Bark At The Ghouls

This was such a good read! My 2 Cents for Free! My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen Released May 2024 Source: Library Borrow See more @ Goodreads Ahhh I loved this one. It gives off old-school gothic everything. It tells the haunting tale of a young woman named Roos who has been taken advantage of her entire life by a mother who cares more about money and herself than her child's safety. Roos can see spirits and allows herself to be inhabited by one named Ruth to bilk people out of money. After years of torment, Roos becomes a companion to a woman named Agnes and moves into an old manor, complete with a woman dying of consumption and another resident spirit. The story is told after all the dreadful things have happened. A doctor interviews Roos, giving the reader tiny hints about what is coming. I enjoyed this format because I’m nosy and it kept me guessing about what really happened in that dreary old home. “Some things are so horrible that the only sane response is a bi...

Haunting and well-paced and great on audio. Finally, a book that lived up to its blurb! My 2 Cents for Free! Arrowood by Laura McHugh Released June 2016 Source: Library Borrow See more @ Goodreads This was a great atmospheric, slow burn story about a family that is destroyed when their twin toddlers are kidnapped. Arden was only a child when her sisters disappeared and were never found and her family became forever fractured. She left them alone only for a moment and was a child herself and swears she saw a gold car drive away with them. But memories are tricky things. She returns to the childhood estate she's inherited and tries to rebuild a new life while reconnecting with old friends (and new) but finds herself digging further into the past and ends up unearthing devastating secrets. Everything is done so well here. The pacing, the messy complicated characters, the mystery, the trauma. It's definitely a good book to dig into on a hot summer day. I don't know how I missed...

Need a slightly spooky read? You might like this one. My 2 Cents for Free! Grave Birds by Dana Elmendorf Released July 2025 Source: Spotify Listen See more @ Goodreads Grave Birds is a decent enough rainy-day summer read but it fell a little flat for me in the end. The southern atmosphere and mysterious start hooked me in pretty good. The heroine sees "grave birds" who tell her stories about people. Dark, tortured stories mostly and she has to piece it all together. Hollis is living in a greenhouse on a property she's been doing her best to buy until a handsome stranger comes to town and swoops in to steal it out from under her. Is he the devil? Is he part of the murky history that keeps coming back to her in flashes? Or is he just a handsome devil who wanted the house? Does it even matter? This book felt more like a light(ish) spooky mystery to me with a thread of under-developed romance. It was a pleasant enough read but I don't think it's going to stick with me...

A slow burn, atmospheric tale of dread and duty. My 2 Cents for Free! The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea Released February 2019 Source: Library Borrow See more @ Goodreads I've been reading a lot of dark and dreary gothic novels lately and realized there have been quite a few that flew under my radar in the past. This is one of them and I'm glad I finally found it! It's never too late to find a book, right? Rosa is in love with her childhood friend but marries an older man with means in order to save the life of her mother who is ailing from sickness and poverty. Set in Iceland 1686 she doesn't have a lot of options. She travels to this stranger's manor with one of his gruff men when he leaves immediately after their marriage to "care for his people". This is clearly going to be mostly marriage in name only. Once she arrives at his abode, she's isolated and told to obey and to spend her days cleaning, cooking, and slaving away while he's out doing wha...

    New Books Because You Know 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. I'm a little late today because I didn't finish this draft before leaving for a trip. But I'm here now and boy is there ever a ton of good sounding weird fiction being released today. Will I find time to read all 9 of them? Highly unlikely but I'll try to read a bunch before 2026 is over. First the  HORROR and HORRORish   because it'll always be my first love. A Box Full of Darkness by Simone St. James Siblings return to the house they fled eighteen years before, called back by the ghost of their long-missing brother and his haunting request to come home. Strange things happen in Fell, New York: A mysterious drowning at the town’s roadside motel. The unexplained death of a young girl whose bod...

Looking for a book that you can fall into? I found one! My 2 Cents for Free! Hungerstone by Kat Dunn Released February 2025 Source: Aardvark Book Club Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads I very much loved Hungerstone. It took me ages to finish it but that's my fault. I was reading several other books for various reasons and had to keep putting it down, but I always wanted to grab it first and reading isn't a race anyway.  It is and it isn't a Carmilla redo. I thought the two were very different (in the best of ways). Carmilla's shadow certainly lingers over quite a bit of Hungerstone but it manages to be its own unique story and I loved that. The author credits Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu but also Coleridge's Christabel, Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations, Keate's Lamia, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as several other texts of historical fiction. Lenore is married t...

So much has changed,  yet so little has changed. Le Sigh. My 2 Cents for Free! The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke Released October 2022 Source: Purchased Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads This is my favorite of the three CJ Cooke books I've read. The other two were The Lighthouse Witches and The Book of Witching . I think I gave them both a three. One of them had two timelines which is sometimes tricky when they don't connect for the majority of the story. It often drives me nuts but that wasn't a problem at all in this one. The timelines here are only a few years apart and they meld somewhere at the midway point.  The Ghost Woods tells the story of several young women who are sent "away" when their pregnancies become an inconvenience that their families just want to shove under the rug. Why is society always so awful to women? Ugh. Anyhow, sometimes they're allowed back but more often than not, especially for the ones without means, they'r...

Hello! I hope you're all doing well out there. It's been a bit since I've blogged and blogger went and fiddled with every one of my review photos and the whole thing looks wonky and it's going to have to stay that way because I CANNOT BE BOTHERED. I'm sticking with the bare bones and sticking the synopsis at the end because if I start fixing things I know I'll never blog again. So here I am back with a mini review of a good book I read last week. Have you read it? My 2 Cents for Free! Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen Released March 25, 2025 Source: Bought with my own $ Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads I thought this was a very good gothic story about how women had to tread carefully or fear being locked away by the men who claimed to love them but really only wanted to own them. Why can’t we lock up hysterical men? There’s a lot of them out there walking around and being a-holes who could do with a padded room and a daily dose of lau...

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...

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...