July ScaredyKIT: Vacation (Reader's Choice)

July is traditionally a month for vacations and holidays, so we're going to take a vacation from categories and let everyone choose whatever horror/thrillers you'd like to read for this month. If you do want to stick to a theme, though, perhaps you could choose a book you'd take on vacation to read by the pool, on the beach, or on the plane. Tell us about your picks here and I hope you all are having a great summer!

I have a few options, based on tags. Not sure how "horror"-like they are (or thriller), but some of my options include:

The Sandman. Vol. 2 The Doll's House / Neil Gaiman.
Dance of Death / Douglas Preston
Chills / Mary SanGiovanni
Dinosaur Lake II / Kathryn Meyer Griffith

>2 LibraryCin: I can vouch for Sandman #2 definitely being horror!

I am going to read some books off the shelf. I have a few that have been waiting for a while.

I love reading about zombies so I am going to go with one from the zombie-master, Robert Kirkland with The Walking Dead: The Rise of the Govenor.

>3 sturlington: Great! Thank you! That's likely one I'll pick up for sure!

I think I shall return to Grimm's; I read about 25% for an earlier category; but the book is 800 pages. So I'll read another 25-50% and perhaps I shall finish it this year!

This will make choosing very easy. Any scary book is the right book.

I'm going with Tales from Beyond the Brain by Jeff Szpirglas. It's an ER win from LT.

I finished Tales from Beyond the Brain. It's a collection of short stories in the Goosebumps vein. The story plots are unique and creepy and the illustrations are excellent.

The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House / Neil Gaiman
3.5 stars

Rose and her mother are flown to England and are in for a surprise when they arrive. Rose then heads back to the US to find her younger brother whom she hasn’t seen in seven years, since she was a teenager and he was only 5-years old. There is an odd convention happening.

Rose’s story was the most interesting storyline for me, though there a bit more going on in addition to her story and the convention. I reread my review for Vol. 1 and found that my favourite parts in that volume were also about the humans; I didn’t find the Sandman parts as interesting, though he does intersect with Rose’s story. On thinking back, I thought I had rated Vol. 1 lower than what I did. So, officially, I rated both volumes “good”, but I feel like I liked this one better, at least as compared to what I remember of the first one.

August thread is up" https://www.librarything.com/topic/309053

The Walking Dead: The Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga was pretty much everything I look for in a zombie thriller plus it has the added advantage of being about a character that I know from the original graphic novels and the television show.

I finished the Brothers Grimm thinking I would get some really gory stuff; but nothing. I checked my book over and nowhere does it indicate these are re-writes or abridged. I have always heard that they were "scarey," but not so much.

I feel like it's taken me a long time to get through my selection for this month, which was Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is different from any zombie novel I have ever read. After a zombie outbreak is put down by the government in the late '60s, a woman and her three daughters discover the body of a dead girl in a field during an Iowa snowstorm. The girl is holding a baby--a baby who is not alive but who still moves (the title character). The family hides the baby and he inexplicably begins to grow. After he is involved in a car accident as a teenager, Stony must escape and discovers a network of zombies who have gone underground. This book had great characters, a fun plot full of conspiracies, and a unique take on the zombie story. I thought it was a blast.

I've read the first in the Supernatural series, Witch's Canyon. It takes place in Arizona's High Country and has a group of shapeshifters committing surprisingly brutal murders.

Finished The Inhuman Condition by Clive Barker--and I actually read most of it on the balcony of a beach house while on vacation! If you like horror short stories, it was pretty fantastic. Full review written for those interested.

Finally finished another ScaredyKIT challenge! I read Fingers of Fear, a 1937 horror thriller. Let me tell you, they don't write them like this any more, which I think is a shame but many would probably disagree . . . . I really enjoyed this haunted-house/insanity-in-the-family shocker. Narrator Selden Seaverns is down on his luck in the depths of the Depression (1933) when a college acquaintance, Ormond Ormes, asks him to ghost-write a history of the Elizabethan influence on colonial American literature at Ormond's family home, Ormesby, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, so Ormond can get a $100,000 inheritance (very roughly $2 million in 2019). Selden doesn't get very much done before he discovers that Ormesby is haunted and the Ormes family members are keeping secrets. But Selden soon finds himself so enmeshed in the family's problems that leaving will be very difficult. The writing is really over the top, of the had-I-but-known type. Recommended for those who like good old-fashioned melodrama, sensation, and horror.

Fingers of Fear sounds like a good one to pick up!

I decided to read something by Stephen King - Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas. I'm halfway through, and it's vintage Stephen King, good stuff.

I wish there was Someone Like Me to make the choice for this month's challenge.

>19 AHS-Wolfy: That's a good one!

I've just finished reading The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, which could be read as a horror story.

I received an Advanced Reading Copy of The Whisper Man by Alex North. I will be reading that this month

Finally finished Four Past Midnight, which I started for July's ScaredyKIT; a bit of a tome at 763 pages, but it was a good one. Four novellas, all of which I rated as either 4.5 or 4*: The Langoliers; Secret Garden, Secret Window; The Library Policeman; and The Sun Dog.