Umm, could someone please explain A House at the Bottom of a Lake to me? Because I sure as hell don’t get it. Admittedly, that could just be me. This could be another Bunny situation going on, where I’m just not existential enough to understand what I just read. This novella by Josh Malerman (of well-deserved Bird Box fame) is a horror story…kinda. Two teenagers row out to some hidden lake where they go swimming and discover an actual...
I'm not sure how I stumbled across The Girl Who Died; I think author Ragnar Jonasson blurbed another scary book that I'd read and loved. I thought, if I loved that book, I'd probably love books by this author, too. The Girl Who Died, despite its off-putting title, was a really enjoyable read. It's brimming with tension and atmopshere, suspense and mystery. Main character Una spontaneously accepts a teaching job in the ultra-remote Icelandic...
N0S4A2 is a Christmas book in the way that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It's a horror novel that just so happens to be centered around Christmas. There are all the entrancing, alluring elements of the holidays that we love – carols, trees decorated with oranaments, the smell of gingerbread in the air – but author Joe Hill doles out each charming tidbit with a sinister twist that morphs the innocent into something incredibly dark and...
I love discovering new authors in supernatural fiction, and The Voices falls perfectly into this genre. This story starts off like most haunted house novels -- a happy couple moves into a too-good-to-be-true lovely old house that turns out to be creepyAF. But that's where anything expected in The Voices ends. Right away, an unsettling feeling grows in your gut that this isn’t going to be your typical haunted house – you know, ghosts moving...
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mexican Gothic is the latest bestseller to fall into the DNF pit. Let me start off this book review by saying that I'm not only disappointed by how much I didn't enjoy this Gothic suspense -- but I'm very surprised by it. Mexican Gothic made HUGE waves last year among bookstagrammers and book bloggers, for its book cover alone! Which is, admittedly, gorgeous. A creepy, crumbling Victorian mansion in a remote...
I uttered "What the fuck?" an unprecedented number of times while reading Bunny. That’s pretty much the only reaction you can have to this novel by Mona Awad. It's a complete What the actual eff??? ride from beginning to end. Bunny takes place at a prestigious art school. There’s a pack of hoity-toity, grad school women there who behave like middle schoolers; they roam around in a pack, affectionately calling each other “Bunny” like...
A blogger friend recommended The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires to me during one of my reading slumps. I jumped on it since I’m a big fan of author Grady Hendrix’s previous novel, Horrorstor. Also, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight enthusiast (don’t judge), I have a thing for vampires. So, I figured this Hendrix story was worth a shot.
What is The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires about? This...
The Dead Girls Club is a pretty morbid book title -- so, naturally, I was immediately drawn to it. The synopsis promised a mix of psychological thriller and supernatural suspense, so I was all "Yup, yup, that's my kind of book!" I'm not usually a fan of books that blur the line between "is this a haunting or a pyschotic break?," with a very few exceptions. However, author Damien Angelica Walters did a good job with this one. Normally, I'm all...
If it’s one thing I love about Wendy Webb novels, it’s that they’re incredibly creepy. And her latest book, The Haunting of Brynn Wilder, certainly delivers all the spine-tingling, floor-creaking moments you’d expect with a title like that. That being said… this book is also incredibly heartbreaking, which is something that I did not expect. What originally drew to me to Webb’s novels is this author’s ability to weave a damn good...
House of Salt and Sorrows is aptly named: there's a heck of a lot of Salt, and there's way more sorrow than necessary plaguing the Thaumas family. The more you read, the more you're like, Sheesh, hasn't this family been through enough??? Despite having more money than Pontus, the one thing they don't have is the ability to keep their women out of harm's way: in the past few years, Annaleigh Thaumas has lost her mother and four -- four! --...
