I’m a kid that grew up during the Blockbuster era. I spent a lot of time in the horror and sci-fi section, going aisle by aisle renting everything they had. Monsters were like vital nutrients to me, but it wasn’t just the monsters themselves that I found appealing. It was what they taught us about ourselves. So many good stories use monsters as a tool to tell interesting and poignant stories about humanity. Doesn’t matter if it’s a walking undead creature or an otherwordly cosmic destroyer, monsters reflect people, and I try to embody that sentiment in my own work.
Located just forty-five miles north of New York City and isolated in the hills of Putnam Valley, Lake Oscawana is the perfect summer getaway. At least, that was what April’s mother told her when she dropped April and her brother off to spend the season at their uncle’s lake house. It wasn’t bad at first. April thought she might’ve finally found someone that made her feel like family and a place she could actually call home. But April grew worried when she found something living in the water. Something strange. Something growing. She wanted to tell someone and sound the alarm, but April would have to learn the hard way that not all monsters lurk beneath the water.
I’m always drawn to unique formats, which is exactly what World War Z is. The narrative is told through a series of fictitious interviews, detailing a zombie apocalypse and its aftermath. In this book, the zombies are secondary. The real draw is how individuals act when society starts to crumble. The book talks about everything from the military to consumerism and how the end of the world affects them all.
It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginning of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse.
Faced with a future of mindless man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the ten-year fight against the horde, World War Z brings the finest traditions of journalism to bear on what is…
Dracula is a classic. There’s no getting around that. However, the truly interesting part of the story is not the powerful vampire but rather the woman he turns. Mina Murray is a tragic character that Dracula turns against those who care for her. They struggle and try to help her despite how unlikely salvation may be, and that is where the story actually shines.
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'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan Doyle
A masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. It begins when Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, and makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England - an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master' - and a determined group of adversaries…
HP Lovecraft created a great cast of cosmic characters, but it’s debatable that other writers have done a better job utilizing them. Cthulhu Armageddon takes Lovecraftian horror and puts an adventure spin on it. The real highlight is the book’s main character, who has to navigate this post-apocalyptic world and the various creatures within it while coming to terms with his own insecurities.
“Under an alien sky where gods of eldritch matter rule, the only truth is revenge.”
CTHULHU ARMAGEDDON is the story of a world 100 years past the rise of the Old Ones which has been reduced to a giant monster-filled desert and pockets of human survivors (along with Deep Ones, ghouls, and other “talking” monsters).
John Henry Booth is a ranger of one of the largest remaining city-states when he’s exiled for his group’s massacre and suspicion he’s “tainted.” Escaping with a doctor who killed her husband, John travels across the Earth’s blasted alien ruins to seek the life of…
Plenty of readers love Frankenstein. It’s a classic gothic horror story about monsters and men, but what I love about this book is its commentary on science. Dr. Frankenstein is a cold and calculating man for whom restrictions are merely obstacles to be overcome. It’s this theme as a work of science-fiction that allows it to stand out.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
Contrary to its famous film adaptation, I Am Legend is a dark social commentary about isolation and depression. After losing his family to a vampire virus, the main character is desperate to belong, but his pessimism is palpable throughout the novel. It's this dichotomy between loneliness and callousness that's makes the novels so relatable, even with its tragic ending.
An acclaimed SF novel about vampires. The last man on earth is not alone ...Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?
I love a good fight scene! It doesn’t need to be long and gruesome, but it must be visceral and make me nervous for those involved. Don’t get me wrong, I also love a good first-kiss scene but unfortunately, my past has made me more adept at recognizing and writing one over the other. I started training in martial arts at the age of nine and continued for thirty years. I don’t train much these days but I took up bowmaking a few years back and now spend a lot of time carving English longbows and First Nations’ bows. I recently also took up Chinese archery.
A wild land too mountainous to be tamed by plows. A duke of the empire, his cunning overshadowed only by his ambitions. A young priestess of the Old Religion, together with a charismatic outlaw, sparking a rebellion from deep within the forests. And an ex-Hospitaller caught between them all.
A druid priestess enlists the help of an ex-Hospitaller warrior and a charismatic outlaw to fight Austrian tyranny in medieval Switzerland. A subtle blend of fantasy and history, ALTDORF (Book 1) tells the events leading up to one of the greatest underdog stories of the medieval age, the Battle of MORGARTEN (Book 2).
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