It’s that time of the year again! We’re into Blogtober now, and I really do like the challenge of trying to post as often as possible during this month. I’ll still post up regular reviews, Top Ten Tuesday, etc, and occasionally might post twice in one day, but largely I’ll be focusing on autumn and Halloween themed posts. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do 31 days in a row, but we’ll see how this goes!
Some of the books on today’s post were also included in my Fall TBR post, but there are others I’d like to get to this month, too.
October TBR
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
His father could find what was lost. His father knew when someone was going to die. His father had talked to him about the dead who rode in on the wind. The dead travel fast.
Gaspar is six years old when the Order first come for him.
For years, they have exploited his father’s ability to commune with the dead and the demonic, presiding over macabre rituals where the unwanted and the disappeared are tortured and executed, sacrificed to the Darkness. Now they want a successor.
Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar break free?
Spanning the brutal decades of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed inheritances, and the sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny.
Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women by Kris Waldherr
For the first time, the untold story of the three women closest to Victor Frankenstein is brought to life in a dark and sweeping reimagining of Frankenstein by the author of The Lost History of Dreams.
The Mother
Caroline Frankenstein will do anything to protect her family against the nightmarish revolutions engulfing 18th-century Europe. In doing so, she creates her own monster in the form of her scientist son, Victor, whose obsession with conquering death leads to forbidden realms.
The Bride
Rescued by Caroline as a four-year-old beggar, angelic Elizabeth Lavenza understands the only way she can repay the Frankensteins is by accepting Victor’s hand in marriage. But when Elizabeth’s heart yearns for someone else, the lives of those she most loves collide with the unnatural creature born of Victor’s profane experiments.
The Servant
After an abusive childhood, otherworldly Justine Moreau is taken in by Caroline to serve the Frankensteins. Justine’s devotion to Caroline and Elizabeth knows no bounds … until a family tragedy changes her irrevocably. Her fate sets her against Victor’s monster, who is desperate for a mate—and desperate to wreak revenge against the Frankensteins.
The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film by Matt Glasby, Illustrated by Barney Bodoano
The Book of Horror introduces you to the scariest movies ever made and examines the factors that make them so frightening.
Horror movies have never been more critically or commercially successful, but there’s only one metric that matters: are they frightening? Back in the silent era, viewers thrilled at George Méliès’ The House of the Devil and Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein. Today, the films may have changed, but the instinct remains the same: to seek out the unspeakable, ride the adrenaline rush and play out our fears in the safety of the cinema.
The Anatomy of Horror will focus on the most frightening films made since the 1960s –from The Innocents (1961) to The Blair Witch Project (1999) to It: Chapter Two (2019) – and examine how they were directed to capitalise on fear. Matt Glasby charts each movie against seven psychological factors (dead space, the subliminal, the unexpected, the grotesque, dread, the uncanny, the unstoppable) to see how each one plays so successfully on terror. The text will also give insider knowledge about how the plots were devised, chart each film’s scariest moments with infographics and tell you the key horror films you need to watch.
Including references to over 100 classic horror films and striking illustrations from Barney Bodoano, this will be a rich and compelling guide to the scariest films ever made.
Welsh Gothic introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Calling on postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, Jane Aaron argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of the Welsh and reveal much about the varying ways in which the Welsh people have been perceived and have viewed themselves throughout history. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on the figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who have entered literature from folklore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, hellhounds, dark druids, and Welsh witches.
The Lady in Chains by Bonnie Quinn
Every year, campground manager Kate sends out a pamphlet titled “How to Survive Your Camping Experience.” In it is a list of rules to help campers have an enjoyable experience and hopefully survive any encounters with the campground’s… other… inhabitants.
With the campground in the throes of a ‘bad year’, it’ll take a lot more than a list of rules to keep everyone safe. Monsters that were previously dormant are starting to stir and they’re waking up hungry. Among them is the Lady in Chains, a creature feared by both human and inhuman thing alike.
Her reappearance creates an upheaval in the balance of power in the campground by renewing an old grudge with the harvesters, who are willing to sacrifice anyone they get their hands on in order to gain an advantage. On top of all this, the man with the skull cup has started taking an unusual interest in Kate. But with the harvesters on the prowl, the Lady in Chains hunting her down, and a sinister spider infestation, Kate is going to need all the allies she can get, even if those allies aren’t actually… human.
The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin
Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city’s heart and wields its magic. New York? She’s got six.
But all is not well in the city that never sleeps. Though Brooklyn, Manny, Bronca, Venezia, Padmini, and Neek have temporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading–and destroying the entire universe in the process–the mysterious capital “E” Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and “law and order” may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside. In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction.
So there we have it – six books I’m hoping to read this October. Whether or not I’ll get to them all remains to be seen, but I’m going to give it my best shot! What books do you have lined up for this month? Are you taking part in Blogtober? Let me know!
Unwrapping Words 