Amelia Bedelia follows every instruction given to her by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, even dressing the chicken and dusting the furniture. However, nothing ever quite works out as planned.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Oh, Amelia Bedelia, your first day of work, and I can’t be here. But I made an alist for you. You do just what the list says,”
“She was very angry. She opened her mouth. Mrs. Rogers meant to tell Amelia Bedelia she was fired. But before she could get the words out, Mr. Rogers put something in her mouth. ”
“Such a grand house. These must be rich folks. But I must get to work. Here I stand just looking. And me with a whole list of things to do. I think I’ll make a surprise for them. I’ll make lemon meringue pie. I do make good pies.”
“Now i must dress the chicken. I wonder if she wants the chicken or the chicken?”
“Mrs. Rogers learned to say unjust the furniture, sunlight the lights, and close the drapes, and things like that. ”
This remarkable and wonderful work of imagination that combines historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy makes the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lasting ramifications palpable.
1954 in Chicago. Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old Army veteran, sets off on a road journey to New England to search for his missing father Montrose with the help of his uncle George, the editor of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, and his childhood friend Letitia. They come across both commonplace white American horrors and malicious ghosts that appear straight out of the strange tales George devours on their way to the mansion of Mr. Braithwhite, the heir to the land that belonged to Atticus’ great-grandmother.
A hidden group known as the Order of the Ancient Dawn, headed by Samuel Braithwaite and his son Caleb, has assembled to plan a ritual that is shockingly centered on Atticus. Atticus finds his father at the manor, imprisoned and in chains. And his one chance for rescue could be the beginning of the end for him and the entire Turner family.
Lovecraft Country is a terrible kaleidoscopic depiction of racism—the terrifying ghost that still stalks us today—touching multiple members of one black family in a chimerical fusion of magic, power, hope, and liberation that spans time.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. But you don’t get mad.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
“That’s the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you’re helpless to help him. Nothing worse than that. Nothing worse.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
“A wanderer in darkness, she followed an eccentric orbit, each new disturbance angling her closer to some long-awaited rendezvous. She could only hope that when the moment came, she’d be wise enough to know it, and brave enough to act.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
“White people in his experience were far more transparent. The most hateful rarely bothered to conceal their hostility, and when for some reason they did try to hide their feelings, they generally exhibited all the guile of five-year-olds, who cannot imagine that the world sees them other than as they wish to be seen.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
“What you going to do?” she cried. “You break my neck, and the what? You think I won’t come back and haunt you? Go ahead! Make me a ghost! See what that gets you.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country
A terrible crime. An unclear investigation. King has written one of his most frightening and compulsively readable stories at a time when his brand has never been stronger.
The dismembered body of an eleven-year-old kid is discovered in a town park. Fingerprints and eyewitness account definitely identify one of Flint City’s most well-liked residents. Terry Maitland is a spouse, father of two kids, Little League coach, English teacher, and English teacher. Maitland previously coached Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son made the arrest. Maitland has a plausible explanation, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to the fingerprints, witnesses, and other available proof. Their argument looks unbeatable. King’s compelling narrative picks up speed as the investigation deepens and frightening revelations start to surface, creating intense tension and nearly intolerable suspense. Although Terry Maitland appears like a kind guy, is there another side to him? You’ll be shocked by the response in the way that only Stephen King can.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider
“Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider
“People had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider
“People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider
“Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world,”
― Stephen King, The Outsider
Hundreds of unemployed men and women queue up in the early hours of the morning in a struggling American city to enter a job fair. They are drained, chilly, and in need. A lone driver in a stolen Mercedes speeds through the crowd after emerging from the fog, invisible until it’s too late. The driver runs over innocent people before reversing and accelerating again. There are eight fatalities and fifteen injuries. The murderer gets away.
Bill Hodges, an ex-cop who is still troubled by the unsolved crime, muses of suicide months later. Hodges awakens from his miserable and empty retirement when he receives a crazy letter from “the perk” accusing him of being responsible for the deaths. He is determined to stop the attack and fears an even more evil one.
Brady Hartfield resides in the home where he was born with his alcoholic mother. He cherished the sensation of death beneath Mercedes’s wheels, and he longs for that rush once more. Only Bill Hodges, together with a few oddball and mismatched pals, can catch the murderer before he commits another crime. They also have no time to waste because Brady’s upcoming mission, if it succeeds, would result in thousands of deaths or injuries.
With his horrifying and unforgettable glimpse into the mind of this driven, deranged killer, the master of suspense presents Mr. Mercedes as a battle between good and evil.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
“Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.”
Iain Reid delves into the depths of the human psyche in this brilliant and dramatic literary suspense book, examining consciousness, free choice, the value of relationships, terror, and the constraints of solitude. “Your dread and unease will rise with every passing page” (Entertainment Weekly) of this edgy, disturbing debut, reminiscent of Jose Saramago’s early work, Michel Faber’s cult masterpiece Under the Skin, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a tense, riveting, and atmospheric novel that draws you in from the first page…and never lets you go.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”
“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.”
“For years, my life has been flat. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I’ve never admitted it before. I’m not depressed, I don’t think. That’s not what I’m saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It’s been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.”
“We’re never inside someone else’s head. We can never really know someone else’s thoughts. And it’s thoughts that count. Thought is reality. Actions can be faked.”
“I think a lot of what we learn about others isn’t what they tell us. It’s what we observe. People can tell us anything they want.”
There is a horrible force outside that should not be seen. One look at that is all it takes to inspire terrible violence. Nobody is aware of its nature or origin. A few dispersed survivors are still alive five years after it started, including Malorie and her two young children. She had fantasized about escaping to a location where they might be secure while residing in an abandoned house next to the river. It’s time to leave now that the boy and girl are four, but the trip will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat while blindfolded, with nothing but her wits and the kids’ trained hearing as a guide.
They are doomed to one poor decision. They are constantly being followed, but is it a person, an animal, or a monster? Bird Box, which weaves together the past and present, is a glimpse of a world in disarray that will have you turning the pages quickly.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It’s better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.”
“How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?”
“In a world where you can’t open your eyes, isn’t a blindfold all you could ever hope for?”
“We left because some people choose to wait for news and others make their own.”
“You are saving their lives for a life not living.”
Chyna Shepard, 26, can’t sleep on her first night in her best friend’s family’s Napa Valley home as she stares out a starry window into midnight. The gut instinct works well. Edgler Foreman Vess, a vicious sociopath, has invaded the home with the intention of killing everyone there. Vess, a self-described “homicidal adventurer,” claims that his primary goals in life are to sate all of his cravings as they come, to lose himself in sensation, to live without regret or boundaries, and to live with “intensity.” In his lethal orbit, Chyna is imprisoned.
Chyna is a survivor who has become tougher after a lifetime of fighting for safety and self-respect. She will now be put to the ultimate test. Her initial goal is only to survive, but by coincidence, she discovers the identity of the nearby innocent Vess’s next target, a person only she can save. Chyna mobilizes all of her inner resources to save a girl in jeopardy as the frightening threat posed by Edgler Foreman Vess grows ever more imminent, driven by a recently discovered yearning for significance beyond simple self-preservation.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.”
“Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.”
“Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.”
“Even if God exists, does He know that you do?”
“Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.”
He’s weird. Actually, Odd Thomas. Brilliant fry-cook at Pico Mundo Grill; lover of Stormy Llewellyn, a stunning woman; and perhaps the only one with a chance of halting one of the darkest crimes in the brutal history of murder…
Odd and Stormy’s desert village is now home to something sinister. It manifests as a shadowy figure with a morbid appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world’s worst murderers, and odd shadows that follow him around like hyenas. Odd is anxious. He has knowledge and insight into the living, the dead, and the imminently deceased. Things that require action from him. He is now scared for Pico Mundo, Stormy, and himself. Because he is aware that the town would be destroyed on Wednesday, August 15, by a ferocious, bloody cyclone of violence and murder…
Best Quotes from this Book:
“From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.”
“Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.”
“We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.”
“Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one’s cow has exploded.”
“You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you’ll do next.”
This fantastically spooky horror book, published by James Patterson’s brand-new children’s imprint, with a plot motivated by the Jack the Ripper murders and a shocking, terrifying ending. Audrey Rose Wadsworth, age 17, was born a lord’s daughter and had a life of wealth and pleasure ahead of her. She does, however, conduct a clandestine secret life in between the social teas and silk dress fittings.
Audrey frequently eludes her strict father’s orders and defies social norms to visit her uncle’s lab to learn about the horrific field of forensic medicine. When Audrey is drawn into the investigation of a serial killer while working on a spate of brutally murdered corpses, she is forced to confront her safe haven. This breathtaking, #1 New York Times bestselling debut from author Kerri Maniscalco will be tough to forget due to the story’s stunning turns and turns, which are complemented by actual, ominous vintage images.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Roses have both petals and thorns, my dark flower. You needn’t believe something weak because it appears delicate. Show the world your bravery.”
“Fear is a hungry beast. The more you feed it, the more it grows.”
“Wield your assets like a blade, Cousin. No man has invented a corset for our brains. Let them think they rule the world. It’s a queen who sits on that throne. Never forget that.”
“There’s nothing better than a little danger dashed with some romance.”
“I was determined to be both pretty and fierce, as Mother had said I could be. Just because I was interested in a man’s job didn’t mean I had to give up being girly. Who defined those roles anyhow?”
This town is filled with spirals, it seems. The small Japanese coastal village of Kurouzu-cho, which is shrouded in fog, is cursed. Teenager Kirie Goshima’s withdrawn boyfriend Shuichi Saito claims that their town is not haunted by an individual or being but rather by a pattern called uzumaki, the spiral, which is the hypnotic hidden shape of the universe. This peculiar horror manga masterpiece is now available in a single volume. Embark on a terrifying downward spiral!
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Spirals…. this town is contaminated with spirals.”
John Wayne Cleaver is risky, and he is aware of this. He has worked hard his entire life to fall short of his potential. Despite his obsession with serial killers, he is not genuinely interested in becoming one. He, therefore, adheres to strict standards he has established for himself in order to protect himself and the people around him, living his everyday life as though it were a form of personal religion that could deliver him from eternal punishment.
John is accustomed to seeing dead bodies. Actually, he enjoys them. They do not ask for or anticipate the empathy he is unable to provide. Perhaps this is what gives him the objectivity to see that the body the police have just discovered behind the Wash-n-Dry Laundromat is different and to understand what that difference signifies.
Now, for the very first time, John must deal with a threat that is external to himself, one that he is powerless to stop, one that threatens everyone and everything he would adore if he could only. The first book of a trilogy by Dan Wells will keep you up at night and then haunt your dreams.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It doesn’t matter what other people think when you’re right – John Cleaver”
“I’m a good person,” I said, “because I know what good people are supposed to act like, and I copy them.”
“Fear is about things that you can’t control. The future or the dark, or someone trying to kill you. You don’t get scared of yourself because you always know what you’re going to do.”
“I used to have a list of people I was going to kill one day. It was against my rules now, but sometimes I really missed that list.”
“I simply felt alone, one leaf sitting miles away from a giant, communal pile.”
Intruders discreetly murder Luke Ellis’s parents in the middle of the night in a home on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis before putting him in a black SUV. Less than two minutes are needed for the procedure. Luke will awaken at The Institute in a room that is virtually identical to his own, save for the absence of a window. Other children with exceptional abilities—telekinesis and telepathy—who arrived at this location similarly to Luke can be found behind other doors outside of his door, including Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. Everybody is in the front half. Luke discovers that some people advanced to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” as Kalisha puts it. You don’t check out; you just check-in.
The director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are brutally committed to drawing out of these kids the power of their extraordinary abilities in this most evil of institutions. This place has no morals. You receive tokens for the vending machines if you comply. If you don’t, the penalty is severe. Luke grows more and more frantic to leave and obtain assistance as each fresh victim vanishes into Back Half. However, nobody has ever managed to leave the Institute.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Great events turn on small hinges.”
“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”
“this life we think we’re living isn’t real. It’s just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.”
“Between midnight and four, everyone should have permission to speak freely.”
“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”
Ali, age 13, discovers a strange picture in the attic just before summer officially starts. She is aware that it contains her mother Claire and her aunt Dulcie’s two children. But who is the third individual, the one who has been erased from the scene?
While on vacation in Maine with Dulcie and Emma, 4, in the home where Ali’s mother’s family used to spend the summer, Ali assumes she’ll learn the truth. Thoughts of leisure are quickly dashed when the girls encounter Sissy, an ugly and spiteful youngster who has a negative impression of Emma.
The strangest part is that Sissy constantly brings up Teresa, a young girl who drowned in odd circumstances when Claire and Dulcie were children and whose body was never discovered. Ali initially believes Sissy is merely making up a ghost story to terrify her, but she quickly learns the real cause behind Sissy’s irrational anger. In this brand-new spooky story that is destined to send chills down her readers’ spines, Mary Downing Hahn is at her most menacing.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The water is DEEP AND DARK AND DANGEROUS”
“To everyone who enjoys ghost stories”
“Sissy tilted her chair back so far I was sure she’d fall on her head any second. Not that I cared. Maybe she’d leave if she hurt herself.”
“The bones came out, the bones came out, the bones came out.”
“Sometimes nothing is the scariest thing of all,”
A junior high school class is sent to a barren island where, as part of a brutal authoritarian program, they are issued with weapons and forced to murder one another until just one survives. This is the basis for Koushun Takami’s infamous high-octane thriller. Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the twenty-first century and a strong allegory of what it meant to be youthful and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog society. It was first criticized as violent exploitation when it was published in Japan, where it went on to become an instant hit. Battle Royale, a current Japanese pulp classic that was adapted into the contentious blockbuster film of the same name, is now available in English for the first time.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Loving someone always requires you to not love others.”
“By then she was dead. In fact, she may have been dead a while ago. Physically, several seconds ago, mentally, ages ago.”
“It’s not a bad thing to be loved.”
“Now, once again, 2 students left. But of course they’re a part of you now.”
“To memorize something, it’s best to write it down.”
In this Southern-inspired supernatural thriller set in the 1990s, Dracula and Fried Green Tomatoes collide with Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes as a women’s book club fights to save their suburban community from a strange and attractive stranger who turns out to be a bloodsucking demon.
Patricia Campbell always envisioned a large life, but after giving up her nursing job to wedding a successful doctor and have children, Patricia’s life has never felt smaller. Her to-do list is never truly completed, her kids are ungrateful, her spouse is distant, and the days are long. Her book club, which consists of a group of Charleston mothers who are solely connected by their love of true-crime and suspenseful fiction, is the one item she has to look forward to. The FBI’s recent siege of Waco is more likely to come up in these discussions than the ups and downs of marriage and parenting.
However, when a creative and compassionate stranger moves into the area, rumors about the newcomer start to circulate at book club meetings. Although Patricia is initially drawn to him, she begins to suspect the newcomer of being involved when other neighborhood kids go missing. She starts her own inquiry, presuming he is a Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. The information she finds is even scarier, and soon she and her book club are the only ones standing between the community’s unknowing residents and the monster they’ve let into their homes.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.”
“He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”
“Think of us what you will,” she thought, “we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.”
“Being a teenager isn’t a number, ” Maryellen said. “It’s the age when you stop liking them.”
“I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.”
Dead is Lydia. But they are not yet aware of this. So starts this beautiful book about a Chinese American family living in a small Ohio town in the 1970s. Lydia is Marilyn and James Lee’s favorite child, and they are resolved that she will realize the goals they were unable to achieve. The careful balancing act that had been holding the Lee family together is upset when Lydia’s body is discovered in a nearby lake, throwing them into disarray.
Everything I Never Told You is both an intense page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, revealing the methods in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives find it difficult throughout their lives to understanding one another. It is a profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you”
“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”
“He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.”