Bark At The Ghouls

Hello, everyone! I hope you found some time to read last week or were at least able to take some time for yourself.  Recent Reads & Listens  I still have an arc or two to finish up and then I'm reading purely for me. New books, old books, books that catch my eye. If I don't like them I'll be free to toss them. Ahhh, the freedom. Here's what I've finished recently: Clicking on a cover will open a new window to my review if you'd like to read it. ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ 1/2 ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Additions to the TBR I found nearly new copies of The Wicked King & The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black inside one of the Little Free Libraries last week, so I grabbed them not realizing they were books #2 & #3 in The Folk of Air series. Ooops. So, I ordered book #1, The Cruel Prince, so I could read them in order. Have you read this series yet?  Recent Watches   ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ 1/2 We just finished up Fargo Season 6 and it was a wild one! Jon Hamm was the absolute worst ex...

Hey, everyone! I haven't done an update in too long. I hope you're all reading some great books, watching some creepy movies and getting outside. I've been feeling pretty meh about a lot of things. I recently lost my other elderly cat Mr. Kirbs and I still find myself getting up to fetch his meds at certain times. He passed quietly in the night after a rough couple of days in and out of the vet's. I adopted him as a kitten and he lived with me for 19 years so it's been sad not seeing his old man cat face, hearing his rumbly purr and having him sit on my head while he tries to eat my hair as I read. I've since decided to ditch most of my social media because it seems to reward stress and hatefulness and terrible people and I just don't have the space for it anymore and I've also decided to slow way down on reviewing arc's to make room to read things I bought and am dying to read. I never seem to find enough time to actually read them and always end up...

via GIPHY Hello book people. I've been feeling very disorganized and stressed and just meh about a lot of things these past few years. It's probably been apparent from my sporadic posting on my own blog and I hate that. I always tend to put my blog last on the long list of things I need to do and I need to stop that. I still love books, but I've had a very long think and I need to change how I spend my time. I've wasted way too much time on social media and it does nothing but make me feel terrible no matter how well I try to curate my feed. I'm finally pretty close to being done with the daily scrolling.  So, I'm going to go back to basics and will focus more of my time on Goodreads and my blog and interacting more with people who actually love books and less with the people who do it to push books for fame and fortune or whatever the heck they're trying to do. I am tired and prefer genuine readers to any of that nonsense. If you're new to my blog, here...

Happy Friday! I didn't think it would ever get here. I've been ignoring social media (always for the best), puppy sitting this handsome little devil, and reading some books. I've been not so great about writing reviews though but what else is new. At least I'm reading books so I suppose I have to be happy about that. What's everyone reading this weekend? I finished DEAD SILENCE by S.A. Barnes a week or so ago for the Ladies of Horror Fiction Readathon we have going on to celebrate Women In Horror Month and did actually write a short review so I'll try to get it posted next week. This is the ARC copy that I dropped in the Little Free Library. I hope someone finds it, reads it and gets addicted to spooky fiction! If you'd like to join us for our April Readalong, we'll be reading The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. You can find all the information  HERE! Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when tw...

 Happy Friday Bloglandia!  I hope you're all doing better than my cat here. Patrick is super grumpy because he's lost his window seat while the puppy has been recovering. I think he wants to throw me in the oven, to be honest. I probably deserve it too! What's everyone reading? I just finished this one and will post the review on Monday. It's good stuff if you like gothics. And I'm planning to get to work on this bunch: In a neighborhood known as the Bramble Patch, the Lyons family endures despite poverty, racism, and the ghoulish appetites of an underworld kingpin called the Barghest. As the years pass and the neighborhood falls into decay, along with the town that surrounds it, what's left of the Bramble Patch will learn the saying is true: These bones are gonna rise again. Titanic meets The Shining in S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, a SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn...

Wow, hello!  It has been a while. Ugh. I had grand plans to blog regularly and catch up going forward but life went sideways on me in January and all of my plans went out the damn window. We lost a family member which has been rough, we moved my son cross-country and back again and I'm now caring for his puppy during the day while I try to work at home. It's been a whole lot of madness and a whole lot of adjusting. Some of it fun, some of it heart-crushing but all of it exhausting.  I haven't felt much like reviewing and have been super distracted, but I have been reading so I'll try to put together some mini book posts while maybe catching up on review posts that have been sitting in the queue for eternity. I refuse to make any grand pronouncements because every time I do that life kicks me in the butt so I'll only say that I'll do my best to be a better blogger now that things are starting to quiet down.  Anyhow, that's more than anyone cared to know so he...

Hi everyone! It's finally time to say good riddance to 2021! I had a terrific year of reading but really that's about all of the good I can say about it. I'm not doing a Top 10 or anything like that this year because I am worn out. I did do a silly tweet thread if you want to see some favorites:   https://twitter.com/BarksBooks/status/1476294896025702403?s=20 I'm not going to make any resolutions this year because life is too complicated and I always end up feeling like a failure when I don't keep any of them.  I'm looking forward to reading some of these and maybe a few from my tbr piles that have been waiting for years 😮 The only thing I hope to do is keep up a steady pace of reading, continue my work with Ladies of Horror Fiction and post to this blog more regularly - something I seem to consistently fail to do.  Stay safe, keep blogging and let me know if you've read any in this pile of mine 👇

Dracarys Gameof Thrones GIF from Dracarys GIFs It's been ages since I've written a post like this but I think it's time before I burn the whole thing down.  Over the past 2 years or so I became a little too involved with Twitter which is a total time suck and can ruin your mood if you scroll the feeds too long. We all know this but some of us do it anyway (someone being me!). There is some good there though believe it or not! I've made some true friends and had a lot of laughs but the good is overshadowed by the negatives far too often. I have had days where the feed was full of stress-inducing tweets (wait, that's every day!), days when people take a shot at a reviewer or post a hot take for likes or post some toxic positivity "be nice, be constructive" bullshit and scream at readers for no reason whatsoever and others jump all over it making anyone with a different opinion feel like their opinion doesn't matter. I only hang out in the indie horror ...

Hi everyone!  My apologies for being so long missing. I am never giving up on my blog here. It is my safe space but sometimes life just doesn't leave me with any free time. I'll be back posting my even bigger backlog of reviews when I have some time to format them. In the meantime, I'm super busy with Ladies of Horror Fiction's current award season!  You can see all of the nominations and a few of the winners (they're still being announced) at https://www.ladiesofhorrorfiction.com/  .  I'll do up a proper post soon and hope to update the Horror Fiction Review Directory before summer ends. I miss you all but I will return soon 😉

I wrote this piece for Dead Head Reviews earlier this year and I'm gonna park it here as well, with their permission. Give them a visit. They recently did a complete site overhaul and it looks gorgeous. They're doing great things in the horror community. Hi there, my name is Laurie but I’m also known as Bark around social media. I can’t even remember how that happened but it probably had something to do with my big mouth and my tendency to bark back at trollish behavior. Dead Head Reviews invited me here to talk about my reading life today. Thank you Dead Head Reviews, I hope you don't regret it! I've been reading scary books my entire life and reviewing them since I first discovered the internet. I've strayed from the genre on occasion but never for very long and I have heard all of the insulting statements and questions that people tend to throw at horror fans. Especially female horror fans. You’re likely familiar with a few of them too. "Why do you read tha...