We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
-Stephen King.
Halloween is just round the corner, the boundaries between the realms are at their thinnest, and we are at that time of year when ghosts and ghouls,’ witches and troubled spirits are said to wander the earth. The library has a fabulous selection of spooky books for all ages and tastes. For this blog, we have decided to select some fresh blood in the form of some newly acquired fiction titles that have a darker side. Blow you’ll find frightening tales from this very year!
A title that caught our particular eye for this All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve, feast of reading is the new work from the modern maestro of horror Stephen King, called Holly. There is also a chilling debut novel from our own shores called Bunny by S. E. Tolsen. To round the chills off, there is a terrifying new anthology called A darker shade of noir : new stories of body horror by women writers .
All our selected works are sure to chill the blood, so perhaps they might be best read with the lights on full.
Holly : a novel / King, Stephen
” When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her own mother has just died, and Holly is supposed to be taking time off. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down. Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harbouring an unholy secret in their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Bunny / Tolsen, S. E.
“Silas didn’t have a happy childhood. Aunt Bunny made sure of that. But out of money and almost out of time, Silas and his girlfriend Rose are forced to return to his childhood home. Back to the darkness, back to the woods, where addiction and hedonism are disguising something much more sinister … Plagued by strange, unnerving events, Silas is drawn back into the family by an ancient presence deep in the woods. It will not let him go, and neither will Bunny…” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.
My brother’s keeper / Powers, Tim
“This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world. When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
A darker shade of noir : new stories of body horror by women writers
“While the common belief is that “body horror” as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the “quintessential emblem of female body horror.” In A Darker Shade of New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Vampires of El Norte / Cañas, Isabel
“As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters–her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead. Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago. Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Black tide / Jones, K. C.
“It was just another day at the beach. Then the world ended. Mike and Beth were strangers before the night of the meteor shower. Chance made them neighbors, a bottle of champagne brought them together, and a shared need for human connection sparked something more. Following their drunken and desperate one-night stand, the two discover the astronomical event has left widespread destruction in its wake. But the cosmic lightshow was only part of something much bigger, and far more terrifying. When a lost car key leaves them stranded on an empty stretch of Oregon coast and inhuman screams echo from the dunes, when the rising tide reaches for their car and unspeakable horrors close in around them, these two self-destructive souls must fight to survive a nightmare of apocalyptic scale.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Voices of the dead / Parry, Ambrose
“1853. In a city of science, discovery can be deadly. In a time of unprecedented scientific innovation, the public’s appetite for wonder has seen a resurgence of interest in mesmerism, spiritualism and other unexplained phenomena. Dr Will Raven is wary of the shadowlands that lie between progress and quackery, but Sarah Fisher can’t afford to be so picky. Frustrated in her medical ambitions, she sees opportunity in a new therapeutic field not already closed off to women. Raven has enough on his hands as it is. Body parts have been found at Surgeons Hall, and they’re not anatomy specimens. In a city still haunted by the crimes of Burke and Hare, he is tasked with heading off a scandal…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
The beast you are : stories / Tremblay, Paul
” The fifteen pieces in this collection are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart. In “The Dead Thing,” a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents’ substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with “the dead thing” inside. He won’t show it to her and he won’t let the box out of his sight. In “The Last Conversation,” a person wakes in a sterile, white room and begins to receive instructions via intercom from a woman named Anne. When they are finally allowed to leave the room to complete a task, what they find is as shocking as it is heartbreaking. The title novella, “The Beast You Are,” in which the destinies and secrets of a village, a dog, and a cat are intertwined with a giant monster that returns to wreak havoc every thirty years…” (Adapted from Catalogue)
