Review: Let Him In

Read from 23rd – 28th September 2023

Synopsis: 

William Friend’s haunting debut Let Him In is a creeping, gothic psychological suspense about a young, newly widowed father struggling to raise twin daughters obsessed with an imaginary friend.

“Daddy, there’s a man in our room…”

Alfie wakes one night to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed, claiming there’s a shadowy figure in their bedroom. When no such thing can be found, he assumes the girls had a nightmare.

He isn’t surprised that they’re troubled. Grief has made its home at Hart House: nine months ago, the twins’ mother Pippa died unexpectedly, leaving Alfie to raise them alone. And now, when the girls mention a new imaginary friend, it seems like a harmless coping mechanism. But the situation quickly develops into something more insidious. The girls set an extra place for him at the table. They whisper to him. They say he’s going to take them away…

Alfie calls upon Julia—Pippa’s sister and a psychiatrist—to oust the malignant tenant from their lives. But as Alfie himself is haunted by visions and someone watches him at night, he begins to question the true character of the force that has poisoned his daughters’ minds, with dark and violent consequences.

Whatever this “friend” is, he doesn’t want to leave. Alfie will have to confront his own shameful secrets, the dark past of Hart House, and even the bounds of reality—or risk taking part in an unspeakable tragedy.

Bookish Things: 240 pages. The cover is suitably creepy and fits with the genre of choice.

Review: The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses

Read from 13th August – 8th September 2023

Synopsis: 

Theodora Corvus can hear the whispers of her crumbling family home. She can hear the whispers of Kingsward Manor, her place of employment. She sees the watchers by the lake, black-eyed and waiting. But Broken Oak is silent. Broken Oak is empty.

When Theodora takes the job as governess to young Ottoline Thorne, she leaves behind her beloved grandmother and the decaying ruins of her childhood home to travel far north to Broken Oak Manor. There, she finds a house filled with secrets. Under the stern eye of the foreboding housekeeper, Theodora quickly navigates the dark and winding corridors of Broken Oak, only to find herself irrevocably drawn to the mysterious lord of the manor. But someone walks the hallways late after nightfall, their footsteps leading to the attic. The only place in the sprawling house that does not remain silent.

As her scandalous feelings for Cassias Thorne grow, Theodora fights to unearth the secrets of Broken Oak. Who wanders the house at night? Where is the Lady of the manor? What lies behind the attic door high up under the eaves of the house?

“Where is Lady Thorne, Cassias? Where is your wife?”

Bookish Things: 194 pages. The cover is glorious and very fitting of the style of story.

Review: Dark Closets

Read on 9th July 2023.

Synopsis: A double header of horror!
In the first of two frightening tales, a young boy turns the monster in the closet loose on a much more grown up fear.
Then, a midnight visitor slithers from a man’s darkest imagination and becomes an all-too-real roommate.

Bookish Things: 12 pages. The cover is very basic and looks homemade.

Where to buy: Amazon on kindle for $1.66.

My Review: 

Bookshelves: horror, 2-star-review, indie-author, made-me-bored, paranormal, short-story, something-missing, too-short

I have no idea when I added this to my TBR List, and I only decided to read this one today because I forgot to get out my next physical book to read, so I picked this very short 12 page story (two actually) to tide me over until I get my book out.

These two stories read very much like writing exercises in horror writing 101. Very little characterisation and almost zero story arc. Mostly just a jumble of sensations and an attempt to build an eerie sense of dread.

While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with these stories, they’re very basic and the ‘twists’ are signposted well in advance.

If you pick this up for free you might enjoy it, but I wouldn’t bother if you have to pay. Took less than 10mins to read both.

I’d probably consider something longer from the author if it’s out there.

Review: Marrow’s Pit by Keith Deininger

Read on 7th January 2023

Synopsis: 

Built to encompass the entire range of lifeless mountains, it had always, relentlessly, clanked on and on. Within, vast halls and endless corridors were filled with the sounds of metal on metal, with hissing steam, with squealing gears. In the eyes of its citizens, it was sacred, deified, omniscient. Enshrined in their mythology for innumerable generations, it had gone by countless designations, but its truest name was perhaps its plainest: the Machine.

For Ballard, the Machine is a place of tedium, and ignorance, and cruelty. He sees little use in his mundane job and secretly questions the purpose of the Machine. When tragedy strikes, Ballard is forced to embark on a paranoid journey that will take him outside of the Machine, and everything he’s ever known, over the edge into darkness, past the point of no return…toward the blackness known as Marrow’s Pit.

Bookish Things: 126 pages. The cover is kinda dark and gritty, like the book, but also lots of interesting details if you look hard enough.

Where to buy: This novella doesn’t appear to be available to buy any longer on Amazon.

My Review: 

Bookshelves: awesome-authors, 3-star-review, gore-and-blood, horror, indie-author, novella, something-missing

I went into this novella after reading Keith’s Shadow Animals, so perhaps I’d done myself a disservice by starting with a great story.

Marrow’s Pit has a strong sense of world, in so much as most people’s world view is of the Machine they live in. With only a few glimpses of life outside of the machine, it’s hard to know what sort of world the book is set. This could have been an opening to something wonderful or truly horrific.

Ballard is a genuinely dislikable character who has zero backbone. I struggled to feel anything for him, his wife or his friends. While unlikable casts have been done before, you don’t get enough of anything to help you see past the initial dislike of them.

The gore/horror elements were scattered throughout, and while somewhat gruesome, didn’t do much more than offer shock value to a kinda okay story.

The writing was good, but let down by characters I didn’t like or relate to and not enough of a story to really draw me in. Not Keith’s best.

Review: Revenant (The Tatterdemon Trilogy)

Read from 23-28th December 2022

Synopsis: 

In 1691 the town of Crossfall taught the witch Thessaly how to die. They beat her, they shot her, they hung her – but nothing worked. When they finally tried to bury her alive Thessaly set the field against them. The first man died as a gust of wind harrowed the meat from his bones. A root,flung like a dirty javelin, cut a second man down. Many more deaths followed. The Preacher Fell impaled the witch upon her very own broom but she dragged him down into the field to wait for three more centuries.

Three hundred years later Maddy Harker will murder her bullying husband Vic. She will bury him in the field as she buried her abusive father years before that. The very same field where the revenant spirit of Thessaly Cross lies waiting.

In three days Vic will rise again – a thing of dirt, bone and hatred.

Men will call him the Tatterdemon.

And hell – and Thessaly – will follow

This is the first volume of a three part novel. All three parts are available on Kindle – either separately or together in a full-sized omnibus novel.

Review: Shadow Animals

Read on 20th December 2022

Synopsis: 

Saul, who has lived his entire life on the edge of the Copperton Forest—known for its strange and unusual wildlife—knows little about what stalks him. He knows only that it is dark, and powerful, and unnamable—and that it has stolen his nine-year-old son, Ezzy, from him.

Now he must travel into those ethereal woods, further upriver than he’s ever gone, into a wondrous, yet surreal and nightmarish world unlike anything he’s ever known, to recover his son from the shadows, if he can survive the journey…

“Shadow Animals is a nightmare journey into the realm of the fantastique. Deininger’s surreal narrative is a live wire of suspense that crackles with tension. Who’d have thought the gates of hell were hidden in the New Mexican wilderness?”
~ Michael McBride, author of Burial Ground and Fearful Symmetry

Bookish Things: 102 pages. The cover is eerily beautiful.