Reader's Place: October 1, 2024
Get into the spooky season mood with this collection of horror, otherworldly mysteries, comic fantasies, and historical vampire tales.
Dreadful, by Caitlin Rozakis (Library Catalog)
A sharp-witted, high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, evil wizards and a garlic festival - all at once. It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something.
It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is…you. Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed. But as he realizes that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be?
Model Home, by Solomon Rivers (Library Catalog)
A new kind of haunted-house novel. The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned. As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family's past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a "natural" death for their parents…but was it supernatural?
Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.
The Empusium: a health resort horror story, by Olga Tokarczuk (Library Catalog)
Set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, Olga Tokarczuk’s new novel probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas. September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
I Was a Teenage Slasher, by Stephen Graham Jones (Library Catalog)
Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist. 1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
Vampires of El Norte, by Isabel Cañas (Library Catalog)
Vampires, vaqueros, and star-crossed lovers face off on the Texas-Mexico border in this supernatural western. 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. When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh. And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society, by C.M. Waggoner (Library Catalog)
A librarian with a knack for solving murders soon realizes there is something supernatural afoot in her little town in this cozy fantasy mystery. Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle keeps finding bodies - and solving murders. But she's concerned by just how many killers she's had to track down in her quaint village. None of her neighbors seem surprised by the rising body count...but Sherry is becoming convinced that whatever has been causing these deaths is unnatural. But when someone Sherry was close to ends up dead, and her cat, Lord Thomas Crowell, is possessed by what seems to be an ancient demon, Sherry realizes she is going to need an exorcist more than a detective. With the help of her town's new priest and an assortment of friends who dub themselves the "Demon Hunting Society," Sherry needs to solve the murder and get rid of the demon. This riotous mix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Murder, She Wrote is a lesson for demons and murderers alike: never mess with a librarian.
We Love the Nightlife, by Rachel Koller Croft (Library Catalog)
A dazzling and dark page-turner about a toxic female friendship finally coming to a head, set amidst the backdrop of London's exclusive nightclub scene. But these girls have an extraordinary history between them - they're vampires. London 1979. Two women with a deep love for disco meet one fateful night on the dance floor, changing the course of both their lives forever. Nicola, a beautiful and brooding vampire for nearly two centuries, can't resist fun-loving and feisty Amber from America, ultimately offering an eternity together where the glamour of nightlife always takes center stage. But not all is what it seems. Nearly fifty years later, after an unexpected betrayal, Amber wants out from under Nicola's thumb, but it won't be so simple to break up this festering friendship when she learns others have done the same - and wound up dead. Sensing Amber's restlessness and in one last play to keep her close, Nicola proposes they open a nightclub of their very own, hearkening back to their best days as dancing queens. Amber agrees but she's secretly hatching a dangerous escape plan. And if she fails...the party is over for good.