I love when Gretchen Felker-Martin releases a new book, and today is no exception. Black Flame is out in the world today, and that’s more than a little terrifying to think too much about.

It’s 1985, and Ellen Kramer is working as a film and negative restorer at a Staten Island archival firm. When a long lost German film, “Black Flame,” arrives at their building, Ellen and her coworkers are torn. It’s not a popular kind of movie, after all. It’s full of queer people in gender-bending roles, made on a low budget, and only recently recovered from the collection of a now-deceased Nazi officer. The film itself is in horrible shape, requiring lots of extra care and attention from the restoration team. The work, however, would pay enough to keep the firm afloat for most of the next year. Never mind the fact that it has the chance to fix the firm’s public image after their last big project’s connection to the KKK brought all the wrong kinds of attention to them. With that kind of money in the offering, Ellen’s boss leaps at the opportunity. He also decides that Ellen, being Jewish, should head up the effort to restore a lost work by a great Jewish director.

Ellen’s very uncomfortable with all of this. It makes her think of her ex, Freddie, and the time the two of them spent together. Time that she would much rather consider a phase after the two of them broke up. It doesn’t help that her parents are trying to set her up with a nice young man who might become mayor someday. They’re concerned that if she doesn’t get married and have children soon, it might be too late for her. The work strains her relationships with her coworkers too, to the point where all Ellen wants is to finish restoring the print so that she can be rid of the film forever.

That’s not how this is going to go. After accidentally cutting her hand on the film negative, things start to get progressively weirder. Ellen begins to question everything she knows about herself, her sexuality, her gender, her religion, her family history, and even reality itself. As the work stretches on, more and more of the past begins to bubble up to the surface. Some things, after all, will always refuse to remain hidden, and the costs of bringing “Black Flame” back into the present are far more severe than anyone could have anticipated.

Black Flame is a quick, almost frenetic short novel, clocking in at just over 200 pages. It’s far shorter than Felker-Martin’s earlier works, Manhunt and Cuckoo, but it’s no less gruesome and scary. Body horror remains one of her strongest suits, but the tension that she builds with Ellen in such a short period of time is absolutely incredible. I raced through this book out of sheer desire for the release of finishing and seeing how the end finally arrives.

My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Black Flame is on shelves today, August 5th. Go get yourself a nice, fast-reading spooky. It’s almost Hallowe’en, after all.

This review originally appeared here: https://swordsoftheancients.com/2025/08/05/black-flame-a-review/

Ellen Kramer is a film restoration expert for a company that specializes in controversial material. One of their most recent, incendiary projects was the early twentieth century film, White Knight, a picture lensed by a filmmaker who was unapologetically a member of the KKK. When media backlash cites the Path Foundation as antisemitic, the company’s owner William Shrier bends the knee to accept a bit of Jewish film history. The Baroness is a little seen German film whose director was executed by the Nazis for the crimes of being both Jewish and queer. And since Ellen herself is Jewish, she’s presented as the public facing lead for the restoration project.

Soon enough, she learns that there are two quite distinctly different cuts of the film—filmmaker Karla Bartok made a complete reshoot, in fact, with real locations and possibly real magical effects—and each has a special kind of power. The simple act of watching them has unleashed a restlessness and yearning in Ellen, a reconsideration of her sexuality and her pleasing her parents by clinging to her heterosexual connection with Jesse, a selfish and abusive partner.

The more she works with the provocative material, the less comfortable with her life she finds herself. She yearns for more than pleasing social norms. The more at home in her own skin she seems to be, the more Ellen realizes how much she loathes this world. Maybe a supposedly cursed film is her access point to something different. Something better. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s newest novel, Black Flame, overflows with outrage and splatterpunk sensibilities.

The author of Manhunt giving a gory provocation? No surprise there. What is more surprising is how disjointed the narrative is. This is a novel about a woman’s growing awareness of herself, and while there are numerous gruesome moments peppered throughout the text (some hallucinatory and some real), the book is initially more concerned with evils of a more relatable kind: humanity’s inhuman behavior toward its own kind. Ellen’s existence is as blurred an unfulfilling as a mimeograph of a photocopy, but that’s all about to change. In fact, Ellen herself is about to change, first in perspective, then in personality, and ultimately in character. It’s a welcome change, all told.

Felker-Martin’s prose employs quite a bit of repetition—taking a drink whenever Ellen hears or things “Do you want it?” will result in a blackout drunk before the novel reaches its giddy, gruesome, and satisfying grand guignol conclusion—and the author’s storytelling is about as subtle as a stubbed toe. However, it’s certainly effective at provoking a response.

There is a looseness to the historical setting. Instead of rigorous research presented as a coherent and cohesive realization of a long ago period, Black Flame feels like a conglomeration of previous eras, an amalgamation of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s. where lauded video restorations of lost or European cinema rubs shoulders with VHS releases while characters attend a screening of what we can only presume to be 1979’s Alien as though it were a brand new feature. Readers in need of a recognizable 1985 (the period stated at the start of the first chapter) will be stymied by the number of anachronisms. Readers looking for a less strict adherence to the real history and a more generalized approach to “Way back then,” will find intriguing nuggets rubbing shoulders.

As well, the protagonist does not start in a place of strength, though she will find herself in one by the book’s end. That journey can and will frustrate readers looking for someone who is ready to spit in haters’ eyes and stand up for herself from the second chapter. Instead, Ellen is the recipient of a vast bucketfuls of hatred from employers, family members, supposed loved ones, and former, spurned lovers. The first half of the book will be an endurance trial for readers who are more accustomed to strong yet sympathetic leads. Even readers with experience for the feckless, ground down protagonists of Michael McDowell’s Toplin, Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark, or Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys will find their patience tested by the depths to which Felker-Martin dunks Black Flame’s protagonist. This is not a comfort read by any stretch of the imagination. Ellen occupies an ugly world that hates everything about her. It’s ultimately a reflection of the character herself, who exhibits surprisingly epic levels of self-loathing which have thus far gone unrecognized and therefore dodged. Only after she tries to expel this does she get any fingernail holds on hope for something better. Not that horror novels of the dark fantastique such as this will give her quite what she yearns for. The devil, after all, is in the details …

While Black Flame has some intriguing visuals and a strong spine for a horror yarn, Felker-Martin is not interested in providing a shock story about a young woman throwing open the gates to dark revelations and flesh tearing devilry from chapter two. Instead, the author delves into Ellen’s personal life, the hatreds she receives for being a woman and a Jew, which builds to a pleasing grand guignol conclusion. Not an easy read for sure, but a worthwhile one.

This was grisly and intense! I'm a seasoned horror reader and not very squeamish, but I appreciate that Felker-Martin is always pushing her readers to sit in discomfort in her stories. Gross-out horror does seem to be in right now, and I'm looking forward to putting it in the hands of the folks that will really love it.

Black Flame is some of Gretchen Felker-Martin's best work yet! Both heartbreaking and hair-raising, we go on the journey with Ellen as she tries to hate herself into nothing only for the film she's restoring to turn her whole life on it's head. So vividly written, it feels like you're right there with the monsters, real and maybe imagined(?), in her life. Black Flame gives a whole new meaning to seeing yourself and your experience mirrored back to you in film... and sometimes it's a horror film.

I'm such a sucker for anything lost media or found footage related, so this one got me from the start. Felker-Martin has a gift for writing visceral and real scenes, and that's readily apparent with Black Flame. It is immersive and will disorient you, and leave you questioning what you just read.

You know a book is gonna be good when the epigraph has a Clive Barker quote.

Black Flame is this twisted, kinky, horrific love child of horror and exploitation films while simultaneously setting about the task of being a cutting and timely commentary on hypocrisy within the Jewish community. What I love about Gretchen Felker-Martin’s writing is how she’s absolutely willing to go places other writers would flinch away from, whether it be harvesting the testicles of feral men in Manhunt or having a fictional version of Strom Thurmond in this book (which made me laugh so hard, you don’t even know).

This book is dark, unnerving, and definitely has a lot of trigger warning material. If you’re a sensitive reader at all you’ll want to look up warnings for this book. For me, all of those nasty, terrible things make books like these even more interesting to read. Horror novels give us a chance to examine the horrors of society through the lens of fictional means. Here, the horror is hypocrisy and how many people your hypocrisy hurts. It turns out hypocrisy can be absolutely catastrophic. 4⭐️


I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Body Horror/Historical Horror/Horror/LGBTQ Horror/Occult Horror/Religious Horror

4.5/5 stars.

Black Flame, in which closeted lesbian and film archivist Ellen starts work on a film that is more than it seems and causes her life to slowly spiral out of control, is an extremely engrossing and gruesome novel that kept my attention throughout.

I was really invested in Ellen, who clearly had a lot of issues to work through but still remained a narrator who was satisfying to follow. The middle of the novel was a little difficult to follow, but I really enjoyed both the truth of the origins of The Baroness and the finale. I felt it all really tied everything in well, with the only issue for me being some pacing in the middle.

It is a political book, with mentions and descriptions of the past- and present-day effects of misogyny, homophobia, the Holocaust, and antisemitism on both the main character and those around her. So just be aware if those are triggers for you. Seeing Ellen deal with all of this while attempting to remain "the perfect daughter, partner, and general citizen" was difficult but also important to see. It was especially nice to see a messy queer person, and I'm glad we see a lot of them in Felker-Martin's books.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I received an e-ARC and am giving my honest review. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this opportunity!

This was insane. Absolutely insane. I'm still reeling (haha, get it. like movie film).

It's taken a while for me to get used to horror that includes sexual themes due to how much sex was demonized when I was a kid, and this was some true exposure therapy. Not in a bad way at all, I am glad to have been kept on my toes like this. This was visceral in ways I can't begin to explain and it was incredible. Ellen's horrific journey through this book was haunting and I found myself getting whiplash from feeling a bit fed up with her to then completely understanding her. I mean, hell, she went through a lot in this novel, even though she had some ideologies I wasn't a fan of, it was made clear they were forced onto her by her mother/upbringing.

There were some points that I absolutely loved but wished we had just a bit more of, or a more solid ending. However, I also know that I don't like loose ends, even when they make sense for the plot, so it's certainly more on me. But Ellen's dad specifically was someone I wish we had more from, and I do wish we had just a bit more leading up to what happens on the very last page. I am saying this as someone who is like Ellen, but it did feel like it could have used just a few more "hints," I guess, about it. Not to say that that last page didn't bring me to tears or not cement this book's place on my list of favorites, but beyond I think one and maybe two lines, I didn't really see it coming. Which, I'll be honest, says a lot coming from me haha.

This is truly the embodiment of queerness in horror and it's incredible. The way sexuality as well as antisemitism is used to not only embolden Ellen but also not just be used as a sad trope, but also empowering, retributive. I love a good story where the homophobes and antisemites and transphobes and racists and sexists get what they deserve.

The latest installment in Felker-Martin's body of work absolutely delivered. Not for the faint of heart, this gory masterpiece packed itself into an impossible-to-put-down novella to be devoured at breakneck speeds and not to be easily forgotten. The themes, unfortunately, are increasingly timely, but nobody does queer survival and revenge like Felker-Martin (which is exactly what I needed to read). I highly recommend this book for fans of Alison Rumfitt especially.

Like the two other books by Gretchen Felker-Martin, I loved this one as well! Ellen, a closeted lesbian, is tasked with restoring a film many believed to be lost during the Holocaust. Soon she becomes obsessed by the project. This book talks about repression and antisemitism, and it is done is a visceral way only Felker-Martin can do. Ellen is figuring out who she is as she pieces together this film that she believes to be actual footage. I also have to state to check your trigger warnings, as Felker-Martin portrays very gruesome realities, and I definitely felt uncomfortable at times. However, I feel that is the whole point. We should not be comfortable with various topics, but we also need to discuss them, and specifically how to not have them happen again, or how to fix them.

4 stars

I am here for it. I thoroughly enjoyed this read. I'll also enthusiastically recommend it but only to a very specific kind of person and reader. This is not one for the masses, the prudes, or the less adventurous. Everyone else? Buckle up.

If you know this author, you'll be expecting a gritty, graphic, somewhat out there experience, and you will get all of those things and more with Ellen, whose relatively pedestrian name hints (falsely) at her externally mundane life. But there's more to Ellen, who is a restorer of films. When it comes to her most recent project, Ellen is piecing together not only one of the wildest films I've ever heard of but also deeply hidden pieces of herself.

Throughout this novel, Ellen's uncertainty about what is real and imagined, who she is, and what her deepest desires actually are becomes so chaotic and powerful that it consumes both her AND the reader's sense of reality. Yes, there's body horror, graphic descriptions of sex and acts some people may not typically associate with that, and much more, but that's not the most sinister part of this experience. The psychological elements here, particularly the coming to terms with who she is and what she wants, make Ellen a model for a real person as much as a fictional character. Can you really know yourself until you've spent significant amounts of time alone with yourself and faced what you did not know you truly desired? Ellen is here to show us.

As has been the case for me with every book I've read by this author, there are parts of this read that made me uncomfortable. That's intentional. I was DYING to listen to an audio version of this and was incredibly fortunate to be able to do that, thanks to a misunderstanding on my part and real kindness on someone else's. Being able to listen to the book added a sense of reality and perspective to wildly unreal events; this all heightened my experience, and I recommend this option when and where accessible.

I continue to really appreciate the originality this author brings to horror and identity exploration, and readers who can manage this content should snap this up immediately. Everyone else, stay away. The beach reads are waiting for you on another shelf, and there's no shame in that (just as there is no shame in the absolutely wild antics that happen here)!

Gretchen Felker-Martin does the damn thing AGAIN! WOAH! This author never disappoints and delivers every single time!
Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin is deliciously dark, evocative, and gory.
This book is just another reason why I’ll read anything she writes.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for this ARC.

Recently I have been binge reading a lot of romance. So, when my mood finally shifted, and I decided I wanted something different, it only seemed right to dive head first into some grade-A horror.
Black Flame follows Ellen, a closeted lesbian in the 1980s, as she works to restore a German pre-WWII queer exploitation film. However, the hauntingly grotesque and hedonistic images of the movie begin to consume her, forcing her to face her debilitating fear of her own sexuality as the occult power of the film begins to bleed over into reality.
Being honest, I am just such a fan of how Gretchen Felker-Martin writes horror. The way in which the narratives of both Cuckoo and Black Flame are so character centric, while still developing these rich psychological mindscapes, invokes the perfect amount of paranoia and empathy, even while you are literally choosing to play witness to these characters falling apart. It also brings out that necessary human element so that as a reader you can see the emotions and the fear that inspired the story—shame, lust, a questioning of our own desires, this want to normalize and not be the outsider even if that means denying ourselves, and what that denial costs us. We can see it all through Ellen’s experiences as she is forced to confront the self she has chosen to be, and the one she has chosen to hide.
Ultimately, Black Flame already feels like it should be a classic in the best way possible. It reminded me a lot of The Ring or more recently Talk to Me, just because of that hyper-fixation element and how the supernatural slowly pours into the protagonist’s day to day, wearing on their sanity and their resolve.

Like Cuckoo, I struggled to connect with Felker-Martin's characters and often felt halfway removed from the story. There's a lot to love here, especially with the gross-out, Barker-esque elements. This is a simple issue between reader and author.

Black Flame is grim and a cautionary tale, within the same vein as the film I Saw the TV Glow, only with a much more violent and historical core.

I really enjoyed the lucid structure of Ellen's maddening present as opposed to the concrete and clear past of Bartok. The denial of truth, both personal and not, strengthens the narrative and makes it all the more grueling to experience.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for the opportunity to read this ARC!

This book follows Ellen, a closeted lesbian, who is tasked with restoring a film many believed to be lost during the Holocaust. She quickly becomes obsessed and chaos ensues.

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s writing is aggressively engaging. She takes you by the throat and throws you so deeply into the story that it’s all you can think about. I devoured this in one day, desperately needing to know the end.

With themes of sexual repression and antisemitism, this book excels at paralleling occult horror with the horrors of reality. That being said, please check trigger warnings before you read as the material is HEAVY.

Just like Manhunt, I know I’m going to find myself coming back to this book. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes talking to me about books knows that I love Gretchen Felker-Martin. This piece is just another reason she is on my “auto-buy author” list.

Cursed Films, Cosmic Terror, and Coming Out

Black Flame is not just a horror novel, it’s a descent into madness, identity, and cinematic dread that transcends the boundary between fiction and reality. Gretchen Felker-Martin continues to cement their status as one of the most vital voices in contemporary horror, delivering a story that is deeply disturbing, richly thematic, and undeniably brilliant.

At the core is Ellen, a film restorationist assigned to a long-lost, ultra-graphic cult film. But as frames are meticulously restored, reality begins to distort. Thus blurring the line between nightmare and lived experience. The deeper Ellen digs, the more unraveling occurs, not just externally, but internally. Her journey is one of delayed identity, suppressed trauma, and the raw, unflinching horrors of self-recognition. I saw myself in her; the silence around grief, the breakdowns, the terrifying clarity of truth finally surfacing.

Felker-Martin masterfully fuses perversion, cosmic dread, and queerness into something both grotesque and gorgeously human. This book is dark. It is graphic. And it is relentless. Certain scenes deliver imagery so vivid and visceral that I genuinely avoided reading after dark. I was fully convinced the shadows might birth the Baroness herself, in all her ghastly glory.

Clocking in at just around 200 pages, Black Flame moves fast. It wastes no time unleashing its horrors, and once the blood starts spilling, it does not let up. Despite its brutality, there’s a profound emotional core here—a story about survival, identity, and confronting the monsters within and around us.

If you’re a fan of cursed media stories, cosmic horror, or queer narratives steeped in blood and revelation, this is your next read. Just know what you’re getting into: this one pulls no punches.

For those sensitive to certain content, I highly recommend checking the trigger warnings before diving in!

This book was absolutely disgusting and I absolutely loved it. The gore and horror was the perfect amount of descriptive, enough to get your blood curdling but not so much that it was superfluous. There were a couple points where I got a little lost, but not so much that I couldn't catch up and the amazing description made up for it.

This book was... something else. I loved it and hated it. It was both repulsive and sensual.

It's not a breezy read. The main character is so disconnected from herself, from her identity, her queerness, her attractions. SA trigger warnings for those who prefer to know ahead of time. The writing was captivating and I lost myself in it.

This is sounding far too fangirl-y but I'm not sure what else to say - it's not going to be for everyone. But for anyone who's struggled with queer identity, who's pushed themselves into a mold to make other people around them happy, this book captures that struggle beautifully.

A visceral, terrifying descent into madness. Nothing is scarier than living an inauthentic life, a life stuffed in a closet you don't want to be in. This is such a powerful fever dream of identity and repression that explodes into a cathartically visceral conclusion. Gretchen is a powerhouse author that I think will be one I will forever gravitate to. What a novel.