My favorite horror reads are ones that involve some kind of mystery, one that gets more horrifying the more you unravel it. Ghost stories do that for me: mysterious deaths, haunted asylums, that one spirit that keeps trying to tell you something.

I'll make this largely a visual post, since it's all about judging a book by its cover ;)

As I mentioned in the previous question, I love ghosts, especially the vengeful kind. I also like ghost stories where the ghost may or may not be a figment of someone's imagination.

My top pick for ghost story (and it's really so much more than a ghost story) is Beloved, by Toni Morrison, which starts with the line "124 was spiteful."

I'm a vampire girl, mostly because it's what I've read more of compared to werewolves and zombies. I especially like the way they've been reimagined throughout time and media.

But if I had to choose from Other, I'd definitely go for ghosts, especially the kind that haunt asylums and abandoned homes because something terrible happened to them.

I'm reading this series because I was offered the third volume for review by NetGalley, and saw that I could get the first two through Kindle Unlimited. Since there are reoccurring characters, I wanted to get acquainted with them and their setting, even though the books seem to be fairly standalone stories otherwise.

I love a good ghost story, and especially the haunted mansion variety. So far, we have a good list of requisite elements: a main character who inherits an old pre-Civil War mansion, spooky stories linked to said house, and an isolated community wary of strangers. The action is proceeding at a good pace, but it's missing a couple of things to make it a truly great story.

For one, the POV changes without warning from one character to another, and it's really jarring the first few times. For a story like this, I much prefer to stick to one narrator, because it enhances the fear factor for me if there's one single POV that feels increasingly isolated. This last point is just me, of course, but the fact is that the perspective does change at weird points within the same chapter, and it messes with the flow of the story.

Also, there's a wooden feel to how the story is being presented. As I noted above, the elements are in place; but they almost feel like the author was going down a checklist of horror tropes, down to the cranky old man in the convenience store doing a terribly cliched job at hinting there's something "not right" about the place. I half expect him to bite it at some point down the line.

While reading, I kept thinking back to a similarly themed series that I absolutely loved: the Eden Moore series by Cherie Priest, which begins with the absolutely terrifying Four and Twenty Blackbirds (linked here: seriously, go read it if you like a good Southern Gothic style horror story). Thompson seems to be trying something similar with Callie, but is not as good of a writer (he does a lot of telling instead of showing, and describing dialogue instead of just having people talk).

But it's a good story so far, and the third chapter ended on a promising image. So onward we go!