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