Dear Readers, September was a good month for reading and catching up on my TBR. I read every book but one off my TBR. I exchanged that book for a library book. I read 2 books this month. I have added them to my top five books of 2024 so far. These books are A Sorceress Comes to Call and Home Is Where the Bodies Are. I read a lot of horror this month with 4 books out of the 6 having some element of horror and the other 2 were mysteries. I read 6 books this month, 1 five stars, 2 four stars, 2 three stars, and 1 two star. I read 3 books that are part of a book series. This month, I broke my views per day record by 24. This month I added creative photos to my review pages, something I’ve wanted to add to the site for some time. I aim to enhance the review by adding some elements to the book. Thanks to my talented wife for the photos.

Five Star Reviews:

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is a loose retelling of Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm. The original story Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm is 5 pages long and involves a princess, a little sorcery, and a horse named Falada who talks. T. Kingfisher has borrowed Falada, the horse that talks. They cut all the princess stuff. They also added a lot more sorcery. The Brothers Grimm story was not that good and had not heard of it before this book. T. Kingfisher has added so much to the story making it scary, compassionate, and adding a lot of heart. The story is pretty simple a mother raising a daughter by herself is tired of being poor and wants to marry into a better class. She finds an older man to do just that. The sister can see that the mother isn’t marrying her brother for love, and tries to stop it. What makes the story interesting is the mother is a murderous sorceress who will stop at nothing to move to a higher class of society. The story is well-paced and very focused. The length of the novel was perfect. There were lots of surprises within the story. One moment was so intense it made me go “holy shit.” It went the opposite of where I thought the scene was going and was both exciting and scary. The climax could have been a little better but it was followed by such a shocking scene that it could not be topped. The novel is full of such wonderful characters that are very memorable and very unique. I read A Sorceress Comes to Call thanks to Netgalley and Tor Books for giving me a free copy. A Sorceress Comes to Call was published on August 6, 2024.

Four Star Reviews:

Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose is a dark slow-burn mystery. After the death of the mother, the kids discover a home movie. The movie shows their parents with the body of a missing girl from their town. The story is dark and uneasy and mainly about grief. The novel is not a fun read but a good read. The story hooked me from the beginning and I was blown away with the writing. Every chapter had a clever metaphor that I savored. This was my favorite quote “I’ve thought about how our street goes nowhere, almost like foreshadowing for the people who stuck around.” The pace of the story is slow for the most part. There are some twists and turns that kept me going. However, I felt the slow pace. There is not a lot that happens in the story. Jeneva Rose relied heavily on dialogue and description. The plot is slow until the end. Then everything happens at once. The novel did a lot at the end it pulled everything together and gave me a shock when everything was revealed. I had doubts about the story coming together at the end but was pleasantly surprised. I was way off on my theory of what was going on.

Goosebumps – Don’t Go to Sleep! By R.L. Stine a unique horror about a boy whose reality changes every time he sleeps. The horror is in not knowing what the next day will be and can he stop it. Sometimes he wakes as older, sometimes as younger, sometimes as an animal, and once as a monster. The premise for this story is great and Stine has a lot of fun with it. The story heads in a weird direction with teenage reality cops. I could have gone without them, but they did add a ticking clock to the story. The pace is pretty good. The setup took a little too long. Still, it was pretty good compared to the 50 other Goosebumps I’ve read. The ending was a little exciting. The final twist worked well with the story you could see it going that way and was delivered decently. The horror of the story was not knowing what was going on which was written well.

Three-Star Reviews:

Plum Island by Nelson DeMille is a mystery thriller involving deadly diseases and buried treasure. Plum Island is the first book in the John Corey series. John Corey is a detective who knows all the rules but will bend and break them in the name of justice. John Corey is a cross between Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch and Columbo the TV detective. John Corey’s approach to being a detective is to joke and annoy until the suspect lets their guard down. Corey could be described as funny and horny. He is relentless in finding clues and very meticulous. The story stays with Corey the whole time, and the audience knows exactly what Corey does about the case. Corey did know the victims before but the novel does a good job of catching the reader up. The pace of the book is a little slow in the first part. It sets the scene so the audience will know everything. The second half moves very fast and leads to a very exciting ending. The ending is an intense 100 pages that feels like an action movie more than a mystery. The ending to one character is pretty brutal and will stick with me for a while. The overall mystery is great with some clever twists and turns.

Aliens – Earth Hive by Steve Perry is a science fiction horror based in the Aliens Universe. The story is about the further adventures of Newt and Corporal Hicks if they did not die in Aliens 3 before the film started (still mad about that). The names have been changed to Billie for Newt and Wilks for Hicks due to rights issues. The story is an adaptation of a Dark Horse graphic novel with the same title. This book is the first in a trilogy that will follow Billie and Wilks and eventually meet up with Ellen Ripley. Ellen Ripley is not mentioned but is slightly hinted at in a flashback. The novel uses different perspectives at different times and has them all sync up eventually. The different timelines added to the mystery effectively. They could have stretched further. We didn’t know the mission that Wilks and Billie were on at the end was pointless. The pace of the story was steady throughout. The biggest problem for me was that I had to read a couple of scenes over. The book would drop you into a scene written in the middle of it with characters that you have never met. The ending was just okay. It left a huge problem for Wilks and Billie to fix later, if at all. It added a new alien species with a twist that did not work.

Two Star Reviews:

Pay the Piper by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus is a supernatural horror book set in the Louisiana swamps. This story was an unfinished novel by George A. Romero that was found in his archive that Daniel Kraus finished. The simple plot is children in the swamps are dying and their bodies are being found in the swamp. The killer is rumored to be a swamp creature called the Piper. The pace of the story is very slow, the murders are boring, and the creature is barely in the story. I felt like this was a creature feature who forgot about the creature until the end. I had a lot of problems with this book. This came after loving the last collaboration between Romero and Kraus with The Living Dead novel. The description of the swamp and settings are almost nonexistent and very hard to picture. They describe this baseball field that the swamp took over that I tried to picture based on the description that I just could not see. The characters were hard to connect with in this ensemble for the most part I did like two. A highlight of the novel is the creature is like cancer and how that is tied into the story. I read Pay the Piper thanks to Netgalley and Union Square & Co. who gave me a free copy. Pay the Piper was published on September 3, 2024.