It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? 9/28/20

Hello and welcome to the last Monday of September.

This month has been crazy and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

This week I’m going to read a book that I’ve owned for years…., a book that I wanted to read before I watch the film on Netflix, and an e-book that I received on Netgalley.

What are you reading?

The Darkest Star- Jennifer L. Armentrout

When seventeen-year-old Evie Dasher is caught up in a raid at a notorious club known as one of the few places where humans and the surviving Luxen can mingle freely, she meets Luc, an unnaturally beautiful guy she initially assumes is a Luxen…but he is in fact something much more powerful. Her growing attraction for Luc will lead her deeper and deeper into a world she’d only heard about, a world where everything she thought she knew will be turned on its head…

#1 New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout returns to the universe of the Lux in this brand new series, featuring beloved characters both new and old.

The Devil All the Time- Donald Ray Pollock

Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and let’s not forget Bill Fucking Skarsgård!! 



A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over-tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi-cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill-ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

The Taxidermist’s Lover- Polly Hall

A modern Gothic tale of a woman obsessed with her lover’s taxidermy creatures and haunted by her past.

Things were never quite the same after you started mixing up the species.

When Scarlett meets taxidermist Henry, a passionate love affair commences. One year later, on Christmas Day, Scarlett recalls the ebb and flow of their intense relationship and tries to unravel her obsession with Henry’s taxidermy creatures and the influence of his rival, Felix. Both enchanted and entrapped by the isolated rural environment on the Somerset moorland she calls home, Scarlett reaches out to her only remaining family, twin brother Rhett, to make sense of the secrets they share. Soon Scarlett realizes that past promises have far reaching consequences.

Drenched in the torrential rains of rural South West England and the sensual pleasures of the characters, The Taxidermist’s Lover, lures you ever deeper into Scarlett’s delightfully eerie world.