This is Shocktober. Book suggestions.

9/18/2021

Post recommendations for our 'Book of the Month' for Shocktober in the comments. Get them in by Saturday, September 25th at 2:00 pm MT so they may be included in the survey. The survey will be available at 3:00 pm.

7 Comments

Andy

9/18/2021 08:20:15 am

If it bleeds - Stephen King

Stephanie

9/18/2021 08:36:18 am

What's scarier than SIDS? Sorcery and witchcraft! And this book has both!

Also:!! Gabby Petito posted on her Instagram page that she had been reading Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby. The characters in the book go on a road trip to find all the copies of the book and destroy the page with the culling song.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (272 pages)

Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers.

Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

Written with a style and imagination that could only come from Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby is the latest outrage from one of our most exciting writers at work today

Sean

9/18/2021 09:32:01 am

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.

To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.

Evan

9/25/2021 09:05:09 am

Jerkstore! Jerkstore is the one!

Evan

9/25/2021 09:10:46 am

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla is an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years.

First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871-72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The character is a prototypical example of the lesbian vampire, expressing romantic desires toward the protagonist.

The novella notably never acknowledges homosexuality as an antagonistic trait, leaving it subtle and relatively unmentioned. The story is often anthologized and has been adapted many times in film and other media.

madison

9/25/2021 12:53:26 pm

The Mary Shelly Club by Goldy Moldavsky

When it comes to horror movies, the rules are clear:

x Avoid abandoned buildings, warehouses, and cabins at all times.
x Stay together: don’t split up, not even just to “check something out.”
x If there’s a murderer on the loose, do not make out with anyone.

If only surviving in real life were this easy...

New girl Rachel Chavez turns to horror movies for comfort, preferring stabby serial killers and homicidal dolls to the bored rich kids of Manhattan Prep...and to certain memories she’d preferred to keep buried.

Then Rachel is recruited by the Mary Shelley Club, a mysterious society of students who orchestrate Fear Tests, elaborate pranks inspired by urban legends and movie tropes. At first, Rachel embraces the power that comes with reckless pranking. But as the Fear Tests escalate, the competition turns deadly, and it’s clear Rachel is playing a game she can’t afford to lose.

madison

9/25/2021 12:54:44 pm

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three.

A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time.
A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory.
And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible.

An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.

This is Shocktober. Book suggestions.

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