Troublesome Tropes #2 – Horror

Ah, horror. The Marmite of literature. You either love it or you hate it, right? Some people live and breathe this genre, while others won't even read the blurb of a horror novel lest it keep them awake all night. I'm a massive horror fan, but like any genre, it does have its fair share …

Review: ‘Paperbacks from Hell’ Grady Hendrix

Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of the 1970s and 80s . . . if you dare. Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Horror author and vintage …

DNF: ‘Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ Mendal W. Johnson

"They're just kids ... It's only a game."  That's what Barbara, a lovely twenty-year-old babysitter told herself when she awoke bound and gagged. But the knots were tight and painful and the children would not let her go. "They're just kids ... It's only a game," she told herself again. But the terror was real ... …

Review: ‘The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’ Grady Hendrix

Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller. Her ambitious husband is too busy to give her a good-bye kiss in the morning, her kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she's always a step behind on thank-you notes and her endless list of chores. The one thing she has to …

The Science behind the Scare

After a ten hour shift at work the other day, I rose from my chair, grabbed a book and a G&T and padded out onto my balcony to soak up the last of the day's sunshine. It was an idyllic scene. Birds were tweeting in the tree in front of our building, the air was …

‘The Nest’ Gregory A. Douglas

It was just an ordinary garbage dump on peaceful Cape Cod. No one ever imagined that conditions were perfect for breeding, that it was a warm womb, fetid, moist, and with food so plentiful that everything creeping, crawling, and slithering could gorge to satiation. Then a change in poison control was made, resulting in an …

Jazz’s Halloween Reads

Here's my selection of creepy reads in the run up to All Hallows' Eve. I bought The Silence based on the recommendation of Amazon after it noted that I'd reviewed Josh Malerman's Bird Box. I've heard mixed thoughts on it, but I'm a hundred pages in and enjoying it so far. As for Disappearance at Devil's Rock and The Cabin at the …

‘Bird Box’ Josh Malerman

Most people dismissed the reports on the news. But they became too frequent; they became too real. And soon it was happening to people we knew. Then the Internet died. The televisions and radios went silent. The phones stopped ringing And we couldn’t look outside anymore. I was first introduced to Josh Malerman's work when …

‘New Fears’ edited by Mark Morris

The horror genre's greatest living practitioners drag our darkest fears kicking and screaming into the light in this collection of nineteen brand-new stories. In "The Boggle Hole" by Alison Littlewood an ancient folk tale leads to irrevocable loss. In Josh Malerman's "The House of the Head" a dollhouse becomes the focus for an incident both …

‘The Amityville Horror’ Jay Anson

The classic and terrifying story of one of the most famous supernatural events--the infamous possessed house on Long Island from which the Lutz family fled in 1975. SPOILER ALERT! Okay, so this was meant to be my Halloween special review (you can check out last year's here), but because I'm shit, I'm 11 days late …