Lord Samper's Library

  The Bank Holiday Weekend may be well and truly over (at least until the next one comes along) but it left a final present in that the rest of the working week is that little bit shorter. Today feels like a Tuesday but it isn’t, is it? No, it isn’t :o) Anyway, we’re all about short reads here at the moment (a natural fit for a shorter week); mostly because of work, partly because it’s still far too hot for anything more substantial, but also because yesterdays Covid vaccination is starting to make its presence felt. In the spirit of ‘trying to focus on my shelves instead of the shelves in Waterstones’, I thought I’d (finally) check out Ronald Malfi’s ‘Ghostwritten’ collection. I had a lot of fun with ‘They Lurk’ , and four novellas means four posts here, so it all made kind of sense. And in the spirit of ‘keeping things nice and simple’, I’m starting off with the first novella in the collection. That made sense too ;o) Page Count: 86 Pages A lot of money is riding on whether the s...

  Page Count: 228 Pages Apologies for the ‘blog silence’ yesterday… Things kind of caught up me (chemotherapy, again) and I’m not going to lie, I spent most of the day moping and feeling all sorry for myself ;o) The day wasn’t a complete write off though, I actually managed to get some reading done. And here’s where I tell you about some of it ;o) It has been an absolute age since I last read James Herbert’s ‘Haunted’ so when I saw an old copy in the Red Cross shop the other day, it felt like someone was telling me it was time I picked it up again. And I tried to buy it but there was no price on the book so the shop couldn’t sell it to me… Yep, it’s taken me a while but I have now officially been refused service by a charity shop :o) I didn’t let that stop me though, just went and ordered myself a copy of ‘Haunted’ from elsewhere. And I finally found the time for it yesterday afternoon.   Three nights of terror at the house called Edbrook. Three nights in which David Ash, the...

My reading kind of tailed off towards the end of the week (yet again, I've ended up with four or five books on the go but am struggling to get into any of them) but when I've been able to stay awake for long enough, I have managed to watch a few more movies. And this is the post where I tell you all about them ;o) Quick thoughts today, I've got a few things that I need to get done, one of which is try and catch up on my sleep... 'The Coffee Table' (2022) A couple buy a new coffee table for the flat; by the end of the day, three people will be dead. These events are all connected... Well, damn... I saw 'The Coffee Table' on Shudder and naturally assumed that it would be a movie about a possessed coffee table. I think it's a fair assumption to make...  Gentle reader , 'The Coffee Table' is not about a possessed piece of furniture...  'The Coffee Table' is a very good film (as tense as hell) but not one that I'd easily recommend, due to ...

Page Count: 9 Pages If you’re looking to read ‘The Dead Remember’ (and if not, you really should), Project Gutenberg has a copy Here while Amazon can sort you out if you have a Kindle. If you’re looking for a physical copy, ‘The Dead Remember’ can be found in Del Rey’s ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard’ collection but I found in a collection called… You guessed it ;o) I was just coming out of finishing ‘The Nest’ and fancied a quick read while I caught my breath and decided what to read next. And it really was as simple as seeing the title, on the cover, and thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if that’s the title of one of the stories?’ It was, I read it and now I get to tell you all about it ;o) Jim Gordon killed a man and his wife, in a drunken rage, and now he is a man waiting to die. The woman’s dying words were to curse him; he would die within the week and she would be there when the time came. Jim has promised his brother that he will go out fighting, but will he be given that ...

So, it's October which means it's the time of year when I start feeling like I should be reading more horror, ghost stories, you know what it's like...We'll see how that goes (the smart person would put money on the 'as well as it ever does' option which is to say, 'could do better'...) but in the meantime, I found this Lovecraft collection in Oxfam, not so long ago, and figured I'd take a look at the contents and see if anything sprang out and demanded that I read it. Well, a title like 'The Evil Clergyman' is all it takes to pique my interest. I've known a few clergymen (and a couple of clergywomen) in my time and they've generally been a quite pleasant bunch; it was time to find out what an evil one was like ;o) As it turns out... Let me tell you about the slightly disappointing read that was 'The Evil Clergyman'. Our narrator is shown the rooms of a clergyman (yep, the evil one) who met a violent end. The narrator is warn...

Brian Keene is making a different book, of his, available for 99 cents each week and not only should you be all over that anyway (there's nothing better than a Brian Keene book to get you through tough times and the world is full of those right now) but I thought I'd read each book as the discount hits. Gives me an excuse to re-visit some old favourites but more importantly, a chance to fill in some gaps where I haven't read the book yet, there aren't many of these but there are a few ;o) 'The Girl on the Glider' is the first book to get discounted and it's one that has sat on my Kindle for a little while, mostly because I'm English and was trying to get my head round the notion of a ghost flying a glider... Yep, I know. It's funny what stops you picking up a book and just how wrong you can be about it. Once I realised my mistake, I found 'The Girl on the Glider' a lot easier to pick up and damn, what a read it turned out to be. Here's a...

I still have a few unread Guy N. Smith books hiding around the flat... ;o) I'm trying to ration them out a bit (if you read more than a couple at a time, it does get very difficult to say something new about them...) but it's been a while so I thought it was time for another one. To tell you the truth, last week was so busy (what with one thing and another) that short books like this were all I had time for so you might see a few more, of a similar length, featured here over the next week or so. But that's for later... The last few Guy N.Smith books have seen a move away from 'creature features' to straight up 'gore fests' and the odd haunting. 'Entombed' is one of the latter, and not a bad one either... Simon Rankin is a failed priest, a failed husband and a failed exorcist. After a terrifying experience in a haunted house, he takes his girlfriend off to North Wales in a desperate search for peace of mind. But the horror left behind is nothing comp...

Last month saw me do pretty well at getting through the pile of books that I'd set myself to read; I haven't done quite so well at reviewing them quickly but it is what it is ;o) I've got one more book to go, after this one, but right now we're all about Guy N. Smith again, this time with 'Phobia'... If there's one thing that I've learned about Guy N.Smith's output (other than that it was more than sizable and that he really knew how to hit all the pulp targets for his readers), it's that he wasn't afraid to make his mark on whatever area of horror he thought he could turn into a book that would sell. And fair play to him, I think we all wish we could be a bit like that. So far, I've come across giant crabs, eco-horror, giant insects and even Communist zombies (well, kind of) but I'd yet to read a haunted house tale... Until now. 'Phobia' is that tale and it's not a bad one either. Number thirteen Schooner Street was a t...

Just a quick post today; mostly because today has been one of those days (and the forecast says that tomorrow looks like being one of those days as well...) but also, well... Let me tell you about 'The Dark'... It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night . . . a small girl smiled as her mother burned... Asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants... In slimy tunnels once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil... It wasn't so long ago that I got ahead of my reading and had a little stockpile of books to get me through those times when I was in the middle of another book and wanted to post something. They were good times :o) As these things do, that pile of books grew smaller but there was always one book that never made it off the pile and onto the blog. And that book was... you guessed it. Today though... Today is the day that 'The...

Work is taking priority today, and most of yesterday as well, so I haven't had time to write a review. I was looking through Tor.com  though (trying to convince myself that I don't have a really important meeting coming up...) and found this pretty creepy short ghost story that I thought I'd share... :o) This totally passed me by but apparently, in 2006, the crew of the ISS equipped  one of their Russian-made Orlan spacesuits (which had reached the end of it's lifespan)  with some batteries and a transmitter, and released it into space broadcasting a signal that anyone with a ham radio on Earth could pick up. They called it SuitSat 1, and it lasted for months until it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere later that year. In 2011, they released another one, SuitSat 2, which burned up in January 2012. What if it hadn't though...?

A lot of things were meant to happen today but then work came along and put paid to most of them. To be fair though, I did get paid today so felt like I ought to show willing... ;o) One of the things that I was planning on doing was getting a book review up but that clearly hasn't happened, has it? That was nothing to do with work though and more to do with my watching the hell out of 'Truthseekers' last night. Seriously, I didn't stop until the last episode was done. Amazon had thrown a few adverts at me, Twitter had recommended 'Truthseekers' and I was in the mood for watching something that wasn't 'The Walking Dead: World Beyond' or 'The Mandalorian'. I settled down, yesterday lunchtime, to watch a couple of episodes and just kept watching... Gus Roberts is the number one engineer at Smyle, Britain's biggest mobile network operator and internet service provider. In his spare time he's also a keen investigator of the paranormal. ...

I know, it's another 'short story post' today but bear with me a little bit. Not only has my reading taken a bit of a hit this week (what with one thing and several others) but 'Under the Bedclothes' is a story that's a little bit special to me. Let me explain... I first came across the short story 'Under the Bedclothes' when, I reckon, I was about nine years old and at primary school. The bookshelves, at my primary school, were nothing like what you'd expect to see these days, in particular I'm thinking about what seemed like loads of horror and supernatural anthologies. Pan Book of Horror? My primary school had that, amongst many others. So I'm reading my way through the '14 th Armada Ghost Book' and I come across this story called 'Under the Bedclothes'. I'll tell you about it in a minute but for now, lets just say that I read it and it scared the life out of poor little nine year old me. It scared me to the point w...

I feel like I’ve been reading a little too much horror recently so needed a little change, not much of a change though. The great thing about Eric Powell’s books is that while there’s still a vein of horror running through it all, his work is so many other things at the same time; just what I needed then. I’m well behind on his ‘Hillbilly’ series (read the first volume back in December , where did the time go…) so thought it was time to do some catching up… With the Devil’s Cleaver in hand, Rondel still walks the wooded hills and valleys of a fairytale world that is hauntingly familiar. If you have a problem with a sprite or troll, it may be that Rondel is the man to help but don’t cross him… He will always have the last laugh. Powell is really taking his time setting this series up and that’s a brilliant thing if you’re a fan, or even if you just like a well told story. If you’re after something to get stuck right into though… Well, you’re going to need to give ‘Hillbill...

Disclosure time... I really enjoyed Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young's contributions to the 'Clickers Forever' anthology so jumped at the chance for a free read of 'The Perfectly Fine House', in return for a fair and honest review of course. As it happens, I couldn't work out how to get the file onto my Kindle, and I hate reading off my computer (I've found out...), so ended up buying a copy for my Kindle and reading that instead. Sometimes, I can't believe that I work in IT... Don't worry though, the review will still be fair and honest. It took me longer than I'd intended to get round to reading 'The Perfectly Fine House' but the title alone meant that I'd be on it sooner or later. It's a title that tells you that Kozeniewski and Young are not afraid to set themselves a little challenge and I needed to be there to see how it all went down. And I was there to see it. The second I finished work yesterday, I pic...