Just one more minute!

I'm fascinated by all things bookish, living a thousands lives and indulging in all genres; from horror to romance, and of course YA books. 

— feeling excited

10 books of 2015 which you should read before Halloween

Reblogged from BookLikes:

IN A DARK, DARK ROOM

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house.

And in that dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room.

And in that dark, dark room there was a dark, dark chest.

And in that dark, dark chest there was a dark, dark shelf.

And on that dark, dark shelf there was a dark, dark box.

And in that dark, dark box there was — A GHOST!

 

Identical twins share a connection that even modern science doesn't fully understand. Closer than mere blood can bind, deeper than any sibling bond, one cell, one mind, one beginning. Alannah Clark has found the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. A magician - but magicians have secrets - secrets that might outweigh Alannah's own dark corners. But nothing remains hidden forever. Magic, thrills, romance, suspense, and sorrow are the emotions of John R. Little's newest and darkest thoughts. Fans are sure to get a thrill ride as he unleashes his newest adventure...
 
When sixteen-year-old Amanda Verner's family decides to move from their small mountain cabin to the vast prairie, she hopes it is her chance for a fresh start. She can leave behind the memory of the past winter; of her sickly ma giving birth to a baby sister who cries endlessly; of the terrifying visions she saw as her sanity began to slip, the victim of cabin fever; and most of all, the memories of the boy she has been secretly meeting with as a distraction from her pain. The boy whose baby she now carries...
 
Simon. Something frightful has happened to Jamie. Please come...
When James Asher is found unconscious in the cemetery of the Church of St. Clare Pieds-Nus with multiple puncture-wounds in his throat and arms, his wife, Lydia, knows of only one person to call: the vampire Don Simon Ysidro. Old friend and old adversary, he is the only one who can help Lydia protect her unconscious, fevered husband from the vampires of Paris. Why James has been attacked – and why he was called to Paris in the first place – Lydia has no idea. But she knows that she must find out, and quickly. For with James wavering between life and death, and war descending on the world, their slim chance of saving themselves from the vampires grows slimmer with each passing day...
 
In this asylum, your mind plays tricks on you all the time ... Delia's new house isn't just a house. Long ago, it was the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females -- an insane asylum nicknamed "Hysteria Hall." However, many of the inmates were not insane, just defiant and strong willed. Kind of like Delia herself. But the house still wants to keep "troubled" girls locked away. So, in the most horrifying way, Delia becomes trapped. And that's when she learns that the house is also haunted. Ghost girls wander the hallways in their old-fashioned nightgowns...
 
The heart-stopping third book in the New York Times bestselling Asylum series follows three teens as they take a senior year road trip to one of America's most haunted cities, uncovering dangerous secrets from their past along the way. With all the thrills, chills, and eerie found photographs that led Publishers Weekly to call Asylum "a strong YA debut," Catacomb is perfect for fans for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Sometimes the past is better off buried. Senior year is finally over. After all they've been through, Dan, Abby, and Jordan are excited to take one last road trip together, and they're just not going to think about what will happen when the summer ends...
 
Just back from rehab, Casey regrets letting her friends Shana, Julie, and Aya talk her into coming to Survive the Night, an all-night, underground rave in a New York City subway tunnel. Surrounded by frightening drugs and menacing strangers, Casey doesn’t think Survive the Night could get any worse...until she comes across Julie’s mutilated body in a dank, black subway tunnel, red-eyed rats nibbling at her fingers. Casey thought she was just off with some guy—no one could hear her getting torn apart over the sound of pulsing music. And by the time they get back to the party, everyone is gone...
 
Enjoy 11 spooky campfire tales based on legends and true events in and around the Great Lakes region. Filled with creepy and sometimes humorous details, each has historic significance. Shiver as you read about the ghosts in Duluth, Minnesota, haunting the Glensheen Mansion, and the myth of a giant moose terrorizing tourists off the North Shore of Lake Superior. Meet the Melon Head Creatures, living in a dark and forbidden forest off Lake Michigan, the result of a mad scientist’s experiments, or a classic Lady in White. Discover the Manitous water gods, Native American spirits living at the bottom of the lake always looking for unsuspecting prey...
 
John Wayne Cleaver hunts demons: they've killed his neighbors, his family, and the girl he loves, but in the end he's always won. Now he works for a secret government kill team, using his gift to hunt and kill as many monsters as he can...but the monsters have noticed, and the quiet game of cat and mouse is about to erupt into a full scale supernatural war. John doesn't want the life he's stuck with. He doesn't want the FBI bossing him around, he doesn't want his only friend imprisoned in a mental ward, and he doesn't want to face the terrifying cannibal who calls himself The Hunter. John doesn't want to kill people. But as the song says, you can't always get what you want...
 
If life has taught me one thing, it is this: that the worst monsters are entirely human.
It began in a hole in the ground, in Paris, in the days after the liberation. What I saw there I saw only for the time it takes a match to burn down, and yet it decided the rest of my life. I tried to forget it at first, to ignore it, but I could not. It came back to me; he came back to me. He hurt people I loved... And so I took the first step on a journey from which there would be no return; a path that led me to fear, to hatred and to revenge - but, above all else, to blood...
 
In the bestselling vein of Guillermo Del Toro and Justin Cronin, the acclaimed author of Chimera and The Hydra Protocol delivers his spectacular breakout novel—an entertaining page-turning zombie epic that is sure to become a classic.
Anyone can be positive . . .
The tattooed plus sign on Finnegan's hand marks him as a Positive. At any time, the zombie virus could explode in his body, turning him from a rational human into a ravenous monster. His only chance of a normal life is to survive the last two years of the potential incubation period. If he reaches his twenty-first birthday without an incident, he'll be cleared...
 
What books are you going to read before Halloween, Booklikers? Share your #Halloween-reading with us.
— feeling vampire

BookLikes bloggers recommend for Halloween

Reblogged from BookLikes:
— feeling vampire

Already the middle of October and we gathered what you're dared to read before the Halloween.

 

The Haunting of Hill House

The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

 

The Dead House

The Dead House, which is set for fall 2015, is about the discovery of a diary in the ruins of a high school that burned down a quarter-century earlier. The diary was written by a girl whom no-one is sure ever existed.

 

 The story mostly revolves around Carly and Kaitlyn, twin sisters of sorts, or perhaps not? They're two minds in one body, and who can tell whether one is crazy and the other just a mere symptom, or whether they're actually two souls who just happen to coexist in an unusual way—Carly during the day, and Kaitlyn at night? After their parents' death, the "sisters" are sent to Elmbridge, a boarding school in Somerset, but their stay there is chaotic, as they're regularly sent back to Claydon, a psychiatric facility for teens. Under the guidance of Dr. Lansing, Carly has to accept that Kaitlyn is only an alter, meant to hold the painful memory of the night when her family was torn asunder. And yet... Doesn't Kaitlyn exist in her own way, too? Is she a construct, or a real person? Doesn't her diary reflect how real she is, just as real as Carly?

 

Pigeons from Hell

“Pigeons From Hell” is the spellbinding short novel of two stranded motorists and a local sheriff who battle strange and malevolent forces that inhabit a run-down, abandoned mansion in the middle of a swamp in the middle of nowhere. "Pigeons from Hell," remains one of Robert E. Howard's most celebrated horror stories and has seen several reprints including the Pyramid Weird Tales anthology published in 1964. Although Howard is best remembered as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, he was equally recognized in the 1930s pulps for his incredible horror stories.

This short story was a blast! It's been recommended to me many times and I've always been too busy to work it in. Being on the front edge of a reading slump, and usually having good luck with short stories to get me out of it, I decided to finally read this classic.  It's short, sweet and scary. What more could you want?

 

The Venus Complex

A man rises out of an abyss of frustration and rage and creates works of art out of destruction, goddesses out of mere dental hygienists and beauty out of death. It's also about the sickness and obsession that is LOVE.Enter into Michael's world through the pages of his personal journal, where every diseased thought, disturbing dream, politically incorrect rant and sexually explicit murder highlights his journey from zero to psycho.

The Venus Complex is a provocative journey into a psychopathic consciousness that is one of the most gripping and disturbing mind trips I've read. Told in a journal entry style first person narration, the first time we meet Michael Friday is the recounting of his wife's death in a car accident. His wife was cheating on him, his accusation and her reaction bring about a clean definitive snap of his mind, from normal to implacable killer and here lies the beginning of a jaunt that nibbles the edges of sanity until there's only one possible outcome.

 

Ghostopolis

A page-turning adventure of a boy's journey to the land of ghosts and back.Imagine Garth Hale's surprise when he's accidentally zapped to the spirit world by Frank Gallows, a washed-out ghost wrangler. Suddenly Garth finds he has powers the ghosts don't have, and he's stuck in a world run by the evil ruler of Ghostopolis, who would use Garth's newfound abilities to rule the ghostly kingdom. When Garth meets Cecil, his grandfather's ghost, the two search for a way to get Garth back home, and nearly lose hope until Frank Gallows shows up to fix his mistake.

Great graphic novel! It's touching and a bit creepy. I would definitely reccomend! It held my attention and I couldn't wait to see how it ended.

 

In a Dark, Dark Wood

When Nora Shaw is invited to the hen do of an old school friend she hasn't seen in years, she's delighted to have a chance to reconnect with her old friend. Little does she know something is about to go horribly wrong... In A Dark, Dark Wood marks the launch of a major new star in psychological fiction.
Leonara Shaw, a writer in her mid-twenties, has been invited to the hen do of an old school friend. Nora hasn't seen Clare in years but she's looking forward to a chance to reconnect with her friend, even if she's surprised not to be invited to the wedding itself. But something goes wrong. Nora wakes up in a hospital room with her head bandaged and a police guard outside her door. Are they there to protect her or arrest her? Nora is worried. Worried because her first thought is not "what's happened to me?" but "what have I done?"

The author knows how to keep the reader on the edge of the seat waiting for the next exciting scene! When the story began, Leonora Shaw, an author who writes crime novels for a living, has received an unusual and unexpected invitation to a hen night for a friend she had not seen in a decade. The email was addressed to the name she used to call herself, Lee, but now she was known as Nora. She couldn’t figure out why her old friend Claire Cavendish would even want her at her hen party. For old time’s sake, though, when Claire’s friend Flo kept calling and pleading with her to come because Claire would be so pleased, she filled with guilt and decided to go.

 

Books of Blood

With the 1984 publication of Books of Blood, Clive Barker became an overnight literary sensation. He was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror," and won both the British and World Fantasy Awards. Now, with his numerous bestsellers, graphic novels, and hit movies like the Hellraiser films, Clive Barker has become an industry unto himself. But it all started here, with this tour de force collection that rivals the dark masterpieces of Edgar Allan Poe. Read him. And rediscover the true meaning of fear.

Fans of Clive Barker's earliest fiction may talk of how he lost his step, by turning away from the more visceral aspects of dark fiction towards the more fantastical. For them, at least they can look back upon these volumes of short stories and revel in what may be the finest collection of horror literature of the 80s, or any other decade. I'm a fan of Barker's fantasy stories, as much as his horror stories, but I must admit there is something unique and indelible about the tales Barker has weaved in these early collections. If you're new to his work and are not averse to being disturbed, you should make it a point to read these stories.

 

"“Harry Potter isn't real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.” "

John Green

"“How do you feel, Georgie?" whispered Mrs. Weasley.
George's fingers groped for the side of his head.
"Saintlike," he murmured.
"What's wrong with him?" croaked Fred, looking terrified. "Is his mind affected?"
"Saintlike," repeated George, opening his eyes and looking up at his brother. "You see...I'm HOLEY, Fred, geddit?”"

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

"You used to be much more..."muchier." You've lost your muchness."

Alice In Wonderland, the Mad Hatter 

A Face Like Glass (First Impressions)

OK, you may be wondering, a face like wha? 

Let's make it clear, it's a book! obviously...e_e 

 

A Face Like Glass, by Frances Hardinge.

 

My first impressions? Brilliant! Now I'm not one to judge a book by it's cover but this particular cover really stood out against the other books in the shop. Partly because I was craving a new fantasy novel and partly because it was placed, facing me whilst the other books were laying on their backs. I've only read a few chapters of the book but felt it deserved a review anyway! and this is my first so I'm overly excited, it's my chance to (hopefully not) bore you with my impressions so far! 

 

I don't really want to give anything away because if there's something I truly hate, it's people who spoil books...without mentioning the FACT THAT IT'S A SPOILER! 

But luckily this isn't, but the idea behind this book is extraordinary! I like to describe it as 'something like Alice In Wonderland...except without Alice...or the wonderland part' but those who have read it can agree that it does have the feeling, right? or is it just me...The book's cover really did make me pause and stare for a few minutes, quite understandable really, but you know you've just got to buy a book if it has that sort of impression on you. The particular cover I'm talking about is the one with the huge onion cage, it's really does look amazing, yes, yes I know I shouldn't be promoting a novel based on it's looks, it's like trusting a cat with your fish because it looks so darn cute...off topic...anyway, this book is seriously one NOT to miss and I know in a few days I'll be posting the how much I loved it!

 

The book literally makes me crave cheese, AND I'M ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH! 

 

So put your feet up bookworms and inherit a cheese factory because things have just got incredibly Grate! :D 

 

"“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
"

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland