Bark At The Ghouls

               New Books Because We Deserve Them! This is where I spotlight the sparkling new weekly releases that are tempting me so you can succumb to temptation too. The focus will be on dark fiction and romance with the occasional thriller tossed in that catches my eye.  HORROR,   HORROR-Adjacent & THRILLERS The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste I really enjoyed Gwendolyn bKiste's novel The Rust Maidens (review  here ) and am looking forward to reading this collection soon.  Celebrated author Gwendolyn Kiste cordially invites you to explore The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. Enter a world possessed by recriminations from bygone eras, where the regrets and malice of years past still reverberate and shape our doom. Here, morally complex women and queer antiheroines swim against the current of a social structure that serves as a spectral prison in these layered stories of the weird and the Other....

This one started out strong but was slightly disappointing in the end. My 2 Cents for Free! This Cursed House by Del Sandeen Released October 2024 Source: Purchased See more @  Goodreads “It’s the living you need to be scared of.” The story starts out promising when a young woman escaping a crappy relationship accepts a job that includes room and board. Jemma thinks she's going to be serving as a nanny to a child. She doesn't ask questions, leaves everything behind and travels to New Orleans. She soon realizes there aren't any children in the old mansion and the people that live there are all beautiful and strange and never leave the house and now she's so entwined she seems stuck too. I enjoyed the first 1/3. It had an air of mystery and eeriness that kept me reading and some throwback tones of VC Andrews, but you really need to go all in if you're going to go there and this one didn't. The villains were all rather dull and behaved as if all the life had been s...

Maybe it'd be better for someone who doesn't read a steady diet of horror novels? My 2 Cents for Free! Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce Released February 2025 Source: ARC for review See more @  Goodreads This book purports to be one thing and then turns out to be something else which is fine, if ultimately a bit disappointing. Mina has just finished her child psychology degree when she meets a journalist named Sam at a grief session. Sam mentions a story he’s working on where he can really use her kind of help and promises her it’ll be a great start to her career. So, she leaves behind her wedding plans, her lame fiancé who can’t be bothered to notice and together they travel to a small town to interview a family and their daughter named Alice who claims to be haunted? possessed? bothered? by a dead witch. This town is inhabited by a whole bunch of superstitious people. Weird things begin to happen. I loved this portion of the book but once a few reveals were made and odd...

              New Books Because You Deserve Them! This is where I spotlight the sparkling new weekly releases that are tempting me so you can succumb to temptation too. The focus will be on dark fiction and romance with the occasional thriller tossed in that catches my eye.  This week didn't overly tempt me too much but I found a few I'd like to read. HORROR,   HORROR-adjacent & THRILLERS The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan Into the woods. Count to ten. Only one of us comes home again. When a teenager disappears from her small Irish town and a therapist is brought in to break the silence of the only witness, old wounds are opened in a search that becomes a race against time. Southwestern Ireland, 1995: Two children go into the woods. Only one comes out. When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the forest, rumored by locals to be haunted...

This one releases next Tuesday and you can pre-order it now. My 2 Cents for Free! Morsel by Carter Keane Released April 14, 2025 Source: Netgalley See more @  Goodreads Comparisons are such a wild thing. I realize they’re trying to sell a book to a targeted audience, but they almost never feel quite right to me. “The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.” To be totally honest, the cover is the reason I chose this as a READ NOW pick from Netgalley. I was thinking it would lean heavily into the bog/fungi horror trend of late especially when they invoked T. Kingfisher up there, but it never goes there. Morsel is such a weird little story. It sort of fits some of those comps but only for brief moments in time. Instead it’s more of a mashup of many things including taking a scathing look at the late stage capitalism that works peopl...

Loved the book but not so much the narration. My 2 Cents for Free! Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher Released March 2025 Source: Netgalley See more @  Goodreads Thanks to Netgalley, Macmillan Audio and T. Kingfisher for providing the arc! T. Kingfisher horror novels are one of my favorite things and this new book is no exception. It’s earthy, it’s creepy, it’s full of bugs and decay and snark and suspicious characters and there is nothing here that I didn’t enjoy about the writing. I am reviewing the audio narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal, however, and I’d recommend you maybe read it in paper if you’re picky about your narrators. There was something about the narration that didn’t seem to fit the historical time period of 1899, and the voices of the men were, I’m sad to say, dreadful in the most terrible of ways. So much so that they made me smirk in places where I really shouldn’t have been smirking and would almost always throw me out of the story. I tried speeding up and slowin...

             New Books Because You Deserve Them! This is where I spotlight the sparkling new weekly releases that are tempting me so you can succumb to temptation too. The focus will be on dark fiction and romance with the occasional thriller tossed in that catches my eye.  This week is a little slim because I accidentally included a few of this week's releases on last week's post. Oops! You can see them here . HORROR,   HORROR-adjacent & THRILLERS Monumental by Adam L.G. Nevill A Novel of Pagan Terror from the Author of The Ritual A story of life and death in the wilderness, and a horrifying tale of extreme survival against supernatural powers, from the four times winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. Disaster strikes quickly and without warning. What should have been a glorious weekend of kayaking and camping, in a secluded beauty spot, is transformed by a scream. The first crisis, initiating a deadly momentum t...

They say a narrator can make or break or a book . . .  My 2 Cents for Free! Something Bad Happened Here by Zoe Rosi Released October 2025 Source: Netgalley See more @  Goodreads I want to thank Netgalley, the author and the publisher for sharing this audiobook with me but I have to be honest in all of my reviews or what’s the point? Something Bad Happened Here but it wasn’t a haunted house, or a demon or any of those supernatural things. It was a thin plot and an absolutely terrible choice when it came to the narration. Not that he was a bad narrator. He wasn’t. He may be a fine dapper fellow for all I know. This is nothing personal against him, but he was such a poor choice for this book. The main character and most of the secondary characters are women and he reads their parts in a falsetto that made me cringe and he narrates the other parts as if the book were a cozy mystery which it isn’t, well, at least in its last ¼ it isn’t. This choice bewilders me. Carmen is drowning ...

 Sometimes a DNF has to happen. My 2 Cents for Free! Where the Darkness Goes by Kiersten Modglin Released October 2024 Source: Library Borrow See more @  Goodreads I guess this a romance with a hint of mystery, but I may never know because I am calling it quits at the 60% mark. It's irritating me and it's boring me, and I just can't do this anymore. I don't give a cat's bum who killed who or who is going to get killed. Perhaps they'll both get it, and I'll miss out, but I can't be bothered. I listened on audio and the modern timeline/teen timeline kept throwing me. Now that I've read a little bit further, I'm pretty sure it's because they still think like horny teens in the modern time. The romance is so cheesy/cliche and not in an entertaining way. Sometimes cheesy is super fun but this one felt lazy. "She smells sweet like coconut and tastes like heaven.” "I remember what you like, my good girl." Maybe all the darkness has mo...