RUN, by Blake Crouch

RUN, is the first book I've read by Blake Crouch. I was able to score it for free when he was offering it on Amazon just before the new year, and I started reading it while recovering from my New Year Hangover. That I blew through this in about a day and a half is a testament to how enjoyable this book was to me. I know that the dark and apocalyptic isn't for everyone, but it really is what I have been enjoying most these days.

RUN was about a family on the run from the vast majority of the American population. An event has turned people hostile and violent, and this is the story of one family who is trying to find a safe place to figure out how they will put their lives back together after society has collapsed. Unfortunately, the family runs into quite a few obstacles. 

From being chased down and shot at on roads, from avoiding concentration camp style execution, from spending a week without food and barely any water on a freezing mountain in the middle of winter with no shelter and barely any hope, I really didn't think this family was going to make it. The total breakdown of the world was too much, in my opinion, to ever be able to recover from, and a little unprepared family with two young children weren't the strongest heroes. 

However, it was the family that shone in this story - the way they struggled and got through danger, wounds, sickness, and loneliness when they were apart - it was a touching family story of survival with the extra goodness of pure, horrifying evil overtaking the rest of the world. 

(Have I ever mentioned that I suck at reviewing books? Like, SUCK at it?)

This was, as far as I am aware, the first independently published book Crouch has put out. I decided I wanted to read it because Crouch has often paired up with Joe Konrath to write books, do interviews, and contribute heavily to the indie publishing scene that I have found myself becoming a part of online. He's one of the ones who have done it right, and it's good to learn from the "pros", if you will, and I see here that RUN would probably have been a great seller if he'd published traditionally, it was just that good.

I'd really recommend this book to anyone who likes horror and intense emotional thrillers, with just the slightest hint of the supernatural. 

On Dark Paths, by Andrew Kincaid

I met Andrew Kincaid on Twitter ages ago, and I believe he emailed me at one point to ask if I would review his book of short stories, On Dark Paths. At the time I was in a writing slump, I hadn't been keeping up with the indie books I wanted to read, and was generally a bad writing-friend, but said I would give his book a read and review anyway. In a nutshell, this review is a long time coming.

Honestly, I am not so much a fan of the stort story. I know, I know. It's just that I have never had much success in writing short stories myself, and I really prefer the meat of a long ass book over a short story. But Andrew's genre is horror - right up my alley, and having read the book, I'm glad I took the time to give some short stories a try.

Some of the stories in On Dark Paths were quite short compared to the others and written in a tense I am not very familiar with. As I have forgotton most things from my composition classes that have to do with tense, I'll give you an example of what I am talking about:

"You jerk awake. 

The room spins and your mind spins with it. You lay still for a long time before they both finally stop."

I didn't much care for these few stories, but the others that I got engrossed in totally made up for that. There were thirteen stories in Andrew's book - I'll highlight the ones I enjoyed the most.

Beyond the Veil - A man is drinking alone in his house one night when a woman comes banging at his door screaming for help. She is naked, filthy, covered in burns and other injuries, and the man decides to let her in and find out what she is running from. Unfortunately he finds that he's made a big mistake when this girl, Mary, refuses to leave his house and becomes a permanent fixture in his life that gets stranger by the day. Oh, and then there is the scratching and pounding on the door every night that keeps them from going outside or opening any doors or windows.....  This one was scary. SCARY. And also really unsettling. I wondered whether I would be the type to help someone who comes banging and screaming on my door in the middle of the night after reading this story - probably not, I fear.

Murphy's Law - This one was sort of on the lighter side of scary and had some dark but funny moments, although the real scare comes in thinking of what would happen to the world if this were true. A man invents a machine, a helmet of sorts, that can bring the dead back to life. Really, these dead people are supposed to be mindless robots that respond the commands a computer gives them - but things go wrong when one of the man's specimens starts to have her own thoughts and feelings, and takes things into her own hands.

Benton's Station - This was by far my favorite story in the book - a "creature feature" that reminded me quite a bit of some of Stephen King's work. The story takes place in an old coal mining town and starts off with an in depth history of how the town came to be and some background about the "mysterious happenings" that go on within it, including mysterious figures that can be seen moving about in the woods, and unexplainable sounds that come from the old mines. The man narrating this story tells his tale of returning to Benton's Station after his father's death, where he finds in his study drawings of a creature that his father had been obsessed with for most of his life. Unfortunately for him, he will actually get to see the creature that his father had been obsessing about, brought to readers in one of the best action sequences I have EVER read in a short story. 

Overall, I really recommend this book of short stories to lovers of the horror genre. It took me a while to read all of the stories, but that's because of the way I tend to read short story compilations - here and there, once in a while, not all at once. 

Honestly, I think that On Dark Paths is a testetment to what a talented writer Andrew Kincaid is, and just a foreshadowing of what he is capable of. I really, REALLY look forward to reading his first novel-length book, because I can tell that whatever it may be, it's going to be scarily good.

Seed, by Ania Ahlborn

I don’t remember how I first came across Ania Ahlborn’s book, SEED. I suppose I probably saw her mentioned on Twitter and then went to her website, http://www.aniaahlborn.com - a website that totally floored me, by the way. When I saw it I thought: “Wait, is this an indie author? Indie authors don’t have such professional looking websites, do they?” But it was true. I clicked through to Ania’s blog (http://aniaahlbornblogs.wordpress.com) and found that she is indeed an indie author, and at the time I found her she was just about to release SEED. She had something great on her blog, though - something I think all indie authors who are about to release should have: excerpts from her book. Now, why do I think all indie’s should provide excerpts? For one thing, it’s an amazing marketing ploy - and for another: IT WORKS. I was HOOKED on SEED before it was even released. I read every excerpt that Ania posted, not having a clue in what order they should have gone, not caring... the writing was superb. So I waited and waited for SEED to be released, and I think I got it that very day. I started reading SEED right away but two things kept me from finishing it in one weekend: I have a tendency to read multiple books at a time, and also, I didn’t want SEED to end. I know, I know. People say that all the time. But I mean it.

SEED is the story of a man named Jack Winter. Jack is a father of two young girls, a husband, a wanna-be rocker. His story starts off with a bang and a crash - a car accident that sets things in motion for the Winter family, and we quickly begin to see that something strange is happening to his youngest daughter, Charlie Winter, and things are happening in the house they are living in. Shadows in dark corners of bedrooms, scratching on walls, the movement of furniture - enough to freak anyone out. Is the house haunted? No, it’s something much worse than that...

As the story progresses, Jack’s  haunted past is slowly revealed bit by bit. We see how he is tortured by knowing that what is happening to little Charlie is his fault because the demon in his past has caught up with him and sunk its teeth into his little girl. A nightmarish prospect. I loved how Ania created suspense in this book, not just with the “action” that was happening with the Winter family in the house, but with little seeds of information peppered throughout the chapters. There is from the very beginning a sense of buildup, we are on our way to something bigger than we may have first imagined, and it gets creepier and scarier as we go along.

The end of the book, well... I have to say, it was spectacular in its horror. Make no mistake, SEED is straight up HORROR. This is not a young adult book, nor is it for the faint of heart. This book is for people who enjoy getting creeped the hell out, getting scared, and even getting a bit disgusted (in that way only a good horror story can bring about.) On her website bio, Ania menioned Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite as being two of her favorite authors, and I see both of their influences here. I am not sure how many have read Poppy Z. Brite with the zeal that I read her books in my younger years, but they are dirty, nasty horror - just the kind I like, and SEED definitely has some of that.

Okay, what did I like most about SEED? It was a BRAVE book.

I am a mother, so my greatest fears mostly have to do with bad things happening to my daughter. Maybe that’s just a mother’s natural instinct, to fear and therefore be on alert to protect her children, I don’t know, but it happens. I have not yet been able to write about children in my horror writing. I don’t have the guts for it. But is it any wonder that some of the horror books and movies that scare me the most have to do with children? Pet Semetery? I saw that movie at way too young an age, and have been scarred for life by the image of Gage crawling around the floor with a scalpel in his hands. Children of the Corn? What the fuck. That’s some scary stuff. I don’t have the guts or the gall to make bad things happen to precious children, but Ania Ahlborn does. She’s got the guts to not only have bad things happen to good kids, but she has the gall to make them DO horrible things as well. She’s a brave writer, and SEED is a brave book of horror.

I can’t say enough good things about this book. I know I say in practically every review “This is the best indie book I’ve ever read,” and here it is again: SEED is the best indie book I’ve ever read. I highly anticipate whatever it is that Ania is working on now, and can’t wait to see where her career will take her. This girl could make MILLIONS.

I rate SEED 5/5 scary, creepy stars.

Visit the author, Ania Ahlborn on her blog: http://aniaahlbornblogs.wordpress.com, on Twitter: http://twitter.com/aniaahlborn, and click here to purchase SEED as fast as your brave little heart can.

I Wish... , by Wren Emerson

I met Wren Emerson, the author of the new novel I Wish... when I began participating in the #pubwrite Twitter forum. For those of you who don't know about #pubwrite, it is a hash tag you can use to connect with writers who like to chat "pub" style. We bring the feel of sitting around at your local bar or pub, some of us tend to drink and get rowdy, some of us don't, but either way I promise you will connect with great writers who are very supportive of indie authors. Wren is one of the first gals I started to chat with on Twitter, she is very friendly and helpful, and I just knew I had to give her a book review to support her on her self-publishing adventure.

I Wish... is the first part in the Witches of Desire series. It features a strange teen girl, Thistle Nettlebottom, who has spent her life being home schooled and traveling around in a pink R.V. with her mother, grandmother, and Shep - her personal trainer. While her grandmother travels the country on her never-ending book tour, Thistle learns how to fight - but never really figures out what she needs to protect herself from, until the fateful phone call that finally brings Thistle back to the small town of Desire, her birthplace, where she meets the family she knows nothing about and where she finds that she has a strange destiny (and power) that is hard for her to get used to. Once in the town of Desire, Thistle tries to find her place in a coven of powerful witch families, and is drawn to a boy that she's told she can't have. To make things worse, she's being stalked by an invisible enemy, has to navigate public school for the first time in her life, and oh yeah.. she can wish anything into existence, which creates more problems than she ever could have imagined.

Whew. Usually I steal blurbs from Goodreads.. can you tell why?

I blew through I Wish... in two days. It was a quick, easy read - and I don't mean easy like it was dumbed down or the writing was simple. It was easy to get through because it was consistently interesting and action packed. In every chapter there was either some cool new information you were learning about the Witches of Desire, or there was cute boy putting the moves on Thistle, or there was danger afoot that she had to avoid and fight off. I Wish... is fast paced in the good way - I couldn't put it down once I started it, because I had to know what was going to happen to Thistle.

The background information on the town of Desire and its inhabitants was strong. As far as the witchy-ness goes, I feel like just enough information was given about the matriarchal society and the powers people possessed to leave readers hungry for more information in the next books. The town itself, which is a huge part of the story, is described in enough detail that I could imagine walking down its tree-lined streets and into its quaint diner and shops. Really, the attention to detail in this book is nearly spot on, and I was really impressed by this, coming from a writer's first publication.

I Wish... is written in the first person, so you really get deep into Thistle's thoughts. I really liked this approach, and Wren did a great job with the character development of her main character. I felt like I knew Thistle and could empathize with her problems. She's also sassy, snarky, and strong - characteristics that make the dialog interesting and funny without being over the top. Thistle's grandmother, Ramona, was also one of my favorite characters, and Ben, Thistle's would-be love interest, stole my heart.

There was one thing about this book that bothered me, though. There are a lot of characters in this book, as it is about a coven of witches. Of course, not all of the witches are discussed, but there are enough of them talked about between different families and first and second daughters to be a bit confusing. I was having trouble remembering who was related to who, or who was going to be friendly with who, and being that I was reading on my Kindle, I couldn't flip back through the pages easily to try to refresh my memory about who the characters were and what their place was in relation to everyone else. I think this book would benefit from a family tree of sorts, to be featured in the beginning near the table of contents, or even as a download from Wren's blog, to have just in case you get lost within these wonderful witches.

The end of this book was abrupt, but that is totally okay for me, since I know that more books in the Witches of Desire series are on their way.  I Wish... was a solid start from a debut author, and I look forward to seeing how Wren's writing progresses with this series and beyond.

I give 5/5 stars for this bewitching book.

Visit the author, Wren Emerson on Twitter @wrenem, and on her blog, Wren Writes, where she loves to discuss the life of being an indie author, and also gives some great advice posts on writing, editing, and self-publishing!

TORMENT - A Novel of Dark Horror, by Jeremy Bishop

 I recently finished this book, TORMENT - A Novel of Dark Horror by Jeremy Bishop, and it certainly needs a good review. I was honestly shocked by some of the one and two star reviews on Amazon that this book received (I don’t think I read those reviews before purchasing this $2.99 ebook from a new author) but now I am surprised that some people thought this book was bad, because I’m a pretty picky reader when it comes to zombies or anything post-apocalyptic, and to me, TORMENT was a wild, scary ride.

Here’s the synopsis from Goodreads:

“Small town reporter, Mia Durante, finds herself having brunch with the President of the United States on the day civilization comes to an end. An electromagnetic pulse blinds the U.S. Cars crash. Planes fall. Chaos reigns. Power is restored within minutes, but it’s already too late. Russian nukes are falling. U.S. allies around the world are all ready wiped out. The United States will cease to exist inside of five minutes.

After giving the order to launch a full-scale retaliation, dooming the planet, the president, White House staff, Secret Service and those lucky enough to be visiting the white house, are whisked below ground where they board several Earth Escape Pods. As the EEPs launch into Earth orbit, missiles descend.

Less than forty survive the end of the world. When they return, they’re greeted by survivors of a different sort. The bloodbath that follows leaves Durante and nine other survivors on the run. They find themselves fighting for survival in a world in which only torment remains and where death is the only escape.”

I bought this book nearly the second I read “Earth Escape Pods.” I guess it’s some thing I have with loving to speculate about government secrets and conspiracy theories. Does President Obama have an Earth Escape Pod? He probably should... So I was thinking that this book was going to be at least partly about random civilians getting launched unexpectedly into space and having to deal with it...and it was, for a bit, about just that... but there was a lot more running from monsters than anything else, and I wonder whether that should be more of the focus of the book summary on pages like Goodreads and Amazon.

At any rate, the story focuses on Mia and her young niece, who was with her when the world went to crap and they were able to escape earth with the president and some of his Secret Service agents and other staff. Mia’s particular story line intrigued me, as a mother myself I could put myself into Mia’s shoes, having to take care of a child in a ruined world is my ultimate nightmare of all nightmares, and I particularly enjoy and admire horror stories that include children as main characters because I think it is a very bold and gutsy thing to do. As a writer myself, I know it’s hard to kill your darlings, and for me, it’s especially harder to write about the horrors that afflict a child.

Upon returning to an earth ruined by nuclear bombs, the survivors find that the humans who (sort of) survived the destruction have turned into zombies. They aren’t your mean, scary faster and stronger than normal zombies, nor are they the slow shamblers of old horror flicks.. in a way they are worse than either of the old favorites, because Jeremy Bishop’s zombies can remember their lives and they always take the time to apologize before going in for the kill...

Mia, her niece, and her companions are forced to run and keep running, always trying to find safety away from these horrible creatures, while facing thirst and starvation to boot. They go from one place to another, and along their journey we get to know them better - that one of them is a priest who is having a hard time giving up the preaching to the few survivors who don’t want to listen, one is a president who is blamed for the destruction of the entire world, and of course there are your usual tough guys in charge, and Mia, our heroine, who is always trying to find away to go on and be strong for her orphaned niece. As the book goes on, some of Mia’s companions don’t make it, and be warned - no one in this book is spared from torment or death. The farther the book progresses, the worse the zombies get, until you are introduced to a monster of our human creation that will scare the wits out of you.

At one point during reading this I sent a Tweet to Jeremy Bishop (@Bishophorror), and said something along the lines of: “I’m now officially too scared to read your book outside, alone, in the dark,” and it was true. Spring has sprung and I like sitting outside at night and reading, but TORMENT simply spooked me out too much. Reading it, I was always too attuned to the sounds of critters in the woods around me. I was always expecting to see something coming at me from the treeline, and I was always ready to run. When a book affects you physically - that is when you know you have one hell of a scary book on your hands.

Now another fair warning - there are a lot of religious elements to this book, and I know that turns a lot of people off. Frankly, it turns me off, and I found myself rolling my eyes a lot at some of the passages with the priest and toward the end of the book when Mia was speculating on her existence and certain death. But the story is about something deeper than the weight of religion.

TORMENT touches on something that lurks in the hearts of us all - that ever-present fear of the end, that moment we all have to face. We are never ready for it.

To me, TORMENT is a solid, five star read - I really enjoyed the ride.

You can find the author of TORMENT, Jeremy Bishop, on his website, and on Twitter: @BishopHorror.