(no subject)

Well, so far Blue Sky is kind of delightful. It's mainly writers talking to each other. Most of social media is actually writers talking to each other.
So..

Via Blue Sky - I was able to pick up a lot of book recs. I was hunting horror novels. Apparently what's kicked me out of my four year long reading slump is jumping to the polar opposite of the romance genre, drum roll please....the horror genre.

I inform Mother.

Mother: I could never get myself to read horror.
Me: Not true - you've read Jackson.
Mother: Yes, but she doesn't really count and not that much..

Neither of my parents really were into it. Although my father read Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby - I know because I snagged his copy of it as a teen.

I like horror novels. I've read a lot of them. And it's time for a binge.
Because I just can't read another book where the hero and heroine are yearning for one another but can't bring themselves to say it. Or read any more awkward sex scenes. I've burned out on the romance genre, which is troubling considering I still have to finish revising the contemporary romance novel.

Maybe I should just write something else? Or a flash-fiction about the characters in it. Ponders.

Anyhow, books that I picked up from Amazon:

* Paul Tremblay's The Pallbearer's Club - because it's an unreliable narrative, and has two narrators telling the tale.

He excels in psychological horror apparently.

* Chuck Wendig's The Book of Accidents

"Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father—and has never told his family what happened there.

Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have—and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures.

Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania.

Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver.

And now what happened long ago is happening again . . . and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.

This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family—and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this battle: their love for one another."

* Gabino Iglesias' The Devil Takes You Home

Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.

The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The last one was heavily rec'd by ann1962. And it recently won the Stoker.

I'll probably start it after The Hollow Places, then jump over to Yellowface.

I spend way too much money on books. But alas, they make me happy.

That and this Redecor video game on my phone that I'm addicted to. It's not competitive and kind of relaxing. All you do is decorate rooms, and people vote on them, and you win coins/tokens. Although eventually in order to play you have to get more coins and tokens - which is where spending money comes in. Kind of true of all video games or so I've discovered over time.

**

Had to put ice on my shoulder, it was killing me.

Wales informed me that one of her co-workers got a bad strain of COVID, and now has no taste. Here's what I've discovered about COVID? You hang out and around folks that like to go to parties, you will get COVID. I tell myself lies so I won't worry about it. Because there's nothing I can do about it outside of what I am doing. I can't work remotely - crazy org won't allow it. I can't wear a mask all the time - it was giving me asthma and gerd.
So, get vaccines, and stay out of crowded gatherings as much as possible.
(The subway - well it varies, and people often insist on talking over you on it.)