Welcome to Litsy!

This is a dark and intense collection of short stories. Some of them involve literal monsters, but in many of the stories, the humans are the monsters or at least the ones commiting monstrous acts. Ballingrud's characters are complex with many of them dealing with loss and having screwed up backgrounds. Favorites included The Good Husband, Sunbleached, Monsters of Heaven, and North American Lake Monsters.

@JoeMo - While on a lovely autumnal walk, you come across an empty house. Inside, you find a crackling fire, a steaming pot of tea, and a pile of books from your TBR. Surely there's no harm in sitting down to read a few pages. Surely it's not possible that while you think you've only spent a few minutes reading in this cozy nook, centuries have passed...

You've been #TrappedinaSpookyHouse !!

@PuddleJumper

Been wanting to read this for years and today I found a copy in the wild! Score!

#monster
#whickedwhispers

#lake
#summersouls

Quick book to read. Like all short story collections, there were some I really liked and others that I just couldn‘t get into. But, overall, I loved the dark horror in these stories and thought they were entertaining and chilling. I would definitely read another book by this author because the writing was exceptional.

This collection of short stories is gripping and showcases each of its main characters in these real life crises that seem impossible. S.S. is about a neo-Nazi youth. The thing I liked about this story is the almost invisible thread. The youth mentions that his father was trampled by horses. That he let his whole family go because of gambling addiction and debts. At the end of the story, in the rain, the kid is with a horrible young woman who👇🏼

I've wanted to read this forever, moving it to the top of my TBR list since the TV show is out now

Whereas most horror short stories have horror running parallel to the character, these mostly feature characters who are drowning in their own crises of life that have their arcs kissed by a tangent of horror. These characters are at crossroads with choices that will leave an indelible mark of who they are, what morals they have. I was impressed by these stories. They had teeth. They were hurtful. And somehow, they left me feeling lighter. Pick!

too dour to be interesting

Weird but soooo good!

Hail to the new Stephen King.
These stories may be enveloped in the supernatural, but they are truly, at their core, about people. Yes, people doing terrible things to each other, aided or possessed by the unknown, but these stories ring so true because they are anchored by ordinary folks playing with forces beyond nature. Must read!

I gave it three stories but hereby declare this author‘s collection “not my thing.”
Honestly, I expected the horror element to be a larger part of the stories? But they just kind of meander on well past any psychological thriller or fantastical elements. It‘s kinda too bad- a coworker recommended this collection so strongly!

#bestiebookclub #july @bessiecat

A collection of short stories about the human condition, highlighted with the paranormal. It was ok. Definitely brought up some good discussion topics, but I'm finding I don't love paranormal writings. It takes me out of a story, especially if it's forced. If it's a fantasy book about vampires, I'm in. But if you just throw a vampire into a story, I'm out.

⭐️⭐️⭐️
Several of these stories got me thinking which is something I really liked. The problem is, they felt rather repetitive. Most of the stories had similar characters and all those characters had to deal with some bleak situation with a touch of something supernatural sprinkled in, and just having that over and over and over again got very tiring after a few stories.

#catsoflitsy #Phoenix

After I finished The Haunting of Hill House, I started If On A Winter's Night a Traveler and this one. Appropriately, you can see the shadows of my ghost lights along the left side.

#freakyfriday
@kait.corum @Clwojick @monalyisha

So @vivastory asked for my Top Five Horror picks, not in terms of favorites (that would probably be The Terror), but in terms of what genuinely unsettled me.

North American Lake Monsters was a gift from my brother and crossed lines I didn't know I had. Quality-wise it was decent. I liked the werewolf story and the ghost story quite a bit. But the zombie story and especially "The Monsters of Heaven" were too much for me.

This is just the most fantastic book!! I don't know how to describe these stories, each one was just so unique. Each story dealt with things I never thought to be thinking about, and it really used it's horror elements very well. Vampires, creatures of all shapes, and monsters, oh my!

#LyricalApril #TheMonster

This book has been on my tbr for a long time. I'm just going to have to buy it, I think. 😃

Ah, Saturday morning. #currentlyreading

#RiotGrams Day 12 - Once the weather gets consistently warm I think I'm gonna be utilizing this park across the street for some weekend reads.

🐲🐲🐲 This book was a bit disappointing. I had heard a lot of good things about it and was really looking forward to it. The stories are meant to be chilling but they mostly left me scratching my head. Perhaps I'm not clever enough to intuit the nuance within these stories? Or perhaps a short story isn't long enough to flesh out the ideas? I don't know what the deal is but I didn't really get most of them.

Thanks so much @ReadingEnvy I loved my presents and can't wait to start reading :). Also thanks @BookishMarginalia for starting this #secretsantagoespostal #wintersolsticebookexchange

So, I was mostly enjoying the stories here, until I got to the one about the horse....and then the beginning of the one about the sled dogs, and I just couldn't. Perhaps if I were in a less tender-hearted mood I could've gotten past it, but I just couldn't right now.

Not exactly what I was expecting, but still enjoyed it for the most part. Several of the stories left me wanting more/feeling unfulfilled by them, but I don't usually do short stories so it might just be that.

These are not your traditional blood and gore horror stories. This is more look at the darker side of humanity with a small side of supernatural. And beautiful language (as seen above). More for fans of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith!

"I don't always sit like a human, but when I do it's to read with my mom." #PennythePup

Lunch with a side of creepy stories.

Short story reading on gloomy afternoon! So far these stories have supernatural elements but the real horror seems to lie in the human characters. It has some beautiful sentences which makes the horror that much starker ☠️📖

Finally got my interlibrary loan books! Just in time for a chilly, rainy Halloween weekend!!

I've been waiting for October to finally devour this collection of short stories. 👻
#hellooctober #booktober #mostanticipated #scaryreads #scaretober

Weird, creepy short stories are my thing. These are just a few of my favorites. #somethingforsept

At 73%, I'm giving up. There was perhaps half of two stories that were good in this collection, but the extreme mediocrity of the rest just annoyed me so much I can't give it any more than one star. This was not at all what I expected. There's nothing eerie, creepy or frightening here. Just "weird" stories that miss the mark. EDIT: went back & read the last story after reading some reviews. It's the only actually good one!

After having spent the weekend in the Norwegian mountains with lots of other people it's WONDERFUL to finally be able to read again! I finally hit upon a story I liked in this book, an #Arctic expedition #horror story (LOVE those, esp The Terror). I kept thinking about it while walking in extremely heavy mist to climb Northern Europe's highest mountain. (Where you could seriously fall down a crack in the glacier or down the side of the mountain.)

I am surprised by the poor quality of the writing and editing for the two first stories. I thought this was a serious high-quality book, not something self-published! (Dunno if it is, but it feels like it)

I am surprised by the poor quality of the writing and editing for the two first stories. I thought this was a serious high-quality book, not something self-published! (Dunno if it is, but it feels like it)

What a wonderful collection of stories that contain inhuman elements, but are really about what it means to be human...frailties, mistakes, and primarily the choices we make and are forced to live with.

These stories are haunting.

I'll be finishing this tonight or early tomorrow. It's such an unsettling collection of stories. There are supernatural or otherworldly elements in each story, but the human element in each is what shocks you or breaks your heart.

Excited about the next few reads!

Yeay! My first month in review post. 😊

All the usual horror suspects pop-up in this collection, but these stories are more unsettling than scary. The writing was descriptive in a way that made me feel like I was watching a horror movie in my mind's eye. I really enjoyed this as a whole, but my favorite story was The Good Husband. 👻

This boy is pretty darn cute when he's not eating my books.