Browsing Area Book of the Week, October 22, 2012.

The Weird: a compendium of strange and dark stories. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Library Call Number: PN6071.H727W45 2012.

          Reaching back and forth through time, the VanderMeers pull together 110 classic and newer short stories of the 20^th and 21^st centuries from around the world.  Alongside Kafka’s gruesome “In the Penal Colony,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmare, “The Dunwich Horror,” are lesser known but still unsettling stories, such as Maruki Murakami’s tale of a woman who meets and marries an Ice Man, Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit”, the story of a nine year-old who goes fishing alone and lives to regret it, Marc Laidlaw’s tale of a police photographer who gets too close to his work in “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio”, and other creepy stories by great authors of fiction, science fiction and fantasy. Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates all make an appearance in this incredible collection of stories, arrived just in time for Halloween.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, October 15, 2012.

Bedbugs by Ben H Winters. Library Call Number: PS3623.I6735 B43 2011.

            Sometimes horror is the monstrous radioactive animal, the human being assembled from parts, the mythical creatures that rule the night.  And sometimes, real horror comes from the things you can’t see.

            When the Wendt family finds a cheap New York apartment with lots of room for them and their daughter, Emma, in a nice building, they can’t believe their luck.  But not long after they move in, Susan finds herself waking up covered with welts, a sure sign of bedbugs.  The exterminator they call, however, finds no trace of the insects.  The landlady, who seems a little weird, swears her building has never had any trouble with bugs and is clean as a whistle.  And why isn’t Susan’s husband Alex, or Emma, being bitten?  Why just her?
            It’s enough to drive someone crazy…
            A contemporary horror story for those Halloweeners who like their scares in print.

 

Browsing Area Book of the Week, September 19, 2011.

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz.  Library Call Number: PS3561.O55 W48 2011.

     Dean Koontz, one of America’s premier suspense and horror authors, began 2011 with this ghost story of terrifying dimensions.  Homicide detective John Calvino finds a serial killer is stalking and murdering whole families, in a fashion similar to a previous killer twenty years before.  What shakes the detective to his core is that two decades before, when he was 14, his entire family was the last murdered and Calvino had killed the homicidal maniac himself in self defense.  But he has always suspected that some evil refuses to stay buried and now he’s certain that same spirit has turned its attention to his wife and children.  Bookreporter.com call this “…a fast-paced novel of hurt and evil, redemption and love. The first half will have you jumping at every little noise, afraid of things that go bump in the night, and the second half will convince you that danger is often closer than you think.”