Horror – Chiara Reads

Don’t Tell a Soul by Kirsten Miller

Title: Don’t Tell a Soul

Author: Kirsten Miller

Genre: Horror, Mystery

Year: 2021

In the dark, it made no difference if my eyes were open or shut.

Bram needs to get away from her life and the things that happened in her past. When the occasion presents itself, she leaves the city and goes to Louth, a small town where his uncle James is restoring an ancient manor in the hopes of making a hotel out of it.

But James is haunted by his own ghosts since the fire that killed his wife and destroyed half of his lovingly renovated manor. There are also other ghosts, or so the rumours say: they are called the Dead Girls, a list of young women who have disappeared after staying at the manor Bram calls home. But the locals are not too friendly with outsiders, and the more she investigates the past of these women, the more Bram start to fear she will be the next one.

The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie

Title: The Children of Red Peak

Author: Craig DiLouie

Genre: Horror

Year: 2020

After years of outrunning the past, David Young now drove straight toward it.

Fifteen years ago, the members of the Family of the Living Spirit committed mass suicide after months of torture and near starvation. Only five kids survived that fatal night, but the trauma they experienced still haunts them to this day.

Now Emily is dead as well. She committed suicide, after sending each of her friends a note to tell them that she couldn’t fight it anymore. David, Deacon and Beth get together for the funeral. They all coped differently with their trauma, finding solace and safety in family, music, or career. As they share their stories and memories of that time, they come to understand that there’s only a way to really leave the past behind them: go back to Red Peak, where their world ended fifteen years ago, and finally find out the truth of what happened.

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Title: Pet Sematary

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Horror

Year: 1983

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis – like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock’s close. A man grows what he can… and he tends it.”

When Dr. Louis Creed takes a new job and moves his family to the idyllic rural town of Ludlow, Maine, this new beginning seems too good to be true. Despite Ludlow’s tranquillity, the town is not as safe as it seems. Those trucks on the road outside the Creed’s beautiful home travel by just a little too quickly, for one thing… as is evidenced by the makeshift graveyard in the nearby woods, where for generations children have buried their beloved pets. Then there are the warnings that Louis receives, both real and from the depths of his nightmares, that he should not venture beyond the borders of the Pet Sematary, where another burial ground, ancient and more sinister, lures with seductive promises and temptations. A blood-chilling truth is hidden there—one more terrifying than death itself, and hideously more powerful. As Louis is about to discover for himself, sometimes dead is better…

The Cavern by Alister Hodge

This review is a rant, and it’s full of spoilers. You have been warned.

Title: The Cavern

Author: Alister Hodge

Genre: Horror

Year: 2019

When a sinkhole opens up in the Australian outback near the town of Pintalba, it reveals an unexplored cave system. Sam is recruited as a paramedic support by his girlfriend Ellie and her team of cave enthusiasts to explore it before anyone else, but as they descend into the dark, they realise that someone – or something – else is hiding down there, and it’s eager to find them.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

This review needs a short introduction.

A couple of weeks ago, I gathered my courage, turned on all the lights in my house, and watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. And I loved it.
It’s a very, very loose adaptation of the novel by the same title by Shirley Jackson, but Mark Flanagan manages to translate the Gothic novel into modern times while doing an amazing job at characters and story.

So obviously when I heard that The Haunting of Bly Manor was coming out really soon, I got very exited and decided to read the book it was based on before watching the series. For those few souls who don’t know, The Haunting of Bly Manor is an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, a 1898 novella by author Henry James. The fact that the book was already on my very long reading list only made the choice easier.

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

Title: Home Before Dark

Author: Riley Sager

Genre: Horror, Mystery

Year: 2020

Every house has a story to tell.

Maggie Holt has lived all her life in the shadows of her father’s book, an account of the twenty days they spent in the Victorian estate called Baneberry Hall, before fleeing in the dead of night and swearing never to come back. House of Horrors, that’s the title of the book, is an allegedly true account of the haunted house and the spirits that tried to kill five-year-old Maggie during their stay. She has no recollection of the events, but the success of the book has shaped all of her relationships: from the kids asking her about ghosts, to the teenagers inviting her to seances, to the hundreds of people who, at the mention of her name, ask her: What was it like? Living in that house.

Horrid by Katrina Leno

Title: Horrid

Author: Katrina Leno

Genre: Horror, Mystery, YA

Year: 2020

She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

Jane North-Robinson is moving across country with her mother Ruth, after her father died and left them with no money. With no other option on the horizon, her mother decided to sell their house and go back to her childhood home, a place she hates and had promised never to go back to. North Manor is big, dark, full of broken windows and strange noises, and in the backyard there are huge rosebushes blooming out of season.

Jane is grieving for her father, but she does her best to adjust to her new life. She makes new friends at school, while at the same time becoming the target for the town bully and struggling to cope with her rising anger. Only her father and her books can calm her down, and now he’s gone. Whenever she’s upset, she picks up one of her childhood books and starts eating a page, slowly, feeling her anger fading as the paper settles in her stomach.

But anger is not her only issue. The house is getting to her: the strange noises, like steps on the upper floor; the lights flickering on and off in one of the empty rooms; the roses growing back wild and black after her mother cut down the bushes. She starts blacking out from time to time, and comes back to consciousness to find messages she doesn’t remember ever sending. Her mother feels far away, buried in her new job and evading Jane’s questions about the house and her past. It all seems to point to the “storage room” her mother keeps locked, and when Jane finally finds the courage to open the door, she doesn’t find piles of boxes inside, but instead a little girl’s room left untouched for years.

Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power

Title: Burn Our Bodies Down

Author: Rory Power

Genre: Horror, Mystery, YA

Year: 2020

How to keep a fire burning.
How to stitch a fight up until it’s only a scar.
That’s the kind of thing you learn with a mother like mine.
Mostly, though, you learn how to be loved without proof.

Margot Nielsen doesn’t know anything about her family. She lives with a mother that feels absent, and their relationship is strained at best. There are moments of tenderness, but they are rare and fleeting, and Margot has learned that the wrong word can destroy them in the blink of an eye.

But she wants something more. She wants a past and family to belong to, and when she finds an old picture that points her to a city called Phalene, she knows what to do.

In Phalene, it takes the locals only a look to guess her last name, and that wins her wary looks all around. Her grandmother is well known and not exactly loved, and the corn fields belonging to her look sickly. Despite everything, when she steps in the old family house, Margot feels like she can finally fill the void left by her mother’s secrets. She has no idea of just how many more are waiting for her within those walls.