Synopsis:
An aging rock star buys an old suit that brings with it a vengeful spirit with a personal vendetta.
Review:
Let’s just get it out of the way. Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. His debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, is a work of horror. And not only is it damn good, it’s good enough [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

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Synopsis:
While working on a novel in Tunisia, a writer encounters his own heart of darkness.
Review:
I had written a truly brilliant review of Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery, but it got eaten. Fie! The salient points were:

Patricia Highsmith plays cat and mouse with the reader just like her most famous creation Tom Ripley [...]

Popularity: 42% [?]

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Synopsis:
Short stories, essays, and an unfinished novel by Shirley Jackson, queen of American Gothic and author of “The Lottery.”
Review:
My love for Shirley Jackson has been well documented in this blog, so I was delighted when my husband got me Come Along With Me for my birthday.
The collection opens with “Come Along With Me,” the novel [...]

Popularity: 56% [?]

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Synopsis:
After finally returning to her homeland, having been kidnapped as a child, Yelena must tame the magic she never knew she had even as she’s suspected of being a spy and embroiled in the hunt to catch a nefarious serial killer.
Review:
It’s been a little exciting up in here lately, with new baby being WAY more [...]

Popularity: 52% [?]

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Synopsis:
Five Toronto college students are pulled into an alternate world where they discover their true destinies at the outset of a war that could affect all worlds, including their own.
Review:
Yep, another hard-to-synopsize epic fantasy book. The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay employs one of the standard fantasy templates–ordinary people drawn into an extraordinary [...]

Popularity: 53% [?]

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Synopsis:
Fearful of her husband’s sexual advances, a young mother falls into a spectacular case of hysteria–that might not be all in her head.
Review:
Angelica is yet another neo-Gothic tale, set in a Victorian England conjured more from literature than from history. It has all of the elements you’d want: repressed sexuality, midnight visions, hysteria and [...]

Popularity: 47% [?]

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Synopsis:
A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think).
Review:
What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing [...]

Popularity: 90% [?]

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Synopsis:
A new house in a suburban Atlanta neighborhood spells disaster for all its inhabitants.
Review:
It’s awfully hard to be frightened when you’re sitting on a rooftop deck in West Hollywood, letting the setting sun dry your bathing suit after discovering that you can float like a cork in the saltwater pool.
Popularity: 75% [?]

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Popularity: 75% [?]

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Synopsis:
Young Simon is in the middle of the biggest adventure his land has seen in years, but if he and is friends fail their mission, the wicked Storm King will prevail. Book Two of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.
Review:
I know it sounds like Lord of the Rings, but it’s all in the details, people. [...]

Popularity: 42% [?]

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Synopsis:
Entranced by the folk tales of an old mountain man, and repulsed by the same man’s grisly crimes, Redmond Hatch struggles to narrate the events which led him to bring his beloved wife and daughter to winterwood.
Review:
I was upset by the way Winterwood seduced me. I did not want to be reeled in [...]

Popularity: 100% [?]

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