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Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened, or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.
In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.
It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed. Then there was that video: 40 seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet it was posted from his own YouTube account. Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed - until now.
The Invention of Everything Else is a luminous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young hotel chambermaid. Louisa, obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests, first catches sight of the hotel's most famous resident on New Year's Day, 1943, and is determined to befriend the strange man.
Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early 20s, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers - Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.
Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: Her 13-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park. The search isn't yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy's disappearance. They feel helpless and alone, and their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: The local and state police have uncovered no leads.
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened, or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.
In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.
It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed. Then there was that video: 40 seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet it was posted from his own YouTube account. Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed - until now.
The Invention of Everything Else is a luminous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young hotel chambermaid. Louisa, obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests, first catches sight of the hotel's most famous resident on New Year's Day, 1943, and is determined to befriend the strange man.
Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early 20s, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers - Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.
Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: Her 13-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park. The search isn't yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy's disappearance. They feel helpless and alone, and their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: The local and state police have uncovered no leads.
From electrifying horror author Nick Cutter comes a haunting new novel, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Stephen King's It, in which a trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods settlement called Little Heaven. Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous.
College student Drew Brady never wanted the power to spy on his friends. But late one night, he finds a box of old Polaroids buried under his house that can change to show him whatever he desires, and Drew finds himself with the power to watch the people around him without them ever knowing.
Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.
In these marvelously inventive stories, Samantha Hunt imagines numerous ways in which human lives might be altered by the otherworldly: an FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission; a young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed into a deer; two strangers become lovers and find themselves responsible for the resurrection of a dog; a woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but riddles that new life with lies.
Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth - but was she really a changeling, as her husband insists? Albie Mirralls met his cousin only once, in 1851, within the grand glass arches of the Crystal Palace. But unable to countenance the rumours that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to Halfoak, a village steeped in superstition.
It's 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson - college professor, stalled writer - has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn't seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she's reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.
After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait.
The Man Booker International Prize, 2016. Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams - invasive images of blood and brutality - torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession.
They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. Polly is set on heading west. Adam says he's also passing through. Yet she stays, and he stays - drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other - dangerous, even lethal secrets. Then someone dies. Was it an accident or part of a plan? By now Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other's lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away.
Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's a small town in the center of the state - the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: It's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.
The village of Saint-Ferdinand has all the trappings of a quiet life. Though if an out-of-towner stopped in, they would notice one unusual thing - a cemetery far too large and much too full for such a small town, lined with the victims of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, who has eluded police for nearly two decades. It's not until after Inspector Stephen Crowley finally catches the killer that the town discovers even darker forces are at play.
A contemporary Gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.
Ruth and Nat are orphans packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who - or what - has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?
In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, and the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural - and vice versa.
I was excited about this one and super let-down. Nothing happens, it just goes in circles, and the voice of Ruth was so airy and irritating I found myself yelling at it
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
Ms. Hunt...I'm not sure how to react to your book other than to say, hmmm, it was interesting...(like they say, "your mother's meatloaf is *interesting*"). Not sure what the hell was going on. It was like running in a dream where your feet don't touch the ground -- but then there is a passage in the book where the characters do just that. Or like being really stoned at the dentist and thinking you've solved world peace and then the gas wears off; or driving down the road when you notice you suddenly don't know how you got where you are; or listening to 11 hrs of an audio book and wondering if the LSD you took in your wild youth really is stored in your spinal column and just got knocked loose... Freaked me out, so I resorted to the experts.
"What keeps all this engaging — beyond the real charm of these two young people — is the way Hunt refuses to let any conclusions solidify in her wry prose." [Wash. Post] Read that last little portion of the quote again....Ehhh... I'm not convinced they know what the hell either. They wrote some very nice things about your book, loved the prose, which made me feel a little bit better about myself, a little less obtuse, because I too loved the prose. Which brings me to how the hell I came about picking your book. I saw the title somewhere in a S. King interview; again it was suggested to me by Audible; again a friend said I needed to read; and I enjoy me some supernatural Gothic occasionally, especially those that are "evil...fru-its of the devil" [Mike Meyers]. Splitfoot sounds like the reportedly cloven-hoofed Beelzebub, the cover looks like the wily garden serpent, voila. And here I am finished and I'm still not sure whether or not your Mardellion is supposed to be Mephistopheles.
A very encourage ing reviewer said..."the novel moves not just in two time frames, told through two voices, a first-person narrator and a third, but also moves in the fourth dimension."[NYTimes] I suspect my own literary shortcomings, but have to tell you that I've transcended the temporal and spatial interpretations of the fourth dimension with Proust, H.G.Wells, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford more soberly. And, I love a good mash-up: future past and present; fact and fiction; science and supernatural...throw in some religious dogma, and I'm in Mitchell heaven. Mix you did! From L. Ron, to Joseph Smith, to aliens, Carl, Sagan, to a comet that hit the US, to a Comet-cleanser snorting cult leader *deep breath* golden plates to the Voyager Golden Records.
I can't really write I review of a book that leaves me wondering, WTH? So, I'm taking some of your words as advice...“There isn’t any point to it,” complains Cora, mid-journey. “I’m not getting anywhere. No start, middle, or end.”
Call me Cora.
16 of 22 people found this review helpful
On paper this should have been my new favorite book with the religious fundamentalism and cults and Kelly Link comparisons but I struggled to get through the book and spent most of the middle bored and looking for patterns.
I bumped it up to 3 stars because I enjoyed the ending despite seeing the plot twist miles from the end.
I also have given up on books narrated by Cassandra Campbell; her tone of voice hear made me think of a disgruntled librarian and I just can't anymore.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I heard an interview with the author on Studio 360 and tried to get the Audible version. Too soon. So I read it on Kindle. Hated to lose the characters so I ordered it on Audible. Even better the second time. Great writing, well performed. You will often have to stop because a sentence is so powerful or beautifully written.These characters and their story are still with me. Now, added to my favorite books list.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
What did you like best about this story?
Entirely original take on a ghost story. I loved it, and am a big fan of Samantha Hunt's gorgeous language, punctuated with her very unique sharp, dark wit. This story had everything for me - plot, style, and characters I could hold hands with.
If you're thinking about getting this book because you've heard it's scary, don't do it. Not even a little tiny bit scary.
One of the worst books I've read. This was my first book on Audible and I was glad it was free. If it hadn't been my book club's choice, I would never have finished it. Over the top, boring, too many extraneous details (grocery lists? really?).
A bizarre story that defies simple description or explanation: parts journey, supernatural, grotesque, coming-of-age, cult, flim-flam, romance and surreal.
Maybe I could say the novel is a long and lively stew brewed up by a playful witch, after oversleeping her nap at the credibility gap.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful
Loved this journey. I didn't know what to expect but I listened to the whole story intently, pleased with the discovery.
The narration was excellent, both narrators voices immersed me deeper into the story.