Bark At The Ghouls

Hmmmm The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Released January 1979, 162 pgs Source: Bought with my own $ Goodreads  |  Amazon For the 75th anniversary of her birth, a Deluxe Edition of the master of the literary supernatural’s most celebrated book—featuring a new introduction by Kelly Link Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic liter...

Le Sigh. The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer Released July 2024, 352 pgs Source: Purchased from Book of the Month Goodreads  |  Amazon Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game. As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived. Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy. Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth ab...

Well, I finished. Winter's Fury by A.E. Rayne Released July 2017, 738 pgs Source: Purchased from Audible Goodreads  | Amazon IN A WORLD RULED BY MEN, ONE WOMAN WILL RISE She was their greatest warrior; the daughter of the king. But her uncle stole the throne and sent her away to marry Eadmund, the drunken son of their worst enemy. Now she must pick up her sword again to restore her family’s honour and return to the home she loves. Despite her skill with a sword, her prowess in battle, and her reputation as the greatest warrior in Brekka, without her father to protect her, Jael was merely a pawn, a woman to be married off so her uncle could forge an alliance to fulfil his own desperate ambitions. Eadmund is broken hearted, tortured by the murder of his first wife, but his father had lost patience with him. He wanted heirs for his kingdom. He wanted his son back, restored to the fierce warrior he had once been. And when his daughter has a dream about Jael, the woman who would save h...

This is another great book I read a bit ago but never managed to get up on my blog. The Wild Dark by Katherine Silva Released October 2021 Source: Received for Review Consideration Goodreads  | Amazon Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Raleigh has lost everything: her job as a police detective, her partner, her fiancé, and her peace of mind. After a month of solitude at a cabin in the woods, she finally feels as though she’s ready to move on. But in one terrifying night, everything changes. Liz's partner, Brody, appears in the form of a ghost. He's one of millions that have returned to haunt their loved ones. Brody can't remember how he died and Liz is determined to keep the secret of it buried, for it means dredging up crushing memories. Along with him comes an unearthly forest purgatory that swallows up every sign of human civilization across the world. The woods are fraught with disturbing architecture and monstrous wolves hungry for human souls. Brody says he escaped from them and that t...

I read this a little bit ago but books don't expire and I'd like everyone to read it!  Inheriting Her Ghosts by S.H. Cooper Released July 2021 Source: My TBR Goodreads  | Amazon Inheritance often comes with strings attached, but rarely are they as tangled as those hanging over High Hearth. When Eudora Fellowes learns she's the sole heir of her estranged great-aunt's seaside manor, she believes it will be the peaceful escape she's longed for. What awaits, however, is a dark legacy shrouded in half a century of secrets, and it doesn't take long before Eudora realizes she's not the only one to call High Hearth home. My 2 Cents for Free! I read S.H. Cooper’s book The Festering Ones last year and enjoyed it quite a bit. It featured a strong protagonist who is fearless and determined to get to the root of the mysteries - even if she has to put herself at risk to do it. Inheriting Her Ghosts has another great heroine and it is very mysterious and ghostly and full...

Need a fun action-packed horror novel in your life? Here's one for ya: Frost Bite by Angela Sylvaine Released October 2023 Source: Received for Review Consideration Goodreads  | Amazon Remember the '90s? Well...the town of Demise, North Dakota doesn't, and they're living in the year 1997. That's because an alien worm hitched a ride on a comet, crash landed in the town's trailer park, and is now infecting animals with a memory-loss-inducing bite--and right before Christmas! Now it's up to nineteen-year-old Realene and her best friend Nate to stop the spread and defeat the worms before the entire town loses its mind. The only things standing in the way are their troubled pasts, a doomsday cult, and an army of infected prairie dogs. My 2 Cents for Free! Frost Bite is a wild action-packed tale set in the 90’s that gets gruesome but doesn’t forget to create memorable characters too. It would make a fun B movie for sure and I hope we see it someday. Maybe with a d...

  Recent Mini Reviews Let's face it, most of my reviews lately are what most people consider "mini" anyhow. Most of the time I'd rather be reading than writing an essay deconstructing every part of a book, so it is what it is. Here are the quick takes and the thoughtless thoughts about the recent(ish) books I've read. This week it's a mix-up of genres. Nothing rated higher than a three but sometimes that happens. When She's Shy  by  Ruby Dixon ⭐⭐⭐ I haven't read anything in the Risdaverse (unless those blue alien books are Risdaverse books? If so, I'm a dummy because I have read a few of them) but this stands all on its own pretty well and now I want to read more so I guess it did its job. I didn't have any pesky questions besides is "Risadaverse" set on Not Hoth? It's short (less than 50 pgs, I think) and the romance is super rushed because, well, it's less than 50 pages but it's a sweet and quick read. No real character...

I wanted to like this one a little more than I actually did. Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine Released August 2023 Source: Received for Review Consideration & Purchased from Audible Goodreads  | Amazon The Push meets The Silent Patient in a gripping thriller that follows a woman convinced a sinister figure is going to great lengths to make sure her pregnancy never happens—while the men in her life refuse to believe a word she says. Anna Alcott is desperate to be pregnant. But as she tries to balance her increasingly public life with a grueling IVF journey, she starts to suspect that someone is going to great lengths to make sure her pregnancy never happens. Crucial medicines are lost. Appointments get swapped without her knowledge. And even when she finally manages to get pregnant, not even her husband is willing to believe that someone's playing a twisted game with her. When the increasingly cryptic threats drive her out of her Brooklyn brownstone and into hiding in th...

I love finding new writers via anthologies and I found a few here! In Darkness Delight Released May 2019 Source: Received for Review Consideration Goodreads  | Amazon Midnight strikes like an invocation, clock hands joining in prayer to the darkness. After the twelfth chime, there’s no escaping the nightmare. Fear reigns supreme. In Darkness, Delight is an original anthology series revealing the many facets of modern horror—shocking and quiet, pulp and literary, cold-hearted and heart-felt, weird tales of spiraling madness alongside full-throttle thrillers. Open these pages and unleash all-new terrors that consume from without and within. Midnight is here. It’s now time to find . . . In Darkness, Delight. My 2 Cents for Free! This is a collection filled with nightmarish images and stories. As with collections of these types, there are always some you’re going to love and others you might not be quite as crazy about. A few of them were so deeply depressing that I had to take breaks ...

I read and reviewed this one a little bit ago but forgot to post it here. But it's never too late to discover a new read, right? Sundial by Catriona Ward Released March 2022 Source: Received for Review Consideration Goodreads  | Amazon Sundial is a new, twisty psychological horror novel from Catriona Ward, internationally bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street. You can't escape what's in your blood... All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice. Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie ...

Here I am late to yet another party. A Court of Thorns and Roses bby Sarah J. Maas Released May 2015 Source: Purchased from Audible Goodreads  | Amazon When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a terrifying creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she knows about only from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not truly a beast, but one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled her world. At least, he’s not a beast all the time. As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever. From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie ...

The set up was perfect but somewhere along the way it began to lose me. The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling Released October 2021 Source: Library Borrow Goodreads  | Amazon Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him. By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is d...