before him. He can’t get that comment out of his mind, so he searches for what happened to the previous tenant. After some internet searching he gets in contact with a guy from a small occult magazine in the next larger town over. He tells him that that house is haunted and that the previous tenant saw ghosts as well and was found dead in her old school tatami bedroom. The official report said that the woman killed herself by inflicting several deep scratch wounds all over her body after a psychotic breakdown, but the occult guy says that it was the vengeful ghost of the original owners that built the house and lived their entire life in it before getting murdered in a random break in. He says that they and the previous tenant now haunt the house and gives MC copies of his occult magazine where he wrote articles about the house. MC reads them on his bus ride home and decides to grab his things and leave right away. But even for a seasoned overwork-veteran, the consecutive days of running on adrenalin without sleep catch up to him and he faints in his bedroom while packing his few belongings into a moving box.

He wakes from the sound of someone or something trying to get into his bedroom door which is blocked because he collapsed against it with his backpack. The first thing that he sees is the door being slowly pushed open now that he got up and isn’t leaning against it anymore. Then he realizes that all the color has gone from the world and that there is a constant eerie ringing sound that only gets overpowered by the screaming sounds of the thing that tries to get into the room.

When the door finally opens he sees grotesque withered yokai monsters shuffling towards him. He grabs a rice cooker from the moving box and bashes the monster’s head in. The other monster gets visibly agitated but he manages to kill it as well. He doesn’t give a shit anymore about his belongings and just takes the meanest-looking kitchen knife he has and tries to flee the house. but outside is colorless as well and the ringing sound gets louder and more annoying in pitch. There are also more monsters in different variations. From slow ones who try to attack him from a distance to big and strong ones who rush into close quarters.

After much struggle and several fights against the yokai he manages to flee the village and makes it into the town where he gets in contact with the occult magazine guy and he is visibly disturbed by the story he hears. Together they go to the police and there he is arrested. The police find the residents of the small village all stabbed to death and MC gets locked away after being found guilty of mass murder. He is now waiting in a monochrome horror cell waiting for the day the monsters come for him to kill him. Still hearing that ringing sound until the day of his execution.

The twist is that at some point the reader realizes that something isn’t right and hopefully only at the end it becomes clear that the monsters were just in his imagination and he killed all the people he befriended. The second twist is that at the very end, it’s unclear if the haunted house made him have the psychotic breakdown or if it’s just a coincidence that both he and the former tenant had the same hallucinations. Maybe the last scene could be the house with now 4 ghostly figures behind the window looking towards a moving truck with a new tenant moving in.

No not even close. The first season adapted only 2 volumes of the light novel which has currently 15 volumes.

That’s a whiplash.

I love their dynamic and hope to see more of them. :)

I wouldn’t be too surprised if Overlord weren’t at least an inspiration. Just by looking at the MC on the cover I get strong Albedo vibes from the horns and lower-back wings.

I wonder if this will be a strict game world or if there will be some isekai aspect to it.

Slow Life and Living with my Mistress for sure. The 3 new ones sound interesting as well. Goblin Maiden sounds like isekai Shrek from the synopsis. Monster Boy sounds generic but I’ll give the first volume a go. But EXP is Golden sounds really intriguing. Always a fan of evil MCs.

Isekai Tensei: Recruited to Another World Volume 8 - I can’t say much about this one. It exists I guess. It’s so perfectly midding that it blends into the background while reading it. And it’s not like there weren’t any opportunities for something interesting. MC is visiting the Beast Nation for the first time, but instead of some interesting world-building you get “Oh this is basically Japan so let’s buy some Soy sauce and Miso. Okay. Thanks. Byeeee”.

Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 22 - Good volume. I love the two new characters and hope that they will join the party again asking (commanding) for tasty morsels. Karion says so as well.

Death March would be my #3 pick if I can’t get the old Tearmoon translator.

• Bookworm
• Cooking With Wild Game
• Tearmoon Empire (but with old translator)

Saving 80,000 - The 1 FUNA series I haven’t started yet

It’s even more ridiculous as FUNA’s usual antics. Imagine a MC that can freely hop between our and the isekai world. And by freely I mean freely. Including just grabbing a battalion of mercs with their armored vehicles to fight of a invasion of guys with bows and swords GATE style. Same humor and writing style as anything else FUNA so if you like their other stuff I recommend it.

Definitively, new Death March and 80k Gold. Babel maybe to see if MC gets better. Volume 1 had its strengths and wasn’t all bad.

I didn’t get any reading in during the weekend because of Metaphor:ReFantasio (such an incredible game with such a stupid name) but I sneaked in one and a half during the week.

A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even: How I Crushed My Homeland with My Mighty Grimoires Volume 3 - I like the ruthless nature of MC but in this volume if thoroughly dislike the cheap “oh oh ho, you see in reality I have been 12 steps ahead of you all the time” type of writing to resolve conflicts with MC suddenly revealing that she knew everything all along. I also dislike casual torture and murder of little children just to establish that villains are evil. It’s unnecessary and makes me skip a handful of pages at a time.

Finding Avalon: The Quest of a Chaosbringer Volume 4 - I thought it would trend upwards with this series but instead it plummeted into sewer waste territory. Instead of following MC and furthering the main story, this volume doubled down on the side characters and their stupid class-ranking plot. Aww poor E-class gets bullied by everyone but with the power of friendship and perseverance, they will overcome the devious D-Class! It’s the same shit as in I’m a Spider so What? when the focus shifted away from Kumoko to the side characters. - Dropped.

So which side wins in the end? Going by those speeches I’m also on team Ariel.

I was so scared for how this would play out, but with the Bento-Buddy in the picture, I think I’ll have a good idea of where the show is going. I mean there is still a chance they Oreimo me in the end but here’s to hope.

It’s the type of trash that I really like but the love interests thirsting for a kid half their age is off-putting. I hope this will be put more into the background.

I just finished the latest volume of A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even and Elizabeth is a great example. She is the stereotypical “crown prince’s fiancee is getting dumped because a commoner girl come noble is buttering up to the prince and throwing false accusations at MC until the prince throws her into jail for bullying his true love”. Seriously the initial setup is so cookie cutter that I wasn’t sure if I really read a new novel…

Anyway, where the series starts to differ from the dozens of others with how ruthless MC is in getting her revenge. While mostly a hyper-competent goodie-two-shoes princess in exile character, when she starts her revenge plots she becomes a monster that has zero concerns with sacrificing innocent civilians. An example from the first volume would be her consciously putting an enrage spell on one of the prince’s cronies knowing full well that he will ultimately go on a killing spree in town before the guards can stop him.

I find her generally off-putting as a character since she is written so inconsequent. For 3/4 of the volume she is saving poor civilians, slaves, and children left and right just like any other MC character, and then suddenly she turns around and makes plots that would kill possibly hundreds of innocents. I don’t dislike ruthless characters but they should be written believable.

Nah, I don’t have any alter egos. Even though the thought of book/LN reviews as a vtuber crossed my mind. I love vtubers and I like telling people what I think about what I’ve read (I know hard to imagine…), but on the flip side I hate hearing my own voice and my heavy accent.

Nice week. It’s easier to just list the one I’m not going to read (Young Lady Albert Is Courting Disaster)

Lacey Longs for Freedom: The Dawn Witch’s Low-Key Life after Defeating the Demon King Volume 1 - Super timid and low-confidence MC. Think Watamote levels of low confidence. It’s also her only personality trait. It gets (slightly) better over the span of the volume, but for a good chunk of it, it’s annoying to read. It’s nice to see the hero being a good guy for a change, though. In the last couple of years, novels have been doing this subversion of expectation thing where the hero is a scumbag, up to the point where I now feel a good hero to be the subversion instead.

The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects: Volume 5 - Dragon hunting in the snow this time. I swear the volumes in this series are just flying by in what feels like minutes.