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Author: Celeste

The Amityville Horror

The Amityville Horror

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The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s no place like home. As long as that home isn’t trying to eat you.

This book proved true the idea that, sometimes, fact is stranger than fiction. I had no earthly idea before last week that this was (billed as) a nonfiction book. Seriously?! I’ve always had this fascination with the macabre and the unexplained, so I would’ve read this book long ago had I known that it wasn’t entirely fictional. (Yes, I’m aware that the book has since been proven to be only loosely based on the truth, but it’s way more fun to pretend that it’s true while reading it!) I think there’s a reason the fictional horror genre is so successful and draws so many readers and viewers; horror speaks to the fear we have of the unknown and the unexplainable. We like the thrill of watching or reading worst case scenarios while knowing that we are safe from them. …

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Night Shift

Night Shift

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Night Shift by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Night Shift is exactly what I have always expected to find in Stephen King’s work, but which I have only experienced sporadically in his novels; it was genuinely scary. Short story collections are generally pretty hit or miss for me. Even those I’ve enjoyed aren’t usually overwhelmingly successful, giving me a handful of stories sprinkled liberally with mediocre tales. Not so here. I honestly enjoyed every single story in this collection. …

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Supraphysica

Supraphysica

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Supraphysica by Drew Boudreaux
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an electronic copy of this novel from the author, in exchange for an honest review.

Christian fantasy and science fiction tend to be very hit or miss for me. While I try my best to support the genres because I really want to see them grow, some the novels tend to feel unoriginal and poorly written. I have read many works of Christian speculative fiction that left me frustrated and underwhelmed. In my opinion, Christian art of any kind, be in fiction or music or visual media, should hold itself to a higher standard than its secular counterparts in order to more powerfully proclaim the message Christians are sent out into the world to share. There are indeed novelists and poets and musicians that hold themselves to said standard, but this is far from the norm. …

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The Dark Half

The Dark Half

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The Dark Half by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There will be light spoilers in this review, but I tried to keep them on par with what would be revealed by the synopsis of the book. There was simply no way for me to review this while keeping every detail concealed.

King crafted something both horrifying and utterly fascinating from his frustration over the loss of Richard Bachman. For those who aren’t familiar with Bachman, he was King’s pseudonym, under which he wrote Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man before accidentally outing himself in his fifth publication, Thinner. …

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The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone

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The Dead Zone by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished this book over a week ago. Why haven’t you reviewed it and moved on already, you may ask? Well, I have this compulsive thing about reviewing a book immediately, so I’ve just been totally ignoring the fact that I completed it. This delay is partly due to the fact that I’ve been insanely busy and too tired to read more than a handful of pages a day, much less having time to properly formulate a response to what I’ve read. But the other cause for the delay is that mediocre books are the hardest to review. And as much as I’ve been loving King the past few years and have enjoyed binge-reading his work every October, that’s what this book was for me: mediocre. …

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Needful Things

Needful Things

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Needful Things by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please!
Come in close where everyone can see!
I got a tale to tell, it isn’t gonna cost a dime!
(And if you believe that,
we’re gonna get along just fine.)”

Are you a seasonal reader? I sure am. Winter is for classics and childhood favorites and romances. Spring is for fiction that builds my faith and fantasies that build intricate worlds in my mind. Summer is for rereads when I’m feeling lazy and new-to-me realms of fantasy when I’m not. But autumn is without a doubt the season that dictates my reading the most. For the past few years, October has been for horror in general and Stephen King in particular. This year, I kicked my King-a-Thon off a little early. And I’m happy to report that I started it off with a bang. …

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Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week

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We the people of the United States of America have proclaimed for centuries that God has given us and the rest of humanity certain unalienable rights, rights that our forefathers outlined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights. These rights include freedom of speech and press, but I believe that the freedom to read is an unspoken inclusion, one that our forefathers didn’t think to include because it seemed obvious. That’s my theory, anyway. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, it seems like a no-brainer that the freedom to read anything and everything, no matter who you are or where you live, is a freedom to be appreciated and protected. And yet, those who came to the New World in search of freedom started banning books before we were even a nation of our own. …

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City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

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City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 6 of 5 stars

City of Miracles is a stunning accomplishment; it is a marvelous ending to what I now consider my favorite trilogy, and a fast-paced, addictive story in its own right.

“One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.”

Sigrud je Harkvaldsson was one of my favorite side characters in both City of Stairs and City of Blades, and I was both incredibly excited and more than a little nervous to read his story. Sometimes when a side character becomes the focal point of the story, they seem to lose a bit of their appeal for some reason. That was definitely not the case here. Sigrud has a wealth of experiences under his belt, most of them not good ones. Those experiences have shaped him into the man he is today, for better or for worse. He feels that he really only excels at one thing: violence. Once again, he finds himself in a position calling for violent action, and he revels in it. Until he doesn’t. Sigrud grows so much throughout this book, and I loved seeing him learn from past mistakes and struggle with his past and who that past made him. …

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Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)

Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)

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Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m so glad that I finally read Gardens of the Moon. It was every bit as lush and intricate and well written as I had been told, and it’s so exciting that this is just setting the stage for something bigger and even more elaborate. Malazan is a series that has been on my list of things to read for years, since before I became active on Goodreads and made all of my wonderful bookish friends. I bought the complete series sometime in 2014 (Brand new! For $50! Thanks, eBay!), and they’ve been just sitting on my shelf staring at me ever since. …

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