Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

 The Longest Books I've Ever Read:

When I saw this prompt, I knew immediately which ones they'd be. 

I wasn't wrong! 

I didn't start reading the Outlander series until the tv show had already started. 

THEN I went back and binged all the books that were already published in the series 

before I would watch any more of the show.

My Goodreads challenge that year suffered in the number of books but the page count was waaaay up there!!

Genre: Historical Fiction/Horror Publisher: Darker Worlds Publishing Date of Publication: Aug 10, 2018

Number of pages: 277 (Kindle)

410 (paperback) Word Count: 78K

Cover Artist: Michael Bray

They thought vampires were fantasy. They were wrong.

In the year 2044, reporters from the Public Relations Ministry gather at the home of Benjamin Harker, the last surviving member of the Harlem Hellfighters. At the age of 144, he is the oldest recorded man alive. Hidden among them, Clyde Bruner is looking for a different kind of story. Across the United States, despite the Great Walls and patrol drones built to keep America secure, something has found its way in. And now towns are vanishing during the night. Entire populations, gone. Only to return after the sun sets, changed, unholy, and lethal. And whatever this evil is, its spreading west.

According to a bedtime story Bruner’s grandfather told him when he was a boy, Benjamin Harker has seen this before. He’s faced this scourge. Fought this evil. Survived them. Killed them. From the trenches of the Great War to the jungles of Vietnam to the sands of Iraq, Harker will search his past to save our future.

Chaos reigns around the world. Strange creatures, accorded the title "Phantom Ninjas" by the media, are leaping off tall buildings and somersaulting back up without any scratch - and then disappear. There follows more spontaneous acts of magic, confounding the world. Who - or what - is responsible? In the middle of the mystery arrives Detective Hetfield, a private investigator just recently released from the FBI due to an on-the-job injury. Hetfield, accustomed to fame as a star witness in the murder trial of a beloved actress, uses the media to put forward the theory that a person of extraordinary magical powers is behind all the incidents, and labels him Dr. Magic. Hetfield gets much more than what he bargained for when that powerful being does exist - in the form of a young man long disillusioned with his past - and cruelly takes him up on his offer.

For lovers of light-hearted and fun novels involving magic.

“Mother knows best” takes on a sinister new meaning in this unsettling thriller perfect for fans of Neil Gaiman and Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Everyone says Lauren Tranter is exhausted, that she needs rest. And they’re right; with newborn twins, Morgan and Riley, she’s never been more tired in her life. But she knows what she saw: that night, in her hospital room, a woman tried to take her babies and replace them with her own…creatures. Yet when the police arrived, they saw no one. Everyone, from her doctor to her husband, thinks she’s imagining things.

A month passes. And one bright summer morning, the babies disappear from Lauren’s side in a park. But when they’re found, something is different about them. The infants look like Morgan and Riley―to everyone else. But to Lauren, something is off. As everyone around her celebrates their return, Lauren begins to scream, These are not my babies.

Publication date: October 23rd 2018    Genres: Adult, Horror, Paranormal, Thriller

Bloody Mary…

Bloody Mary…

Bloody…maybe we shouldn’t test that just yet.

Urban legends, fact or fiction, at the end of the day they’re all stories. We know not to spin around the room in the dark whispering her name. We’ve heard about the man with the hook and the terror that stalks the babysitter while she’s home alone.

But there are other tales told around the fire at night. 
The man finding the steps into hell and sanity flickering away. 
Mind control experiments by governments, big and small. The woman married to the man of peculiar tastes. 
There are the haunted hospitals, sleep trials in Russia and more.

Margaret Willow has never met an eleven-year-old as dangerous as Natalie Glasgow. Natalie spends her days comatose, but at night she prowls her mother’s home, unnaturally strong and insatiably carnivorous. With doctors baffled, Natalie’s mother reaches out to Margaret, an expert in the supernatural. But even Margaret is mystified and terrified by Natalie’s condition. She’s dying, and before she dies, she might kill someone. Has a demon clawed its way inside an eleven-year-old girl? Or does the source of this nightmare lie with Natalie’s dead father?

A tight, tense novella, THE POSSESSION OF NATALIE GLASGOW twists the exorcism tale at every turn down to its final grave confrontation.

"Whatever set foot out there and made those heavy steps had to be far stronger and heavier than any eleven-year-old girl in the world.


And each step brought it closer."

In this horror novella, Natalie's mother, Heather, having exhausted medical reasoning for her daughter's strange nocturnal behavior and stuporous daylight affection, consults paranormal expert, Margaret. Natalie starts stalking the hallways of her home, a strange nightly occurrence of a child that is comatose during the daylight hours. Her mother, understandably, locks herself in her bedroom each night while Natalie, if it even is Natalie,  roams in search of sustenance: Red meat, the rarer the better. Margaret confronts her during one of these dark nights, trying to determine exactly what is hiding inside Natalie's skin. 

When the blurb describes this as a "tight, tense novella", they aren't kidding. The tension is elevated from the first few pages and it continues throughout. Within five minutes of starting to read, the hackles on the back of my neck stood up. There's real fear experienced in The Possession of Natalie Glasgow and the author commands it to rise off the pages and wrap itself around you, coating you in anxiety and unease. 

It's not often that I'm taken unawares by horror, whether it's a book or a movie. I'm the person that usually spoils it for everyone else by going "Oh, I bet..." (and I'm almost always correct-le sigh). When you love horror like I do, especially paranormal horror, there's not much that you haven't seen done before. This novella managed to surprise me. In hindsight, it should have been obvious. There were signs all over the place pointing in the direction of exactly what is haunting Natalie Glasgow, but I didn't see any of them until it was too late. Not only did I not anticipate the ending, but I was also completely unprepared for the poignancy of it. When I turned the last page, I couldn't vocalize exactly what the reading had impressed upon me, only that it did.

If you are looking for a quick, frightening read that touches on the primal fear within us all, this is your story. The Possession of Natalie Glasgow takes the typical exorcism tale and turns it on its head, with the lesson that sometimes karma comes back to bite you...and those you love.