Glimpse is my second book by Jonathan Maberry, and I felt like I was taking a little bit of a chance because several years ago my attempt to read his book Patient Zero did not go so well. However, the premise simply sounded too good, and in the end I’m glad I overcame my hesitation to give this one a try because I really enjoyed it. In addition to being a blend of horror and the paranormal, this chilling story also has an element of otherworldly suspense that I think will make it appeal to fans of Joe Hill or Dean Koontz. Glimpse follows recovering junkie Rain Thomas, a twenty-something young woman who has struggled to overcome tragedy and loss to build a life for herself in New York City. At age sixteen, she became pregnant and was forced to give her child up for adoption after Noah, her first love, was deployed to Iraq and killed in an IED attack before he even found out about the baby. An embarrassment to her upper crust family, Rain was essentially left to fend for herself after she succumbed to her grief and fell into of life of drug addiction. Now three…

Unbury Carol is a wonderful story that takes you into the mind of Carol, a woman with a condition that causes her to have episodes where she appears to be dead. She goes into a coma like state, her breathing slows to the point of being almost undetectable. From the outside, she seems dead, but she remains fully aware of her surroundings. She can hear and remember conversations that are held around her, but she can’t respond. It’s a living nightmare, having your mind and awareness held captive in her paralyzed body. This book is not going to be for everyone. It is a slow burn and the conflict is not an adrenaline rush type of suspense. It is a psychological horror that really focuses on Carol’s character and the fears and risks her condition presents. She lost her first love, James Moxie, due to her condition as he just couldn’t handle the stress of watching the woman he loves die again and again, always worried if she would come back. After this, she was very selective in who she told, worried that other’s may leave as well. After the death of her dear friend John, the only person who…

One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning is not a book for the squeamish! The body count rises at an astronimical rate, and details are not spared. I enjoyed it, and have to admit, parts were certainly unexpected, always a good thing. It takes place on a remote island that is currently home to an adventure group that does team building exercises. The current group of coworkers on a retreat to the island find themselves trapped there as their ferry home crashed amongst the rocks, littering the corpses of its incoming passengers. Did they die in the crash? Were they murdered? Or is something else going on? If they didn’t die in the crash, are they safe or are they the next potential victims? All things to think about instead of heading back home as they planned. I have to admit, just the thought of traveling to a remote island with coworkers is a bit horrifying by itself. But then to get stuck there as horrify deaths that start to pile up? With no idea who you can trust? Then it becomes a living nightmare. This book is part of a series that I’ve not previously read. I am…

Here’s the thing: I like Seanan McGuire, but for some strange reason or another her books always seem to rub me the wrong way when she writes as Mira Grant. Because of this, I almost didn’t pick up Into the Drowning Deep, but in the end, I’m glad I did—the premise of a horror novel about mermaids was just too amazing for me to pass up, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have at least bit of fun with it. Still, I wish I’d enjoyed the book more, though like I said, there’s probably a precedent for some of my more conflicted sentiments, namely that some of the same issues I’ve had in the past with her characters and world-building just kept cropping up. While Into the Drowning Deep is the start of a new story, it is also technically the follow-up to Rolling in the Deep, a novella chronicling the tragic fate of the cruise liner Atargatis which set sail for the Mariana Trench seven years ago on a mission to film a mockumentary about the existence of mermaids. Only, no one made it back alive. Every member of the Imagine Entertainment studio film crew was…

Some of my favorite horror stories involve haunted houses, because after all, a home is supposed to be a place of warmth and shelter. The idea of what was once a safe haven being invaded by malevolent spirits creates such a sense of wrongness that the terror is elevated to a whole other level. In Kill Creek, a character even ventures to explain why such stories fill us with dread, positing it’s because we never expect such awfulness to lurk so close beneath the surface of what is considered normal. This novel is a good example of such horror, the kind that sends chills down your spine, making you wonder if anything is even safe anymore as you steal nervous glances over your shoulder to make sure you really are alone. At the center of this story is the house at Kill Creek, an old abandoned three-story that was built in the mid-1800s on a lonely road in the middle of the Kansas prairie. Lovingly constructed by its first owner, the house saw a few good years before tragedy struck, and people say it has been haunted ever since. Nobody could stand to live in it for more than a…

Strange Weather is a collection of 4 short novels, each telling a unique story. They are all independent of one another, and could be read in any order. I may not rate this one quite as high as most of the works I’ve read by Hill, but I suspect most of that comes from my preference for longer works. The stories are quick and varied covering funny to horrifying to creepy and the main character in each are varied. One aspect of these that some readers will love, but some may not is the endings can ;eave the reader just on the edge of “what happens next”. You can probably guess, for good or for bad, how the cards will fall, but Hill will leave you right on the precipice, giving the reader something to think about and let their own imagination fill in the details. This is something I have always enjoyed, I feel like endings like this make a book last a bit longer for me because I find myself thinking about the ending more than if every last detail had been provided. That said, I know not all readers love this type of ending as much as…

Well, the question of whether M.R. Carey could catch lightning in a bottle twice has been answered. Not that I had doubted it much, but while The Girl with All the Gifts was met with much acclaim, I’d made sure to temper my expectations for its follow-up companion novel in the months up to its release. Given the infuriatingly vague publisher description, and with the newness of the whole idea, there were just way too many unknowns. Thankfully, The Boy on the Bridge came through with flying colors. It might not have been quite as fresh as the original, simply because we know so much more about the world now, but the book still had plenty of surprises in store. Here’s what I can tell you: The Boy on the Bridge is something of a prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts but it can be read as a standalone (though I still highly recommend reading the books in their publication order). The world has been ravaged by the Cordyceps plague, turning much of its population into “Hungries” — effectively just another term for the walking dead. And yet, humanity still has hope that it will find a cure,…

The White Road will creep under your skin, fill your mind with all the ghastly things and make you leery of participating in activities like, oh, let’s say caving or mountain climbing. I was totally going to go climb Everest next year, really!  Never mind that I have a bum knee, a bum ankle, and maybe I’m scared of heights and also am a wimp, maybe I could have considered it anyway. But nope. Not now. None of my more rational reasons for never climbing Everest are nearly as convincing as reading this book. My knee may hurt, but it doesn’t haunt me night and day and give me the creeps. Maybe this is fiction, maybe there really aren’t haunted caves or mountains, either way, I am very content staying planted on the ground (not beneath or above) letting other people figure that out. I will bask in the experience vividly given to me via Lotz’s book. Kind of like how I felt about cruises after reading Day Four. Lotz has cemented herself as one of my favorite horror authors with this book. The characters are real and fascinating. The book is just downright creepy! I love it! The dark sense…

Adam and Meryam are a newly engaged couple from very different backgrounds, but they have always bonded over their love of adventure. In recent years, they have even achieved moderate fame for their series of videos taken from their travels around the world. Now they are eyeing their next great challenge, an expedition to climb Turkey’s Mount Ararat after an avalanche has reportedly revealed a massive cave up high in the side of the mountain. Wasting no time, Adam and Meryam call upon an old friend to be their mountaineering guide, and together they begin a harrowing race up Ararat in order to be the first ones to discover its secrets. However, what they end up finding in the cavern goes even beyond their wildest dreams. Within its depths, the couple discover the remains of a large ancient ship, which immediately raises the question: could this be Noah’s Ark, the great vessel that weathered the Biblical flood in the Book of Genesis? To answer this question, a full team is quickly assembled to excavate and study the find, with Meryam at its head as project manager. Included among the scientists and other experts is also a documentary crew, which is…

This novella has a simple boy-meets-girl plot, but the love story is wrapped in some sinister forces befitting a horror story. It’s a testament to the skills of author Josh Malerman that this tale somehow successfully navigates between a quaint story of mild-mannered ghosts and the gruesome gore that seems to always find young lovers near lakes. We first meet James, a teenager who works in his father’s hardware store, just before he meets Amelia, who comes to buy a hose but forgets that when James asks her on a date. Through short, fast chapters written from each teenager’s point of view, we see how nervous and awkward the two feel about themselves and their date as they head out on a canoe to explore a lake. The first lake is connected to a second, and the second is connected by some kind of drainage tunnel to a third. This hidden lake is not as attractive as the first two except for the fact that is deserted, and James and Amelia discover their common ground–a shared interest in exploration. While paddling about they discover the house at the bottom of the lake. It is fully intact, furnished and ready for…