WWAR October 2023
Show Notes
Today is WWAR for October and our theme is Horror or Spooky reads.
Tracey reported on Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. Just Like Home is a darkly gothic thriller perfect for
fans of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House as well as HBO's true crime masterpiece I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the
memories ― she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and
the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family.
Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A
parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare
parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting... but who
else could it possibly be?
There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them
and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.
She then touched on Mary by Nat Cassidy (Tor Nightfire 7/22). Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing
her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.
But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look
in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and
inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she
begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an
infamous serial killer.
Then the killings begin again.
Mary’s definitely going to find herself.
Ann reported on the book Holly by Stephen King (Scribner 9/5/23). It really isn't a horror novel but it
does have a very spooky vibe.
Stephen King’s Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have
witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to
Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective
in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and
brilliantly disguised adversaries.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter,
Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just
died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible
for Holly to turn her down.
Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the
picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong
academics. But they are harboring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one
that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are
up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.
Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver the shockingly twisted professors
in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.
Her second book is much more or a horror novel. She reported on the book Knock, Knock, Open Wide by
Neil Sharpson. (Tor Nightfire 10/3/23)
Knock Knock, Open Wide weaves horror and Celtic myth into a terrifying, heartbreaking supernatural tale of