Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That Are Still on My TBR

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Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Ten Books That Have Been On Your Shelf (Or TBR) From Before You Started Blogging That You STILL Haven't Read Yet 

 

Book Review: The Fall by Bethany Griffin

The Fall
Author: Bethany Griffin
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Horror | Retellings
Released: October 7th 2014
Review Source: Greenwillow Books

She has spent her life fighting fate, and she thought she was succeeding. Until she woke up in a coffin.

Ushers die young. Ushers are cursed. Ushers can never leave their house, a house that haunts and is haunted, a house that almost seems to have a mind of its own. Madeline’s life—revealed through short bursts of memory—has hinged around her desperate plan to escape, to save herself and her brother. Her only chance lies in destroying the house.

In the end, can Madeline keep her own sanity and bring the house down? The Fall is a literary psychological thriller, reimagining Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher.

The Fall was the perfect read for October. The eeriness and slow build of the story truly brought suspense that made you want more. The Fall is a reimagining for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Madeline is cursed, the whole Usher family is cursed.

Madeline Usher is unfortunately part of a family that is truly cursed. They live in a house that controls everything, controls thoughts, actions, and impending deaths. The house truly lives to destroy and taunt the Usher family, a house that is very much alive as the people that are living in it. We start Madeline’s story off before the house truly invades her, but she sees it taking over her mother and her father, but she is the one that house chooses, its next reason to thrive. We also get journal entries from an Usher that has already passed, Lisbeth Usher, who was trying to find a way out, a way to leave the house and actually live. It deems impossible to actually leave the house, something always brings them back. I don’t want to give too much away since I love getting the smaller things that made the book what it is, a thriller, mystery, something you’re going to want to piece by piece yourself.

For me this book took me some time to read, it was a slow read, but always engaging. The way Bethany Griffin tells Madeline’s story will get you entranced with everything, wanting to know more, and wanting to destroy the house as well. Since it was a slow and steady pace I was having a hard time picking it back up, this is something different from what I normally read and I wanted something  new to try, which I believe is the reason why I was having difficulty with it, but that no way lessens my views on the story being told. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who loves an eerie read, that doesn’t mind a slow speed but loves receiving clues and tidbits that piece together a great book.  

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Make sure to check out the guest post we featured during THE FALL blog tour on the 7th of October.

Top 5 of the spookiest scary stories you have ever read!

Blog Tour: The Fall | Bethany Griffin | Guest Post | Giveaway

Welcome to our stop on The Fall tour for Bethany Griffin. This tour is hosted by Rockstar Book Tour.

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The Fall
Author: Bethany Griffin
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Horror | Paranormal | Retellings
Released: October 7th 2014

  

Madeline Usher is doomed.

She has spent her life fighting fate, and she thought she was succeeding. Until she woke up in a coffin.

Ushers die young. Ushers are cursed. Ushers can never leave their house, a house that haunts and is haunted, a house that almost seems to have a mind of its own. Madeline’s life—revealed through short bursts of memory—has hinged around her desperate plan to escape, to save herself and her brother. Her only chance lies in destroying the house.

In the end, can Madeline keep her own sanity and bring the house down? The Fall is a literary psychological thriller, reimagining Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher.

Top 5 of the spookiest scary stories you have ever read!

I’ll start off by saying I’m a wimp, and one of the most irritating wimps ever, because I’m really attracted to spooky things, but I’m not a real horror story lover. For one thing (despite writing the Masque books which feature lots of dead bodies), I’m really freaked out by gore, and I don’t really like to be scared for the sake of being scared. What I like is to invest in characters and care so deeply that I don’t want them to get hurt, so a book where a character I love is in danger is the worst sort of horror for me.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher- I read this in either 7th or 8th grade, and it stayed with me. Why? Because I’d never read anything so atmospheric, there isn’t anything like the atmosphere Poe created in that story, you had to practically slog through his descriptions to find out what was going on with the Ushers, but once you got there it was really scary. And the disease that affected the Ushers was so weird and unusual seeming it felt like something that could really happen. And the idea of being buried alive? It was so awful, particularly when Roderick admits that they put Madeline living in her tomb. Everything about this story unsettled 7th grade me.

2. It by Stephen King. Stephen King is my favorite author, but I mostly love his fantasy stuff (The Talisman, the Dark Tower, the Stand). IT is my favorite that comes across as scary/spooky. The first scene is one of those that stay with you forever, and even though I’ve never had a particular fear of clowns or of things in storm drains, the whole ‘we all float down here’ refrain, the idea of some indefinable evil preying on a town, and then everyone forgetting/not connecting the dots, as the kids in the story connect the dots it reminded me a lot of childhood, of seeing certain things that adults don’t see, and not being able to make them understand, and just the sense of peril as these kids battle the evil. It’s such an epic book, and the movie does not come close to doing it justice.

3. Shadowland by Peter Straub, because it’s weird and creepy and scary in all the right ways. It features misfits and a prep school and real magic and fake magic and sacrifice, and a kid morphing himself into a monster, and I’ve never quite been sure of everything that happened in the book, even on multiple readings. Weirdly, the fact that I can never exactly pinpoint what this book is about is one of the things that I love most about it.

4.  The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman- This story about madness was a huge inspiration for The Fall (in fact there is an homage to it in the Fall). It’s the story about a woman who’s been deemed hysterical and locked away in a room and the things that go through her mind, and the horror of it really overwhelmed me the first time I read it. And yes, this is totally an English-major type choice, but I can’t help it.

5. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. Why? Because it looks so deeply at the darkness inside of humans, the depths we’re capable of, the pure evil? Because that evil is juxtaposed by the purity of a small child and the desperation of a father trying to save him? None of these are new themes (and in fact I’ll mention Swan Song by Robert McCammon in which I first read, and was horrified by, these same themes) but perhaps it’s because The Road is so beautifully written, it’s like poetry, but poetry about death and destruction and a desperation so huge that I couldn’t stop turning the page, even though I was terrified by what I might find on the next page. I bought myself a copy and immediately swore never to read it again because it unsettled me so much.

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Bethany Griffin is a high school English teacher who prides herself on attracting creative misfits to elective classes like Young Adult Literature, Creative Writing, and Speculative Literature. She is the author of HANDCUFFS, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, DANCE OF THE RED DEATH, GLITTER AND DOOM, and THE FALL. She lives with her family in Kentucky.

1 Grand Prize- A Poe Prize Pack with a Raven Scarf, Necklace, Candle, and a signed hardcover of THE FALL and a signed bookmark! US Only

3 Signed Hardcovers of THE FALL and signed bookmarks International

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Week Two:

10/6/2014- Fiction Freak- Review

10/7/2014- Once Upon a Twilight- Guest Post

10/8/2014- WinterHaven Books- Review

10/9/2014- Fiktshun- Interview

10/10/2014- Two Chicks on Books- Guest Post

Book Review: Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin

Masque of the Red Death
Masque of the Red Death #1
Author: Bethany Griffin
Reading Level: YA
Genre: Science Fiction/Steampunk
Released: April 24th 2012
Review Source: Greenwillow Books
Available: Amazon

Summary: (from goodreads) Everything is in ruins.

A devastating plague has decimated the population. And those who are left live in fear of catching it as the city crumbles to pieces around them.

So what does Araby Worth have to live for?

Nights in the Debauchery Club, beautiful dresses, glittery make-up . . . and tantalizing ways to forget it all.

But in the depths of the club—in the depths of her own despair—Araby will find more than oblivion. She will find Will, the terribly handsome proprietor of the club. And Elliott, the wickedly smart aristocrat. Neither boy is what he seems. Both have secrets. Everyone does.

And Araby may find something not just to live for, but to fight for—no matter what it costs her.

Masque of Red Death is a book that will intrigue you from the moment you lay eyes on the cover. The cover of this book is absolutely stunning. I hate to say it but sometimes I do judge a book by it’s cover, sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m wrong. In this case I was......

RIGHT!! Judge by the cover my first thought was “Oh this book must be good!” and boy was it good! The way this book was written was fascinating and the plot was uniquely delicious. I devoured myself in this story from the first page and couldn’t stop until I was done. The characters are very well developed and each character is highly likable. The romance in this story is a triangle and it was heartbreakingly hard to decide which male character Araby should choose since they were both great in different ways.

The story is told in modern time but with a Victorian twist. The world the author created was a bit horrific with the illness and the devastation that was described in the plot. However, it made the story that more interesting. The story measured up to feel as if it was running smoothly, not to slow or fast or not too much or too little. Just right.

I highly recommend this story to all YA and just anyone who can enjoy a good romance.