Bark At The Ghouls

This is such a weird and so hard to put down book. My 2 Cents for Free! The Fruitcake by Leah Orr Released October 2023 Source: Audible Plus Catalog Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This is a wild book. I found it in the Audible Plus catalog and thought, why the heck not. May as well get my money's worth out of my pricey Audible plan. A well-to-do couple with triplets moves into a very pricey and exclusive gated community. Holly has people who help clean and care for the kids and life is pretty near perfect from what I’m reading. At least on the surface. As she begins to become friendly with some of the women in the community, she learns of some strange things simmering beneath the perfect exterior but it’s the fruitcake tradition that brings it all to the surface. I know. Why fruitcake? Does anyone eat fruitcake? Why eat fruitcake when you can eat cheesecake or chocolate cake or frosted cardboard, ffs? I don’t get it but I don’t have to. It doesn’t matt...

 New Books Because You Know You Need Them! I'm going to start spotlighting brand new releases I've added to my "want to buy" list so you can succumb to temptation too. The focus will be on dark fiction and romance and the occasional thriller. Today I found two tempting horror novels and one dark romance from new-to-me writers.  The Bloody Brick Road by Maude Royer (horror fiction) In this wildly creative, horror-soaked reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, nothing is as it seems in Dorothy’s dystopian nightmare. Fans of Tender Is the Flesh and Maeve Fly will want to follow her twisted journey down the yellow-brick road. When nineteen-year-old Dorothy Noroît finds out she is pregnant, the road ahead seems bathed in golden light. She has a hard-working boyfriend, a beautiful home, and a job where she works with her best friend. But on October 2nd, 1994, everything changes. Fast forward twenty-four years. The city of Montreal is plagued by extremist ...

The people are awful but I couldn't stop reading. My 2 Cents for Free! Play Nice by Rachel Harrison Released September 2025 Source: Book of the Month Club (you can join here using my referral link) Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads Chappell Roan could've soundtracked this one. "I love being bitter It makes me feel better Bitter feels better than tryna get better and I Yes, I love being bitter But it makes me feel weathered Now I'm sick in the head and it's not even my fault" I've read much of Rachel Harrison's work and this one harkens back to the bitterness between the friends featured in The Return. That one wasn't my favorite, but I may reread and may have a change of heart. I think I'm digging these bitter characters lately. This time around it focuses on a family with many secrets and secret resentments while a demon may or may not be thriving as they emotionally destroy themselves. There's a lot of rage and...

  My Favorites of the Year I have been working my way through my tbr in 2025 and unfortunately dnf'd quite a few. I have so many books I purchased ages ago and I think my taste might have changed a bit. I'm slowing down on physical book purchases in 2026 so I can get through more of the books I already own before my taste changes again.  But it wasn't all dreary dnf's. I read quite a few gems in 2025 too! Most of them happened to be newish books. I was mostly into gothic horror novels in 2025 and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. Fortunately, I have a bunch sitting here so 2026 may look similar. In no particular order, these were my favorite reads of 2025. "Hazelthorn is a gorgeously written tale of a gothic mansion and a terrible garden filled with secrets but it’s so much more. It’s lush and grotesque and imaginative and filled with physical and emotional pain and it all comes together in the loveliest way." Complete review here . "I really enjo...

Bloom is a beautifully crafted nightmare. My 2 Cents for Free! Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson Released October 2023 Source: Spotify Audio Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This story lulls you in with what appears to be a sweet, healing romance but soon enough the dark undertones start rising to the surface. Ro(semary) meets the most beautiful girl in the world, an elfin cottagecore dreamgirl come to life, at the farmers market. She is smitten. She’s also recovering from a breakup from a guy who ruined her self-esteem and gave her an issue or two. Ash is very private but allows Ro into parts of her life but Ro is consumed by wanting to know everything about her and her nosiness and insecurity and complete lack of boundaries (ugh) has her snooping where she shouldn’t be snooping . . . I loved and adored everything about this book. It’s a lovely romance on its surface but there are sinister moments that peek through and the slow burn really pays off in the last few ac...

So much cottagecore coziness. My 2 Cents for Free! The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst Released July 2024 Source: Spotify Audio Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads I'm giving this a five because I didn't want it to end. It is a bit rushed at the end which is my only complaint but it's going on my favorite shelf so five stars it is. If you want something that is magical and leaves you with that cozy feeling, this one is probably meant for you too. I originally picked it up because I requested The Enchanted Greenhouse from Netgalley not realizing that it was a sequel. I'm not sure if they need to be read in order but I didn't want to take a chance. The Spellshop tells the story of Kiela, an introverted and sorta grumpy librarian who is forced to grab her sentient plant, hop in a little boat and leave her beloved safe place when the overlords who want to hoard all of the magic start destroying everything, as overlords tend to do. She sails over to the i...

Looking for a book that you can fall into? I found one! My 2 Cents for Free! Hungerstone by Kat Dunn Released February 2025 Source: Aardvark Book Club Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads I very much loved Hungerstone. It took me ages to finish it but that's my fault. I was reading several other books for various reasons and had to keep putting it down, but I always wanted to grab it first and reading isn't a race anyway.  It is and it isn't a Carmilla redo. I thought the two were very different (in the best of ways). Carmilla's shadow certainly lingers over quite a bit of Hungerstone but it manages to be its own unique story and I loved that. The author credits Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu but also Coleridge's Christabel, Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations, Keate's Lamia, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as several other texts of historical fiction. Lenore is married t...

So much has changed,  yet so little has changed. Le Sigh. My 2 Cents for Free! The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke Released October 2022 Source: Purchased Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This is my favorite of the three CJ Cooke books I've read. The other two were The Lighthouse Witches and The Book of Witching . I think I gave them both a three. One of them had two timelines which is sometimes tricky when they don't connect for the majority of the story. It often drives me nuts but that wasn't a problem at all in this one. The timelines here are only a few years apart and they meld somewhere at the midway point.  The Ghost Woods tells the story of several young women who are sent "away" when their pregnancies become an inconvenience that their families just want to shove under the rug. Why is society always so awful to women? Ugh. Anyhow, sometimes they're allowed back but more often than not, especially for the ones without means, they'r...

Botanical horror is having a moment and it's a beautifully disgusting thing. My 2 Cents for Free! Hazelthorn by CG Drews Released October 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads Hazelthorn includes everything that bugged me a little about Don’t Let the Forest In because I am she of little patience, including the endless pining, the memory gaps and small glimpses of pained but forgotten histories and it is very angst heavy, but I loved all of it. Maybe I was just in the right mood? Or perhaps it's just a very good book. It’s earthy and mysterious and sometimes pretty bloody and gross and all of it is pretty damn haunting. Evander is a lonely, sickly teenage boy who has been wasting away in an old mansion. His door is locked until one day it isn’t . . . The writing is beautifully evocative. Or at least I think so. At one point Evander thinks about himself, “He is an autumn leaf. Meant to be pressed between the pages of an old book and forgotte...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 🎄 My 2 Cents for Free! Hark! The Herald Angels Scream edited by Christopher Golden Released October 2018 Source: Purchased Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This was a bit of a mixed bag with many of the stories lacking in the scary Christmasy feelings I was expecting but there were a few standouts worth checking out. Absinthe and Angels by Kelley Armstrong A couple are spending a quiet Christmas at a remote cabin here when they hear a knock at the door. This was super creepy and filled with nightmare fuel. It was a great start to the collection and is definitely worth a read. Christmas in Barcelona by Scott Smith A tired couple with a new baby head out for a vacation they booked when they were still childless. Now they’re rethinking things because everything that could add stress to the trip has happened. Screaming baby, lost bags, no food, etc. and so on. When they arrive at their destination, the husband decides to wander a...

This was a fun change of pace. My 2 Cents for Free! The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi Released September 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads If you like a well plotted mystery/thriller/serial killer story with some moments of dark humor and attention to characterization (no one here is a faceless throwaway character) you might want to add this one to your fall reading list. Everyone seems to love a slasher but sometimes they get a little cheesy or too formulaic for me and I think I overdosed on them, so now when I see everyone raving about a book because it’s a “slasher” I usually stay away until the honest reader reviews start coming in. I’m super picky about them now and I need characters I can care about as well as an interesting plot or I doze off pretty quickly. This one caught my attention at Netgalley because it takes place in an old folk's retirement village and the characters are in their 70’s and 80’s a...

Unique and timely. This is a good one! My 2 Cents for Free! Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker Released January 2025 Source: Purchased @  Aardvark Book Club Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads A little mystery, a little tragedy and a whole lot of horrors await a small group of crime scene cleaners as they wield their way through the early days of the Covid pandemic. A world that often feels overtaken by hatefulness and prejudice. As of this day (sometime in November of 2025), we are still dealing with Covid mutations and all of the mess and selfishness it has wrought out into the open, so I was a little wary of reading a novel about a time that still feels like a festering open wound. I feared it would be too depressing and turns out it was but yet it really wasn't, and I credit that to the storytelling and characterization. Cora Zeng is the main character and she's lonely and closed off and dealing with trauma but as the story moves a...