End of the Year Book Tag

The Ladies of Horror Fiction team was tagged by our member Cat over on her blog Red Lace Reviews to complete the End of the Year Book Tag.

Emily has shared her thoughts below regarding her end of the year reading:

1. Are there any books you started this year that you need to finish?

Just my current reads, which include The Lingering by SJI Holliday & Satan’s Sweethearts by Marge Simon & Mary Turzillo.

The Lingering by S.J.I. Holliday

Married couple Jack and Ali Gardiner move to a self-sufficient spiritual commune in the English Fens, desperate for fresh start. The local village is known for the witches who once resided there and Rosalind House, where the commune has been established, is a former psychiatric home, with a disturbing history.

When Jack and Ali arrive, a chain of unexpected and unexplained events is set off, and it becomes clear that they are not all that they seem. As the residents become twitchy, and the villagers suspicious, events from the past come back to haunt them, and someone is seeking retribution…

At once an unnerving mystery, a chilling thriller and a dark and superbly wrought ghost story, The Lingering is an exceptionally plotted, terrifying and tantalizingly twisted novel by one of the most exciting authors in the genre.

Satan’s Sweethearts by Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo

Satan’s Sweethearts is an evil collection of poetry. Meet the macabre history of villainesses such as Ching-Shih, Delphine LaLaurie and Lizzie Borden.

2. Do you have an autumnal book to transition into the end of the year?

The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn

Ryan Adler and his twin sister, Jane, spent their happiest childhood days at their parents’ mountain Colorado cabin — until divorce tore their family apart. Now, with the house about to be sold, the Adler twins gather with their closest friends for one last snowboarding-filled holiday. While commitment-phobic Ryan gazes longingly at Lauren, wondering if his playboy days are over, Jane’s hopes of reconciling with her old boyfriend evaporate when he brings along his new fiancée. As drama builds among the friends, something lurks in the forest, watching the cabin, growing ever bolder as the snow falls — and hunger rises. After a blizzard leaves the group stranded, the true test of their love and loyalty begins as the hideous creatures outside close in, one bloody attack at a time. Now Ryan, Jane, and their friends must fight — tooth and nail, bullet and blade — for their lives. Or else surrender to unspeakable deaths in the darkened woods.

3. Is there a new release you’re still waiting for?

Not that I’m aware of at the moment.

4. What are three books you want to read before the end of the year?

Unmemory by Kristi DeMeester

An original, 9,000-word short story by Kristi DeMeester, with 10 illustrations by Yves Tourigny. A university student attempts to track down the briefly-glimpsed Christmas film which traumatized her as a child.

The Season of Giving by Angel Gelique

Lou Reilly grew up in a strict, oppressive environment, raised by zealous religious parents who merely wanted to protect him from the sinners of the world. Sheltered to the point of isolation, Lou is unprepared to fend for himself when his parents pass away. Bullied and tormented at his new place of employment, Lou starts suspecting that his parents were right to shield him from such harsh and hateful people. Just as Lou begins to befriend a colleague who vows to help improve his life, he is put to the ultimate test of faith. All seems hopeless. But he won’t let the sinners win. He won’t burn in hell as his parents have warned.

Lou will make things right….

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly –

Slipping away from them –

And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.

“Miri I conjure you ”

This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

5. Is there a book you think could still shock you and become your favourite book of the year?

No, it’s currently tied between The Rust Maidens & another novel, and I don’t think anything can beat them.

The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste

Something’s happening to the girls on Denton Street.

It’s the summer of 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio, and Phoebe Shaw and her best friend Jacqueline have just graduated high school, only to confront an ugly, uncertain future. Across the city, abandoned factories populate the skyline; meanwhile at the shore, one strong spark, and the Cuyahoga River might catch fire. But none of that compares to what’s happening in their own west side neighborhood. The girls Phoebe and Jacqueline have grown up with are changing. It starts with footprints of dark water on the sidewalk. Then, one by one, the girls’ bodies wither away, their fingernails turning to broken glass, and their bones exposed like corroded metal beneath their flesh.

As rumors spread about the grotesque transformations, soon everyone from nosy tourists to clinic doctors and government men start arriving on Denton Street, eager to catch sight of “the Rust Maidens” in metamorphosis. But even with all the onlookers, nobody can explain what’s happening or why—except perhaps the Rust Maidens themselves. Whispering in secret, they know more than they’re telling, and Phoebe realizes her former friends are quietly preparing for something that will tear their neighborhood apart.

Alternating between past and present, Phoebe struggles to unravel the mystery of the Rust Maidens—and her own unwitting role in the transformations—before she loses everything she’s held dear: her home, her best friend, and even perhaps her own body.

6. Have you already started making reading plans for 2019?

How dare you ask me that. Yes.

Do you have any end of the year reading plans? Feel free to tag yourself to answer the End of the Year Book Tag questions.