Bark At The Ghouls

This book is being released by a new publisher with a new cover. I read and reviewed it back when I was on a blog hiatus and missed posting here so what better time than now to finally do so? My 2 Cents for Free! Cross Roads by Laurel Hightower Reprint April 2026 Source: Purchased See more @  Goodreads What’s there to say about this book that hasn’t already been said hundreds of times over by people far more eloquent than myself? I guess I can say that the thought of reading it scared me because when so many people promise a heart-crushing read my expectations sometimes ruin the experience for me. I was more worried about being let down than I was about any of the content I might find inside the book. And there’s some heavy stuff in this book. If you’re feeling low you might want to save this book for a day when you’re better equipped to get through it. Or keep a lighter book handy to read in-between chapters which is what I did because I don’t allow myself to sit with grief and su...

This is a slow burn story with a creepy undertone. My 2 Cents for Free! The Fourth Wife by Linda Hamilton Released March 2026 Source: Netgalley See more @  Goodreads The Fourth Wife is a haunting historical story set in 1882 about a heartbroken young woman who marries a man who gave me some serious Bluebeard vibes early on. But a man killing wives and accumulating new ones isn’t the focus of this book. Though this man does accumulate wives, it’s because he’s allowed to do it by his religion even if it’s illegal. Hazel is a young woman with impossible dreams of marrying her love and playing her piano but instead she’s forced into a plural marriage with three other sister-wives and their offspring because men rule over all positions of authority and she’s been born into this hell. The Fourth Wife explores her life with these women in his creepy moldering manor as he dips in and out doing whatever the eff he wants to do. Toss in some terrible nightmares/visions, some secrets (y...

               New Books This Week! 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 Bromeliad House by Jessika Grewe Glover Bromeliad House, once a sprawling heirloom estate on Florida’s Treasure Coast, is now a crumbling relic of a family worn to its barest threads. Within its walls, Delphine began seeing the doppelgängers of loved ones before they died. A phenomenon known as a fetch... Delphine Pembroke sees a fetch for the first time at ten years old in a mirror at her family’s decaying subtropical estate. Soon after, she goes to live with her aunt and uncle and their two boys, who attempt to give her a normal life. Since childhood, she had witnessed the impending death of loved ones, creating a compulsion to neve...

This one was not for me but I read it anyway. My 2 Cents for Free! Gothikana by Runyx Released June 2021 Source: Kindle Unlimited See more @  Goodreads I started this book on Kindle Unlimited, had to put it aside, forgot about it and restarted it on audio from the beginning because all of the details dropped out of my brain.  I guess there was a reason I put it aside. . . Anyhow, here are my thoughts. I love a dark story that takes place in an old castle, house or school where evil may still be lurking atop every ancient staircase or waiting in the forest to getcha. Some of these old places have seen some shit. This story takes place in a university where sketchy things have happened upon its grounds. Students seem to “go missing” during the annual Black Ball (or whatever it was called - my mind is a sieve) and no one seems to give a damn. They just keep on keeping on, probably glad it wasn’t them! Corvina was homeschooled and sheltered from society, raised by a mostly ...

That ending though . . .  My 2 Cents for Free! Little Girls Sleeping by Jennifer Chase Released May 2019 Source: Purchased See more @  Goodreads This was a decent enough start to a series featuring an army veteran named Katie and her service dog Cisco. It's too bad it blew the ending. Katie's given an office job by her uncle at a police station and is soon snooping into a cold case of a missing child. The snooping leads to her and Cisco stumbling on to the graves of two little dead girls. Katie seems to stumble her way into a lot of things in this book and if I ever decide to continue with the series I hope this changes. I loved Cisco and am glad he wasn't injured in any way, but I'll be forever perplexed about why he wasn't on the cover instead of the generic thing we get instead. There's a little flirtation but no romance and there's a bunch of resentment with the men on the force who think she doesn't belong there and isn't qualified to do what sh...

               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 Kiste'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...