Spooky Book Club - June 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
June’s Spooky Book Club selection is So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in June to discuss!
*****
A woman must learn to take life by the throat after a night out leads to irrevocable changes in this juicy, thrilling novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Such Sharp Teeth and Black Sheep.
Sloane Parker is dreading her birthday. She doesn’t need a reminder she’s getting older, or that she’s feeling indifferent about her own life. Her husband surprises her with a birthday-weekend getaway—not with him, but with Sloane’s longtime best friend, troublemaker extraordinaire Naomi. Sloane anticipates a weekend of wine tastings and cozy robes and strategic avoidance of issues she’d rather not confront, like her husband’s repeated infidelity.
But when they arrive at their rental cottage, it becomes clear Naomi has something else in mind. She wants Sloane to stop letting things happen to her, for Sloane to really live. So Naomi orchestrates a wild night out with a group of mysterious strangers, only for it to take a horrifying turn that changes Sloane’s and Naomi’s lives literally forever. The friends are forced to come to terms with some pretty eternal consequences in this bloody, seductive novel about how it’s never too late to find satisfaction, even though it might taste different than expected. https://bookshop.org/p/books/so-thirsty-rachel-harrison/20975203?ean=9780593642542&next=t
Spooky Book Club - August 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
August’s Spooky Book Club selection is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in August to discuss!
*****
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. https://bookshop.org/p/books/perfume-the-story-of-a-murderer-patrick-suskind/8525602?ean=9780375725845&next=t
Spooky Book Club - September 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
September’s Spooky Book Club selection is Slewfoot by BROM. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in September to discuss!
*****
Set in Colonial New England, Slewfoot is a tale of magic and mystery, of triumph and terror as only dark fantasist Brom can tell it.
Connecticut, 1666: An ancient spirit awakens in a dark wood. The wildfolk call him Father, slayer, protector.
The colonists call him Slewfoot, demon, devil.
To Abitha, a recently widowed outcast, alone and vulnerable in her pious village, he is the only one she can turn to for help.
Together, they ignite a battle between pagan and Puritan – one that threatens to destroy the entire village, leaving nothing but ashes and bloodshed in their wake.
This terrifying tale of bewitchery features more than two dozen of Brom’s haunting full-color paintings and brilliant endpapers, fully immersing readers in this wild and unforgiving world. https://bookshop.org/p/books/slewfoot-a-tale-of-bewitchery/18841349?ean=9781250621993&next=t
Spooky Book Club - October 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
October’s Spooky Book Club selection is The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in October to discuss!
*****
Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-bloody-chamber/17744851?ean=9780143107613&next=t
Spooky Book Club - November 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
November’s Spooky Book Club selection is Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in November to discuss!
*****
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL • NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR
“Defiantly populated with living women . . . beautifully drawn, dense with detail and specificity . . . Notes on an Execution is nuanced, ambitious and compelling.” —Katie Kitamura, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Editors' Choice)
"A searing portrait of the complicated women caught in the orbit of a serial killer. . . . Compassionate and thought-provoking." –BRIT BENNETT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Los Angeles Times • Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • USA Today • Buzzfeed • Goodreads • Real Simple • Marie Claire • Rolling Stone • Business Insider • Bustle • PopSugar • The Millions • The Guardian • and many more!
In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room, a gripping and atmospheric work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life—from the bestselling author of Girl in Snow.
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood.
Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.
Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.
"Poetic and mesmerizing . . . Powerful, important, intensely human, and filled with a unique examination of tragedy, one where the reader is left with a curious emotion: hope." —USA TODAY
“A profound and staggering experience of empathy that challenges us to confront what it means to be human in our darkest moments. . . . I relished every page of this brilliant and gripping masterpiece."—ASHLEY AUDRAIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Push https://bookshop.org/p/books/notes-on-an-execution-danya-kukafka/16909648?ean=9780063052741&next=t
Spooky Book Club - December 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
December’s Spooky Book Club selection is The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in December to discuss!
*****
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.
From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.
But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?
A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-unworthy-agustina-bazterrica/21530471?ean=9781668051887&next=t
Spooky Book Club - May 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent literature, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
May’s Spooky Book Club selection is Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in May to discuss!
*****
A collection of horror–inspired flash fiction, featuring over 40 new stories from literary, horror, and emerging writers—edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, the twisted minds behind Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of Mystery and Murder
In this playful, inventive collection, leading literary and horror writers spin chilling tales in only a few pages. Each slim, fast–moving story brings to life the kind of monsters readers love to fear, from brokenhearted vampires to Uber–taking serial killers and mind–reading witches.
But what also makes Tiny Nightmares so bloodcurdling—and unforgettable—are the real–world horrors that writers such as Samantha Hunt, Brian Evenson, Jac Jemc, Stephen Graham Jones, Lilliam Rivera, Kevin Brockmeier, and Rion Amilcar Scott weave into their fictions, exploring how global warming, racism, social media addiction, and homelessness are just as frightening as, say, a vampire’s fangs sinking into your neck.
Our advice? Read with the hall light on and the bedroom door open just a crack.
Featuring new stories from Samantha Hunt, Jac Jemc, Stephen Graham Jones, Rion Amilcar Scott, and more! https://bookshop.org/p/books/tiny-nightmares-very-short-stories-of-horror-lincoln-michel/17252478?ean=9781948226622&next=t
BANNED Book Club - May 2025
Knowledge is power. Join Audrey for Glendora Bookshop’s newest book group: BANNED Book Club, a reading group exclusively for young adults/teens.
BANNED Book Club meets every LAST Wednesday of the month @ 5pm EST. At the meeting, we will talk about why these books are banned and the consequences of censorship.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire.
This month’s BANNED Book Club selection is Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in May to discuss! Join us again in June for our Author Event with Angeline Boulley! Check back soon for details on this author event.
*****
An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller! A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick! A Printz Medal AND Morris Award Winner!
Soon to be adapted at Netflix for TV with President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground.
“One of this year's most buzzed about young adult novels.” —Good Morning America
With four starred reviews, Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, is a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community, perfect for readers of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange.
Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team.
Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug.
Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source. But the search for truth is more complicated than Daunis imagined, exposing secrets and old scars. At the same time, she grows concerned with an investigation that seems more focused on punishing the offenders than protecting the victims.
Now, as the deceptions—and deaths—keep growing, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.
Return to Sugar Island in Warrior Girl Unearthed...https://bookshop.org/p/books/firekeeper-s-daughter-angeline-boulley/14661768?ean=9781250866035&next=t
Spooky Book Club - April 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
April’s Spooky Book Club selection is Winterset Hollow by Jonathan Edward Durham. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in April to discuss!
*****
Everyone has wanted their favorite book to be real, if only for a moment. Everyone has wished to meet their favorite characters, if only for a day. But be careful in that wish, for even a history laid in ink can be repaid in flesh and blood, and reality is far deadlier than fiction . . . especially on Addington Isle.
Winterset Hollow follows a group of friends to the place that inspired their favorite book-a timeless tale about a tribe of animals preparing for their yearly end-of-summer festival. But after a series of shocking discoveries, they find that much of what the world believes to be fiction is actually fact, and that the truth behind their beloved story is darker and more dangerous than they ever imagined. It's Barley Day . . . and you're invited to the hunt.
Winterset Hollow is as thrilling as it is terrifying and as smart as it is surprising. A uniquely original story filled with properly unexpected twists and turns, Winterset Hollow delivers complex, indelible characters and pulse- pounding action as it storms toward an unforgettable climax that will leave you reeling. How do you celebrate Barley Day? You run, friend. You run.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/winterset-hollow-jonathan-edward-durham/1031f8b4284279da?ean=9781625862082&next=t
Spooky Book Club - March 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
March’s Spooky Book Club selection is Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in March to discuss!
*****
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (NPR, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, The Telegraph, Goodreads, Tor.com, them, and more)
A FINALIST for the LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD and GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD
“A deeply strange and haunting novel in the best possible way…An impressive and exciting debut novel that may leave you thinking about your own relationships in a new light.” —NPR
“Shocking…Achingly poetic…Sharp and beautiful as coral polyps…Armfield exercises an exquisite—even sadistic—sense of suspense." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.
By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/our-wives-under-the-sea-julia-armfield/17449967?ean=9781250229908&next=t&next=t
Spooky Book Club - Feb 2025
Spooky Book Club is a monthly reading group for the macabre-curious. The genres we explore are often horror, horror-adjacent, thriller, supernatural, gothic & more. We meet every LAST Friday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire. Spooky Book Club also mingles on FB so be sure to join our group to keep in touch.
This month’s Spooky Book Club selection is Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - a dark fantasy-thriller with a spooky kick. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in February to discuss!
*****
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film—and awakens one woman’s hidden powers.
“No one punctures the skin of reality to reveal the lurking, sinister magic beneath better than Silvia Moreno-Garcia.”—Kiersten White, author of Hide
LOCUS AWARD FINALIST • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Tordotcom, Polygon, CrimeReads, BookPage, Book Riot
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.
Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.
As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/silver-nitrate-silvia-moreno-garcia/18963482?ean=9780593355381&next=t&next=t
Spooky Book Club - Jan 2025
We’re kicking off the New Year with something fun for Spooky Book Club - Choose Your Own Adventure: Stephen King! For the month of January, choose any book by horror icon Stephen King, whether that’s the perfect, bite-size novella, or one of his… lengthier titles (ahem, looking at you The Stand…) and come discuss what you read! This is a fun way for us to spotlight an author who sports an extensive catalogue. Let’s get to know the writer behind some of the most influential horror ever written!
We have copies of some of King’s work in house, and we can always order special order whatever you’re looking for. Be sure to stop in and inquire - see you in January spooky book friends!
Join our Spooky Book Club Facebook group!
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire.
Outside/Underground Nature & More Book Club: Jan 2025
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER - A remarkable memoir of courage, faith, and the power of persistence about one woman's extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage.
"[Maathai's] story provides uplifting proof of the power of perseverance--and of the power of principled, passionate people to change their countries and inspire the world." --The Washington Post
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people's environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya's forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country.
Copies of Unbowed: A Memoir are in house now - give us a call to reserve a copy today!
Spooky Book Club: Dec 2024
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST EDITED ANTHOLOGY - BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEE FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN AN ANTHOLOGY - LOCUS AWARD FINALIST
A bold, clever, and sublimely sinister collection that dares to ask the question: "Are you ready to be un-settled?"
Norris Black - Amber Blaeser-Wardzala - Phoenix Boudreau - Cherie Dimaline - Carson Faust - Kelli Jo Ford - Kate Hart - Shane Hawk - Brandon Hobson - Darcie Little Badger - Conley Lyons - Nick Medina - Tiffany Morris - Tommy Orange - Mona Susan Power - Marcie R. Rendon - Waubgeshig Rice - Rebecca Roanhorse - Andrea L. Rogers - Morgan Talty - D.H. Trujillo - Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. - Richard Van Camp - David Heska Wanbli Weiden - Royce K. Young Wolf - Mathilda Zeller
Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai'po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear--and even follow you home.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples' survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Spooky Book Club
"To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to my memory with ambiguous alternations--sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church. Sometimes, I start from a reverie, certain I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door."
Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for companionship--until a carriage accident brings another young woman into her life: the secretive and sometimes erratic Carmilla. As Carmilla's actions become more puzzling and volatile, Laura develops bizarre symptoms, and as her health goes into decline, Laura and her father discover something monstrous.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's compelling tale of a young woman's seduction by a female vampire was a source of influence for Bram Stoker's Dracula, which it predates by over a quarter century. Carmilla was originally serialized from 1871 to 1872 and went on to inspire adaptations in film, opera, and beyond, including the cult classic web series by the same name.
Outside/Underground Nature & More Book Club
A perfect introduction to Mary Oliver's poetry, this stunning collection features 26 nature poems and prose writings about the birds that played such an important role in the Pulitzer Prize winner's life.
Within these pages you will find hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows and, of course, the snowy owl, among a dozen others-including ten poems that have never before been collected. She adds two beautifully crafted essays, "Owls," selected for the Best American Essays series, and "Bird," a new essay that will surely take its place among the classics of the genre.
In the words of the poet Stanley Kunitz, "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations."
For anyone who values poetry and essays, for anyone who cares about birds, Owls and Other Fantasies will be a treasured gift; for those who love both, it will be essential reading.
Spooky Book Club
Bram Stoker's peerless tale of desperate battle against a powerful, ancient vampire
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his 'master'. In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries - led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing - Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
Spooky Book Club
Just Like Home is a darkly gothic thriller from nationally bestselling author Sarah Gailey, 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.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/just-like-home-sarah-gailey/18672676?ean=9781250174710
Outside/Underground Nature & More Book Club
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms--and our relationships with them--are changing our understanding of how life works.
Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award - Shortlisted for the British Book Award - Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
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