Bark At The Ghouls

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 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...