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. 

When Heather L. Montgomery sees a rattlesnake flattened on the side of the road, her first instinct is to pick it up and dissect it—she's always wanted to see how a snake's fangs retract when they close their mouths, and it's not exactly safe to poke around in a live reptile's mouth. A wildlife researcher with a special penchant for the animals that litter the roadways, Heather isn't satisfied with dissecting just one snake. Her fascination with roadkill sets her off on a journey from her own backyard and the roadways of the American South to scientists and kids in labs and homes across the globe. 

Larry Kavanaugh is an ordinary kind of guy. He’s got a nagging wife and two kids, both annoyingly gifted. No matter what he does, there is no end to what his family needs. What’s a regular, everyday guy to do? Well, he cuts a few corners, obviously – one very big corner. He sells his soul to the Devil.

Maybe it’s not the actual Devil, but Larry is ready to make a deal with one of the Devil’s minions. He meets some demon whose name he can’t remember. Funny, it was right on the tip of his tongue, a name of something you step on. Roach the Demon has sort of good intentions. He just wants a re-write of Dante’s Inferno with himself as the star.

Roach goes after Larry as a rogue operation. He needs to make a point to his boss, Satan, so he uses the body of a human to follow Larry around and stir up trouble. He offers Larry an airtight guarantee that nothing could possibly go wrong. After all, Larry does not feel like he has much to lose – or does he? Even Roach might be in over his head this time.

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.

This week's TTT is Books by My Favorite Authors That I Still Haven't Read.