Tor Nightfire Mary: An Awakening of Terror

What a ride! This was amazing. A woman turning 50 is fired from her long-term job and asked by her aunt to come take care of her as she's dying. Coming home to her small town is not what she expected. There is a bloody ghost haunting the bathtub shower. She sees ghosts all over town and the people are all odd and creepy.This was an exciting read. It starts creepy and just gets better and better. I didn't find it gross or scary but I loved the unusual plot. The twist was a surprise for me and the bloody showdown was great. I was a little disappointed with the end. I expected more but that didn't stop me from totally loving this book.

Mary Mary Mary…what a rollercoaster ride of a book! The horror coupled with beautiful writing was perfection. Very realistic depictions of loneliness and middle age made this novel one of the most original stories I’ve ever read. And the twists just kept on coming…

Incrivel

There just isn't enough supernatural horror about peri-menopausal women making terrifying discoveries about their pasts (plural) when they revisit their cult-driven desert hometowns, but 'Mary'is a great start.

One of the reasons I enjoy book clubs so much is because I get exposed to books I likely wouldn’t have come across otherwise. Quite some time ago, I realized that I was in a book rut, and to get myself out of that rut, I perused Instagram and ran across the Good Morning America Book Club. It’s not that I didn’t have previous knowledge of this book club, I do watch GMA every morning (usually as background noise and to keep and eye on the Deals and Steals), I just hadn’t paid close enough attention. I decided to add GMA’s book club to my reading list…and things took off from there. I now follow five celebrity book clubs, I’m a member of three online book clubs, and I have one in-person book club. They all bring me joy. Sometimes, that joy is in the form of a book I was previously unaware of, like this one. It’s hard to describe this book without giving away major plot lines that would spoil the story…and I hate spoilers, so forgive me for writing what could end up being the vaguest review I’ve ever written. Mary is a woman with a dark past, and after finishing this book, I felt strongly that Mary should have stuck it out in New York and never gone back to her birthplace, sick aunt be damned. Alas, she didn’t stay in New York, she took her creepy dolls and flew west, back to a small, desert town populated with residents who had some questionable, um, hobbies…? This book includes some great examples of foreshadowing, though they’re relatively obvious. I recall, back when I was teaching English to middle schoolers, how much I wished I could use horror novels in my classroom, because they tend to include easy to point out examples of literary elements I was required to teach. This one has many, and it’s also funny, which would make it a great read for middle school kids (it’s a challenge to get a 13-year-old to WANT to read a book. There just isn’t enough high interest grade-level material). This book made me realize how much I continue, 13-years after I left the classroom, to analyze a book as though I’m planning on using it in my lesson plans. I took notes while reading then to add to my lesson plan, and I still take notes now to use when I write a review. I suppose, in a way, I’m still trying to teach literature. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It has all the elements of a horror that I want with the added bonus of humor. Funny horror, done well, makes for a great book. I appreciated many of the themes Cassidy threw into this story, and I loved both the foreword and afterward and what they brought to the story itself. For those horror fans: read this one.