Bark At The Ghouls

              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...

            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.  HORROR,   HORROR-adjacent & THRILLERS The Cellar Below the Cellar by Ivy Grimes A playfully dark folk horror inspired by the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and the mythology around Frau Perchta, set under the blazing sky of endless auroras. When a wild solar storm wipes out all electronics and traps Jane at her grandmother' s house in the woods, she is forced to start a new life off-grid as part of a small, isolated community. However, there is something very strange about her new neighbors, and the longer she lives under the eerie glow of the auroras, the more she feels her grandmother may be hiding unsettling secrets. To have any hope in her new world, Jane ...

I love Chuck Tingle's work but this one wasn't my favorite. My 2 Cents for Free! Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle Released August 2025 Source: Purchased See more @  Goodreads I’ve read all of Tingle’s horror novels and each and every one is a little weird, but this one definitely wins the prize for most imaginative and outrageously strange turns. It’s deeper than many books I typically read and in all honestly wasn’t my favorite of his work. I realize it’s delving into matters of identity and existence and nihilism and bi-erasure but there was so much zaniness going on at points and a few changes in tone that were disorienting to me as I was reading. It almost felt like an X-Files episode with some insane trauma, an unsupportive mother and something called the Low Propensity Event that must be investigated tossed in. It was all a little too chaotic to keep my focus at times but maybe it’s just me. Lucky Day starts out introducing Vera who is about to celebrate her first book release ...

           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.  Sorry so late but still in time for the weekend! These are the books that look pretty darn good that have released this week. HORROR,   HORROR-adjacent & THRILLERS Cold Snap by Angela Sylvaine The highly anticipated sequel to FROST BITE! WORMS GONE WILD! It’s 1998, and the town of Demise, North Dakota, is recovering from the Meteor Murders, hundreds of deaths caused by alien worms but blamed on a mass poisoning by a doomsday cult. While nineteen-year-old Realene’s heroic actions saved the lives of many, she wants nothing more than to hide from the world and mourn the ones she couldn’t save. When a second half of the meteor is found north of the border where her best frie...