The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix @grady_hendrix narrated by @TheRealBahniT #bookreview

Hello book friends, I hope you are all doing well?

I am not a huge paranormal reader, but occasionally one hits my radar and I have to check it out!

This was the book that did it for me!

My Review

Ok so I have to admit, this was a bit of a “Bookstagram made me do it” kind of thing, everyone was talking about this one, and I don’t like to be left out Lol

So I had a spare Audible credit, and checked to see who was narrating it, when I saw it was my favourite narrator Bahni Turpin, I was sold!!

I’m so glad I did, because I loved it!!

There is something about a book set in the South that gets me all grabby, I’m not sure if it is the accent (I think that’s what it is) or just the thought of one day travelling there myself, but I’m all in either way.

Hailed as Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula, this book is exactly what it says on the tin, a Southern Book Club.

Patricia is our MC in this story, she is married with a couple of kids, and is in a marriage that isn’t perfect, her kids are brats, and her husband need Yeeting into a distant planet in my opinion!
The only thing that Patrica looks forward to every week is her Book Club, with the other local women of the Charleston neighbourhood.
After a rocky start with the group, with book choices etc. they eventually start reading True Crime stories and Thrillers.

When a handsome stranger moves into the neighbourhood, he is the new topic of conversation amongst the women, and Patricia in particular is intrigued.

She gets even more intrigued after a series of incidents involving children, especially after they go missing.

Patricia automatically goes back to her True Crime novels and assumes that the new stranger is involved and is some kind of serial killer, but she uncovers something a lot darker than she expected.

I absolutely loved this story, it was funny but also dark in some places, a few people have said that it was gory, I didn’t find that myself, but I am a Horror reader, and this wasn’t gory to me at all, but I can see some parts being a bit gruesome for some.

🎧🎧

I would absolutely recommend the Audiobook, Bahni Turpin is an absolute genius at narration as always, she always brings an extra oomf to a story, and that is why she is my favourite! If you have never listened to her before, please check her out as she is absolutely brilliant and deserves every award that she receives.

Enjoy
Vicci 📚💛✨

The Blurb

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a real monster.

Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her ambitious husband is too busy to give her a goodbye kiss in the morning, her kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on thank-you notes and her endless list of chores. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime and paperback fiction. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are marriage, motherhood, and neighborhood gossip.

This predictable pattern is upended when Patricia meets James Harris, a handsome stranger who moves into the neighborhood to take care of his elderly aunt and ends up joining the book club. James is sensitive and well-read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in 20 years. But there’s something off about him. He doesn’t have a bank account, he doesn’t like going out during the day, and Patricia’s mother-in-law insists that she knew him when she was a girl, an impossibility.

When local children go missing, Patricia and the book club members start to suspect James is more of a Bundy than a Beatnik, but no one outside of the book club believes them. Have they read too many true crime books, or have they invited a real monster into their homes?

UK Purchase Links

Berts Books

Waterstones

Amazon Affiliate Link

 

The Institute by Stephen King @StephenKing @HodderBooks @SantinoFontana #TheInstitute #StephenKing #BookReview #ViccisBestBooksof2019

Happy New Year book friends,

2019 was a great year for reading, and I had a great time doing it!

Here is a late entry for me that I read in November.

My Thoughts

Oh My, I have finally found a new favourite Stephen King since 11.22.63

This one came with a slow start, I couldn’t really see where it was heading, and then a few chapters later, BAM I was invested!

This book follows 12 year old Luke Ellis, who is a normal boy, well except for the fact that he can move things with his mind, but he thinks that is just normal really, it doesn’t happen all the time, just when he’s mad.

Except, you and I both know that it isn’t normal, and so do the people that break into his house one night, kill his parents, kidnap him, and take him to The Institute.

We also meet Tim, an ex Cop, who was on his way to somewhere completely different, until he decides at the last minute to gives up his seat on a packed flight, and then just goes on his merry way. He finds a random old town, and gets a job as a Night Knocker, that he is way overqualified for, but seems to enjoy, and everything in his life seems to be going Hunky-Dory.

Luke has woken up in his bedroom, except is isn’t his, it just looks like it, turns out, that The Institute has a lot of kids just like Luke, and they are subjected to some horrific experiments by the adults in charge.

Do Luke and Tim have a connection? Well it wouldn’t be a SK if people were randomly shoved in his story for no reason would it?

Am I going to tell you what the connection is? OF COURSE NOT YOU FOOLS!!!

If you loved watching shows like Stranger Things, or reading SK’s older books like Firestarter, or even newer books like The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken or Vicious by V E Schwab (personal favourites of mine) then you will LOVE this book!

It reads more like a YA than most of his books, so don’t let the STEPHEN KING thing scare you, if you’ve never read any of his books before, then this would be a great starter for you.

Mr King is not known as The King for nothing, his books are usually huge, and this one is no exception, but if you go in knowing that it is going to be a wild ride, then you are going to have a great time.

🎧🎧

When I knew that Santino Fontana was narrating this one, I just KNEW that I was going to love it, if you’ve already listened to YOU by Caroline Kepnes then you’ll know what I mean (if you haven’t, what are you waiting for, add it to your never ending TBR)

Narration = Perfection
Story = Perfection
Me = Happy
Stephen = KING!

Enjoy

Vicci📚💛✨

About the Book

Amazon UK *

Amazon US

*Affiliate Link

Deep in the woods of Maine, there is a dark state facility where kids, abducted from across the United States, are incarcerated. In the Institute they are subjected to a series of tests and procedures meant to combine their exceptional gifts – telepathy, telekinesis – for concentrated effect.

Luke Ellis is the latest recruit. He’s just a regular 12-year-old, except he’s not just smart, he’s super-smart. And he has another gift which the Institute wants to use….

Far away in a small town in South Carolina, former cop Tim Jamieson has taken a job working for the local Sheriff. He’s basically just walking the beat. But he’s about to take on the biggest case of his career.

Back in the Institute’s downtrodden playground and corridors where posters advertise ‘just another day in paradise’, Luke, his friend Kalisha and the other kids are in no doubt that they are prisoners, not guests. And there is no hope of escape.

But great events can turn on small hinges, and Luke is about to team up with a new, even younger recruit, Avery Dixon, whose ability to read minds is off the scale. While the Institute may want to harness their powers for covert ends, the combined intelligence of Luke and Avery is beyond anything that even those who run the experiments – even the infamous Mrs Sigsby – suspect.

Thrilling, suspenseful, heartbreaking, The Institute is a stunning novel of childhood betrayed and hope regained.

Until the end of the World by Sarah Lyons Flemming @SLyonsFleming @justjuliawhelan #Audiobookreview #PostApocalyptic

Hello book friends,

I’m super happy to bring you a review for a new series that I think is going to keep me busy for a while as I couldn’t tear myself away from it.

Sorry for being MIA for a while, Real Life bitch-slapped me in the face for a while and I kind of got stuck in a bit of a slump!

But I think I’m back and ready to make up some lost time (and reviews!)

Why did you pick it up Vicci? 

Well, I saw lots of people talking about this book in a Facebook group that I am in, and you know how I don’t like to be left out of anything!!

Well, I have found myself a new series to binge, I can’t wait to read the next one in this series, I was on the edge of my seat for most of it.

A genre that I wouldn’t usually read was being banded around on a FB group that i am in, then I heard the narrator, Julia Whelan…..and I was invested.

I promptly bagged the who series on KU and upgraded the Audio’s for £3.47 each!!! what a bargain!

Told in the POV of Cassie, we see her in her home town of New York, there seems to be some sort of “flu” epidemic that is sweeping the city, so people are being quite cautious, but until she gets a call from her friend explaining that people are dying and there is no cure does she really start to worry.

Her friends tells her to get out of town immediately, so her and her friends try and do just that, except it turns out that the people that are dying from this epidemic, have not done being dead yet!

This was such a great story, I was so invested in all of the characters, and they were all brilliantly narrated by the awesome Julia Whelan, one of my favourite narrators, ho bought every one of them to life in my head.

This is not a gory book, there is a little gruesome talk, but nothing too bad, if you liked The Walking Dead then you will probably like this, as it is about a group of people trying to survive.

Try it, You never know, you might like it!!

Book 1 is only £2.49 on audio or free on KU, what have you got to lose?
Until the End of the World – Book 1

About the book 

Until the End of the World
By: Sarah Lyons Fleming
Narrated by: Julia Whelan
Series: Until the End of the World, Book 1
Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
Publisher: Podium Publishing

Cassie Forrest isn’t surprised to learn that the day she’s decided to get her life together is also the day the world ends. After all, she’s been on a self-imposed losing streak since her survivalist parents died: she’s stopped painting, broken off her engagement to Adrian and dated a real jerk.

Rectifying her mistakes has to wait, however, because Cassie and her friends have just enough time to escape Brooklyn for her parents’ cabin before Bornavirus LX turns them into zombies, too. This is difficult enough, but Cassie’s tag along ex-boyfriend and her friend’s bratty sister have a knack for making everything, even the apocalypse, more unpleasant.

When the two attract a threat as deadly as the undead to their safe haven, Cassie’s forced to see how far she’ll go to protect those she loves. And it’s a lot farther than she’d anticipated. This, coupled with Adrian’s distant voice on Safe Zone Radio and, of course, the living dead, threaten to put Cassie right back into the funk she just dragged herself out of. Survival’s great and all, especially when you have leather armor, good friends and home-brewed beer, but there’s something Cassie must do besides survive: tell Adrian she still loves him. And to do that, Cassie has to find faith that she’s stronger than she thinks, she’s still a crack shot and true love never dies.

 

Flashback Friday Featuring – The Troop by Nick Cutter #FlashbackFriday #BookReview #Disturbed

The Troop by Nick Cutter

⭐⭐⭐⭐ If Stephen King said so stars!

Synopsis

Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story and a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—stumbles upon their campsite, Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bio-engineered nightmare. An inexplicable horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival that will pit the troop against the elements, the infected…and one another.

Review

What can I say about this book??

I love horror books, I was a mahoosive Stephen King fan when I was younger, and literally hoovered up anything he wrote, also James Herbert and Dean Koontz, so I have read my fair share of yeuch throughout the years. ……..oh but this book!!!

Stephen King reviewed this on GR and said that it scared the shit out of him, that means you have to read it right??

I can safely say that this is the only book that has EVER made me gag!

I was listening to it on audio and I had to take my earphones out as I thought I was going to hurl lol.

On an island just off of Canada a scout troop go to spend a weekend there, as they do every year, with no technology or phones allowed, they go to have a great time.

Apart from this time, this time a man shows up out of nowhere, he is desperately hungry, and I mean HUNGRY, to the point that he starts eating the chair!!

Scout Master Tim helps him inside the cabin they stay in as he knows a bit of first aid and he can clearly see that the man is ill, but he doesn’t know how ill ……..until he sees something moving in the man’s stomach!

A stomach churning – 4☆ read

Read with caution,

Vicci

Sunday Swaps: Bird Box by Josh Malerman ~ Including a Double Review ~ #bookreview #SundaySwap

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Synopsis

Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.

Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it’s time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat–blindfolded–with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?

Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.

Vicci’s Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ That is some creepy sh*t stars!

This was a reread for me, but it was on our Goodreads group (A Million More Pages, you should totally join, it’s awesome!) as a Book of the Month, so ya know…points!

Anyhoo….

This little Dystopian cracker is a creepy little mind fu*k because you don’t really know why you are scared, I mean how could you while you are wearing a blindfold?

It all starts when seemingly normal people start to loose their sh*t and go mad, not in the “He’s crazy” type thing, i mean totally bat shit crazy, they are normal one second, and the next they are killing their husband/wife/kids, and then turning the weapon on themselves.

When i say weapon i mean anything they have at hand, knives, guns, hammers, even their own teeth!!

This is happening quite far away in a different county, and it is being reported on the TV so it isn’t anything to get really worried about…..

Until it starts happening closer to the U.S.A…

Then in your state, then in your home town!

People start to cover their windows/doors and are scared to look outside, as it seems to be that something out there is causing all of this, but the thing is, if you look…..you die!!

So Malorie is there…

In the house……

All alone……

She can’t go outside…..

She can’t look outside…..

She WON’T look outside…………

Oh yes, i forgot to say that she is a few months pregnant!!!!

Because you are with Malorie throughout this creepy little read you start to feel the claustrophobia as you are not really sure what is out there, especially when you have to eventually open that door and go outside…………

🎧🎧Audio narration for this book was perfect, Katharine Mangold really managed to make me believe that *I* was Malorie, and i was scared out of my pants!! 😱

Berit’s Review

Don’t Open Your Eyes!

What the **** did I just read? This book was NOT what I was expecting… at all! It was disturbing, creepy, and kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time…. just going to put it out there if I were in this situation, in this post apocalyptic world, I would so be gone in the first day…. just saying….

Something is out there, something that makes you go mad if you lay your eyes on it…. mad to the point you will kill others, yourself, or both…. mad to the point of no return…. so how do you survive? You board up your house with cardboard and cloth, you never go outside unless completely necessary, and then you wear a blindfold…. sounds fun, right? Oh yes and I forgot to mention sometimes when you’re outside you will feel or sense whatever is out there around you…… creepy!

Mallory the protagonist in this book was a quietly strong woman…. when things started going completely sideways not only did she find her way to a safe place, but she was also pregnant…. The story is told in alternating time periods… Mallory on a river trip trying to find her way to an even safer place… and Malory‘s backstory…. I have to give it to Mallory… not only did she have herself to take care of but two young children who she needed to train to escape and survive….

I’d recommend if you like postapocalyptic books, creepy books, or are just in the mood to be freaked out….

🎧🎧🎧5 huge stars for the audiobook narration by Cassandra Campbell… I absolutely 100% enjoyed this book more because of her fantastic narration, she made me feel as though I was there on that rowboat with her going down that river….

*** thank you so much to my amazing blog partner V, this is a Sunday Swap read and I probably would have never picked it up otherwise ***

Enjoy the creepiness,

Vicci and Berit

Parasite by Mira Grant #FlashbackFriday

Parasite by Mira Grant

⭐⭐⭐⭐🌠 Ewww Stars 4.5

1/2 Star removed due to the terrible English accent!

Synopsis

A decade in the future, humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease.

We owe our good health to a humble parasite – a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the tapeworm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system – even secretes designer drugs. It’s been successful beyond the scientists’ wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them.

But these parasites are getting restless. They want their own lives…and will do anything to get them.

Review

WOAH! !!!

Stand back everyone this is a cracker of a book.

Sally, Sal for short is finding it hard to find the right words to say. …..a lot!

The reason for this is because she had a really bad car accident and was in a coma, she was pronounced brain dead and her parents were asked to turn her machine off.

Then all of a sudden just before they pull the plug Sally wakes up!

How I hear you say?

Well ……

This is all down to a tapeworm!!

Now I heard you say EWWWWW! I did.

BUT wait a minute, did you know ……?

1. All that you need to do is take 1 little tablet brought to you by SymboGen and the Intestinal Bodyguard will do all of the work for you.
This means, no illnesses ie. Viruses, cancers, it even controls your contraception for you!

2. The Intestinal Bodyguard sits in your stomach and just gets on with it, you don’t even know it’s there.

3. Million and millions of people use The Intestinal Bodyguard by SymboGen with no side effects what so ever!

And so Sally wakes up after being implanted with a little bodyguard and has to start again, literally, she is officially only 6 years old.

She has had to learn to walk, talk etc.
But she has a completely different personality to Sally who she was before.

Everything is peachy and she is getting along lovely thank you very much, until these darn sleep walkers start turning up, banging on her doors and windows.

She gets a secret message that ties to a childrens poem and the ride starts from there.

I could put in loads of spoilers but I won’t, read it and take the journey by yourself.

BTW, Tansy …… Loved her!

Enjoy the Riddle,

Vicci