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Before You Sleep
Before You Sleep
Adam Nevill | 2020 | Horror
9
8.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
124 of 200
Kindle
Before you sleep: three horrors
By Adam Nevill

A trilogy of horror stories from the award-winning writer's first collection of short stories - SOME WILL NOT SLEEP - and an introduction to the nightmarish visions and ghastly spectres that have been disturbing the sleep of readers for years. In this book you'll find two ghost stories and a tale of ancestral demoniac horror.

In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear . . .
When the children left the house, their toys remained . . .
A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . .





1. Where Angels come in

So reading this in the dark is so bloody frightening but the only way to read it! This reminds me of all the creepy places we used to dare each other to go as kids. There are images from this story that are going to stay with me for a while! Brilliant short!!

2. Ancestors

Well that was bloody creepy as hell!! One I think I’m hiding all the toys in a locked box!! Also don’t go poking your nose in where it’s not needed!


3. Florrie

This sent shivers down my spine. I also felt a little sad at the lives just being left and florrie still being tied to the house. Think he would have listened to his mother though! A very strange story!

Overall!

I’m a huge fan of Adam Nevill’s work and have been for years his books truly terrify me. I find myself jumping at stupid noises in the house that I know are normal! I highly recommend his books!
  
Whew... what a way to end a series. But that is what I love about Susan May Warren's books. They engage you fully, from your thoughts down to your actions. You can be consumed by her writing.
    As this series comes to a close, Susan May Warren chooses to awash us in a battery of action-packed pages, faith-filled moments, and the promise of a second chance. I have personally been looking forward to Ham’s story from day one; I mean who wouldn’t be curious about a guy willing to go over a cliff for his friend? Well, Susan May Warren leads us on a merry chase to learn Ham’s story and she introduced us to Ham’s Wife and Daughter as well. The characters were well done, I loved their interactions with each other and the somewhat over the top action on every page. While this story was not how I picture Ham’s story taking us it was interesting and a conclusion for the ages. I am truly sad to see this series end, but I am looking forward to the next book Susan May Warren writes.
I give this book 4 out of 5 stars for the action-packed moments, the theme of second chances, and for making me want more! I do wish that there had been less going on in the story and that we could have seen more of the main story. But overall, it was good, just left me with more questions!
*I volunteered to read this book in return for my honest feedback. The thoughts and opinions expressed within are my own.
  
Collection by Electric Light Orchestra
Collection by Electric Light Orchestra
1995 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I grew up in London, but I spent my teens in the countryside, and I’d come to London on the weekends. It was the early stages of the band where we were meeting new people, getting drunk and stoned - all of those really formative experiences of exploring the decadent debauchery that London has to offer. Then at the end of the weekend I’d have to hop on a train and go back to the sanity of school life. “Whenever I hear this song it evokes that feeling, the sense of the early days of the band and discovering my gang. Your early twenties are about finding your tribe, which is what I did during that time by travelling to London and having those formative experiences with them. “Last Train to London” evokes that sense of finding where you belong, and it happens to contextually fit in with my experience at the time. “It’s a stark contrast to the previously mentioned songs, which are a little darker and heavier. It’s a feel-good tune to me, although it’s a song which has a kind of sad, bittersweet mood in the lyrics, like “I really want tonight to last forever / I really want to be with you.” I felt that bittersweet feeling at the time. “It’s also just a great disco banger! It’s mixed so loud and so relentlessly; and sonically it’s an incredible song. I’m uplifted whenever I hear it, it makes me feel elated. I always drop it when I DJ, it bulldozes the songs on either side of it when I play it."

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Deadly Truths (Kiss Her Goodbye #3)
Deadly Truths (Kiss Her Goodbye #3)
Rebecca Royce | 2019 | Contemporary, Romance
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Contains spoilers, click to show
42 of 250
Kindle
Deadly Truths ( Kiss her Goodbye book 3)
By Rebecca Royce

Once read a review will be written via Smashbomb and link posted in comments

I'm Everly Marrs.

Eighteen months ago the Letters took me to force my father's hand and turned my world upside down. A few months after that, a man named Ben took me from them and I went through hell before I saw them again and they turned my heart inside out. In fast moments I'll never get over, I killed my father and walked away from everything--the Alliance, the Letters, my heart.

Before D, W, T, K and J, I had plans. I was going to help people. After, I barely recognize myself, but I went through the motions, and I finished school. I had a job that paid under the table. I avoided electronic monitoring and I knew how to take care of myself. I was going off the grid. I was going to be safe and disappear.

Then one of my Letters walked into a bar...it sounds like a joke yet its anything but funny. Once again, I'm plunged back into their world, only they aren't taking me this time. No one is.

No, this time I know what it means to be Everly Marrs and what happens next is going to happen my way.


Yes!! Everly gets her happy ever after!! She worked hard for it and finally took control of her life. Love Rebeccas books and although sad to see this end it’s great to have a complete story that is compact and holds a punch! Brilliant RH series
  
Build Your Home Around My Body
Build Your Home Around My Body
Violet Kupersmith | 2021 | Fiction & Poetry, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I loved this enchanting, horrific, beautiful story. Build Your House Around My Body is a difficult book to describe. There are at least three timelines, all relevant to what is happening in the present day to the main character, Winnie née Ngoan.

Winnie is a lost soul - she has gone to Vietnam to stay with family while she teaches English to Vietnamese students, hoping to find herself, but she seems to become more and more lost as the story progresses. She struggles with her dual identity as her mother is American, and her father is Vietnamese. The fact that she seems to deliberately sabotage her own life is the most tragic thing about her.

The time does jump around a bit, but this didn’t confuse me at all - the chapter headings made sure of that - in fact they gave some interesting history lessons (e.g. French colonialism, Japanese occupation).

It’s a weird and wonderful one (my favourite kind!), sometimes bordering on the grotesque (ditto). Bodily functions and food that I wasn’t sure about, galore! (I’d still try the food though, although I draw the line at dog…).

The supernatural elements showed that these things are still very much a part of Vietnamese culture (spirits and demons both feature).

Some parts are achingly sad, some made me feel a bit ill, and others were actually quite amusing. I couldn’t put this book down. The joy of it was that I didn’t know, couldn’t predict, what was going to happen next!

I’m really interested to see what Kupersmith writes next if this is her debut - what an imagination!
Many thanks to Jellybooks for giving me the chance to read this wonderful book.
  
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Issac Holman recommended track Claire by Baxter Dury in Happy Soup by Baxter Dury in Music (curated)

 
Happy Soup by Baxter Dury
Happy Soup by Baxter Dury
2011 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

Claire by Baxter Dury

(0 Ratings)

Track

"Baxter Dury was a big inspiration for me and Laurie. Back in the day when we were first touring we’d do loads of shows and I remember that on pretty much every journey we’d have the album Happy Soup on, not talking to each other, we’d just have that on full blast. ‘Claire’ was the one that struck a chord with me, I love the honesty and sincerity of it and the softness in his voice. The instrumentation is everything that I love about a tune, it’s quite melancholic and nice and sad. “I love Baxter Dury. I love Ian Dury as well, but I think they’re in completely different ballparks, they get compared quite a lot but I don’t think they should. I actually discovered Baxter Dury through my Mum, I feel like I’m dropping my parents into this whole thing! My Mum’s very much into new and current music, she’s got her finger on the pulse and she’s always introducing me to new stuff. When this came out she was the first person who showed it to me. She said ‘This is Ian Dury’s son’ and I was ‘Woah, this is fucking sick.’ “Weirdly, Baxter was doing something on 6 Music and he played one of our tunes. He ended up talking to Laurie about the tune, a song of ours called ‘Where's Your Car Debbie?’ and I think he wanted to know more about it. Much to our excitement, we got in contact with him and ended up doing a tune with him and becoming friends with him, it was wicked."

Source
  
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Guy Garvey recommended Amnesiac by Radiohead in Music (curated)

 
Amnesiac by Radiohead
Amnesiac by Radiohead
2001 | Rock
7.5 (2 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I love the orchestration, I love the sentiment, [Thom Yorke] is going through a peaceful patch on that record. He sounds like for the first time he is crooning to you a little bit, like he is a little more comfortable. He is still dealing with huge social issues in his lyrics and very deeply personal experiences as well. On 'Morning Bell' he sings: ""Where'd you park the car?"" That's the conversation your parents have when they are newly split up. They still have to share a vehicle, that is a conversation that they have to have. If you're a child of the '80s, nowadays everybody's got their own car, but that was the only communication my parents had after about six months. And when I heard it singing out in the middle of his lyrics, I just knew for sure that's what he was talking about. So, beautiful, overarching. Sometimes Thom's lyrics are like being berated. It's like being shouted at, and then at other times, he seems to pull a rainbow out of the sludge out of nowhere. That record, it could have been any of them, but that's the one I consider mine, in the same way I feel a sense of ownership of those Talk Talk records. That's the Radiohead album that's given me the most joy. It can take you back to a sad time in your life, and I think that's what good music does as well. You know it brings you forward to the present, but also reminds you of your emotional connection to something in the past. And I think if an album can do that, it's worked, basically."

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Jeff Lynne recommended Greatest Hits by Roy Orbison in Music (curated)

 
Greatest Hits by Roy Orbison
Greatest Hits by Roy Orbison
1988 | Pop, Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"What a beautiful guy. He was so sweet. I mean, every song he’s done is my favourite. You can’t go wrong with them. Some of the songs aren’t as good as others but most of the ones he wrote with Joe Melson and Bill Dees are great. I’ve just recorded ‘Running Scared’ for my new album, Longwave, and he once told me that ‘Running Scared’ was his personal favourite of all the songs he’d ever done. I actually got to work with Roy and be his pal and be his producer and his co-writer on a song called ‘You Got It’ which was a big hit in America and here too. So that was a big thrill for him to have a hit. And it was his first hit in 20 years and we’d done it together and that was a great, marvellous feeling. In real life, he was actually a very funny guy. And he could do all Monty Python sketches on his own! He did all the parts! When we were doing Wilburys videos, we’d be going in a van to Grand Union Station in LA to film ‘Handle With Care’ and he’d be doing Monty Python sketches. And he’s got this enormous and most infectious giggle you’ve ever heard and we’d all be giggling like schoolgirls after a minute or two and all fucking fall about! He was a lovely guy and if he was sad he never showed it. When Roy died we did talk about getting someone else in but we thought that nobody could replace Roy Orbison."

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ClareR (6230 KP) rated Hamnet in Books

Sep 26, 2020  
Hamnet
Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell | 2020 | Fiction & Poetry
10
8.4 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
I think this has probably made it to the top of my favourite books of the year. How can this possibly be topped by anything else?

Hamnet is an imagining of what could have happened to Shakespeare’s son - even in the parish records it doesn’t say what his cause of death was. Maggie O’Farrell makes this version completely plausible though: plague should have been a real threat at this time. It killed indiscriminately: young and old, rich and poor, weak and strong. They were all vulnerable to illnesses with no cures. I’m something of an emotional reader at the best of times, but as Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, was preparing her son for burial, I was crying in to my breakfast. My 16 year old son looked at me over the top of his bacon butty and said:”Another sad bookthen, Mum?”, and shook his head. To read of a mother and her dead son, and see my 13 and 16 year old sons merrily tucking in to their bacon sandwiches, may not have been the ideal time to be reading this.

This is the kind of book that makes you really look at how precarious life was in those times, and how lucky we are today to have so few worries on this scale (Covid-19 aside!).

The writing is so beautiful, so descriptive and emotive: it picks you up and sets you down squarely in Elizabethan Stratford, making you feel exactly how Agnes must have felt. Honestly, it broke my heart to read of her pain.

If you haven’t read this yet, you’re in for a treat. This deserves ALL the awards.
  
The Big Sick (2017)
The Big Sick (2017)
2017 | Comedy, Drama, Romance
One of those products that feels fresh and generic in about an equal ratio, but this just *soars* off of the chemistry of its cast. Zoe Kazan and Kumail Nanjiani are wonderful, simply wonderful together here; Ray Romano and Holly Hunter are faultless; and Kumail's family + stand-up partners are as well cast as can be even if the latter add nothing more than mostly tired jokes that don't land to the story. I admit this is still pretty scattershot, but for me that's part of what makes it so interesting? If anything is subversive here it's two things: 1. the way this flips the typical romcom on its head by taking on multiple different styles of execution as it goes along (the mostly unfunny but charming as hell opening romance, the anxious but amiable [and more funny] first meetings with the parents, the harrowing confrontation of grief, and the confusing [for the characters] but unfortunately rather rushed through ending resolutions) and 2. Kumail playing himself during a real life tumultuous period in his life. Even though dozens of liberties were taken to make this more palatable for a studio romance, the broad side of things remains rooted in truth even down to supporting scenes - and seeing Kumail as himself act out those real life events and formulate them into a positive story add a whole new level of emotional heft. Plus he's just a rock-solid comedic force in general and he handles the sad scenes nearly just as well. Even if there are still some tropes in this, the base story still feels rather nuanced. Very flawed but so nice, so wholesome.