Book Review — The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson

Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Queer Fiction
Published by: Harper Voyager
Publish date: September 9, 2025
Number of pages: 400 pages
Author’s website: https://kosokojackson.com/
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A picture is worth a thousand nightmares.

A struggling painter, Lewis Dixon is shocked when the British Museum shows an unusual interest in his art. While he’s always felt there’s something powerful about what he puts on canvas, he also felt there was something disturbing just under the surface—especially as he was compelled to make a painting of a painting—one that he has a connection the object of his art is one of the ten paintings his great-grandfather created over a hundred years ago. Only Lewis’s version is surreal…and maybe just a touch horrific.

Still, he accepts the invitation, only to find not a curated show, but a to see if he not only has the magic necessary to enter the paintings, but also the strength to escape them. Because unbeknownst to Lewis, there is power in his art, just as the ten paintings carry with them both immense eldritch abilities and a terrible curse—making them, perhaps, the most valuable works of art in the world.

And Lewis has been asked to destroy them all.

With orders from a mysterious museum official, Evangeline, and partnered with an alluring agent in her employ, Noah Rao, Lewis must plunge into a world of black markets, gothic magic, ancient history, and unspeakable terror to save those unlucky enough to call any of the paintings their own, and to hopefully locate the tenth painting in the series, long missing, the powers of which are suspected to be most devastating of all…

Rating: 4/5

I loved this book conceptually. Lewis has a connection to the creator of a series of paintings collectively known as The Macabre that someone from the British Museum has a special interest in. That someone is Evangeline who wants Lewis’s help in locating these paintings that have special abilities particularly on its owner.

What I loved about this book:

There’s travel both physically around the world to locations of the paintings and through time to to when the paintings were created (this really filled that high of that Mary Poppins scene that I didn’t know I was chasing lol).
Lewis and Noah’s relationship is really cute. The grow together . Plus, it was refreshing to see a queer, interracial relationship between two people of color that I rarely see in literature.
There’s a dark academia vibe to this despite the characters not being in the formal sense of an educational setting. The museums, art history, british location really brought that feeling to me.

I do think this book was ambitious and would have been better fleshed out as a series of books instead of a standalone. I would have liked more world building in particular the magic. I also think that each painting could have been it’s own story so that we’d get more history of the people who came to own the painting, more insight to Lewis’s ancestor when he created each painting, and the importance of the location of the paintings. Lastly, with the title and genre being horror and fantasy, I will say I was expecting this to have more horror elements than it did. Still a very unique and enjoyable read!

Have you read this book? What are your thoughts? I’d love to know!