I’m an October baby born during a full moon, into a small New England town notorious for their connection to the Salem Witch Trials. My house was for sure haunted growing up, I’ve had a lot of nightmares over the years, and I found solace in the horror genre. Though my true background is in comedy having studied with Second City Chicago, the experience afforded me the opportunity to explore the more pained and shadowed sides of myself as a tool to write relevant material. I learned to focus those explorations into narratives and create stories with a lot of heart that highlight my own quest to uncover inner peace.
The world is overcome by chaos. Satellites use artificial intelligence and neural net learning to seek out signals of fear and transform our reality into a landscape of twisted paranoia, madness, and violence. Poe, a seasoned soldier, has spent years fighting. He longs to crash the Satellites and restore the world’s natural balance in memoriam of his late sister.
Suddenly released from active duty, Poe is sent to live with his estranged parents amidst the City in the Sea - an artificial island supposedly safe from the war - where secrets loom as thick as the morning fog. After seeing the horrors of battle and the horrors of life beyond it, he soon discovers the horrifying truth and questions whether humanity is worth saving.
A fellow New Englander, Tremblay took me by complete surprise with this novel. In the past, I saw horror defined by slashers, gore, and jump scares. This novel helped me understand that modern horror is a bit savvier and more nuanced, with a stronger focus on emotional suffering.
I really connected with the struggling working-class family and sympathized with their decision to let a documentary film crew create a series about their clearly struggling daughter. The film crew intended to market the girl as possessed by a demon, which the family signs off on in order to collect a desperately needed financial boost.
It expertly explores the hardships of the middle class, sibling love, and the societal hush-hush of mental illness. Plus, it’s got some twists and turns to that made my blood run absolutely cold.
The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show.Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets…
The first full novel by Hill—who I secretly recognized as Stephen King’s son—takes his father’s traditions to a whole new level. I fell immediately in love with Hill’s twisted yet insightful storytelling.
An aging rockstar protagonist who sets out to confront his unsettling past and weird addiction to odd memorabilia? Yes, please. I’m in awe of Hill’s ability to pack more into a single sentence than most authors do in an entire chapter. He balances the pace of a face-melting guitar solo with the gentle tenderness of vulnerability as his characters struggle to understand their place in the world.
This book had me clutching the covers one moment and reaching for the tissues in the next.
He bought it, in the shape of the dead man's suit, delivered in a heart-shaped box, because he wanted it: because his fans ate up that kind of story. It was perfect for his collection: the genuine skulls and the bones, the real honest-to-God snuff movie, the occult books and all the rest of the paraphanalia that goes along with his kind of hard/goth rock.
But the rest of his collection doesn't make the house feel cold. The bones don't make the dogs bark; the movie doesn't make Jude feel…
Few people write well, and fewer people write horror well, and I am certain that even fewer can hold a flame next to Yoko Ogawa. Revenge rocked my world as a series of interconnected short stories that span the themes of grief, bad choices, murder, and, of course…revenge.
Ogawa has a rare skill that immediately invites me into the hearts of her characters and allows me to see myself in them—even the most twisted and cryptically demure. In doing so, she exposes the true nature of humanity and highlights the constant need to make peace with our own complicated emotions.
I read this during my MFA tenure when my own complicated emotions and lifepath felt like a series of interconnected short stories, which ultimately led to a greater sense of self.
"It's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book… [and] one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants, as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind ― it does in mine ― as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience." ―Alan Cheuse, NPR
Sinister forces collide---and unite a host of desperate characters---in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Though often overlooked in Bradbury’s canon of masterpieces, The October Country is such a fantastic treat. I recommend it every chance I get and often quote his descriptions of Autumn. “It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.” I mean…right?? How heartbreakingly beautiful is that?
The book comes together as a collection of short stories that take place in a world of perpetual autumn, where trees drop their fiery leaves one by one, lakes become still, and darkness creeps in earlier each day.
I swear, if I could wrap myself in a cocoon of this feeling, I’d be a happy camper. Plus, touches of the supernatural? Yes. All day. Count me in. Forever and ever. Amen.
The October Country is Ray Bradbury’s own netherworld of the soul, inhabited by the horrors and demons that lurk within all of us. Renowned for his multi-million-copy bestseller, Fahrenheit 451, and hailed by Harper’s magazine as “the finest living writer of fantastic fiction,” Ray Bradbury proves here that he is America’s master of the short story.
This classic collection features:
The Emissary: The faithful dog was the sick boy’s only connection with the world outside—and beyond . . . The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother’s dream come true—or her worst nightmare . . .…
This is the only book that has ever made me physically sweat while reading it. I admit to being a true crime junkie, and this book scratched that itch in a huge way – despite being fiction.
Jumping back and forth between the day of a family’s horrific murder and present-day, where the surviving daughter is obsessively sought after by true crime enthusiasts (heyo!) and internet sleuths, this book turned a glaring spotlight on the hardships of both the economically poor, and single parenthood.
To say this book left me devastated would be an understatement. Add in a touch of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and this page-turner is nothing short of an absolute masterpiece of character work and cultural empathy. Not only did this book give me 759 heart attacks (the good kind), but it had me guessing up until the very last page.
'Eerily macabre... Wonderful' Guardian 'A nerve-fraying thriller' New York Times 'Every bit as horribly fascinating as In Cold Blood' Daily Mail
Libby Day was seven when her family was murdered: she survived by hiding in a closet - and famously testified that her older brother Ben was the killer.
Twenty-five years later the Kill Club - a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes - gets in touch with Libby to try to discover proof that may free Ben. Almost broke, Libby agrees to go back to her hometown to investigate - for a fee.
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
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