I’ve become such a big fan of thrillers, it’s quite surprising. If you told me that four years ago, I wouldn’t believe you, but now it’s one of my favourite genres. Let’s call that character development.
Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power
Although I found the characters hard to connect with at first, Burn our Bodies Down is a chillingly beautiful story. Well, the storyline is actually quite brutal, but the way in which it is written is beautiful. It was also a bit confusing at first, but that feeling passes very quickly.
From the get-go, I was well and truly creeped out and the further I got into the story the more that feeling built. I’ve never read anything like Burn Our Bodies Down. I did a review of it way back in 2020 so check it out here if you want.
Synopsis: Ever since Margot was born, it’s been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot’s questions about what came before. No history to hold on to. No relative to speak of. Just the two of them, stuck in their run-down apartment, struggling to get along.
But that’s not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And she just found the key she needs to get it: A photograph, pointing her to a town called Phalene. Pointing her home. Only, when Margot gets there, it’s not what she bargained for.
Margot’s mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what’s still there?
The only thing Margot knows for sure is there’s poison in their family tree, and their roots are dug so deeply into Phalene that now that she’s there, she might never escape.
The Hazel Wood series by Melissa Albert
*This was going to be just about the first book but I realised too late that I didn’t have a decent picture of it.*
The Hazel Wood is a chilling contemporary thriller that takes what we think we know about fairytales and bends them into a world of brutality. I didn’t know what to expect when I first picked this up, but I read the entire book in one sitting as I could not put it down.
These books sit more on the creepy side of autumnal reads which is why I love it so much. I don’t think I’d ever really read a thriller until The Hazel Wood, but it definitely got me into the genre.
Now they aren’t scary books, but they do have a chilling atmosphere. I know a lot of people really didn’t like the first book, but it has a certain magical quality to it that I really enjoy.
Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: her mother is stolen away-by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother’s stories are set. Alice’s only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”
Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother’s tales began―and where she might find out how her own story went so wrong.
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