Tag: horror

GUEST BOOK REVIEW by C.R. Richards: Inside & Midnight Screams

megHan

Two Frightfully Fun Books Written by Women

Crisp wind dances through the falling leaves, sending a blanket of burnt-orange and yellow across the damp ground. I shiver, my gaze drifting along the landscape. Pumpkins smile an ominous warning from their sentry post beside the front door. I catch the distinct aroma of cinnamon and cloves in the air. Someone is baking. I quicken my pace as thoughts of hot tea, and pumpkin cookies make my mouth water.

A warm glow beckons me. Home. Smiling down at my furry walking companion, I climb the stoop and open our front door. My cozy reading chair waits inside. I run anxious fingers longingly across the small stack of books resting upon a table beside the armrest. I’ve been looking forward to my evening read all day.

Hot tea at the ready, I sit down in my chair and scan the scary books on my Halloween Reading List. Will it be The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson? Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, perhaps? No. I want to begin my Spooky Season reading with two new favorites, written within the last decade by talented women authors.

Inside
By: D.M. Siciliano

Genre: Horror, Ghosts
Publisher: Parliament House Press
Publication Date: October 2019
Pages: 354

1987 “Does it burn in the dark?”

Reid is a bully, but he’s still Alex’s best friend. When Reid pushes Alex and their friends into invading a historically haunted Massachusetts house, Alex knows it’s a terrible idea, but indulges his friend. What could go wrong?

Inside, a mysterious Shadow looms in the darkness. The door to the house vanishes, leaving them trapped. The group flees through the tiny, one-roomed house that defies logic, constantly shifting, presenting them with new doors, hallways, and rooms that seem to be plucked from their memories and fears. One by one, the Shadow hunts them, intent on burning them all from within.

Is there any way to escape? Or will they be burned from the inside out?

C.R. Richard’s Review:

It’s 1987. Five teens dare each other to go inside a haunted house in the middle of the Massachusetts woods. What could go wrong?

The one-story house waits in the wood as it has done for centuries. Locals know it by reputation as being haunted, so naturally, a group of friends go inside to explore. Reid, their leader, is a bully and enjoys asserting his dominance on the group. Not wanting to be a victim of his best friend’s teasing, Alex agrees to go inside with the rest of the group. But the friends soon find the house has deadly games of its own to play. Portals and constantly changing rooms keep the characters and readers guessing.

Time and space are fluid in this house of horrors. What seems like a simple shack in the woods turns into an evil predator with a wicked taste for psychological cruelty. I was both fascinated and terrified by the story’s concept. Warning. This is NOT a lightweight read. The emotional torment of the characters can be draining. We, as readers, become emotionally invested in their well-being.

Author D.M. Siciliano is a modern-day master. Expertly layering emotional torment with threats to the physical, the author guides her readers through the terrifying paradox that is the single-level house.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Pumpkins!

Banshee 1:
Midnight Screams
By: Sara Clancy

Genre: Horror
Publisher: Scare Street
Publication Date: May 2017
Pages: 144

When Benton dreams, people die…

Every time Benton sleeps, he becomes a trapped passenger within a murderer’s skin; able to hear, see, and feel every part of their kill. When he wakes up, he knows it’s only a matter of time before his dreams become reality. No matter how hard he tries to stop the murders, it always ends the same way – with death.

After ten years of constantly relocating, his parents have decided to settle in Fort Wayward. A quiet Albertan town where Benton could focus on graduating high school and living an idyllic teenage life. That is, until he finds a dead body in his backyard.

Benton’s hopes for normalcy come crashing down as something new begins stalking his dreams. Something that’s not human. And, for the first time, he’s not the only one watching.

As his dreams and reality collide, Benton finds himself facing a monster beyond his understanding. In his fight for survival, Benton soon discovers why death follows him, why monsters draw close, and why he always wakes up screaming.

C.R. Richard’s Review:

Nightmares are terrifying. Trapped inside the deepest realm of our psyche, we are helpless against the brutal torture exacted by our subconscious. Escape comes with the aid of a clamoring alarm clock or an unexpected nudge toward reality. Sweating and afraid, we laugh with a heavy sigh of relief. It was only a dream!

Imagine if the dreamscape won’t let go. Something imprisons Benton, forcing him to witness horrific scenes of violence as if he were the one committing the atrocities. Each night he sees a new murder and experiences it through the killer’s eyes. He wakes, knowing the killings will soon become a reality.

Author Sara Clancy draws us into the troubled life of Benton, the high schooler who is desperate to live a normal life. Clancy has created a sympathetic and interesting character. Being the new kid in high school is awkward enough, but throw in visions of murders, and you have the perfect setup for horror. The author adds ‘literary salt’ to Benton’s wounds as she expertly builds the tension between him and his anxious parents.
Midnight Screams is a wonderful mix of heart-stopping horror and crushing emotional angst.

My Rating: 5 out of 5 Pumpkins!

Still Hungry for Horror? Check out The Horror Writers Association for more hauntingly good stories.

Boo-graphy:
C. R. Richards is the award-winning author of The Mutant Casebook Series. A lover of horror and dark fantasy stories, she enjoys telling tales of intrigue and adventure. Her most recent literary projects include the epic dark fantasy series Heart of The Warrior and the novel-length dark fantasy thriller, Pariah. She is an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Look for her paranormal dark fantasy project, The Vengeful Dead, coming in 2022.

For more information on the author’s books and upcoming events, please visit her website or social media:

Author Website
Blog: Deep Thoughts & Junk
Facebook Author Page
Amazon Author Page
Goodreads
Twitter

GUEST BOOK REVIEW by Joshua Rex: Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

megHan

Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked
By: Christa Carmen

Genre: Horror, Short Stories, Collection

Publisher: Unnerving
Publication Date: 7.30.2018

Pages: 244

A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.

In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.

Imagine you’re in a very cramped, very dim, and very silent antique store. You’re scanning the stacks, the piles, the shelves, breathing in the yellowed air, deciding whether or not to listen to your intuition which is telling you that you might want to leave this place. You notice a box on one of the lower shelves. It’s wood, dark wood, maybe it has even darker stains, maybe there are some arcane carvings on it. It is heavy, and things rattle within as you pick it up. You lift the lid. You see many things inside: scary things, forbidden things, harmful things…

This is what it’s like opening the cover of Christa Carmen’s Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked and venturing through its stellar and unnerving thirteen tales. There are bones, blood-covered blades, black-eyed dolls, snatches of hair, dried grave flowers. Crypts. Corn Mazes. Masks that might not be masks. There are dubious babysitters, the phantoms of dead ex-boyfriends, people trying to recover and people who will not recover. It is visceral, but it is also poignant, and the language in the collection is exquisite.

Some examples? Behold: “Her name dies on your throat like a poison-doused perennial.” “When you wake again, the light is softer, more diffuse, like yellow begonias at dusk.” “His movements caused the satin ribbon to cascade over the side of his desk like molten lava over a volcano summit.” “In the ramshackle Victorian on Elm Street that had once been her parents’, but now belonged to her and her sister, dried bouquets of flowers covered every available surface of wall, upside down and desiccated like a silent colony of bats.”

While the items you find within this metaphorical box of sharps and relics may be terrifying and suggest a past of horror, death, and possibly worse, they also tell a human story—one of struggle, terror, grief, and perhaps most of all, courage when the very notion of it seems audacious and hopeless. This is horror with a heart—one that continues to beat no matter how hard the world tries to make it stop.

Boo-graphy:
Joshua Rex is an American author of speculative fiction. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio and grew up between the Midwest and New England. He is the author of the collection What’s Coming for You (Rotary Press, 2020) and the novel A Mighty Word (Rotary Press, 2021)

Website

What’s Coming for You —
In these ten unsettling tales—the debut collection from Joshua Rex—cities and houses become predators, mothers macabre curators, dormant antique coats and colonial legends revivified dangers. A psychometress resurrects a rapacious fiend, and a psychologist counsels an eerily familiar patient. A man returning home to bury his father is forced to exhume a horrid secret, and a bullied adolescent’s game-winning shot is not only a team victory but a bloody and visceral personal triumph.

Uniting these doomed is the unequivocal certainty that what is coming is coming for us all.

Includes: The Leap. Breakout Season. The Unfinished Room. What’s Coming for You. A Mother’s Museum. Coattails. The Whispering Wheel. The Reveal. In Situ. The Voice Below.

A Mighty Word —
Kevin Heartstone is a past-obsessed tenth grader grieving the loss of his father, an architect and restoration specialist, and struggling with his mother’s new relationship with the owner of a demolition company. While visiting his father’s grave, Kevin encounters Jane Cardinal, a fifteen year old girl who has been dead for over a century and a half. Jane, along with her contemporaries, have recently been re-animated by the by-product of an anti-depressant produced by Still City’s leading employer—Preventative Solutions—which has been illegally dumping the waste into the decaying area neighborhoods and cemeteries. Jane will be Kevin’s link to a time for which he longs, while Kevin himself will become central in his fractured hometown’s survival, and the dilemma of reconciling its past with its present by conciliating the dead with the living.

READING of a SHORT STORY: Christa Carmen

megHan

In Which Two Squirrels Nest in an Abandoned Attic & Amuse Themselves with the Relics of Humanity

Boo-graphy:
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked won the 2018 Indie Horror Book Award for Best Debut Collection, and additional work has been published in places such as Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Fireside, Not All Monsters, and Behold the Undead of Dracula.

These days when I’m not writing, I keep chickens, read books like Mary, Who Wrote Frankenstein and The Gashlycrumb Tinies to my daughter, forget to pull a daily tarot card, and tinker with a dog food recipe concocted to make my beagle live forever.

Most of my work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

Something Borrowed, Something Blood Soaked —
A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.

In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.

GUEST BOOK REVIEW by Christa Carmen: A Mighty Word

megHan

A Mighty Word
By: Joshua Rex

Genre: Horror, Magical Realism, Speculative Fiction

Publisher: Rotary Press
Publication Date: 4.12.2021

Pages: 175

Kevin Heartstone is a past-obsessed tenth grader grieving the loss of his father, an architect and restoration specialist, and struggling with his mother’s new relationship with the owner of a demolition company. While visiting his father’s grave, Kevin encounters Jane Cardinal, a fifteen year old girl who has been dead for over a century and a half. Jane, along with her contemporaries, have recently been re-animated by the by-product of an anti-depressant produced by Still City’s leading employer—Preventative Solutions—which has been illegally dumping the waste into the decaying area neighborhoods and cemeteries. Jane will be Kevin’s link to a time for which he longs, while Kevin himself will become central in his fractured hometown’s survival, and the dilemma of reconciling its past with its present by conciliating the dead with the living.

Halloween is a two-faced entity, characterized both by long-standing traditions and a host of fun, more modern frights. While one can celebrate the night on which the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is thinnest by visiting a cemetery to pay respects to a lost loved one, an equally viable option is to gather a group of costumed friends to shudder before the latest A24 horror film.

Joshua Rex’s A Mighty Word, like Halloween itself, encompasses the best of seemingly competing worlds. It is a celebration of things that have come before as well as an exploration of that which scares us most in the here-and-now. Death. Loss. Change. Oblivion. No longer recognizing the world around you, or your place within it. It is a novel that engages insightfully with the fear that the best of humanity has come and gone.

The story takes place in fictional Still City, a community that is keeping its last grip on life by producing and promoting an antidepressant called Plaiscene, manufactured by Preventative Solutions. When the toxic byproducts of Plaiscene seep into the ground, causing the deceased residents of Treestone and Neil Memorial Cemeteries to rise from their graves, it quickly becomes clear that the dead are far less monstrous than those in Still City intent on keeping Preventative Solutions running smoothly, no matter the fallout.

Too busy navigating an unfamiliar world after his father’s unexpected death to have bought into the Plaiscene hype, Kevin Heartstone is clear-headed (and open-minded in the way that only somewhat-different-and-subsequently-alienated-kids can truly be) when he stumbles upon the reanimated Jane Cardinal, and finds that his old-fashioned view of things aligns him closely with her and the other corpses.

Kevin and Jane’s fight for what is right is not only hard-hitting in today’s politically embittered times, but in the hands of Joshua Rex, it’s rendered hauntingly on the page. During Kevin’s solitary treks through a ghostly, near-abandoned city, he would “search the newly vacant lots for scraps of the recently demolished, finding perhaps a plaster acanthus curl from a Corinthian column, a spandrel or bracket dowel, a pane from a latticed window.” As the dead rise, they contemplate their surroundings, those spots that were once “hallowed,” that once held “rows of handsome oaks and flowerbeds bright as barrelfuls of spilled jewels.” Even death is beautiful here, and when the mayor takes drastic measures to escape culpability in Still City’s demise, his end is marked by “a volcanic spray brilliant as brimming lava… superimposed against the red and orange shell burst of twilight.”

It’s clear that Joshua’s care wasn’t for a single, or even a handful, of elements when it came to penning this novel. Characters are not sacrificed for plot; neither is language for dread-inducing suspense. Horror—sociopolitical, Gothic, and the beautiful macabre—along with captivating discourses on life coexist bewitchingly on the page.

Some of the best horror, the best stories regardless of genre, are those works which are not easily categorizable; A Mighty Word resists being put in a box much in the same way that the wise and dignified corpses who shape its narrative refuse their stuffy coffins. If Halloween is as much for tradition as it is for the newer rituals that continue to shape it, then Joshua Rex’s novel is what you should be reading this October 31st. It’s a delightful trick of horror subgenre, and an overall treat of dark fiction.

Boo-graphy:
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked won the 2018 Indie Horror Book Award for Best Debut Collection, and additional work has been published in places such as Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Fireside, Not All Monsters, and Behold the Undead of Dracula.

These days when I’m not writing, I keep chickens, read books like Mary, Who Wrote Frankenstein and The Gashlycrumb Tinies to my daughter, forget to pull a daily tarot card, and tinker with a dog food recipe concocted to make my beagle live forever.

Most of my work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

Something Borrowed, Something Blood Soaked —
A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.

In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.

READING from Stalker Stalked: Matthew Lee Goldberg

megHan

Stalker Stalked —
Lexi Mazur is a depressed, alcoholic, pill-popper whose only joy has become her reality TV shows, often fantasizing that the people on TV are a part of her world. After her boyfriend Steve leaves her, she fixates on the show Socialites and its star Magnolia Artois, following every facet of the girl’s life on social media in the hopes of befriending and becoming more like her.

But stalking isn’t new to Lexi. She ultimately won over her ex Steve by following and manipulating every minute detail about him so he’d fall for her. In fact, she landed her other ex-boyfriend Jeremy in the same way. Being a pharma rep, she’s used to manipulation to get doctors to buy her drugs, along with the perk of saving pills for herself.

But what happens when the stalker gets stalked?

Recently, Lexi has felt someone watching her: in her apartment in Queens, at her job. At first, she thinks her mind’s playing tricks, but the watcher is behaving just like she would. And soon they begin leaving threatening clues like she starts to do to Magnolia once her obsession grows more dangerous. Is it one of her exes out for revenge? Her only real friend from childhood who she’s always had an unhealthy rivalry? A detective who may have figured her out? The reality star Magnolia trying to turn the tables? Or even someone she might not know?

Lexi learns the only way to beat her stalker is to use her own stalking prowess to outsmart them at their own game. But has she finally met her match?

Boo-graphy:
Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of eight novels including THE ANCESTOR and THE MENTOR, currently in development as a film off his original script, and the YA series RUNAWAY TRAIN. He has been published in multiple languages and nominated for the Prix du Polar. STALKER STALKED will be out in Fall ’21. After graduating with an MFA from the New School, his writing has also appeared as a contributor in Pipeline Artists, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Writers Review, Cagibi, Necessary Fiction, Hypertext, If My Book, Past Ten, the anthology Dirty Boulevard, The Montreal Review, The Adirondack Review, The New Plains Review, Underwood Press and others. His pilots and screenplays have been finalists in Script Pipeline, Book Pipeline, Stage 32, We Screenplay, the New York Screenplay, Screencraft, and the Hollywood Screenplay contests. He is the co-curator of The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series and lives in New York City.