Let the Right Book In

A group of salvagers are given the job of stripping down an old mansion in four days. However it won’t be as easy as they had hoped... “They echoed and scratched like a blade on the brittle, cheap wood of the attic’s subflooring - cutting letter after letter in an accusation that wouldn’t die.” If you’re looking to develop an unhealthy fear of your bathroom, you gotta pick this one up! As a horror fan, I can’t help but LOVE a big gothic house, steeped in history and secrets. I mean, I couldn’t live in one, but I adore books and movies wherein an unsettling house is the main focus. The Family Plot certainly brought the scares for me! It wasn’t pee your pants scary - very few books are, if any. But I did feel more at ease reading it during the daylight hours. There’s just something about a haunted house! My thought process runs along these lines - “This takes place in a house, you say?! But I live in a house! This could happen to ME” And then I start talking myself down “Ah, b...

In the highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood answers some of the questions that have tantalised readers for decades. “You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.” I’m not gonna lie... I could read about Gilead until the cows come home. I find this dystopian world absolutely fascinating - and equally terrifying, given our current climate. Combine this with Atwood’s sharp, insightful commentary and her stunning prose, and you have all the necessary ingredients for an amazing book! However, I do feel like it pales in comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s perhaps unfair to compare it to a book that has become so revered and well-loved, but I couldn’t help doing that as I was reading along. There are three narratives in The Testaments, and as many of the reviews I read agreed with, one of the narratives is just not as enjoyable as the other two. I can do without an annoyingly whiny teen, thank you very much. Aunt Lydia’s ...

Well, this is the first time that a Joe Hill book has disappointed me. It’s a real shame, because I used to shout from the rooftops that I have basically loved every Hill I’ve read so far - but now there is a black mark on his record... ”A child has only two parents, but if you’re lucky enough to get to be an artist for a living, ultimately you wind up with a few mothers and fathers.” Okay, let’s dial it back, perhaps I’m being a tad dramatic... it’s not terrible! There are a total of 13 stories in here, and a few are really good. But there is quite a lot of forgettable fluff. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly, but I sometimes felt like the themes and topics included in this collection just bored me at times. It also bothers me that 4 of the stories that had been previously released, you can’t help but feel a tad short changed when you already have these ones. In the introduction he talks about his relationship with his father and how if you are an artist you will ...

Roy and Celestial are a young African-American couple only recently married when Roy is wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. “Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now.” This was our read of choice in September for the book club in work and we had a really interesting discussion yesterday about it - whilst indulging in some homemade brownies. I feel like book club is making me evaluate and analyse my reads more intensely than if I had just read them on my own. Our discussion actually made me appreciate this book more! My initial criticism of this one was that I just didn’t really connect to, or like any of the characters - which is fine, this isn’t always necessary - but in hindsight, I feel like this shows how human and real Jones’ characters are. Everyone is flawed, we all have complex and complicated relationships with family members, with partners etc. And marriage just isn’t easy - I guess it just makes this story feel more rooted in real li...

In Guy Montag’s world, fireman start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book. “It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” Can I preface this review with a PSA - if you have read Fahrenheit 451 and you hated it... please try another Bradbury book! This one was so different to the other Bradburys that I have read and loved, in terms of tone, writing, warmth, themes... Everything! Pick up one of the Green Town books (Something Wicked This Way Comes or Dandelion Wine) or The October Country. Whilst this may not be a new favourite by Bradbury, I did really appreciate the message behind this story. Anything that highlights the importance of books and reading is going to score a few brownie points! I found Bradbury’s dystopian world incredibly interesting and terrifying, and really love...

When I first read The Shining a number of years ago I thought it was fantastic and gave it 5 stars, but it just never ranked as a personal favourite. On this reread, however, my socks were well and truly blown off and I had an entirely different experience. This is why I will always be a huge advocate for rereading - it’s quite apparent that wherever your head is at, or whatever life circumstances you find yourself in, can really impact how you view a book. As if that isn’t obvious. “Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.” On my first read, I was impatient. I was just starting to read King, I wanted the SCARY BITS. This time around I was emotionally involved. I felt a deep connection to Danny and I could really tap into Wendy’s fears as a parent. A younger, more naive me would have thought “why don’t you just fucking leave if all this creepy shit is happening?” - well, until the snow storm at least - but now I can appreciate this a...

If you enjoyed Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer is a must-read! As Bradbury explains in the afterword, this is an extension of Dandelion Wine, initially cut by his publishers. He then revisited it years later to create what would become his last published novel. “His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.” Farewell Summer is a beautiful book where everything comes back to one theme: the passage of time. Whether that is hitting puberty and experiencing the changes that come with that, like discovering girls, or sitting down and asking an elderly person about life and what it all means. This is truly one of my favourite themes, I love it when people with life experience look back and provide little nuggets of wisdom. As has been the case with all the Bradbury I’ve read so far, the writing is simply...

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. She is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort - a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny”. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon”... “The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.” Wickedly funny and deliciously dark, Bunny is a messed up fever dream that I did not want to wake up from!! It’s best to know as little as possible before starting this one. I really had no clue what was coming, and it was a helluva ride! It gets very dark and pretty brutal at times, there are some violent scenes. However, this contrasts nicely with Awad’s often hilarious writing and the saccharine characters in their beautifully patterned dresses and heart-shaped sunglasses. There’s lots of “what the fuck just happened” moments and at times...

The sixth book in King’s Dark Tower series, wherein the ka-tet are split up and sent to different “whens” and “wheres” to achieve their goals. “It got so I couldn't tell if you were the hero, the antihero, or no hero at all.” Song of Susannah was one of those instances where a reread proved to be very informative... as what I thought happened in this book did not actually happen in this book... I was getting ahead of myself. And for that reason I understand the complaints that not much really happens in here plot-wise, it does serve as more of a build-up and a bridge to the final book in the series. There are three separate storylines running simultaneously as the ka-tet is divided, and all feel very fraught and tense in their own ways, but I do miss the interaction between all the characters. Susannah’s strand is probably my least favourite, which is a shame as it should be the most thrilling, but at times it felt bogged down with these hallucinations and the three ...

Nothing has felt right since Elle rented out her house to a family through Airbnb. Since coming home from her vacation in France, she feels like she is being watched... “I am no trespasser, I remind myself. You let me in.” Some of the lessons I learnt whilst reading this book: - drinking and driving after one or two large glasses of wine is okay apparently (sidebar: IT IS NOT) - noting all your passwords in one location is a great idea (again: it is NOT) - it might be a good idea to visit your doctor if your insomnia has gotten to the point where you’re going batshit crazy (it bugged me that she didn’t do this) - it’s not a good idea to constantly post clues suggesting the location of your home on social media when you’re a famous author (or even if you’re not famous, for that matter!) - don’t fucking walk home drunk alone on the beach at night - if you have a glass room at the top of your house (pfft, don’t we all), maybe you should invest in some blinds or curtains...

Deep in the woods of Maine, there is a facility where kids, abducted from all across America, are incarcerated. “Great events turn on small hinges.” Oh man, starting a new King just feels like coming home after a long day and wrapping yourself in a huge blanket... It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about King’s writing that evokes such feelings, but if I could bottle it up and sell these feelings, I would, because everyone needs to experience it! We all know that King does kids best. From the Loser’s Club in IT, to the boys in The Body, he always seems to nail it! And the kids in The Institute were no exception - Avery was my personal favourite. Add in superpowers and a mysterious Institute and this has all the makings of a binge-worthy story! It’s a little slow at the beginning, but this is usually the case with King as he introduces the characters and the setting, before he puts his foot down and increases the pace. The parts within the Institute were my favourit...

The multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia. “There is always something left to love.” I have been hesitant about writing this review as I will never be able to do this book justice - it is simply that incredible. So, please bear with my fangirling and inability to put into words how truly magical, beautiful, breathtaking and heartbreaking One Hundred Years of Solitude is. The movement of the story over one hundred years is mesmerising. New characters are constantly being introduced as the family expands, which can be overwhelming at times, but if you have a family tree and give the book the undivided attention it deserves, the pay off is worth it. This is not one to be picked up on a whim, you need to be in the mood to peel back the layers of the Buendía family. And a multitude of layers there are! Crazy things are constantly happening - civil wars, u...

The Morrows are a family residing in a secluded farmhouse, far in the Appalachians — far enough that nobody outside of the family can hear the screams... “A party ain’t a party without a splash of red.” If you asked me to describe this book in three words, I would choose the following: brutal, disturbing and tense. So basically any Ania Ahlborn book, right?!  If you think your family is fucked up... meet the Morrows. Families who commit heinous acts together, stay together - is that how it goes?? Ahlborn develops her characters so well that we actually feel sympathy for one of the family members, because you can see right away that he is different - he isn’t straight-up evil like the rest of the clan! And boy, are they evil. What a cast of twisted, depraved individuals! I loved it! I can’t recall the last time I read a book where the tension was just so palpable... the dread continually builds throughout the entire novel to a dizzying finale that is spattered with bl...

Noah Turner sees monsters. His father saw them - and built a shrine to them with The Wandering Dark, an immersive horror experience that the whole family operates. The rest of the Turner family has experiences with the monsters too, but Noah chooses to let them in... “I started collecting my sister Eunice’s suicide notes when I was seven years old.” Are you a fan of Stranger Things? How about weird fiction? Or Lovecraftian stories? Or literary horror? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, then you need to pencil the release date for A Cosmology of Monsters into your diaries! (it’s September 17th, FYI) I don’t always need to care about my characters in order for a horror novel to work - sometimes I just really enjoy a slasher with indiscriminate characters - but when you really care about the outcome, the stakes are raised. The Taylor family were well-developed and incredibly interesting, and I still miss them after having turned the final page. Eunice, in p...

When we talk about the most prolific and horrifying serial killers, such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer etc, we should be adding another name to the list - Israel Keyes. “If he had been about five seconds slower getting out of his car and going into his apartment, he would have been The One that night.” Prior to the hype around this book, and seeing that Last Podcast on the Left had covered him across a few episodes, I really had never heard of this guy before, which baffles me! Keyes was a true monster, evil incarnate. Some of the details of his crimes left me feeling sick to my stomach and incredibly uneasy before bedtime. Well-written true crime books are hard to come by, which is why I choose to mostly get my true crime fix through podcasts, but American Predator is one of the best I’ve read. It’s informative and detailed, without becoming dry and tedious. Callahan tells the story of Israel Keyes by starting at what is technically the end, by kicking it of...

The fifth book in the Dark Tower series finds Roland and his ka-tet in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they must help the residents overcome a formidable enemy. "Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You...Eddie, you fill me up." Even though this book took me what felt like a million years to finish, I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much every page (well... I’m not the biggest fan of the New York plot in this one, I’d rather have just stayed in the Calla!) King is well-known for his depiction of small towns and bringing all the residents to life, and this one is no different! Lots of new characters to meet, as well as the reintroduction of an old one. I LOVED catching up with this character, quite a lot of time is spent filling in the gaps of his story and I was not complaining in the slightest! The Dark Tower is such an epic tale where our ka-tet are mostly travelling around and on the m...

A desperate and distraught gunman takes a women’s health centre hostage. “Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.” This was the first pick for my book club in work and I must say, it was an excellent suggestion! Incredibly thought-provoking and uniquely written, A Spark of Light really leaves an impression. It doesn’t need saying that abortion is a hot topic now - although it’s pretty much always relevant - so it was fitting to read this at a time when there is a lot of talk surrounding criminalisation of abortion. We all have our own thoughts and views, and so does Jodi Picoult, but at no point did I feel like she was preaching about her own view. Both sides of the argument are eloquently and rationally put forward, with a range of characters who have had different experiences. The story is told in reverse- so we start close to the end of the hostage situation in the health centre, and Picoult works backwards hour by hour. I wasn’t ...

A middle-aged man returns home to attend a funeral, where he finds previously forgotten memories beginning to return... “Adults follow paths. Children explore.” I went into this one thinking it would become an all-time favourite - and there is still the potential that it WILL become one - but it fell JUST short of the mark for me on this read. Everything was incredible - the writing, the themes, the imagery, the villain... my only issue was that I was left scratching my head every now and again? I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on at times and had to reread parts to try and follow the narrative. Now maybe that was just a case of me stop-starting this one during a busy week, or maybe not everything is meant to be clear, but it did affect my enjoyment a little. This is why I feel like I might end up simply adoring it on a subsequent reread, therefore achieving that all-time fave status. The main character himself is also one that a lot of bookworms will be able to re...

Susan Garth is a sweet little girl of high school age who suddenly develops an aversion to churches and a newfound fondness for vulgarity (as well as attacking the parish priest). If madness can’t explain her behaviour, the answer must be demonic possession. “Capture the dragon, the ancient serpent who is Satan, and send him in chains into the Abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations.” If you go into this one looking for a terrifying demonic possession story, then you’re gonna have a bad time. Or you’ll just be really disappointed. BUT if you go in with an open mind, you’ll find a really thought-provoking story about one priest’s struggle with his faith. Set in 1962, The Case Against Satan came before The Exorcist, before Rosemary’s Baby, and you can definitely see how subsequent books have been inspired by this tale. It was probably ahead of its time in terms of looking at demonic possession through a lens of “is this a possession or could it be explained by science ...

If you’re a fan of the My Favorite Murder podcast, then there’s a good chance of you enjoying this part memoir/part self-help book. Lacking in true crime itself (which totally works!), it shines a light on the other topics and discussions that come up regularly on the show, such as mental health issues, self-care and addiction. “The epitome of ‘fucking politeness’ is learning how to act in the moment, instead of wishing you had later.” For each of the catchphrases or slogans that the show has created, eg Fuck Politeness or Stay Out of the Forest, there’s essays from Karen and Georgia discussing their own life experiences or what that slogan truly means to them. I have heard the audiobook is fantastic as it is just like listening to the podcast, so I’ll have to check that out at some point too! I laughed, I cried and I fangirled immensely over Georgia’s chapter on how Ray Bradbury’s writing effectively saved her life. One of the hardest essays to read was one where Karen wr...

White Teeth focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends - the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones - and their families in London. ”Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.” Well. This was disappointing. Luckily I was a huge fan of Zadie’s writing itself, and so I’m not ruling out trying her other books... which means @ab_reads has not disowned me. In reality, this should have worked for me. I enjoy stories that span decades, that follow multiple people and families. But this narrative just felt a bit TOO all over the place, with too many characters and a number of different storylines that felt completely unrelated until too late in the book. Like yeah, everything ties together eventually, but it just felt ridiculous to me. None of the characters were particularly likeable either. I don’t need to like the characters in order to enjoy a book, but in t...

A maintenance man called Eddie dies and is sent to heaven, where he encounters five people - some known to him and some not - who each teach him a lesson. “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.” If heaven truly exists, I sure hope it’s exactly like this! What sounds better than meeting up with loved ones who have gone before and have them explain to you the meaning of your life? Religion and whether or not you believe in heaven or the afterlife is obviously a very personal thing and therefore I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to everyone. The book wasn’t overly religious nor was it preachy either, and I do think non-religious people could still enjoy the story, but that’s up to each reader to decide! I do believe in God and I do believe in the afterlife - and I feel like that’s a difficult thing to openly admit on here, but I feel like it’s necessary to explain why I loved this book. It was a total comfort blanket for me - my b...

An impoverished ex-student in St Petersburg, Rodion Raskolnikov, formulates a plan to kill a pawnbroker for her money. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” I’m still in shock over how much I enjoyed Crime and Punishment. SHOCK. I feared it would take me WEEKS and that I’d be begging for it to just end... but I flew through it in less than a week and quickly found myself looking at which Russian classic I wanted to tackle next! All I can say is, if this one has interested or intrigued you, but it has intimidated you... do not be afraid!! It is incredibly accessible and bingeable. The perfect introduction to the Russian classics. There is so much going on that it’s almost impossible to cover it all in a review. There’s a crime... and there’s punishment. And so much in between! The idea of temporary insanity, the effects a guilty conscience can have, question...

Ingrid Magnusson is sent to jail for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, leaving her daughter, Astrid, to enter the foster care system. “If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” White Oleander is pure poetry. The writing is absolutely exquisite - it’s one of those books where you keep pausing just to inhale really moving and poignant prose. I would happily read anything else Janet Fitch has written/will write, as she has blown me away! The mother/daughter relationship between Ingrid and Astrid is complex, flawed and difficult. The influence that one person can hold over you is quite scary - even though Ingrid is in prison, she still exerts this weird control over Astrid from afar. Her relationship with her mother is something that Astrid struggles with, as well as the lack of a father during he...

The Inferno tells the journey of Dante through Hell, accompanied by the ancient Roman poet, Virgil. ”They yearn for what they fear for.” Dante’s Inferno presents one of those incredibly frustrating scenarios where the plot, imagery, themes etc are all fucking insane, but the prose made me want to claw my eyeballs out. I looked at how long the actual poem was and thought “that’ll take me about 2 days?” WRONG. Over a week. This may have been due to the fact that I was also reading the accompanying notes at the back alongside each canto, but I needed to read those or I would have been utterly clueless the majority of the time. In terms of the nine circles of Hell, all of that stuff was INCREDIBLE. There was actual POOP on one level! It was all so dark and visceral and BADASS, but I couldn’t help but wish that I was reading a graphic novel of this instead, or even an illustrated edition, as I’d love to have experienced this alongside some epic illustrations. It’s not often...

A fictionalised retelling of the story of Grace Marks and the part that she may or may not have played in the murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. Grace was only 16 when she accused of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. ”If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.” This is a fantastic mix of true crime and historical fiction! Atwood blends the two wonderfully, even including actual excerpts from reports and books, as well as pictures of the two charged with the murders. Atwood’s research and attention to detail is very apparent, although I held off on reading about the true crime case that inspired the novel until after I had finished. The story kicks off with Grace in Kingston Penitentiary, serving her sentence for these murders. That is until Doctor Simon Jordan becomes involved in her case and tries to unlock some of the memories that she claims are hidden away. What unravels is a slow-paced yet addictive read, brimming with sex...

Slaughterhouse-Five is about Billy Pilgrim’s survival of the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war during World War II and is often cited as one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time. “How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” Let me be real here - it’s times like these that I am so thankful for bookstagram. Never in my life would I have picked up this book if it wasn’t for this platform... and I am so incredibly glad I did as it surprised me in the BEST way possible. You think this book is about one thing... and then it kinda goes down a different path that I did NOT see coming and all of a sudden there’s science fiction thrown into the mix?! Whaaaat! Yet it works SO WELL. These may even have been my favourite parts of the book! The narrative is non-linear as we jump back and forth in time and yet it doesn’t feel disjointed in the slightest. There’s a lot of repetition as well, which again, doesn’t bother me, because Vo...

Forced to flee from her hometown, Catherine Goggin finds herself pregnant and alone at just sixteen. Having settled in Dublin, she gives her newborn baby over to a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun. And so begins the story of Cyril Avery... "...life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face." Reasons why you NEED this book: - it is incredibly engrossing. Once you start you won’t want to put it down! - it is laugh-out-loud funny. That Irish sense of humour! - it would be a fantastic read for #pridemonth - it tackles so many heavy issues from the oppression of the Catholic Church in Ireland to the violence and terrorism inflicted by the IRA to the HIV/AIDS crisis... it covers it all!! - the story spans for decades from Cyril’s birth to when he reaches old age and every single stage of his life is depicted in such a heartfelt and real way - it will crush your heart in the best way possible; books like this are the reason why we read in the first pl...

The story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, and his struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. ”Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is.” My first experience with Ernest Hemingway and it wasn’t terrible... nor was it amazing. It just felt very middle of the road for me. I’ll start with what I did like. Hemingway’s writing is so simple and to the point, yet he can convey quite a lot with so few words. I also greatly admired the old man himself (Santiago, not Hemingway lol) - his perseverance and strength is truly something to behold! I had been doing some research after I finished and was a bit dismayed to find that Hemingway had said this story isn’t an allegory for anything. The old man is just an old man. The sea is just the sea... and so forth. However I find that I like it more when I interpret it a little deeper. So I’ll just pretend it means something... In terms of the negatives... fishi...

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. “You have my whole heart. You always did.” Some books are an experience. This is one of them. Exhausting, bleak, brutal, heartbreaking... certain parts will just stay with me forever. This was my first encounter with Cormac McCarthy and the beautifully poetic prose prompted me to buy yet another one of his books (I already have Blood Meridian on my shelf). His writing is GORGEOUS. The short, blunt sentences and the minimal use of dialogue would normally frustrate me, but McCarthy just makes it work. It perfectly reflects the stark, cold world that this man and his son find themselves living in. It’s stunning. I love the relationship between the father and son. You can really feel how much they need each other, in a world where they have nothing else. My main overriding thought during a lot of this was that I just could NOT survive this. I don’t think I would have the same hope or perseverance that these characters d...

The fourth book in the Dark Tower series finds Roland telling his ka-tet the story of the first time he encountered a thinny, and also his first love, Susan Delgado. “If it’s ka it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.” Sadie and Jake of 11/22/63 have been my favourite King love story since forever, but I’ve got a new favourite - Roland and Susan. “If you love me, then love me.” Okay, yes. They’re teenagers and it might get a bit icky if you think about it for too long. But I think King perfectly portrays the intensity and naivety of first love. I love Susan as a character, I find her incredibly relatable, and I’ve cried with her as she mourns the loss of her father. It honestly crushes my heart to see Roland laugh and smile with such carefree abandon. I feel like this book is CRUCIAL to understanding Roland’s past and his obsession with the tower - we finally get to see the more human side of Roland, and appreciate wh...