Let the Right Book In

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...