creepy

The Burn Palace

By Stephen Dobyns
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Helen H.
Oct 30, 2016

I’ve been obsessed with Abigail Thomas’s work, and I've been reading everything she’s written one after the other. I decided I wanted to read something else, not only to cleanse my palate, but so I would have a book I already know I’ll love waiting for me at some time in the future when I really, really need a good book to read. So I compromised and read an author whom Thomas had thanked in her acknowledgments. It worked out beautifully. Stephen Dobyns is a poet with a large body of work, but the only title readily available was The Burn Palace. I’m not typically drawn to police procedurals

Coraline

By Neil Gaiman
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Sam S.
Oct 26, 2016

While exploring the new home Coraline and her family have just moved in to, she stumbles upon a small, mysterious door hidden behind wallpaper in one of the rooms. Through it, she discovers a world very much like her own, and yet very different, including alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. This alluring world turns dark when she finds that her parents have been kidnapped and she is slowly becoming trapped in a web of her Other Mother's making.

Witches of Lychford

By Paul Cornell
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Helen H.
Jan 9, 2016

I happened upon Witches of Lychford as it lurked, unnoticed amongst row upon row of bestsellers, midlist titles, and forgotten classics--not unlike the way Autumn stumbled upon the gateway to another world. It was there all along, simply hidden in plain view.

Cornell, writer of comics like Batman & Robin, Wolverine, and Doctor Who, puts a witch, a reverend, and a non-believer of both in the middle of a clash between quaint little town lovers and the corporations that want to modernize them with big box stores. The threat of modernization is both tantalizing and threatening. The town is

The Ruins

By Scott Smith
Star Rating
★★★

Rated by Catherine G.
Mar 26, 2015

Scott Smith’s The Ruins is a calm and harmless enough story at the beginning. Four kids, just out of college, take a trip to Mexico to do nothing more than lounge on the beach and drink tequila. Shortly after arriving they make some new friends and decide to tag along with them on a day trip to the Mayan ruins. Their new friends are searching for a guy who went to the ruins the previous day, but never returned. Armed with not much more than youthful defiance and a sense of adventure, the group heads out, ignoring numerous warning signs to stay away.

As you can guess, they are anything but

Mar 27, 2013

At the end of the Victorian period, Edward Moon is a stage magician and detective whose fame is fading away. Trying to restore his former glory, he and his assistant, the Somnambulist (fancy name for sleepwalker), get caught in a twisted, nightmarish mystery where nothing is quite what it seems. In a race against time, Moon will discover if he still has what it takes to bring truth to light and save London.

The Somnabulist is one of the strangest stories I have read in some time. It is a tale of bizarre and freaky characters, weird mysteries, and dark places. I could almost hear the creepy