Room on the Broom
Guided Reading: Level L
This is a great book to read during Halloween. This book is about a witching her cat flying on a broom when the witch loses three things. Three helpful animals find her things and then want a ride on the broom. But will there be room? This is great book to talk about predictions. Do you think everyone will fit on the witches broom?
Synopsis: It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.
But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . .
*****
I'm a sucker for a good, scary vampire tale. Nothing makes me happier than getting involved in a long novel featuring numerous characters I can really relate to, only to come to a gruesome end via fangs to the neck. Does that make me sick? Maybe . . . but it's Halloween season, so it's okay. Let's face it: vampires are one of the most awesome tropes in all of horror entertainment. And, sadly, great vampire tales are pretty hard to come by. Let The Right One In filled the scary vampires quota for me for quite a while, though. It's a corker.
At first disarming and (admittedly) off-putting, this novel doesn't really get cooking until a little past the hundred page mark... but from there the author rarely lets up. Brutal murders and frightening sequences abound in this 472-page book filled with some of the most frightening bloodsuckers I've come across this side of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.
The main plot is the friendship between bullied loner Oskar and vampire girl Eli. Their friendship -- especially their nightly meet-ups and communication through the wall separating their apartments via morse code -- are among the story's most endearing elements. The friendship feels real, as does Oskar's reaction when he finally discovers his friend is a vampire.
The novel features about five main characters and three or four minor characters, all well-drawn and fully formed. Each character gets their time to shine and the reader is in completely on their thought processes and why they do what they do. The people this author has created become real. At times it felt like I was living in Stockholm and reading about dear friends.
There is really not a whole lot to say about this novel except this: read. it. It makes for excellent Halloween material since it's filled to the brim with some of the nastiest stuff I've come across in horror fiction in a long time. Once one gets past the plodding opening chapters he or she will find there is an engrossing story here waiting to unfold and wrap the reader in a hug... in the dead of night while the wind blows...
Already the middle of October and we gathered what you're dared to read before the Halloween.
The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
The Dead House, which is set for fall 2015, is about the discovery of a diary in the ruins of a high school that burned down a quarter-century earlier. The diary was written by a girl whom no-one is sure ever existed.
The story mostly revolves around Carly and Kaitlyn, twin sisters of sorts, or perhaps not? They're two minds in one body, and who can tell whether one is crazy and the other just a mere symptom, or whether they're actually two souls who just happen to coexist in an unusual way—Carly during the day, and Kaitlyn at night? After their parents' death, the "sisters" are sent to Elmbridge, a boarding school in Somerset, but their stay there is chaotic, as they're regularly sent back to Claydon, a psychiatric facility for teens. Under the guidance of Dr. Lansing, Carly has to accept that Kaitlyn is only an alter, meant to hold the painful memory of the night when her family was torn asunder. And yet... Doesn't Kaitlyn exist in her own way, too? Is she a construct, or a real person? Doesn't her diary reflect how real she is, just as real as Carly?
“Pigeons From Hell” is the spellbinding short novel of two stranded motorists and a local sheriff who battle strange and malevolent forces that inhabit a run-down, abandoned mansion in the middle of a swamp in the middle of nowhere. "Pigeons from Hell," remains one of Robert E. Howard's most celebrated horror stories and has seen several reprints including the Pyramid Weird Tales anthology published in 1964. Although Howard is best remembered as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, he was equally recognized in the 1930s pulps for his incredible horror stories.
This short story was a blast! It's been recommended to me many times and I've always been too busy to work it in. Being on the front edge of a reading slump, and usually having good luck with short stories to get me out of it, I decided to finally read this classic. It's short, sweet and scary. What more could you want?
A man rises out of an abyss of frustration and rage and creates works of art out of destruction, goddesses out of mere dental hygienists and beauty out of death. It's also about the sickness and obsession that is LOVE.Enter into Michael's world through the pages of his personal journal, where every diseased thought, disturbing dream, politically incorrect rant and sexually explicit murder highlights his journey from zero to psycho.
The Venus Complex is a provocative journey into a psychopathic consciousness that is one of the most gripping and disturbing mind trips I've read. Told in a journal entry style first person narration, the first time we meet Michael Friday is the recounting of his wife's death in a car accident. His wife was cheating on him, his accusation and her reaction bring about a clean definitive snap of his mind, from normal to implacable killer and here lies the beginning of a jaunt that nibbles the edges of sanity until there's only one possible outcome.
A page-turning adventure of a boy's journey to the land of ghosts and back.Imagine Garth Hale's surprise when he's accidentally zapped to the spirit world by Frank Gallows, a washed-out ghost wrangler. Suddenly Garth finds he has powers the ghosts don't have, and he's stuck in a world run by the evil ruler of Ghostopolis, who would use Garth's newfound abilities to rule the ghostly kingdom. When Garth meets Cecil, his grandfather's ghost, the two search for a way to get Garth back home, and nearly lose hope until Frank Gallows shows up to fix his mistake.
Great graphic novel! It's touching and a bit creepy. I would definitely reccomend! It held my attention and I couldn't wait to see how it ended.
When Nora Shaw is invited to the hen do of an old school friend she hasn't seen in years, she's delighted to have a chance to reconnect with her old friend. Little does she know something is about to go horribly wrong... In A Dark, Dark Wood marks the launch of a major new star in psychological fiction.
Leonara Shaw, a writer in her mid-twenties, has been invited to the hen do of an old school friend. Nora hasn't seen Clare in years but she's looking forward to a chance to reconnect with her friend, even if she's surprised not to be invited to the wedding itself. But something goes wrong. Nora wakes up in a hospital room with her head bandaged and a police guard outside her door. Are they there to protect her or arrest her? Nora is worried. Worried because her first thought is not "what's happened to me?" but "what have I done?"
The author knows how to keep the reader on the edge of the seat waiting for the next exciting scene! When the story began, Leonora Shaw, an author who writes crime novels for a living, has received an unusual and unexpected invitation to a hen night for a friend she had not seen in a decade. The email was addressed to the name she used to call herself, Lee, but now she was known as Nora. She couldn’t figure out why her old friend Claire Cavendish would even want her at her hen party. For old time’s sake, though, when Claire’s friend Flo kept calling and pleading with her to come because Claire would be so pleased, she filled with guilt and decided to go.
With the 1984 publication of Books of Blood, Clive Barker became an overnight literary sensation. He was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror," and won both the British and World Fantasy Awards. Now, with his numerous bestsellers, graphic novels, and hit movies like the Hellraiser films, Clive Barker has become an industry unto himself. But it all started here, with this tour de force collection that rivals the dark masterpieces of Edgar Allan Poe. Read him. And rediscover the true meaning of fear.
Fans of Clive Barker's earliest fiction may talk of how he lost his step, by turning away from the more visceral aspects of dark fiction towards the more fantastical. For them, at least they can look back upon these volumes of short stories and revel in what may be the finest collection of horror literature of the 80s, or any other decade. I'm a fan of Barker's fantasy stories, as much as his horror stories, but I must admit there is something unique and indelible about the tales Barker has weaved in these early collections. If you're new to his work and are not averse to being disturbed, you should make it a point to read these stories.
Synopsis: Calcutta: a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction. Robert Luczak has been hired by Harper's to find a noted Indian poet who has reappeared, under strange circumstances, years after he was thought dead. But nothing is simple in Calcutta and Lucsak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare when he learns that the poet is rumored to have been brought back to life in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.
*****
I always feel bad when I dislike a novel that is as original as this one. It is pretty hard to find works like Song of Kali, especially in the era in which it was written -- that era being the mid-80s, i.e. when horror fiction was at its peak in popularity. Horror novels were *it* but, sadly, a lot of books written in that genre then were barely more than pedantic Stephen King rip-offs.
If anything, this novel is definitely not a Stephen King rip-off.
As I said, this book is original and was unlike anything else I've ever read. Dan Simmons's first novel is a roaring entrance into the game, and it doesn't really ever let up for the entirety of its 300 pages. I'm a big fan of Dan Simmons -- Summer of Night is one of my favorite novels ever -- but this book, despite its originality, doesn't quite show the skills Simmons would hone only a couple of years down the road. However, this is his first novel and I wouldn't expect it to be perfect.
What, you may ask, is my beef with this novel? Actually, I only had a problem with a couple of things, but those things -- the protagonist/narrator as well as, say, every other character -- are pretty big. This book is told in first-person, so all of the events are witnessed through the eyes of our main character, Robert Luczak, an aspiring poet and staffer for a magazine who has taken his wife and infant daughter with him on assignment to Calcutta, India. This guy, for lack of better descriptive terms, is an arrogant, self-absorbed asshole. And for no reason, too! His wife is calm and put together and tries to help him, but he constantly treats her like a child. He is the sole reason this family of three has horrible things happen to them in India because he consistently does stupid things that he acknowledges is stupid... but he does them anyway. I won't say more because I would hate to spoil anything. '
As well as Robert, all of the other characters are annoying, but they're just annoying because I don't know enough about any of them to feel any other way. They're hastily-drawn ciphers whose only role (in most cases) is to keep the story going. When they suffer, I don't really care because Simmons does not offer enough backstory or details about these people he's brought to the page. I typically enjoy Simmons's characters because they are almost always written in such detail and given so much life... but I guess he hadn't learned how to create realistic people yet. I dunno.
I'm going to keep this review short because I'm sort of annoyed at this book -- mostly because I wanted to like it. It won the World Fantasy Award in '86. It's often touted as one of the scariest novels ever by so many horror fans online. It has such a following... and I don't know why. In my opinion, it wasn't even all that scary. Sure, there were several chilling moments but in most cases the author substituted actual fright with mere gross-out, which might work for some readers... but it definitely doesn't work for this guy. It was a quick read and, like I said, it's highly original. If anything, Simmons uses the location of Calcutta to his advantage, getting all of the mileage possible out of the concept he has created. In addition, the last couple of chapters are pretty bittersweet, mixing horror, fright, and suffering in a way Simmons would often do in his later, bigger novels. The final chapters is where the novel shines most.
All in all, Song Of Kali wasn't a bad read, but it wasn't particularly great either. It was a decent way to kick off my October reading, but I doubt I'll ever go back and read it again. 3 stars.
IN A DARK, DARK ROOM
In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house.
And in that dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room.
And in that dark, dark room there was a dark, dark chest.
And in that dark, dark chest there was a dark, dark shelf.
And on that dark, dark shelf there was a dark, dark box.
And in that dark, dark box there was — A GHOST!
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