I’m a sucker for a storyline where many enter and few will survive 🤣. Seriously, if there is a story where people are forced to fight against each other or against “something” to survive in a “locked-room” environment, I just can’t help but love it!
Which brings me to Hide, a story of 14 contestants entered in a game of Hide and Seek at an abandoned amusement park. The 14 contestants don’t have a ton of details about this new mysterious game, but they know that there’s money for the winner at the end, and for these people, that’s enough. What starts out as a fun game of Hide and Seek soon turns deadly.
Wow, I really enjoyed this one. What a fantastic story! This was creepy, and confusing, and had a surprise ending. I loved it!
This is told through two timelines, and both are compelling stories, which I really appreciated. Sometimes one timeline is more interesting than the other, but in this story, I loved them both! We have the 1978 story where we follow three children living with their grandmother. But grandma has some secrets…
The second timeline is present day, where we follow Lizzie. She’s a monster hunter, but right now, she’s hunting a different kind of monster…her sister.
What We Harvest was an absolutely fantastic book that had elements of family and friendship, magic, and creepy horror. It was the exact amount of horror I can handle too! 🤣 This was an outstanding debut from Ann Fraistat!
Wren lives in Hollow’s End, an old town set in the backdrop of present day. The town has four farms run by four founding families, and each one has its own special element that helps drive revenue and tourism for the town and families. Something has gone wrong in Hollow’s End though. A blight is taking over the crops, sucking the life right out of them, but it’s more than just the crops. People and animals have begun to go missing, and now they are showing up again, but they are shells of the humans they once were, and they are dangerous.
I could not ignore this book’s cover! I love how wonderfully it fits the story, I look at it now, after reading, and I just think it was matched so well.
This was a creepy, dark, atmospheric read, and it was so different than what I was expecting! The magical elements were darker and more sinister making this a great gothic story. I loved the characters and their backstories. As the plot wove its way through the pages, I was blown away by what was really going on. It was surprising, and something that I absolutely enjoyed!
This is the third book in the Haunting Clarisse series, and I think it can be read as a stand-alone if you haven’t read the others in the series. You will be missing some backstory on the main characters, but if that doesn’t bother you, then you could go ahead and jump into the story here.
This book again has our main characters, Harry and Clarisse working to save the day. Old Tailem has been overrun with demons, and it’s up to these two to stop them. I loved that this was once again, a real ghost-town that the author chose to place the story into. I think it adds some special to the story!
I loved the creepy characters in this story. Alex North does a great job of describing his characters and really allowing the reader to imagine each person. He makes them feel real, like they are coming right off the pages and being brought to life!
How I Felt:
The Shadows takes the reader into a story that starts 25 years ago when two teens were part of a murder. While one boy was captured, Charlie Crabtree escaped, disappearing without a trace. Now, Paul Adams, who was linked to the original crime, must return to his hometown to help care for his elderly mother. His mother keeps saying things about the murders…she seems to know more than Paul thought. When a copycat killer starts bringing up the past, Paul must face his past and question everything, and everyone.
I loved the choices the author made to tell this story! It’s written like an actual journalistic investigation into an incident. The audio version was amazing because a cast of narrators was used to differentiate between the characters, and it was wonderful!
How I Felt:
Devolution is “A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre”. A small group of people that have chosen to live secluded from society become trapped when Mount Rainier erupts leaving their escape paths covered in lava. I thought this was going to more about their need to run from the eruption, but that isn’t it at all. They are pretty much safe in their homes with the lava flows going down the other side of the mountain. The real danger lurks in the forest around them!
The twists and turns that this book took me on were insane! I had absolutely NO idea what was going on, no guesses as to what the truth was. It was an amazing ride, and I loved it!!
My Synopsis:
Maggie’s father wrote a book that has haunted her every day of her life. As a young girl, her family bought Baneberry Hall, a secluded estate with a tragic history. Maggie doesn’t remember anything about their less-than-a-month stay in the home. All of her memories are from the non-fiction book, House of Horrors, written by her father. Maggie knows that everything in the book is a lie, but her parents will never discuss it.
When her father passes away, Maggie is shocked to learn that her father still owned the house, and she is now the owner of Baneberry Hall. Determined to understand what really happened during their stay in the home, Maggie moves in.
She is adamant that the ghost stories, snakes, and gruesome history were all a figment of her father’s imagination to create a best-selling book. When she arrives though, the things from her father’s book begin to seem less like a story and more like a foretelling of things to come.
How I Felt:
This is my first Riley Sager book! I know, I know. I’m so behind the times! But – I am with you all now, he is an amazing author, and I now need to read everything he has written!
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires had this mixture of Steel Magnolias type characters with a vampire plot and I really enjoyed it! I think that overall, it was the southern-style ladies that saved this book for me. Their gentle, southern charm softened the horror enough that I wasn’t terrified throughout the story!
How I Felt:
I don’t do horror well. I get scared, like read with the lights on and my back to a wall creeped out super easily. I couldn’t even pick a super scary image for my “Horror” genre image above. So, let me first of all say that this book was more horror-lite than full-on horror.
While The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a story about a group of book club ladies that think there is a vampire living in the neighborhood, it is also about so much more. I was surprised by the additional pieces of this story. There is a focus on family, sacrifice, love, poor choices, and relationships. It was, all-around, a well-written story that I really enjoyed.
The story begins with an introduction of the main character, Patricia Campbell, that really gave me a good feel for who she was as a person. Patricia is supposed to lead her book club’s discussion of this month’s book, but she hasn’t read it yet. She tries and fails to discuss the book by posing questions to the group, but it turns out that most of the women also didn’t read the book. After being called out by the head of the book club, the group disbands. Patricia is invited to join a new group, but they “aren’t a book club” as the leader likes to say.
She Just Loves Books 