Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls - Grady Hendrix - January 2025 Set against the haunting backdrop of a 1970s unwed mothers home in St. Augustine, Florida, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is Grady Hendrix at his most chilling—and most heartbreaking. Combining the author’s signature horror-tinged storytelling with a devastating slice of social history, this novel struck an especially personal chord with me. Like the girls in this story, my own mother had her child taken from her as a teenager under the guise of “what’s best,” a story so many women in that era know too well. We follow 15-year-old Fern, frightened, pregnant, and utterly alone as she enters the rigid confines of the Wellwood Home. Girls like Fern are labelled “loose” and “troubled,” stripped of their autonomy and made to follow a life path dictated by shame and control. But what begins as a bleak narrative of conformity slowly morphs into something powerful, strange—and even a little magical. When a mysterious Mobile Libra...

Review: How to Sell A Haunted House - Grady Hendrix - January 2023 Louise and her brother Mark have never gotten on and Louise found that her mum favored her brother and it was always poor Mark. Louise gets a phone call from her brother to say that their parents have both died in a car accident. Now the pair of them must return home organise things and clear the house. The thing though is that Louise has bad memories of the house and believes it to be haunted.  This is probably due to the fact it is covered with puppets as her mum created them and ran a Christian puppet ministry for the community. Louise is about to discover that her mother has left everything to her brother except the art which goes to Louise. The house though has bad vibes especially a crazy puppet named Pumpkin who was the bane of Louise's childhood existence as it caused her to do bad things and it looks like it's not finished. As we all know Grady Hendrix is the King of Demons and Ghosts etc, we learn th...

Review: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix - April 2020 This particular book, I tried a few years ago and couldn't get into it. However this year, I found myself getting into a few of Grady Hendrix's books and decided to give this one another read. This time I managed to enjoy it and push my way through the book. The book starts with a Southern Book Club group of friends who decide to start their book clubs by reading a mixture of classics and then true crime stories like Helter Skelter and The Stranger Beside Me. During this time Patricia's MIL Mrs. Mary comes to live with her, she is suffering from Dementia. During this time, their neighbor has passed away and her nephew James Harris has come to live in the house and clear it out. At first, James is very nice and inviting and charming but things start to get a bit odd as Mrs Mary is convinced he is someone she knew from her past Hoyt Pickens, and that Hoyt was involved in missing chil...

Review: The Final Girl Support Group - Grady Hendrix- July 2021 In May, I decided to participate in a bookstagram challenge where we focused on clearing our bookshelves and getting rid of our print books. I didn't do too bad and managed to clear 10 books off my bookshelf in the 30 books I had read which I am quite pleased with as it made a tiny dent off the shelf and I managed to move some books from the boxes on my pile to the actual bookshelf and cleared it also of books I am never going to read. Books that were simply taking up too much space. This was one that I had been meaning to read as about a year ago I ended up going through a Grady Hendrix phase. In The Final Girl Support Group, we meet a group of six females who were all known as "final girls' for surviving their serial killers. All of them have also had movies made about their stories and had to live with the media immortalizing their pain and what they went through. They also have been all coming to a suppo...