Posts tagged with horror
If I'm feeling brave
I clicked on this article about an upcoming stop-motion kids' movie because of my love for Jordan Peele, but I'm less interested in the kids' movie than the Peele-produced project mentioned at the very end: Lovecraft Country, based on the novel by Matt Ruff...
The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories, by Charlaine Harris
Charlaine Harris's The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories is a collection of nine short stories and a novella. I'm not sure how hardcore Sookie Stackhouse junkies will feel about this book, but as a casual fan I actually found it more fun than a full-length novel—it offers a tantalizing glimpse of Harris's characters and world-building, but you get to skim over all the tedious background drama created by thirteen books' worth of storytelling...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories, by Charlaine Harris
This week's Book Giveaway is Charlaine Harris's The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories. Considering the popularity of this series, I'm always surprised by the homemade vibe of the cover art, which feels like something designed by an artsy middle school student. (But what do I know? Clearly, these books sell just fine.) Our full review will be posted soon...
Edward Gorey-esque
io9 recently featured a bunch of pages from Brian Coldrick's new book Behind You, a collection of fragmentary, single-page ghost stories. I usually prefer anything I read to come with a plot pay-off, but I actually love this idea: it blends Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick with...
Red Sister, by Mark Lawrence
Let me start with a word of warning: Mark Lawrence's latest fantasy novel Red Sister is really, really violent. Scenes include (but are by no means limited to) the execution of a child, the torture of an older woman, and the fatal beating of an animal. There's a lot to admire about this book, but readers with delicate sensibilities should take heed...
This looks massively stressful.
There's a new trailer out for the upcoming miniseries Waco, which apparently is relying heavily on the accounts of two nonfiction books: Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by Gary Noesner, and A Place Called Waco: A Survivor's Story, by David Thibodeau...
Yet another one (yay)
Enchanted with all the money IT has been raking in, Paramount has decided to remake Stephen King's Pet Semetary, too. They've hired Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer as co-directors. Kolsch and Widmyer previously...
Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero
Edgar Cantero's novel Meddling Kids is clever, creative, and funny. It is also profoundly self-indulgent and only occasionally creepy. Individual readers' mileage will vary, based on their tolerance for pointless stylistic quirks and their love for the book's many pop-culture sources...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero
This week's Book Giveaway is Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids, which has a great cover and an even greater hook: it's being sold as a subverted, grown-up version of works like Scooby-Do, The Hardy Boys, and Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" series. I have no idea how well that combination will actually work, but it sounds like my idea of note-perfect Halloween reading. A full review will follow shortly...
The House of Binding Thorns, by Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard's The House of Binding Thorns is the sequel to last year's The House of Shattered Wings, a book I described as “more The Godfather than... sword-and-sorcery adventure”. In this installment, a handful of characters from the first book are still struggling to survive the mafioso-style wars between the various Houses of Paris...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The House of Binding Thorns, by Aliette de Bodard
This week's Book Giveaway is Aliette de Bodard's The House of Binding Thorns, the sequel to last year's The House of Shattered Wings. My review of the first book in this series was not unequivocally positive, but I am still intrigued by de Bodard's premise, and that cover art feels like an A+++ choice for the week before Halloween...
I think not.
Just what the world needs: more grim Scandinavian horror! The trailer is out for the Icelandic film I Remember You. The movie is based on a best-selling ghost story of the same name by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, described as "The Queen of Icelandic Crime"...
The Tell-Tale Heart (plus corn)
Here's the trailer for (yet another) Stephen King movie adaptation, in case you were longing for more. The movie is based on King's novella 1922, and is currently available to stream on Netflix. I haven't read the short story, but...
Happy Birthday, Stephen King
I am informed that today is Stephen King's birthday. He can celebrate with this news: his novel IT has been holding the #1 slot in the "Fiction and Literature" category of Apple’s iBooks store for a couple of weeks now, presumably due to the success of the recent movie adaptation...
The Empty Grave, by Jonathan Stroud
For the past five years, I have welcomed every fall with a new installment of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. series. I don't know what cutesy name to give to the autumnal equivalent of a “beach read”, but that's totally what these books are—the perfect reading choice as the weather gets gloomier and we all start craving Halloween candy...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Empty Grave, by Jonathan Stroud
This week's Book Giveaway is Jonathan Stroud's The Empty Grave, the last book in our beloved Lockwood & Co. series. I'm strangely reluctant to start this book—it's a little painful to accept that this will be the last time we get to celebrate the beginning of autumn with a new Lockwood book. Where will I get my only-technically-G-rated scares now?!? Anyway, a review will be posted as soon as I accept the inevitable...
Makes sense
If you have mixed feelings about the upcoming movie adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, there seems to be a TV series in the works, too. It's unclear if version will have much (if anything) in common with the movie, but TV certainly seems like a more logical medium...
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
After reading the laundry list of awards won by Seanan McGuire's 2016 novel Every Heart a Doorway, I was expecting something spectacular. What I got, sadly, was a stylishly packaged novella that is long on atmosphere but distressingly short on plot, payoff, or fully-developed characters...
Women in refrigerators (or snow, in this case)
The trailer is out for the upcoming film adaptation of Jo Nesbo's The Snowman. I have a policy of avoiding movies with trailers that start off with an attractive young woman being chased through a dark/snowy/isolated landscape by an unseen assailant*, so...
The creepiest
The trailer is out for Cary Fukunaga's miniseries adaptation of Caleb Carr’s bestselling 1994 novel The Alienist, starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning. It looks like what Crimson Peak and Penny Dreadful tried (and failed, despite using fantasy elements as a crutch) to be...
Just one!
The trailer is out for the upcoming movie adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. The trailer looks cool (well... Idris Elba looks cool, anyway), but would it kill them to put a couple of girl characters in it? There are a few women hanging around in the background in poses that suggest...
Alice and Red Queen, by Christina Henry
I've read more than a dozen retellings of Alice in Wonderland, and they all too frequently rely on the same ideas: Alice as an amnesiac; Alice as a traumatized young adult; Alice in a madhouse; Alice and the Mad Hatter in a romantic relationship. Christina Henry's duology—Alice and Red Queen—checks off every cliché on this list, but Henry at least delivers her recycled material with style and energy...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Silence Fallen, by Patricia Briggs
This week's Book Giveaway title is Silence Fallen, the 10th book in Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series. We rarely review such advanced series installments, but I have a soft spot for these books: they are set in my beloved Washington, they feature a Native heroine, and—judging on a scale of long-running urban fantasy series—Briggs's stories are approximately one bajillion times better than this...
The Dark Days Pact, by Alison Goodman
When I read the first book in Alison Goodman's Lady Helen series, I found it solidly written but over-engineered. The second installment, The Dark Days Pact, has similar strengths and weaknesses, but the deepening emotional stakes make the overall story far more satisfying...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Dark Days Pact, by Alison Goodman
Today's Book Giveaway is Alison Goodman's The Dark Days Pact, the sequel to last year's The Dark Days Club. I'll be posting my review shortly, but first I need to re-read the first book—Goodman's writing is best appreciated when one pays attention to the details...
Maybe on DVD?
The first trailer is out for the updated version of Stephen King's IT, and, surprise! it looks scary. I'm not sure how much of a difference modern special effects will make in this story, but I am hoping that the director and screenwriter have a really brilliant idea for coping with...
Ugh
According to The Wall Street Journal, Richard Hickock—one of the two Kansas murderers made famous by Truman Capote’s true-crime story In Cold Blood—wrote his own book with a Kansas journalist, which was never published...
All kinds of no.
Okay, this looks CREEPY AS HELL. There's an upcoming movie adaptation of Silvio Raffo’s mystery novel Voice from the Stone, which Entertainment Weekly describes as "a haunted house tale and a powerful meditation on grief, all in one." If the trailer is accurate...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Heart of the Storm, by Michael Buckley
This week's Book Giveaway is Michael Buckley's Heart of the Storm, the final book in his Undertow trilogy. I've never fallen as deeply in love with this series as I did with Buckley's Sisters Grimm stories, but these books are plenty fun in their own right. A full review will follow shortly...
The Darkest Torment, by Gena Showalter
Gena Showalter's The Darkest Torment is the literary equivalent of a music video—flashy and evocative, but short on coherent plot. Admittedly, this is the twelfth installment in an ongoing series, so I didn't expect to grasp the minutiae of Showalter's world, but the standalone elements of this story (including the entire romantic story arc) didn't make much sense, either...