Let the Right Book In

Full Dark, No Stars is a collection of 4 novellas in which King explores the "dark side" to people, and how exactly would you react if placed in certain situations? For example, what would you do if you found out that your husband of over 20 years has been hiding a dark secret? How would you react if a a psychopath raped you and left you for dead? If given the opportunity to pass your hardships onto someone else...would you? "Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. It's just how the world is." One of my favourite aspects, and one of the most horrifying things, about this collection is that some of these scenarios could actually happen. You could very easily find yourself in a situation where you don't know your spouse as well as you thought you did. And there is definitely the potential to encounter brutal rapists/murderers ...

Often considered to be a love story, Wuthering Heights is actually a story of revenge. Set on the moors of England, Wuthering Heights focuses on a mysterious character named Heathcliff. At a young age, Heathcliff is rescued and grows up with his adopted family, before being resigned to servant status. After the woman he loves, Cathy, marries another, he flees only to return years later, a rich and educated man, intent on revenge against the two families he believes have ruined his life. "He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same." Reading this book was a rollercoaster for me. I was switching between loving and hating it from chapter to chapter. First, the pros: the writing is beautiful, the relationship dynamics were really interesting at times, the scenery and location were just perfect. Now, the cons... what a hateful, di...

This month's theme was Infested and Infected... and as per usual, it did not disappoint! We got THREE, count 'em, THREE books this month, as well as a pretty cool King-inspired wearable and only the greatest mug I've ever seen. Let's look at this month's contents... As always, let's start with the books! I was lucky enough to get a signed book this month - Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones, synopsis is as follows: "Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees a person in full Blackfeet regalia step through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew." This horror novella sounds pretty good, I'd honestly never heard of it before! The second book was this month's new relea...

I was lucky enough to receive an ARC copy of this collection of short novels by Joe Hill (release date is later in the year). For those interested in a brief synopsis of each story... keep reading. If not, skip ahead! The first story, Snapshot, is about a young boy's encounter with a villain who robs his victim's memories by taking Polaroids of them. The second, Loaded, tells the story of a mall security guard who is believed to have stopped a mass shooting, but his story quickly unravels... Aloft, the third story, is a unique tale about a skydiver who lands on a very strange cloud in the sky. Finally, the last story, Rain, tells of an apocalypse wherein literal nails fall from the sky as rain. Pretty interesting collection of stories! "When movie stars grieve in the tragic third act of a love story, they always make mourning look a lot more beautiful than it really is." I do enjoy a short story or a short novel... as Joe Hill himself says, it's all ki...

A young boy is found murdered and crucified on a pair of rowing oars, a priest is decapitated in his confessional box... Mutilations performed at these crime scenes suggest a serial killer from years before, who had been previously shot and presumed dead (although the body had never been recovered). A police detective, Lieutenant Kinderman, investigates these crimes and ends up visiting a mental asylum, where there are a couple of possible suspects and some connections to the exorcism of a certain Regan MacNeil began to form... "Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we're going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn't be. It makes no sense. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn't any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death ...