A weird laboratory. A nefarious scientist. A hidden past. If you believe you know what happened to Eleven’s mother, get ready to have your world flipped around in this fascinating prequel to the smash program Stranger Things. It’s the summer of 1969, and the shock of war reverberates through America’s young, both at home and abroad. Terry Ives, a student at a tranquil college campus in Indiana’s heartland, couldn’t be further from the front lines of Vietnam or the explosive rallies in Washington. But the world is shifting and Terry isn’t willing to stand by and observe.
When word spreads of an important federal experiment in Hawkins, she agrees to be a test subject for the study, called MKUltra. Unmarked vans, an isolated lab in the woods, mind-altering chemicals supplied by tight-lipped researchers… and a mystery that Terry, the young and restless protagonist, is desperate to solve.
But a deeper plot lurks behind the walls of Hawkins National Laboratory—and the penetrating gaze of its director, Dr. Martin Brenner. To face it, she’ll need the assistance of her fellow test subjects, including one so mysterious that the world is unaware she exists—a little girl with unexplained, superhuman abilities and a number instead of a name: 008.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Monsters,’ she said., ‘of course my brain has them.’ As long as they stayed in there, everything would be all right. Wouldn’t it?”
“When it’s our government involved, I think you’ll find our rights are often to be determined.”
“Knees were an unpleasant place to have the nervous sweats.”
“Men. Even the good ones make life difficult.”
“What people believed didn’t matter. The truth did.”
The dramatic television programme “American Horror Story” was conceived and is produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. The series focuses on a different location and narrative each season.
A family moves to a home in Los Angeles during the first season without realizing it’s haunted. After having an affair with a student, Father Ben Harmon is dealing with the rejection he received from his wife and quickly falls under the influence of the house. Wife Vivien must also deal with the fallout from a miscarriage while trying to forgive her husband. Daughter Violet makes friends with Tate Langdon, the unstable adolescent patient of her father, and encounters hostile girls at her new school. Additionally, Constance, a neighbor who was formerly an actress, is hiding nearby. Adelaide, Adelaide’s special needs daughter, can smell the evil in the house, and Constance hates Adelaide while yet being curiously protective of her.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Oh honey… goddesses don’t speak in whispers… they scream”
― American Horror Story
“Normal people scare me”
― American Horror Story
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“We have two selves… One the world needs us to be, compliant… And the shadow… Ignore it and life is forever suffering.”
― American Horror Story
“If you look into the face of evil, evil’s gonna look right back at you”
― American Horror Story
“You will learn, its not our precious virus that makes you, its not who you kill or who you screw… its the heartbreaks… the bigger… the better… and I know better than any of us”
― American Horror Story
When Beth Harmon is committed to an orphanage at the age of eight, she quickly learns two methods to escape her circumstances, although briefly: chess and the little green tablets provided to her and the other children to maintain their silence. Soon, it becomes clear that she is a tremendous skill, and as she rises to the top of the US chess rankings, she is able to carve out a new life for herself. But she is unable to overcome her need to self-destruct. There’s more at risk for Beth than just winning and losing.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it’s predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.”
“She was alone, and she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.”
“Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful.”
“She had flirted with alcohol for years. Now it was time to consummate the relationship.”
“The strongest person is the person who isn’t scared to be alone.”
Three shots were fired in Dallas on November 22, 1963, killing President Kennedy and altering the course of history. What if you could reverse the change? A man goes back in time to thwart the JFK assassination in Stephen King’s new, heart-stoppingly dramatic novel, which is a thousand-page masterpiece. Following the phenomenal success of Under the Dome, King transports readers to another instance—a period in actual history—when everything goes awry: the JFK assassination. Additionally, he provides an introduction to a figure with the ability to alter the course of history.
Jake Epping, a 35-year-old English teacher at Lisbon Falls High School in Maine, also works as a GED instructor for adults. One of the students gives him an essay, a grisly, terrifying account of the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father returned home and murdered his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry survived with a broken leg, as was evident from his awkward gait. The owner of the neighborhood diner, Jake’s friend Al, reveals a secret shortly after that: his cellar is a doorway to 1958. In an insane—and absurdly possible—mission to try to stop the Kennedy assassination, he enlists Jake. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, a life that defies all the laws of time and is filled with Elvis and JFK, big American cars and sock hops, a disturbed loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, and a stunning high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who ends up being Jake’s love.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
“If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.”
“I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”
“Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor”
This book tells the story of the four March sisters named, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, as they live in the state of Massachusetts before, during, and after the American Civil War. Their adventures in love and loss take place before, during, and after the war. The events of the novel took place both before and during the war, as well as after it. The storyline of the book depicts the time leading up to, during, and immediately following the conflict.
The novel is filled with feminist themes, and it provides a wonderful glimpse into the way of life of the upper and middle-class families in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This is because the work was written in that era in which the events it describes took place.
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.”