Tag: Thriller

Mister Magic by Kiersten White

Fiction

I was drawn to this book similar to how I have been drawn to the horror section of the bookstore lately. I just now noticed while I was writing this that I have been reading a bunch of thrillers lately. I guess my mind needed a change from the romantasy binge I ended a few weeks ago and now it has found its new obsession. Think of this as a warm up for October, when I plan to read horror and thrillers all month long. With its vibrant pink cover, which I thought was an unusual choice for a book in the horror section, it seemed to be saying “pick me”. I didn’t even read the back for a synopsis, I just grabbed it and went to the register. 

Not knowing anything about the story going into a new book is a rare thing for me. I usually choose books based on what I read from the back cover or from my ever growing list of books I hope to one day read. By the time I got to the chapter that comes after two, I was hooked. I say the chapter after two because the one that follows two is not titled three, as you might expect. I won’t say what it is, but I loved what the author did, it very much suited the story and I found myself always looking forward to discovering the very on theme chapter names. The plot of the story is based around a very mysterious canceled children’s show that everyone seems to remember differently but that no one can prove the actual events of. Why? Because there is no physical evidence that the show ever existed, no video tapes, no audio recordings, nothing. The story takes place in the present, thirty years after the last episode airs, when there is a reunion of the last group of kids, now adults, that appeared on the show. I was frustrated a lot while I read this, because I was just as confused as the main character, Val, who cannot remember anything from her time on the show with her friends. Something traumatic happened to her, and she cannot remember anything in her life before the age of eight, which is when her father removed her from the show and took her far, far away from where it was filmed. 

It’s an unusual story, with elements of horror and mystery, cults, in more than one type of form, trauma, loss, and closure. It doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but some people might be satisfied with the way things turned out. I’m still trying to decide if I accept the way things ended or if I would have preferred something else.

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

Fiction

I had a really great time with this book. Until the very end I could not tell if what was going on in the village was real or a paranormal incident. I won’t spoil anything for you, I’ll just give a little background on the plot. 

Alice is an aspiring filmmaker, and by aspiring I mean that she went to school for it and has had no success or real life experience in the field yet. Everyone she had classes with seems to be doing well and having success in their careers, yet she can’t seem to land a job. Filming a documentary about an abandoned village in Sweden has been something she has been dreaming of doing her entire life, and she finally has gotten enough money, volunteers, and resources together to begin the project. She’s done the research, rented all the necessary equipment, and sourced together a few good friends to help her scout out the area and take preliminary photos and videos. It seems that she has done all the necessary prep work to make the project go smoothly, including intense research of the area and sourcing former residents of the village to interview. But once she and her crew are in the village all the research in the world has not prepared her for when things start to go wrong almost immediately. 

The back cover has it right, it does feel like you are reading a book that would be akin to the Blair Witch Project. It’s a little spooky, mysterious, and has psychological elements. I also really enjoyed reading a thriller that took place in Sweden. I love the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, and while this book was nothing like those books it for some reason made me want to go back and read the whole series again. It also made me want to read another book by this author, titled The Resting Place. So if you decide to read The Lost Village and enjoy it, maybe you will also be interested in another work by the author. If you get to it before I do, let me know what you think!

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Fiction

I’m going to call it now and say that this is the best book I have read this month. I was as entranced as I get when I’m reading a fantasy novel, I kept looking forward to all the free moments I would have in my day so that I could read more. I have been classifying a lot of the fiction books I have been reading lately as ones I would not read again. It was making me feel disappointed in the genre as a whole. This one, however, is going to be a repeat read in my future. 

We get two first person points of view, one from first semester college student Carly, and one from English professor, Dr. Scarlett Clark. The two women couldn’t be more different, Carly being shy, reserved, and unsure, Scarlett meanwhile being confident, ambitious, and masterful. You wonder if they are going to cross paths, since they are both at the same college, but what the circumstances might be to land them in the same place, different as they are. Scarlett intrigued me from the very beginning, I love a villainous female lead, and an intelligent one at that. Her purpose in life is a mission that I would classify as lawful evil, what she is doing is wrong by the majority of civilized societies standards, but she has her reasons for why she chooses to deliver her form of justice. And I can’t say that I disagree with her reasons. 

I don’t want to get too much more into it, I don’t want to ruin the plot for you because it is very good. It gets messy for a while, you are constantly on edge wondering if her secret is going to be discovered, it’s part of the reason why I couldn’t wait to read it every day. I will say this though, world’s do collide at some point but not in the way I expected at all and I think you might be surprised too. I highly recommend it!

Nocticadia by Keri Lake

Fiction

I absolutely loved this book! I am so excited that I found a dark romance standalone that has substance to go along with the smut. It had everything that I love in a story, a mystery that takes time to unravel, a fair bit of gore, science, and a little bit of drama. 

Our main lady, Lilia Vespertine, is an intelligent girl who dreams of being a doctor as she takes one or two classes a semester at a community college while she works full time and then some. Miserable, constantly exhausted, and always worried about money, Lilia thinks it will take her a decade or more before she can reach her dreams, if they are even possible at all. After a professor is very impressed over a paper she wrote, Lilia is given the opportunity to have her dreams come true, with a full scholarship for a semester at a prestigious university. She does the smart thing and leaves her very unfulfilling life behind.

The way the author describes the campus makes me wish it was real and that I was even a little bit qualified to go there. Old, gothic buildings converted into lecture halls, classrooms, and dorms, with the addition of modern structures and modern amenities, on an isolated island that also has a beautiful town. Lilia is one of the few students that is not privileged, making her feel like an imposter as she walks around campus in her second hand clothes and borrowed laptop, surrounded by young people in designer fashions that drink eight dollar coffees. She finds it hard to make friends, never really having had time for them in the past four years, but there is one person that it seems she would make all the time in the world for. That person just happens to be one of her professors, Devryck Bramwell.

He is such an immovable, cold, intelligent character, I was instantly into him. He was pretty much my ideal fictional guy, super smart, driven, with strict self imposed rules that he eventually breaks. He is not nice, and he often speaks cruelly, but when he finds something that he is passionate about he would do anything to protect it, or in this case, her. 

If you love a dark tale, with scandal and danger, and dirty, passionate scenes, you will really enjoy this book. I see myself reading this again in the very near future. I almost wish it wasn’t a standalone, I would love to see more of the characters, but the author has said she would not be writing any additional books about Lilia and Devryck. I kind of hope that she changes her mind.

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

Fiction

Is it just me, or are there a lot of creepy rabbit book covers on the scene lately? What Moves The Dead is just one of the many that I have seen, and it is the one that intrigued me the most. I was very interested to read what has been described as a reimagining of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, and I can tell you that there were a lot of differences but you can see the parallels. 

My favorite character in the book was Lieutenant Alex Easton, and not just because kan was the main character. That is not a typo, for Easton is not a man, but also not a woman, and so the Lieutenant goes by kan rather than him or her. Easton was born a woman, but took on the role and life of a man after her father died when she was young. I was a little confused for the first few pages, because I couldn’t figure out if Easton was a man or a woman, but after the explanation I understood. I was reminded that I had heard of this before, a woman who chooses to live her life as a man. I did a little bit of research and came across the phenomena. These women actually exist in Albania and they are called burrnesha. I read a really great article about them titled The Mountains Where Women Live As Men by Michael Paterniti, which I will put a link to below. There is a good amount of written information regarding these women, and a documentary by the BBC, so if you are intrigued you can find out more by doing your own research. Overall, I think creating this character for the story really made the entire book. 

Seeing that I gave away the surprise of the uniqueness of Lieutenant Easton’s life, I will not tell you anymore about the story itself. If you have read The Fall of the House of Usher you might have some idea of where the story is going. The cover itself also gives you a hint of the more morbid details that have been woven into this tale. 

For more information about burrnesha:

https://www.gq.com/story/burrnesha-albanian-women-living-as-men