
sammyjoe2222 TBR'd a book
7w

The Dorians
Nick Cutter
On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause—forever, perhaps. The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive. The dark heart of unbridled human ambition finds its apex in an unholy experiment that now tests the limits of both creator and subject, eclipsing all bounds of morality and sanity….

sammyjoe2222 TBR'd a book
7w

The Therapist
B.A. Paris
A gripping psychological suspense and a powerful tale of a house that holds a shocking secret. When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they’ve dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive… As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbors are keeping secrets and things are not as perfect as they seem…

sammyjoe2222 DNF'd a book
7w

Smile for the Cameras
Miranda Smith
An actress desperate to reclaim her fame must survive the real-life plot of the horror movie that made her famous in this psychologically twisted locked-room thriller influenced by '90s slasher films.Twenty years ago, Ella Winters was the it girl. She made a name for herself in Hollywood and throughout America as the final survivor in the cult-classic slasher Grad Night. But the real horror is what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling—something terrible that Ella and her co-stars agreed never to speak of again. Shortly after the movie's premiere, Ella disappeared from the acting scene under the pretense of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for a quiet life out of the spotlight to ease her guilty mind.Now, after her mother’s passing, Ella has decided to return to the silver screen. And with the cast and crew of Grad Night in the process of filming a reunion documentary, Ella has the perfect ticket back into Hollywood's good graces. Weighed down by the secret she’s been keeping all these years, Ella apprehensively makes the trip to the original set—a cabin in rural Tennessee—to reunite with her castmates for the first time in over a decade. But when the actors begin to meet the exact gruesome fates of the characters they originally played, falling victim to someone dressed as the Grad Night villain, it's clear their secret is out.Now, the question Can the final girl survive one last nightmare?

sammyjoe2222 DNF'd a book
7w

The Luminous Dead
Caitlin Starling
A thrilling, atmospheric debut with the intensive drive of The Martian and Gravity and the creeping dread of Annihilation, in which a caver on a foreign planet finds herself on a terrifying psychological and emotional journey for survival.When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she’d be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She also thought that the fat paycheck—enough to get her off-planet and on the trail of her mother—meant she’d get a skilled surface team, monitoring her suit and environment, keeping her safe. Keeping her sane. Instead, she got Em. Em sees nothing wrong with controlling Gyre’s body with drugs or withholding critical information to “ensure the smooth operation” of her expedition. Em knows all about Gyre’s falsified credentials, and has no qualms using them as a leash—and a lash. And Em has secrets, too . . . As Gyre descends, little inconsistencies—missing supplies, unexpected changes in the route, and, worst of all, shifts in Em’s motivations—drive her out of her depths. Lost and disoriented, Gyre finds her sense of control giving way to paranoia and anger. On her own in this mysterious, deadly place, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, Gyre must overcome more than just the dangerous terrain and the Tunneler which calls underground its home if she wants to make it out alive—she must confront the ghosts in her own head. But how come she can't shake the feeling she’s being followed?


We Used to Live Here
Marcus Kliewer

sammyjoe2222 started reading...
8w

The Residency: A gothic suspense novel set on a remote Scottish island that will keep you up all night
C. D. Major
Don't linger in the gallery. Don't look too closely at the artwork. Don't ask questions. Artist and single mom Ginny is offered a place on a three-month artist retreat on a remote Scottish island. She leaps at the chance. Even better, her host is happy for her to bring her daughter Isla. But the island is not what it seems. The inhabitants greet Ginny and Isla with stares and avoid contact wherever possible. And the house they're staying in is old and strange. Eerie whispers follow Ginny through the corridors. Artworks once covered become uncovered. And unexplained smells clings to the walls lavender, cigar smoke and vomit. With no WiFi on the island, no help from the locals and no regular transport back to the mainland, Ginny is stranded and all alone. She must unravel the dark secrets of the house before they claim her and her beloved daughter. An unsettling gothic horror novel set on an isolated Scottish island. Perfect for fans of Sarah Pinborough, Rebecca Netley and Laura Purcell.

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8w

The Burn Line
Jonathan Sims
From the dark and twisted mind behind the podcast sensation The Magnus Archives comes a suffocating, socially charged nightmare that reveals how fear festers in the cracks of everyday life… Beneath the streets of London, it hungers… It's the hottest summer on record and the city is suffering. Prices are high, pay is low. And on one fateful morning five travelers find themselves trapped in a tube car deep in the London Underground. It will change their lives forever. By the time they leave the train they will be bound together as witnesses to a single horrific event. Something terrible, irreversible, and monstrous. Something hungry. But they can't remember what it is. On their own, they each begin to experience strange dissociative events. Time gets lost. Friends disappear. Something stalks them in the shadows. They make an unlikely team, but to remember what they encountered that day on the train, they will have to work together. Because now it's up to them to understand what horror they saw – and stop it in its tracks before it drags everyone else down below.

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8w

The Queen
Nick Cutter
The national bestselling author of #HorrorBookTok sensation The Troop returns with a heart-pounding novel of terror about a young woman searching for her missing friend and uncovering a shocking truth. On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead. Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…but Charity carries a secret that even she is unaware of. A secret engraved into her DNA helix. For Charity is also known Subject Six, the crown jewel of Project Athena—a clandestine and unorthodox gene manipulation experiment, the brainchild of tech titan Rudyard Crate. And when Charity’s gene sequencing actualizes during a traumatic event at a high school party, it sets in motion a chain of events that will end in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story—the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly dreadful breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…

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8w

The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s. Robin Buss’s lively English translation is complete and unabridged, and remains faithful to the style of Dumas’s original. This edition includes an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

sammyjoe2222 finished a book
8w

Congo
Michael Crichton
Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes. Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies — all motionless except for one moving image — a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur. In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 “signs,” the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to fingerpaint. But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition — along with Amy — is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death … source: michaelcrichton.com

sammyjoe2222 finished a book
8w

Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders
Terry Sullivan
Who was John Wayne Gacy?The model citizen whose business skills were admired by his peers? The hospital volunteer whose sweet-faced clowning lightened the patients' days? The member of the Jaycees who was a civic-minded friend of the community? The depraved maniac who sodomized, tortured, and killed thirty-three young men and boys? Shortly before Christmas of 1978, a teenage boy disappeared from the drugstore where he worked. He would be the final victim of John Wayne Gacy's horrifying compulsion. Then, ten days after the boy's disappearance. Detectives, finding a human bone in the crawl space of Gacy's house, dug into the lime-covered ground. With mounting horror, they pulled bone after bone from Gacy's suburban home until finally they had gathered the remains of twenty-eight more youths who had fallen prey to the killer clown. 16 Pages of Shocking Photos! "An unnerving true story of murder, terror and justice." –The Dallas Morning News

Eaglemask finished a book
22w

But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Chuck Klosterman
We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure—until, of course, they don’t. But What If We’re Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge? Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We’re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”

sammyjoe2222 DNF'd a book
22w

The Cut
C.J. Dotson
In this chilling supernatural horror novel set in a mysterious hotel, a woman fleeing her abusive ex finds herself running from more than just her past. A historic hotel long past its prime and huddled along The Cut, a questionable Lake Erie beach, isn’t Sadie Miles’ ideal place to raise a toddler while also navigating her second pregnancy. After finally fleeing her abusive ex-fiancé, though, Sadie’s new housekeeping position and free room at L’Arpin Hotel are the best she can manage. On her first night, Sadie runs to help a guest struggling in the hotel’s pool only to find the water calm and empty when she gets there, leaving her with a lingering unease. When a guest then goes missing and her manager insists they simply left without checking out, Sadie suspects he’s covering up darker goings-on in the hotel. After her ex, Sadie won't let anyone convince her that what she’s experiencing isn’t real again. So, she keeps digging, quickly uncovering suspicious interactions with the staff, mysteriously vanishing security cameras, more missing guests, and things that go bump in the night...and drip in the walls, slither in the tub, and squirm in the halls. Everything isn't as it seems within the dim hallways of L’Arpin. Sadie has nowhere to go and nowhere to hide; she'll need to keep her wits about her to survive and keep her toddler and unborn child safe from whatever lurks nearby.

sammyjoe2222 finished a book
22w

We Live Here Now
Sarah Pinborough
After a holiday accident that nearly kills her, 32-year old Emily and her husband Freddie move from London into Larkin Lodge, a beautiful country house on remote Dartmoor, far away from their lives and friends in London. It should help heal her and be a wonderful fresh start but soon after moving in, Emily starts to feel that there's something wrong. There's a terrible presence emanating from the room on the third floor. While Freddie doesn't sense anything wrong, Emily can't bear to even step across the threshold, and as the darkness she feels in the room upstairs spreads like mould further into the building, and strange occurrences start happening, Emily becomes convinced that someone was murdered in the house and is now haunting it.But there are no records of any one ever dying in the property, not even old in their beds. In fact, it's been a happy home for all who've lived here. Except, it seems, for them. Ever since they moved into the house, their marriage has started to crumble. There's a sense of distrust. With Freddie growing distant and irritable and dismissing her concerns about the house as part of her post-sepsis syndrome, and with cracks in their relationship building with each day, Emily starts doing some digging into the secrets of Larkin Lodge and the locals who've lived there.But how can she solve a murder that never happened? And can she solve it in time to prevent another?What if you could have the best of the person you once fell in love with, and all it took was one little murder - a murder no one could ever know took place?Would you do it?If so, then Larkin Lodge will be happy to help.

sammyjoe2222 started reading...
23w

Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders
Terry Sullivan
Who was John Wayne Gacy?The model citizen whose business skills were admired by his peers? The hospital volunteer whose sweet-faced clowning lightened the patients' days? The member of the Jaycees who was a civic-minded friend of the community? The depraved maniac who sodomized, tortured, and killed thirty-three young men and boys? Shortly before Christmas of 1978, a teenage boy disappeared from the drugstore where he worked. He would be the final victim of John Wayne Gacy's horrifying compulsion. Then, ten days after the boy's disappearance. Detectives, finding a human bone in the crawl space of Gacy's house, dug into the lime-covered ground. With mounting horror, they pulled bone after bone from Gacy's suburban home until finally they had gathered the remains of twenty-eight more youths who had fallen prey to the killer clown. 16 Pages of Shocking Photos! "An unnerving true story of murder, terror and justice." –The Dallas Morning News

sammyjoe2222 finished a book
24w

The Maze
Jordon Greene
Kayden Walker is a typical sixteen year old high school student. He hates school, thinks he can't go a day without talking to his girlfriend, and his phone is perpetually in his hand. Stuck on the family's yearly October beach getaway, Kayden reluctantly tags along for an excursion into a Halloween-themed maze that his mom found online. It's a small, rundown facility about thirty minutes off the beaten path with rusted doors and a rotted wooden edifice. There's only one problem when Kayden's family and a newlywed couple enter the maze. Once you enter, you're not allowed to leave. Warning: This is an extreme horror story. Some content may be disturbing to sensitive readers.