October. As the leaves are quickly separating from the trees, and the nights are starting to release the chill of pending fall… I find myself, like many of you, thinking of a little something spooky to cuddle up with in the evenings.
What scares you?
Here are a few that I would love to get the opportunity to read:
In 1987, Bohjalian purchased a Victorian house, only to discover a mysterious sealed door in the basement. But it wasn’t until 2009, when pilot Sully Sullenberger was forced to (successfully) land his plane on the Hudson River, that Bohjalian had the second thread he needed for The Night Strangers’ terrifying plot. His protagonist, Chip Linton, is a pilot who lives to tell the tale of his emergency landing on Lake Champlain. But Flight 1611 ends up with 39 casualties among the 40-odd passengers and crew. Thirty-nine just happens to be the same number of bolts that seal shut a hidden door in the basement of the new house Chip and his lawyer wife Emily move to with their twin daughters Garnet and Hallie. This retreat to the mountains of northern New Hampshire is an attempt by Chip to come to terms with the crash. However, peace doesn’t come easily.
While Chip goes about refurbishing the house (discovering the boarded-up door and random weapons hidden in nooks and crannies in the process), Emily and the twins realize this small White Mountain village is populated with numerous greenhouses and self-proclaimed herbalists. As Chip’s grief slowly descends into a type of madness, Emily begins to question why the town is so obsessed with teaching her daughters the tricks of the plants.
The basic premise, that of an amnesia victim suffering from debilitating short-term memory loss, has been thoroughly mined in print (James Hilton’s Random Harvest, G.H. Ephron’s Amnesia) and cinema (50 First Dates, Memento). Where Watson diverges from the formula is in his exhaustive exploration of one woman’s spiral into paranoia. Does Christine have a happy marriage, or is it a total sham? Does she have a son, and if so, did he die in Iraq, or is that just a figment of her overworked imagination? And what’s up with her doctor, anyway? From early on, it is clear that her husband is not being entirely truthful with her, but to what end—Christine’s well-being or something darker? On the sly, Christine begins keeping a journal, documenting the inconsistencies in the stories she is told by those she thought she could trust, leading to a showdown of epic proportions.
My name is Amelia Gray. I’m a cemetery restorer who sees ghosts. In order to protect myself from the parasitic nature of the dead, I’ve always held fast to the rules passed down from my father. But now a haunted police detective has entered my world and everything is changing, including the rules that have always kept me safe.
It started with the discovery of a young woman’s brutalized body in an old Charleston graveyard I’ve been hired to restore. The clues to the killer—and to his other victims—lie in the headstone symbolism that only I can interpret. Devlin needs my help, but his ghosts shadow his every move, feeding off his warmth, sustaining their presence with his energy. To warn him would be to invite them into my life. I’ve vowed to keep my distance, but the pull of his magnetism grows ever stronger even as the symbols lead me closer to the killer and to the gossamer veil that separates this world from the next.
For 10-year-old Beau Jackson, the annual late August trek from his home in Richmond, Virginia, to his grandmother’s ancestral property on a Georgia peninsula known as Gull Island is a dismal one. For two weeks, Beau will have to deal with his constantly arguing parents as well as his alcoholic aunt and uncle, swarms of mosquitoes, unbearable humidity—and his weird cousin Sumter Monroe.
But this summer proves to be different from past vacations. Sumter, always a little strange, is downright disturbing. Obsessed with a decrepit shack at the edge of the property, Sumter makes it his own personal clubhouse and names it Neverland, a place where grown-ups are forbidden and an old human skull is worshipped as a destroying god. Compelled to Neverland to escape the dysfunction and alcohol-fueled fights inside Grammy Weenie’s house (ironically called The Retreat), Beau and his older twin sisters Missy and Nonie enter Sumter’s dark sanctuary and become entangled in a web of evil that includes thievery, animal sacrifices, blood drinking, demon worship and, quite possibly, facilitating the beginning of the end of the world.
Thank you to Book Page and Goodreads for these suggestions
That’s just to name a few. How about you? Any “scare-awesome” reads coming up?DO any of these appeal to you or do you have others on your radar? Or maybe you skip the spooky all together…
Oh and in answer to what scares me….
dolls.
Dolls have always creeped me out.
There I said it. 😛
Book Journey 