Typical Books of Terror: Horror Books and Fiction Discussion

My Kindle is bursting, and I received two books this month with another on the way. As usual, there is a magazine in the mix and a call out to suggest recent vampire books!  

0:00 - Mergers and Acquisitions

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Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

Typical Books is one of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts! Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories.

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

Here are short reviews of two very well-written extreme horror novellas I've read recently. One outshines the other in quality and level of extreme content, but both were enjoyable to read and had me thinking of them long after - not only for their shock value but in terms of levels of extreme content and how the reading public has rated and reviewed them so far. 

I've been moving away from star reviews for a lot of my reading, not only with extreme and splatterpunk horror. It is easy to rate true crime since I have specific objectives when I read it. How can one have specific objectives when reading fiction? That is getting harder to answer: then I read books like this and it all goes out the window, where ironically, the stars are.   

A Gathering of Evil by Gil Valle from Comet Press  https://amzn.to/3u0NvHu

Both have to do with violence against women, cannibalism, rape, stalking,  ... and then necrophilia in various stages of decomposition to putrefaction and abortion, one book more so than the other.  

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon ▹ https://amzn.to/34mJamZ

✮ Music by ænorex ▹ https://aenorex.com ✮ music used by permission of the artist

Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

Typical Books is one of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts! Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories.

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

A new review of a book that has been out since 2011, John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster by Judge Sam L. Amirante. It may be the Honourable Sam L. Amirante (Ret.) depending, and it was co-written with Danny Broderick. Really fantastic book, all around, and recommended highly for true-crime fans or just those looking for a new angle on this case.   

Pick up a copy from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3v45KMa   

I will definitely say it is a five-star read as it gives a really fresh insight into the spiral the killer went through when he was apprehended.  It chronicles the investigation, his capture, his confession, his mindset, the psychiatrist's opinions, and of course what was found in his house. There is a little bit near the end of course talking about his execution.   

True crime books seem to be mostly written by journalists, former journalists, retired cops, or some sort of law enforcement otherwise but few seem to be written by lawyers.  Of course, there's a shining example of Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi who was the prosecuting attorney in the Manson family trials.  With John Wayne Gacy defending a monster we get a bird's-eye view from the bench sitting beside the monster himself.

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Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

Typical Books is one of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts! Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories.

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon ▹ https://amzn.to/34mJamZ

Find my books and more at ▹ http://lydiapeever.ca

Email review requests to ▹ lydiapeever@ live.com

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A little list of the recent new releases from Horror Writers Association authors, with at least one that is going on my reading pile. How about you?

00:00 - Welcome

01:17 - New books

Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner from Flame Tree Press

Family Solstice by Kate Maruyamafrom Omnium Gatherum Media

The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay from Silver Shamrock Publishing

99 Nightmares by Joseph VanBuren from Sykophunk ProductionsThe Mother We Share by Jennifer Soucy from RhetAskew Publishing

Stained Mirror, A Serial Killer Memoir by Gianni Franco

Matters Most Macabre by Tylor James

Telecommuting by L. Marie Wood from Mocha Memoirs Press 

The Promise Keeper by L. Marie Wood from Cedar Grove Books

Typical Books is voted 3rd in a list of the top 35 Canadian Book Podcasts!

See the list of other Canadian bookish shows here: https://blog.feedspot.com/canadian_book_podcasts/

Typical Books EP185 - New Horror for Mid April

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About Typical Lydia

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Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

Typical Books is one of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts! Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories.

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

This month I feel I read more than I did ~ perhaps I've forgotten a book in my March wrap-up! Here is a peek at books to come, books that had been, and books of the future...

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music used by permission of the artist

Books I read this month:

A Gathering of Evil by Gil ValleConspiracies Uncovered: Cover-ups, Hoaxes, and Secret Societies by Dr. Lee Mellor

Books that came in this month:

The Last Book on the Left by Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski and Ben Kissel

To Be Read:

Shadowy Natures by Rebecca Rowland

Coming soon!

Rave by Konn Lavery

I can earn when you shop on Amazon

✮ Music by aenorex ✮

About Typical Lydia

✮✮✮✮✮✮

Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

Typical Books is one of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts! Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories.

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

Let's Go Play At The Adams’ is often compared to Jack Ketchum’s book The Girl Next Door and is the only novel by Mendel W. Johnson. Published in 1974, the year before I was born, I felt a need to review this especially since it has wildly varying praise and scorn.

A current cult classic it seemed to be hard to get hold of through the years, being reissued a couple of times. In 1974 came out by the small company and these are those coveted hardbacks you might see for $100 at Abe books. That company was incidentally bought out by Harper. This was released in the 80s by Bantam Books and this is probably, I'm just guessing here, what most of the paperback copies at least see are from. Then, of course, with much fanfare, this book was chosen by Grady Hendrix and Will Erickson and whoever else is there is at play to be reprinted after being featured in Paperbacks from Hell.

From what I understood going into this it was a grimy novel talking about coming of age and rape and violence and I wasn't sure if it was rape-revenge because I never got into spoiler territory with any of the descriptions.

I can earn when you shop on Amazon

✮ Music by aenorex ✮

About Typical Lydia

✮✮✮✮✮✮

Welcome to Typical books; horror fiction unbound - I am Lydia Peever, horror author and co-host of the horror film podcast Dead Air and creator of the horror booktube channel TypicalBooks.

One of the Top 35 Canadian podcasts: Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories

Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little podcast.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

The Book Addiction Tag has been making the rounds and I wanted to play along. This is a super fun one to sit back and watch so I hope you have fun with it too!

The ænorex trailer for 'ocahaen' is live! https://youtu.be/zOYfXypEhkQ

Some creators versions I really enjoyed:

Atterntion! https://youtu.be/Q4GNvwQs_do

Jason's Weird Reads https://youtu.be/LdgQOE0UJOA

Merphy Napier https://youtu.be/cFWOVHHQBW8

Questions:

1. What is the longest amount of time you can comfortably go without picking up a book?

2. How many books do you carry on your person (physical or device) at any one time?

3. Do you keep every book you buy/receive or are you happy to pass them on to make space for more?

4. How long would you spend in a bookshop on a standard visit?

5. How much time per day do you actually spend reading?

6. Where does the task “picking up a book” appear on your daily to-do list?

7. How many books do you reckon you own in total (include ebooks)?

8. Approximately how often do you bring up books in conversation?

9. What is the biggest book (page count) you have finished reading?

10. Is there a book you had to get your hands on against all odds (searched bookstore, online digging, stalked author, etc.)?

11. Is there a book you struggled to finish because you refused to DNF?

12. What are 3 (some) of your main book goals for the year?

13. Have you ever had the privilege of converting someone into a reader (by inspiration or your incessant nagging)?

14. Describe what books mean to you in FIVE words.

#bookaddictiontag #bookaddiction

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon

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About Typical Lydia

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Thank you to Anchor for hosting! Feel free to comment and let me know what you are reading during your ooky spooky day, and for now, on with the show!

If you are looking for something new to read, some insight or reviews of horror you have read, or even talk from a writer’s perspective, I hope you enjoy this little show.

Feel free to check out the youtube version by searching typicalbooks, or visit me at lydiapeever.ca

Daughters of Darkness features a stunning cover and four authors; Stephanie Ellis, Alyson Faye, Theresa Derwin, Ruschelle Dillon. Plus! At the end of the video I have an update on the grand giveaway happening at @darkbetweenpages : https://youtu.be/RUZiWU7V8ro

Conjure a copy of Daughters of Darkness: https://amzn.to/39izht4

00:00 - Introduction

4:01 - Francois Vaillancourt

4:39 - Theresa Derwin

5:33 - Ruschelle Dillon

6:19 - Stephanie Ellis,

7:44 - Alyson Faye

9:53 - The Giveaway!

The last time I read a book that I can recall that involved more than one author as a short story collection was Triage featuring Jack Ketchum Edward Lee and Richard Laymon. it was fantastic and I don't have a copy anymore - had I known then what I know now I'd have hung onto it as it is hard to come by. Daughters of Darkness, on the other hand, is a fresh release that came out in February of this year so 2021 and it came out in the very middle of women in horror month, so I'm a little behind on my review.

This was a graciously gifted review copy from Ruschelle Dillon, one of the authors featured here and who you may recall from a previous new releases video with her book of the stain and she had also equally graciously interviewed me for the horror tree 2 years ago. Also featured in this book are Stephanie Ellis, Alyson Faye, and Theresa Derwin. So, we have a group of four women writers who specialize in horror of varying kinds in one book.

From the back cover: A quartet of established female horror writers from both sides of the Atlantic have joined supernatural forces to bring you - Daughters of Darkness - a publication from the women-run indie press Black Angel. These stories will take you across the centuries, from Whitechapel to New Orleans, from dark humour to Gothic, weaving the weird with the macabre. Within these pages, meet the myriad monsters these female writers have conjured, letting them loose to roam and cast long shadows.

The gorgeous cover as mentioned I absolutely adore and it was designed by Francois Vaillancourt who is Canadian and you may recognize from many other books covers an author's if you're out there he often designs covers and then has them up for commission beautiful at work and of course on my list of things to achieve the cover by Francois Vallencourt.

A fantastic collection that I do recommend if you are not familiar with these authors or just want to line your shelf with some really nice dark female offerings. I hope to see more of this being that this could be an annual tradition it would be really cool, or just more collections with more than one story by each author. I'd be very interested in collections like that as opposed to the traditional anthology.

Title: Daughters of Darkness

Author: Stephanie Ellis, Alyson Faye, Theresa Derwin, Ruschelle Dillon

Date: February 2021

Publisher: Viking Press

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon ▹ https://amzn.to/34mJamZ

Buy these books locally ▹ https://bookshop.org/shop/typicalbooks

Find my books and more at ▹ https://www.amazon.com/author/lydia

New to Youtube? Try TubeBuddy ▹ https://www.tubebuddy.com/typical

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I have a lifetime membership. Well worth every penny!

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The first I recall hearing of this crime was a podcast, as usual, on a bus ride to work. The more we know of Isreal Keyes, the more fictional the case feels.  Here I review American Predator by Maureen Callahan. 

00:00 - Review and case basics 

15:37 - Jump to the star rating

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/3ckbBGu

This book is far more gentle than most podcasts on the topic as there are no photos. Other than that, it is a very straight-forward true crime book in that it starts with the most media-centric crime that many may know, and dives into the motivations we can glean from the killer’s personality, and presents a strong profile made of as many facts as the author surfaced on Keyes. 

“I had a lot of access to the FBI agents working this case. I spoke with them often and in-depth for a year and a half. One of the things they would never really talk to me about, and one of the things I could never find any record or documentation of was: What was the childhood like? What was his adolescence like? What was his upbringing like? That’s a key part of the narrative when you’re trying to figure out how a person becomes a killer.”

One thing that makes this unique among true-crime books that are written after the fact, is that many authors of lower caliber true-crime wait for low-hanging fruit. In this case, the FBI had not released much of the information and it seems the author met with resistance at every turn in her research:

“I became very determined to know more about what the FBI was hiding. And so I wound up suing the federal prosecutor in Alaska to the tune of like $30,000 to get interrogations with Keyes that they had been hiding, 13 hours worth. They’d ordered psychological evaluations, which were done very soon after his arrest, and are the greatest self-report we have about his childhood.”

https://www.refinery29.com/en-ca/who-is-israel-keyes-serial-killer-rapist-book-american-predator

So many aspects of this case present rabbit holes. His travel tactics, his stalking and terror campaigns, his kill kits buried across the united states; it is not a wonder there have been podcasts, documentaries and books galore but he remains a killer few know much about. For more, I do recommend the podcast ‘True Crime Bull****” which is fantastic though, for me, not the most easy-listening due to copious adverts and music at the end of each episode so I have to scramble to skip forward through them then again for the music which is detestable. 

Recently, eleven rudimentary skull pictures painted in Keyes’ own blood found in his cell were released to the public from the FBI. This was near the ten-year anniversary of his death and though there is little help to be had to identify a missing person from a stick figure skull artwork. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-keyes-serial-killer-skulls-blood-48-hours/ 

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon ▹ https://amzn.to/34mJamZ

Buy these books locally ▹ https://bookshop.org/shop/typicalbooks

Find my books and more at ▹ https://www.amazon.com/author/lydia

New to Youtube? Try TubeBuddy ▹ https://www.tubebuddy.com/typical

For writers, I recommend ProWritingAid ▹ https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=6264

I have a lifetime membership. Well worth every penny!

✮ Music by ænorex ▹ https://aenorex.com ✮

music used by permission of the artist

Had a great time with this quick read: The Low, Low Woods. A weird tale set in the crags of Pennsylvania in a town not unlike Centralia. Lovely stuff. I didn't rate it but it is a solid 4 of 5 for me ~ with potential depending on how much more if this series there ever will be.   

There's something in the woods...  Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for years. The woods are full of rabbits with human eyes, a deer woman who stalks hungry girls, and swaths of skinless men. And the people of Shudder-to-Think? Well, they're not doing so well either.  

Pick up a copy: https://amzn.to/2PlAlFy​ 

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I can earn when you shop on Amazon ▹ https://amzn.to/34mJamZ​

✮ Music by ænorex ▹ https://aenorex.com​ ✮