Halloween | Raging Biblio-holism

The Fifty Year Sword

October 28, 2015 by Drew

The Short Version: At a birthday party somewhere in East Texas, Chintana is unhappy – mainly, although not completely, because her recently deceased husband had slept with the birthday girl. She ends up joining a group of five orphans for their story time but the story is not quite what anyone expected and the storyteller carries with him a long black case with five clasps. Do they dare open it, even after hearing the man’s story? The Review: It’s quite clear, […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror, Literature • Tags: A Visit to October Country, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Fairy Tales, Fiction, Ghost Stories, Halloween, Horror, Literature, Mark Z. Danielewski, Reviews, The Fifty Year Sword

Horns

November 6, 2010 by Drew

I read Joe Hill’s first book, Heart-Shaped Box, on the plane back from Chicago the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was half in afterglow, half teary from parting – and not at all looking forward to getting back to work. I had finished the books I’d brought with me and needed something, so I picked this up at the airport kiosk. I’d heard good things, it looked pretty interesting… Turns out Mr. Hill is Stephen King’s son […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror • Tags: Fiction, Halloween, Horns, Horror, Joe Hill, The Biblioracle

Dark Harvest

October 31, 2010 by Drew

Now THIS is a Hallows Read (thanks Neil Gaiman!) Fast, furious, a little scary, a lot of spooky, and a general sense of AUTUMN. This book was just fun fun fun – and the speed with which I dispatched it only reaffirmed that fun. Seriously, I polished this sucker off in the space of two hours. The plot? Pretty simple and totally predictable. Seriously, if you don’t figure it out about fifteen pages into the book, then… well, I don’t […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror • Tags: A Visit to October Country, Dark Harvest, Fiction, Halloween, Horror, Norman Partridge

Something Wicked This Way Comes

October 30, 2010 by Drew

I don’t know how I’m just getting to this book now. This is one of those books that has always been on my radar but never ended up in my hand walking out of a store. I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451 back in high school and I try to read parts of From The Dust Returned every Halloween night… but for some reason, I’ve never read further into Bradbury’s canon. I think it may’ve been reading Johannes Cabal that pushed this […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror, Literature • Tags: A Visit to October Country, Fiction, Halloween, Horror, Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Hater

October 26, 2010 by Drew

I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a rut with books of late. With the exception of Soulless, everything has been squarely three-star reading. It’s all just… you know, sort of middle of things. Not bad but not altogether great either. Just… okay. Hater falls into that “just okay” realm as well. The book leapt out to me at some point when I was in a Barnes & Noble and I just needed to buy it. The psuedo-zombie […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror • Tags: A Visit to October Country, David Moody, Fiction, Halloween, Hater, Horror

Invitation to a Beheading

October 23, 2010 by Drew

So begins my yearly Halloween week reading. Sure, I read scary/thriller/spooky/ghost/etc books all year ’round… but this is a different time. Halloween’s a week from tomorrow – and the thirteen days before Halloween are crucial. You can ONLY read those type of stories, to better fortify yourself against the encroaching… others. Ahem. What a strange book. I guess I wasn’t expecting anything else, really – the back alludes to Kafka and denotes some of the strangest moments of the novel […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: A Visit to October Country, Fiction, Halloween, Invitation to a Beheading, Literature, Vladimir Nabokov

The Gates (Samuel Johnson #1)

November 1, 2009 by Drew

To begin, we’ll start with a book that I put aside all of my schoolwork for. Every year, I try to give myself a present for Halloween – a new “spooky” novel. I usually “give it” to myself before Halloween but I try not to start it more than two or three days before the big event. Anyway, context aside: this year’s annual Halloween novel (and the first of the Second Annual Cannonball Read, which I’m not an official participant […]

Categories: Cannonball Read II, Fiction, Horror, Literary Challenges • Tags: A Visit to October Country, Book #1, Cannonball Read II, Children's Lit, Fiction, Halloween, Horror, John Connolly, The Gates

Raging Biblio-holism

The overwhelming urge to collect, consume, and consider books

Tag: Halloween