Bark's Book Nonsense

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...

If anyone has some patience to spare, I am in desperate need. My 2 Cents for Free! The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark Released June 2025 Source: Purchased @ Gibson's Bookstore Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads The Ghost Writer is a book for people who have endless patience. I’ve discovered that person is not me. This story is about Olivia who is a ghost writer who has changed her name because her father is a famous writer with murder accusations from the past that surround him like a haze. She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he was a terrible father. Can’t say as I blame her really. Anyhow, now he is penning his last book, suffering from Lewy Body Dementia and needs her assistance to bring it all together. She accepts because she needs money. Can’t blame her for that either. The book then bounces back and forth between the present day and the past as she attempts to make sense of his scribblings and clues that may or may not reveal the murderer of the u...

This one gets icky! My 2 Cents for Free! Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Released September 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads Spread Me is a frightfully, delightfully, off-puttingly weird little horror story. It probably won’t be for everyone. It is very much a twisted erotic horror tale. The blurb promises a “darkly seductive tale of survival” which doesn’t really express what awaits you inside its pages. Things happen pretty quickly and the atmosphere and slight claustrophobia set in right away as a small group of researchers break protocol and bring back a specimen to their living space that they find buried deep within the desert sand. The specimen makes almost everyone sick but they get over it soon enough. Or so they think! No one is prepared for what happens next. This crew is very open to romantic entanglements and partner swapping but Kinsey has always been uninterested and professional and keeps herself to herself. She’s also hiding a ...

The Hounding is out today! My 2 Cents for Free! The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis Released August 5, 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads All it takes is one sonofabitch to stir up an entire village. Grrrr. The Hounding is a historical fiction novel about five sisters living on a farm in a small village filled with superstitious people. The sisters have been raised by their grandparents after being orphaned and are mourning their recently deceased grandmother. Many of the townsfolk are wary of them because they’re not demure, mild-mannered creatures. Their grandfather has allowed them to run free and wild. They’re a little loud, they laugh freely, and they keep themselves to themselves. So, OF COURSE, that makes some of the local men feel a certain way. One day their grieving is mistaken for howling and rumors spread that they are able to change into dogs. They then get blamed for everything ailing the town. It’s an infuriating look at human natu...

This book brings the ick. 🍄 My 2 Cents for Free! Girl In the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner Released July 15, 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads Erin is a young  journalist who heads to a small town an hour out of Portland to write an article. Faraday is tucked away and filled with woods and mushrooms and rot, as well as poachers and murderers of people. People go missing and no one seems to care very much. There’s definitely a terrible story here but it’s also personal for her as her beloved brother went missing in the area a few years earlier. Erin meets up with a podcasting group and a bunch of their friends and, for the life of me, I couldn't tell you much about any of them because they all sort of hang around on the periphery (waiting to get picked off, it seems to me) and we don’t get to know them as people which was a frustrating experience. They’re all young and beautiful and smart but none of them have developed personalitie...

This started out amazing but lost me along the way.  My 2 Cents for Free! Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou Released April 2025 Source: Purchased from local indie bookstore Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads Sour Cherry is a retelling of the murderous Bluebeard, he of the penchant for collecting and murdering wives. He's no different here. The story starts out when he's just a "little lord". He's an odd child, whose nails grow at a frightening pace, and he can't seem to fit in with the other children. His wetnurse cares for him when no one else can quite bring themselves to. Is he an evil seed, is he truly cursed or is it the lack of nurturing? We shall never know but as the story goes along any sympathy I was able to dredge up for him was soon lost. The book has some beautiful language, but the story is oddly composed. It takes its time getting started. We get to know Bluebeard as that strange child I mentioned above. This section is a goo...

This wasn't quite what I was expecting which was actually a nice surprise. My 2 Cents for Free! The Undoing of Violet Claybourne by Emily Critchley Released November 2024 Source: Library Audio Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads I picked this up from the library thinking it was a gothic mystery and, though it features a once fine manor that is in disrepair, it’s definitely a historical tale of friendship and tragedy and secrets that ultimately is mainly about young women who weren’t free to live their lives as they’d like due to their own mistakes and class wars but mostly because of the way society is set up to give young women very little agency in their own lives and then there's the fact that mental health issues continue to be woefully dismissed. Whew, that was a mouthful. Fifteen-year-old Gillian befriends a friendless girl at the posh school she attends. She isn’t nearly as wealthy as the rest of her classmates and jumps at the chance to spend a holiday...

 A mini review for my archives My 2 Cents for Free! Wake Up And Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman Released January2025 Source: Library Audio Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This was bleak and there’s a scene I’ll never forget early on but it’s definitely not a book I’d read again. It’s just too much with everything that’s going on here in the US. The audio is very good except for the repetitive kid baby ghost show iPad thing which got on my last nerve when it was in my ears over and over again but I’m sleep deprived and short of patience so you may have a different experience. It’d make a good companion read with CJ Leede’s new one, American Rapture, if you’re into delving into sex plagues and bumming yourself out. I borrowed this audiobook from my local library. Final Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐1/2 Publisher Plot Synopsis (if you need one, be warned because sometimes they can spoil it all!) From Vulture's "master of horror" Clay McLeod Chapman, a relentless a...