Halloween

  Prologue   It begins, they say, with a woman screaming. You can’t tell at first if it’s pleasure or pain, or that tricky place where the two meet; you’re almost embarrassed to hear it, but if you listen closer it comes… Read More

With Halloween just around the corner, we’ve put together our edit of seriously spooky reads. Bestselling psychological thriller While You Sleep is sure to give you chills, and prepare for a sleepless night or two with the truly terrifying serial killer thriller Stalker. Don’t miss out… Read More

Today, in celebration of Halloween coming up this Friday, we have John Harding, author of Florence and Giles and The Girl Who Couldn’t Read, on the blog talking about gothic horror and what inspired him to write two very sinister stories… My introduction to Gothic fiction… Read More

Happy Halloween Killer Readers! In the spirit (no pun intended!) of today we started discussing the books that have scared us the most. Take a look at our picks below, and let us know in the comments what the scariest book you’ve ever read is! Without… Read More

Hello and Happy Halloween from the Killer Reads team. In the spirit of today’s festivities (and also the release of the new Bond movie), my question to the KR team this morning was “Who’s your favourite bad guy?” Read on for their brilliant answers and your chance to win a special treat...   Sarah Hodgson: Blofeld remains the all-time classic supervillain. As well as vast wealth and far-reaching influence, he also has a very cool cat.   Kate Stephenson: Best villain (not sure it’s correct to say my favourite, because I hated this guy with the passion of a thousand suns): Col. Hans Landa as played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. That apple strudel scene with Shosanna – so incredibly unsettling. Actually, just all the scenes with him in them. Such a talented actor. Read More

As we are leading up to Halloween I decided it was the prime opportunity to ask the Killer Reads team what books they have each recently read that gave them nightmares. Being a group that love thrillers, crime and anything that means you spend the next week leaving the lights on just so you can sleep, they all proceeded to pull at least one book out of their bag that had given them the heebie jeebies. So we thought we would share them with you so that you, like us, can start preparing your scare-o-meters for the ever looming fright night...   Blacklands by Belinda Bauer Chosen by Emad Akhtar   Blacklands is a story that unsettled me for a long time – it’s an unusually absorbing and affecting story. This is partly because Blacklands, as Belinda Bauer says in her afterword, ‘was never intended to be a crime novel’. It began as a way of exploring ‘the impact of crimes such as Avery’s, how they affect people for years, lifetimes – maybe even generations’. Read More