Monthly Archives: October 2025

The Cemetery Boys – Heather Brewer

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Seventeen-year-old Stephen and his father have packed up their lives in Denver and moved to Spencer to live with Stephen’s taciturn grandmother. It’s the summer before Stephen’s senior year and Stephen isn’t happy about – well – anything. First of all, Spencer is a weird backwater, population 813. Secondly, they’ve left Stephen’s mother behind. Well, she’s been institutionalized. Stephen’s father is unemployed. Stephen’s grandmother is expecting a little help around the house in exchange for their room and board.

At the start of Heather Brewer’s YA novel The Cemetery Boys I was sure I was in for a fast-paced thrill ride.

My fingers were going numb, my bound wrists worn raw by the ropes, but I twisted again, hard this time. I pulled until my skin must have split, because I felt my palms grow wet, then sticky, with what I was pretty sure was my blood. The knots were tight, but I had to get loose. Those things were coming for me, I just knew it.

Those things, it turns out, are The Winged Ones, some supernatural entity that demand a human blood sacrifice every so often for the sake of the town’s prosperity. At first it just seems like some made up bull designed to scare newcomers, but when Stephen meets Devon and the other boys who hang out in “The Playground” aka the local cemetery, he discovers that Devon actually believes in The Winged Ones.

Then there’s Cara, Devon’s beautiful twin sister with whom Stephen experiences an insta-love connection. Not entirely believable.

Despite starting with a bang, The Cemetery Boys ends with a whimper. There is certainly something sort of Stepford-esque about the town and its inhabitants, but nothing really goes anywhere and the book is mostly about a bunch of teenaged boys getting together and drinking their asses off. Until it’s late in the day denouement that is relatively anticlimactic.

Just okay for me.

The Hellbound Heart – Clive Barker

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So, apparently British horror writer Clive Barker’s 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart is a classic. It spawned the cult movie Hellraiser, which I have never seen…and am not likely to see after having finished the book.

Frank is tired of the world. In fact, “there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat. No sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.” Then he finds Lemarchand’s box, which offers him an intriguing puzzle to solve and if he does, untold pleasure of the darkest kind.

Of course, you can’t make a fair bargain with the Cenobites. They are tricky entities. Frank soon discovers “There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.”

Frank’s brother Rory and his wife Julia have recently moved into Frank and Rory’s childhood home. One of the rooms is damp and creepy and Julia soon discovers the reason why. Some version of Frank inhabits the walls and in order to be made whole he needs blood. Julia, who had a pre-marital tryst with Frank, an event that “had in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and joylessness of rape”, feels her lust for Frank reunited. despite the abhorrent form he currently takes.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blacked as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle, a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason–

The plot is relatively straightforward – equal parts predictable and revolting. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.

Wildman – J.C. Geiger

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Eighteen-year-old Lance Hendricks is on his way home after auditioning for a spot at a prestigious music school when his ’93 Buick breaks down. Lance is really anxious to get home to a party where he and his long-time girlfriend, Miriam, are finally going to do the deed, but his car is towed off and it looks like he’s going to be stranded in the middle of nowhere because he is not leaving his car behind. Not the car his father left for him.

J.C. Geiger’s YA novel Wildman is essentially the story of what happens when a person whose life is all figured out discovers that maybe that buttoned-up life isn’t the one he wants after all.

Lance takes a room at the Trainsong – a dumpy roadside motel – and heads over to The Float, the only spot for miles where someone can get something to eat (and drink, even if you are underage). There he meets Mason, Rocco, and Meebs. And Dakota.

She was watching him.

A girl in the darkness. In possession of perfect stillness. Her stillness made him stop, and because he stopped, it came. The feeling he’d been aching for. Toes in ice water. feathers up his calves. A hair-prickling, teeth rattling rush of a shiver so good it made his eyes sting.

As Lance waits for his car, he gets caught up in a world vastly different from his own. Lance was on the fast track to success: valedictorian of his graduating class, a full-ride scholarship, a summer internship at the bank. The future is all mapped out. Until he loses his way or, maybe, finds a different more appealing way.

I enjoyed my time with Lance and the people he meets on this journey. The book is well-written, often laugh-out-loud funny and asks some big questions at a pivotal time in a young person’s life.

We Used to Live Here – Marcus Kliewer

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Years ago, I started to watch the movie The Strangers and I couldn’t make it past the first twenty minutes. Totally creeped me out.

While I eventually did make it through the whole thing, I don’t think I’d ever be looking to repeat the experience. Except maybe in book form.

Marcus Kliewer’s novel We Used to Love Here began its life on Creepypasta. I have only had one other experience with a book with the same starting point: Pen Pal. Like that book, this one started off with a bang and ended with a bit of a whimper.

Eve and Charlie have recently purchased an old fixer-upper in a secluded location with the intent of either renovating or demolishing and rebuilding. Eve is home alone one evening when the doorbell rings. There’s a family on her doorstep and Eve concludes

All in all, they seemed the kind of brood that would cap a Sunday-morning sermon with brunch at Applebee’s. Eve was more than familiar with this crowd.

The father wants to know if he can bring his family in because he used to live in the house. Weird, right?

Eve is reluctant to let them in and so she plays the only card she has: she’ll check with her girlfriend because

The distant alarm bells of her subconscious rang out. She vaguely remembered hearing stories. Stories of strangers showing up at houses, claiming they had lived there once, asking to take a quick look around. Then, when the unsuspecting victims had let down their guard: robbery, torture, murder.

What starts as a relatively straightforward domestic thriller soon morphs into something completely unhinged. The family starts to seem less “off” and Eve starts to feel way more unreliable. And the house, yeah, the house is changing, too. “”The basement’s bigger that you’d think,”” Thomas tells Eve. “”Lots of nooks, crannies, places to hunker down.”” Similarly, the attic is labyrinthine. But this discovery, like the basement, is new to Eve – discovered only after the arrival of the family.

We Used to Live Here was certainly easy to read – but I found it sort of disjointed, especially as things went along. It wasn’t scary, although there were certainly some creepy moments. I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied, mostly because I wasn’t 100% sure I understood exactly what had happened. That may be my own fault rather than the book’s – so your mileage might vary.