Our very own Jolene Haley teamed up with Brian LeTendre to write Woodsview Murders #1: Harrowed. Let's celebrate by reading it together! Synopsis Journalism Rule #1: Always report the story. Never become the story. Avery Blair has accepted the fact that nothing exciting ever happens in her small town of Woodsview, Massachusetts. As the editor of the high school blog, she prays for something–anything–to come along that would make for a great headline. When Beatrice Thompson’s body is found in the girls’ bathroom, Avery has her biggest story ever. The ru[...]
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Midnight Book Club
3 Moira Fowley-Doyle's The Accident Season has me really excited. Magical realism. Great comp titles. Horror. Also, Fowley-Doyle is an Irish author. Not only do I love reading international authors, but as an Irish American, I have a personal interest in this one. Synopsis For fans of We Were Liars and How I Live Now comes a haunting, sexy, magically realistic debut about a family caught between a violent history, a taboo romance, and the mysteries lurking in their own backyard. It's the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises[...]
Midnight Book Club focuses on recent releases, so we can stay up-to-date on the latest writing in YA horror, but every once in a while, it's nice to shake things up. Last month, I wrote about gothic fiction's legacy. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King cites three texts as formative to the horror genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (the monster story), Dracula by Bram Stoker (the vampire story), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (the shifter story). Because I may be challenging readers who prefer to read contemporary work, let's[...]
On July 7th, Danielle Vega releases Survive the Night. Subway horror? Yes, please. Synopsis We're all gonna die down here. . . . Julie lies dead and disemboweled in a dank, black subway tunnel, red-eyed rats nibbling at her fingers. Her friends think she’s just off with some guy—no one could hear her getting torn apart over the sound of pulsing music. In a tunnel nearby, Casey regrets coming to Survive the Night, the all-night underground rave in the New York City subway. Her best friend Shana talked her into it, even though Casey just got out of rehab. Al[...]
This month, we'll be reading the recent release from Midnight Society member, Amy Giuffrida, The Bleeding Heart. Synopsis Brooklyn is a talented artist with an obsession for blood; one that she satiates at her uncle’s tattoo shop. It’s here at The Bleeding Heart that Brooklyn practices the art of dispensing pain onto others. Yet, nothing can dull the desire running through her veins, especially since the man she really wants to torture rots in jail for murder. When Daniel comes into her life, Brooklyn’s obsession with tattoos and blood quickly turns into[...]
The Girl from the Well was released in hardcover last August, but it was just released in paperback on May 1st. Let's read it! Synopsis You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night. A dead girl walks the streets. She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago. And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the n[...]
Released on March 30th, The Cemetery Boys is the latest from New York Times Bestselling Author Heather Brewer, who wrote the The Chronicles of Vladmir Tod, among other things. Synopsis When Stephen is forced to move back to the nowhere town where his father grew up, he’s already sure he’s not going to like it. Spencer, Michigan, is like a town straight out of a Hitchcock movie, with old-fashioned people who see things only in black-and-white. But things start looking up when Stephen meets the mysterious twins Cara and Devon. They’re total punks–hardly th[...]
Released on February 3rd, Shutter is Courtney Alameda's debut YA horror novel. The Midnight Society is proud to support the work of up-and-coming authors. Synopsis Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat—a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by captur[...]
The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero is on the hot new releases list at the high school where I work. After digging into it a little more, I'm stoked to read it. Synopsis: When twentysomething A., the European relative of the Wells family, inherits a beautiful, yet eerie, estate set deep in the woods of Point Bless, Virginia, it comes as a surprise to everyone—including A. himself. After all, he never knew he had a "second cousin, twice removed" in America, much less that his eccentric relative had recently committed suicide by jumping out of the t[...]
Back in October, Amy interviewed the authors of Creed, Lindsay Currie and Trisha Leaver. I'm curious who's read since then, and if you haven't yet (like me), we can discuss it this month. I've also made some reading resolutions this year (maybe you have too), so this will help with accountability. Fun, right? Here's a synopsis: Three went in. Three came out. None even a shadow of who they once were. When their car breaks down, Dee, her boyfriend Luke, and his brother Mike walk through a winter storm to take refuge in a nearby town called Purity Springs. When th[...]