book reviews
Book reviews for horror fans; weather a sleepless night with literary accounts of hauntings, possessions, zombies, vampires and beyond.
Breaking The Chains
Other than my discussion on the comparisons with “Bird Box” and this Pandemic, I haven’t done anything close to a straight forward book review as I’ve already been wanting to. Well, I never do anything straight forward, so here’s something to think about adding to your reading list, that oddly enough ties in, in a very frightening way, to the isolation we all feel right about now as we continue to more or less shelter in place during this Pandemic.
By Chloe Medeiros5 years ago in Horror
Someone SAW "Bird Box" Coming!!
In our current way of life, it's hard NOT to notice, how familiar it all appears. A cloth must always cover our face in order to survive an invisible monster. The only difference is, we're allowed to see, we just have to be careful what we breathe.
By Chloe Medeiros5 years ago in Horror
Book Review: My Best Friend's Exorcism
"I love you, Gretchen Lang. You are my reflection and my shadow and I will not let you go." Rating: 10/10 Synopsis: Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fifth grade, and don't expect that to change anytime soon. However, one summer in the 1980's when the girls are in high school, Gretchen starts to act like a completely different person; like, the old Gretchen Abby knew and loved so much isn’t even there anymore. And this isn't the typical changes everyone goes through in high school, this is something...abnormal. As if that isn’t weird enough, creepy things start to happen whenever Gretchen is around - birds dying by the hundreds, her friends getting injured in the strangest ways, and much much worse. Abby soon comes to the conclusion that there can only be one thing wrong with her best friend: she’s possessed.
By Veronica Traggiai5 years ago in Horror
Reed Alexander's Literary Review of 'Trief Magic' (2020) by John Baltisberger
The first thing that caught me, is the primary character Ze'ev (Wolf), reminds me very much of John Constantine. He's a bit of a jaded todger and its difficult to tell if he's doing this because its a job, or if he in some respect believes in what he's doing. There are tons of fairly stark comparisons between the two, so I won't belabor the point. Needless to say, everything from the attitude to the talk, to the 'film noir' gum-shoe stylization, matches pretty closely.
By Reed Alexander5 years ago in Horror
Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women' 2020, Edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn
In order for me to consider an anthology good, it needs at least three solid stories that are worth the purchase. The only exception, my review of the Creeping Corruption Anthology, where I mentioned that The Being by J. M. Striker, was worth the cover price, alone!
By Reed Alexander5 years ago in Horror
Book Review: The Woman in the Window
Women, girls... they are everywhere, man. They’re in cabins, they’re on trains, they’re in spider’s webs or hornet’s nests. Sometimes they’re gone. Sometimes someone let them go. Sometimes they’re in a group. In this case, there is a woman in a window. She’s not a woman in white or a lady in shadows or a girl who circumnavigated anything. She’s just a woman named Anna Fox in a window.
By The Bookish Elf5 years ago in Horror
"Haunted Castles" by Ray Russell
I first read this book as a teenager because I had found it amongst a bunch of 70s paperback horror novels when I bought Peter Straub’s “The Throat” from the marketplace in my hometown (unfortunately, said book seller no longer is with us, rest his soul). But, my initial copy of Ray Russell’s three-story collection was tattered, torn and definitely second-hand. It was missing the publication page and it was dusty and raw. When I went home, I put down the Straub book and got stuck into the Russell collection almost straight away. It was amazing but it also scared the living daylights out of me. It was absolutely terrifying and a gothic masterpiece. There was an obvious relation to older horror novels and gothic texts in Russell’s attempt at showcasing the more dubious and deceptive side of human nature. But most of all what I liked about it is that when I came to re-read the book, I had actually completely forgotten about what I’d experienced the first time. I had a brand new copy which was published by Penguin and it was immaculate. I remembered reading the book but not what I had thought of it and so, sitting in the back of the car, on my way to the seaside, I re-read the whole thing. I ended up having a massive anxiety attack in the car because of the wide open spaces and since, I have constantly associated the book with being absolutely terrified. The book itself was not the initial reason for the attack but I think it may have contributed. Books can terrify me in ways that films only dream that they could. It just feels far more immersive when it is in a book and there are clear parallels between some of the stories in this book and older, wiser, darker books of our past - like Victor Hugo’s “The Man Who Laughs” and a number of others.
By Annie Kapur5 years ago in Horror
"The Man in the Picture" by Susan Hill
When I first read “The Man in the Picture” by Susan Hill I must have been around thirteen and then, I re-read it when I was about twenty-one. I like doing that with books because you discover things about the book you didn’t realise initially because you were so young. The things I unfolded when I was twenty-one were extreme in the field of psychological torture. It was actually far more frightening the second time I read it than the first. When I first read it, I was on a sort of ghost-story binge and so I was reading things like MR James, EF Benson, HP Lovecraft, Charles Dickens and others. But, in Susan Hill’s works I noticed a more modern gothic with a definite old flavour to it, it is something I absolutely fell in love with when it came to her works and “The Man in the Picture” was one of her newer ones. By then I had already read “The Woman in Black” and “Mrs. De Winter” and so, I was used to her gothic, atmospheric and often terrifying writing style. I would say that her books are best read at night, whilst it is raining, next to a dim lamp or better yet, by candlelight. Top it off with a slight thunderstorm and you might just have the perfect setting in which to read a Susan Hill novel. “The Man in the Picture” is no exception. It is a chilling book that you really need to read more than once in order to really get it.
By Annie Kapur5 years ago in Horror
"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James
I was fairly young the first time I read this - around ten or eleven. I’m not going to lie to you, I had my dictionary at the ready and was looking up strange words left, right and centre. First time around, I didn’t really get it, so I went back and read it again and scared myself half to death because, after reading it once, I knew what all the words meant now. For a few days, I didn’t get much sleep and I was up most nights thinking about those weird children and the haunting coldness of Bly Manor. I would re-read the book over the years because the way in which the ghosts psychological enrapture the children is so incredibly intense even though the text itself is relatively short. You’d imagine you would need a long novel to build that kind of atmosphere, but Henry James does it in a short amount of time, leaving you with a shivering and shuddering feeling long after the text has ended. The last time I read it was when I was teaching it, maybe last year some time in the Spring. The students I was teaching it to often admitted that the text felt very dark because of the fact the bad things were happening to children. I think that much like novels such as “The Exorcist” by William Peter Blatty and “Suffer the Children” by John Saul, Henry James offered us a darker look at hauntings and horror through his writing of the innocence and child-like nature of Flora and Miles. It is not only frightening, in some cases it is rather disturbing too.
By Annie Kapur5 years ago in Horror
"The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson
I first read this book when I was about fourteen years’ old and honestly I can say that I lost a lot of sleep afterwards. I found it in the library and the copy was a bit tattered and old, it looked like it had been there for a while and I took it home to read at night time. Honestly, I didn’t think it was going to be that bad because by that time, I’d already read and watched William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” and read a bit of Stephen King. I was pretty solid during my teens. But this book is a book that literally chilled me because different to all of those, it was a book in which your mind is completely turned and twisted and even the language makes you swallow your pride. The book is a reality of one woman who slowly loses it and yet, you lose it with her. It’s almost impossible not to feel the book in your body whilst your going through the insanity of its history, its story and every single one of its three dimensional, dark and flawed characters. Before you ask, I wasn’t a big fan of the TV show even though I did watch it - it didn’t seem to have anything similar to the book but the name. I hope they don’t do the same thing with “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James. I really hope they don’t. But, Carla Gugino was stunning as always.
By Annie Kapur5 years ago in Horror
