According to Goodreads, I’ve read 33 of Stephen King’s books – since getting bitten by the bug through some of his best a few years back, I’ve been slowly working my way through the rest of them. Rose Madder isn’t one of his best, nor is it one of his worst. Instead it’s a decent book, albeit with a harrowing subject matter, that would have been a lot better had it been missing its supernatural elements. Rosie Daniels has spent fourteen years in an abusive […]
Old-School Horror for Kids
When I was a kid, my dad and I read books together. It’s a bittersweet memory, since we’ve been estranged for most of my adult life. My favorite author then was John Bellairs, who wrote Gothic horror set during the era of his own childhood in the 1950s. The early editions had covers and sometimes illustrations by Edward Gorey, and between Bellairs and Gorey, I grew up with a lifelong love of the macabre. This weekend, I had to do an assignment for my editing […]
Maybe don’t read this one alone in the dark?
So our leading lady, Leonora is out of the blue invited to an old friend’s bachelorette party. Only we’re in England, so it’s called a hen party. Or a hen do? Something henny. Anyway, she hasn’t talked to Clare (the hen / bride) in nearly a decade. She’s not really sure why she’s invited, but she asks another friend to go too (she’s also invited). The house they end up at is in the woods, and kinda creepy. Leonora is called Lee, Nora, and Leo, […]
Cleaning up Cthulu
The Laundry Files had been recommended to me as a series before, and this time it was a book shop employee pushing them, so I picked it up. The book took me about two weeks to read. I carried it to and from work, and always found a reason to read something else. (Though the news these days is very distracting..) Normally I read much faster than that! The book is a mix of an old school spy novel (he describes his influences as Len […]