Lately, the state of the world is a big factor of negativity and rumination for me. To keep from getting jaded, I have to take periodic breaks from reading the news and researching crime cases. Fiction works as an escape, especially horror, which might sound like ugly-adjacent, but it’s cathartic. The characters aren’t real, so if anything happens to them, it’s not going to affect my psyche the way real families dealing with the murders of their loved ones does. Sometimes a perfectly-solved mystery or a revenge tale is a breath of fresh air compared to the unresolved loose ends of real life.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, butThe Fireman has it all––a pandemic that causes its afflicted to spontaneously combust (called Dragonscale because Spinal-Tap Drummer Disease was too long), a plucky pregnant nurse determined to have a healthy baby in spite of the odds (which includes an unhinged husband and a blood-thirsty post-apocalyptic death squad), a commune that has figured out a way to live with the disease, and a lone wolf that wears a fireman’s jacket who has somehow learned how to control his fire.
The characters are so real they still live rent free in my head. I read it during the COVID lockdown and the parallels were both scary and hopeful.
Nobody knew where the virus came from. FOX News said it had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated it might've been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides. While every TV station debated the cause, the world burnt.
Pregnant school nurse, HARPER GRAYSON, had seen lots of people burn on TV, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the…
There is an intrinsic link between comedy and horror.
Fans of Jordan Peele’s horror films would probably appreciate that author John Ajvide Lindqvist worked as a stand-up comedian for twelve years. And his take on the vampire story is immersive, thanks to Ebba Segerberg’s amazing English translation of the Swedish novel. The descriptive scenes rival both movie adaptations.
You are transported to a suburb in Sweden in 1981 where a twelve-year-old boy is struggling with the loneliness brought on by bullies and his parents’ divorce. Until an attractive new neighbor moves in that only goes out at night. Oh, and a body is found in the woods, completely drained of blood. Now life is a bit less monotonous for our protagonist.
John Ajvide Lindqvist’s international bestseller Let the Right One In is “a brilliant take on the vampire myth, and a roaring good story” (New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong), the basis for the multi-film festival award-winning Swedish film, the U.S. adaptation Let Me In directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman), and the Showtime TV series.
It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at…
I’ve been a fan of horror stories for as long as I could read.
(God bless those librarians who talked my mother into letting me bring home the books that I wanted to check out, or I wouldn’t be the person I am today.)
The scariest element of horror in my opinion, is a predator without boundaries in the physical world. Combining that element with rattlesnakes, uninterred graves, and river-soaked apparitions, you’ll get a southern gothic tale of revenge on a young girl’s murderer who usually finds himself immune to the law.
"The finest writer of paperback originals in America." - Stephen King
"Readers of weak constitution should beware." - Publishers Weekly
"McDowell has a flair for the gruesome." - Washington Post
Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: fourteen-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law.
But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of…
The dynamic between the protagonist and her aloof, hypochondriac mother was all too familiar, and maybe that’s what attracted me to the storyline.
This book is more than just a murder mystery––it’s a book about women and the toxic relationships we make with ourselves and others that are perpetuated from unhealthy upbringings. But it’s also about finding inner strength while it challenges the stereotypes that portray femininity as weak, nurturing, and safe.
This is a very psychologically complex story with very real, very flawed characters, and is worth the raw, dark journey to the perfect conclusion.
NOW AN HBO® LIMITED SERIES STARRING AMY ADAMS, NOMINATED FOR EIGHT EMMY AWARDS, INCLUDING OUTSTANDING LIMITED SERIES
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GONE GIRL
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds…
A young pharmacist is hired in a rural town and begins to question what happened to the original druggist he replaced.
This Appalachian tale of murder and drugs even has its own soundtrack; I swear I could hear the radio and smell the characters, because the descriptions in this novel are so well written. This is one of the rare times I’ve read a book in one sitting because I had to know what was going to happen next.
A young pharmacist takes a job in a small rural town and is quickly introduced to a world of drugs, sex, guns, and deceit. Unexpectedly, he falls in love with the local 'good-time girl' and finds himself trying to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of the pharmacist he was hired to replace.
January 18, 1970, two West Virginia University freshmen—Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell—left a movie theater and headed back toward their dorms. Deciding to hitchhike, they entered a cream-colored sedan. This was the last time their friends saw them alive.
Investigators didn't find too few suspects––they had far too many: the campus janitor with a fur fetish, the cab driver who beat a woman nearly to death, the violent orderly with the bloody broomstick, and the unstable bouncer with the "girlish" laugh who threatened to cut off people's heads.
Then handwritten letters began to arrive taunting the police to find their bodies: "You will locate the bodies of the girls covered over with brush––look carefully. The animals are now on the move."
In a flooded city on the brink of collapse, the arcology provides a high-tech haven – for those who can afford it. Here, safe in her pampered confinement, Eva longs for escape. But each day she is made to play The Game, a mysterious virtual environment that seems more designed to monitor and test than to entertain.
Outside, life is a different story, where unregulated tech spawns nightmares to rival those of fairtytale and folklore – ghosts and monsters, the no-longer-human and the never-should-have-been. Here, Squirrel is a memory thief, eking out a fraught existence in service to the criminal…
Tidelands is an ongoing sci-fi and fantasy serial. Set some years in the future, it is a dystopian blend of cyberpunk, first contact, Lovecraftian horror and dark humour.
In a flooded city on the brink of collapse, the arcology provides a high-tech haven – for those who can afford it. Here, safe in her pampered confinement, Eva longs for escape. But each day she is made to play The Game, a mysterious virtual environment that seems more designed to monitor and test than to entertain.
Outside, life is a different story, where unregulated tech spawns nightmares to rival those of…
