Tag: horror books

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Little Eve

Title: Little Eve

Author: Catriona Ward

Genre: horror

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

This book is the third of Catriona Ward’s that I’ve gotten from NetGalley. The Last House on Needless Street was one of the best I read in 2021. And Sundial was delightfully disturbing. So, when I saw she had a new book out, I knew I had to read it. And wow, was this one excellent. Last House is still my favorite of hers, but this one was outstanding.

From Goodreads: On the wind-battered isle of Altnaharra, off the wildest coast of Scotland, a clan prepares to bring about the end of the world and its imminent rebirth.

The Adder is coming, and one of their number will inherit its powers. They all want the honor, but young Eve is willing to do anything for the distinction.

A reckoning beyond Eve’s imagination begins when Chief Inspector Black arrives to investigate a brutal murder, and their sacred ceremony goes terribly wrong.

And soon all the secrets of Altnaharra will be uncovered.

This description doesn’t even begin to explain how insane this book is. Altnaharra’s secrets are plentiful, right down to the cellar where atrocities occur. The story jumps narrators and time periods, so it’s important to keep track and who and when you are in the story. I’m having a hard time explaining anything without spoilers because so much occurs that is better revealed as you read. But, like Ward’s other books, so much happens that you don’t see coming. She’s a master of writing the subtle plot twist. I absolutely recommend all her books. She’s a fantastic writer, and I can’t wait to read her next.

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Sundial

Title: Sundial

Author: Catriona Ward

Genre: horror

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I LOVED The Last House on Needless Street. It was one of the best books I read that year. Top 10. So, when I saw that Ward had another book coming out, I knew it was going to be one I was going to read. And, even better, I got this one from NetGalley to review. This one wasn’t quite as good as Needless, but I still enjoyed it and will recommend it.

From Goodreads:

All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. Far from her childhood home, Sundial, hidden deep in the wild Mojave Desert.

But beneath the veneer, Rob is terrified for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind.

Running from her past has led her directly back to it — what’s buried at Sundial could never stay a secret forever, and Rob must risk one last trip out there to protect her family, and her future.

I had no idea what was going to happen in this story. Callie seems to be so disturbed. But so does Rob because her marriage is pretty rough. The way she and her husband interact is far from healthy. And when she can Callie get to Sundial, the real story begins. We learn about Rob’s childhood. She tells it in bits and pieces, so the true horror doesn’t come for a while. The best thing about this book is that I never knew what was coming around the next turn. The characters are so unhinged that anything was possible. Ward is 2 for 2 in my book, and I’ll definitely be looking for more from her.

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The Final Girl Support Group

Title: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Genre: thriller/horror

Thank you Netgalley for this copy!

Wow, did Grady Hendrix knock it out of the park again. I’ve only read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which I also loved, and definitely need to back to his previous books. I couldn’t read this one quickly enough. I was dying (pun intended) to get to the end. Lynette, the main character, is a final girl. Meaning she was the last girl standing at the end of slasher-movie type event, but a real-life one. Of course, they made movies about the girls and the horrors they lived through, but these survivors have found each other and attend a monthly support group.

From Goodreads: In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized–someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

Don’t confuse this book with Final Girls by Riley Sager, which is just an okay book. They follow the same basic concept, but that’s about it. Lynette is a badass in this book. And she is jerked around by every other character in various ways, but she keeps standing to protect those around her. The other final girls have their own quirks, but all are survivors. One in particular, though, embraced the dark side, which was my favorite part of the book because of the creepiness. I thought this book was fantastic. It’s suspenseful, horrifying, and such a fun read.

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Full Throttle

Title: Full Throttle

Author: Joe Hill

Genre: horror short story

PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt: an author who shares your Zodiac sign

I’ve read a lot by Joe Hill. The Fireman was my favorite, but I also enjoyed Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2. I’m not a big short story fan, but I’m trying to read more. My strategy is to pick a book and read one a day, while I’m also reading other novels. It actually works well for me, and I’m definitely going to use this for my Stephen King story collections that I haven’t gone through yet.

From Goodreads: A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . . . and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. And tension shimmers in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert as a faceless trucker finds himself caught in a sinister dance with a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in “Throttle,” co-written with Stephen King.

There are some memorable stories in this collection. One is told entirely through tweets, which was excellent. One was formatted in a stair step fashion to mimic the plot. Another was told about an event from multiple perspectives of people on an airplane. “In the Tall Grass” was also co-written by Stephen King, and I know it’s also a Netflix movie, but I definitely will not be watching that. This story is so horrific, but great, but it’s one I know I won’t be able to stomach actually seeing. Overall, this was a great collection with some really creative stories, some really gruesome stories, and some really heartfelt stories. So far, Joe Hill hasn’t let me down.

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Audition

Title: Audition

Author: Ryu Murakami

Genre: horror

Shout out to Devin from the Book in the Freezer podcast for this recommendation! I don’t read a lot of Japanese books. I know a lot of people like Haruki Murakami, but he’s not really up my alley. A little too out there for my taste. But when Devin recommended this one, it sounded really interesting. Clocking in at under 200 pages, I flew through this book in one day. And oddly enough, the horror doesn’t happen until the very end, and then BOOM. completely, utterly, terribly horrifying.

From Goodreads: In this gloriously over-the-top tale, Aoyama, a widower who has lived alone with his son ever since his wife died seven years before, finally decides it is time to remarry. Since Aoyama is a bit rusty when it comes to dating, a filmmaker friend proposes that, in order to attract the perfect wife, they do a casting call for a movie they don’t intend to produce. As the resumes pile up, only one of the applicants catches Aoyama’s attention–Yamasaki Asami–a striking young former ballerina with a mysterious past. Blinded by his instant and total infatuation, Aoyama is too late in discovering that she is a far cry from the innocent young woman he imagines her to be. The novel’s fast-paced, thriller conclusion doesn’t spare the reader as Yamasaki takes off her angelic mask and reveals what lies beneath.

I got to page 168 before anything awful happened. The book is mostly about the auditions and Aoyama falling for this woman, which is still a really captivating story in and of itself. I had no problem getting hooked into his thoughts and their relationship. But when the horror hits, be prepared. It’s intense and graphic. I had to skim a bit, honestly, because it was just a bit too much for me. Murakami has a handful of other books, all of them around 200 pages, and I will definitely be checking them out. This one was great and will be one I remember for awhile.

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The Book of Accidents

Title: The Book of Accidents

Author: Chuck Wendig

Genre: horror

Thank you Netgalley for this book!

I’ve been meaning to read Chuck Wendig for awhile. I follow him on Twitter. I own Wanderers. I just haven’t gotten around to it, yet. But when I saw this one available on Netgalley, I jumped at the chance to read it. Topping out at over 500 pages and heading for vacation for a week, this book took me forever to read. But if I had had more time, I would have gotten through it much faster because it was excellent.

From Goodreads: Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father—and has never told his family what happened there.

Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have—and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures.

Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania.

Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver.

And now what happened long ago is happening again . . . and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.

This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family—and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this battle: their love for one another.

I’ve been reading so many thrillers lately that I forgot this was a horror book at times until something, well, horrifying happen. It also reads a lot like a thriller with a mystery to solve. This book is full of great characters and a really creative plot. What I really appreciated was that things that happened early on in the book that didn’t really make sense were fully explained by the end. The entire plot came together well. I’m glad the horror genre is getting more of a spotlight these days. A lot of people judge the books as just “gross” or “graphic,” but this one had a great plot, a lot of heart, and was well-written. I really enjoyed it.

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Different Seasons

Title: Different Seasons

Author: Stephen King

Genre: story collection, horror, psychological thriller

PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt: A book that has the same title as a song

You can’t beat old school Stephen King. I’ve been digging through his old works that I’ve yet to read and just find the early stuff to be so rewarding. Last year I read Night Shift and was blown away by the story collection. Not a bad story in the entire book. The same goes for Different Seasons and its four novellas. You’re probably familiar with two or three of them.

From Goodreads:

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption–the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo. Apt Pupil–a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism. The Body–four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. The Breathing Method–a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.

Three of these have been turned into movies, two of those are classics. Shawshank Redemption is one of the best all-time movies, and the story itself was fantastic. The movie features some entire passages of dialogue from the novella. Red, the narrator, is actually an Irishman in the book, but I couldn’t help but hear Morgan Freeman’s voice. The movie fleshes out the plot, but overall the similarities are fantastic. I loved it.

Also, The Body is the movie Stand By Me, which is a movie I’m not as familiar with, but I believe is still a great adaptation. I remember a lot of similarities between the two. And it’s just a beautifully written story. The friendships and heartbreaks of childhood. This novella was, in my mind, a precursor for IT.

Apt Pupil is the most horrifying thing I’ve read of King’s. Scary clowns, vampires, haunted hotels, just don’t scare me. They aren’t real. And most of his books have enough of a supernatural element that they are unrealistic enough not to terrify me. But Apt Pupil, written in the early 80s is about a teenager obsessed with Nazis. I read Rage, which is about a school shooting, and it was pretty terrible subject matter. But Apt Pupil takes the terror to a completely different level.

The last story isn’t enough to be a movie (I say that now, but Lawnmower Man certainly wasn’t movie caliber and that happened…) but I still enjoyed it. Unlike the others, this had a touch of supernatural or mystery to it, but it was also just a bit of a ghost story, so who knows what really happened.

I’m loving going to King’s older works and digging through them. I’ve read so much of his new stuff, which is great, but it’s like listening to The Beatles. There’s the early stuff, the middle starting to get weird stuff, and there’s the super crazy late stuff (my favorite). With King there’s the super crazy early stuff, the middle cocaine fueled stuff, and then the lighter newest stuff. I’m pretty sure the super crazy early books are my favorite. They just never disappoint.

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Cabin at the End of the World

Holy. Smokes. This book!!! Definitely in my top reads of the year. I couldn’t put it down. This book is my third book by Paul Tremblay A Head Full of Ghosts (which I liked okay) and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, which I thought was great, but this one is his best, so far. I absolutely loved it.

From Goodreads: Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault.” Three more strangers arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.

Absolutely no spoilers because this book would be completely ruined by them, but the tension presented and the horror this family faces, both physical and psychological, is so terrifying. The story is told from multiple characters, which makes the plot even more awful because you see the events from so many different perspectives. I can’t really go into more, however. Tremblay is just a high school math teacher who happens to write books. At this point, I’m confident he could quit his day job and be just fine. I can’t wait to read his newest, Survivor Song.

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The Hollow Places

Thanks to Netgalley for this book!

Several of my friends have read and recommended this book, so I was really excited to get it from Netgalley. I was told that it’s a good creepy book, but I thought it was more silly than anything with a bit of creepiness thrown in. The premise was really intriguing, though. The best part was the snappy dialogue between the characters and in the main character’s internal dialogue.

From Goodreads: Pray they are hungry. Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring the peculiar bunker—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more you fear them, the stronger they become.

So the “hear your thoughts” part really is only a tiny bit of the plot. Kara and her friend, Simon, go through the portal and really discover some horrific things. Kara’s uncle owns a museum full of crazy things, lots of taxidermied animals, especially, so when the portal begins to take over control of Kara’s real life, the silliness begins.

I still really enjoyed this story, even though it was nowhere near as creepy as I had expected. The dialogue was clever and kept me giggling. The secrets of the portal were revealed in a creative way, and Kara was a really likable character. Overall, this was a super fun book!

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The Talisman

For anyone new to my reviews, I’m a huge Stephen King. I own all his books in hardback and am currently working my way through his catalog. This year, I’ve read Joyland, If It Bleeds, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Night Shift, Cycle of the Werewolf, and Blockade Billy. I still have a few on the list to read in the next few months, as well.

From Goodreads:

On a brisk autumn day, a twelve-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America–and into another realm.

One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother’s life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest begin. . . .

The Talisman is one of the few books King co-wrote, this one with the amazing Peter Straub, who also writes horror books. (Ghost Story is a great one of his). The main character, Jack, is excellent. Even though he’s only twelve, he’s brave and hard-working and smart. That said, the secondary characters annoyed me to no end. They were such a distraction to the main story. The villain wasn’t really all that scary. There were other minor villains that were much worse, and Jack finds himself in some difficult situations that seem to last forever while reading.

I always wonder if I love SK’s books because they are legitimately good or because he wrote them. Can I be objective or do I just think all his books are amazing. Well, we have an answer. This one was just okay for me. I didn’t LOVE it like I have most of his other books. I know there are plenty in the past that I read and just found mediocre, but as of late, most everything has been excellent. And even though I enjoyed this one, I didn’t give it five stars because it seemed to drag for me in a lot of ways.