My Review for Good Dogs by Brian Asman, read by Alex Picard, Erin deWard and Joe Hempel

'Live, let live, and let the things that howl in the night, be'.

If you remember, you will know that I rarely read a synopsis, so I am presuming this ended up on my Libro FM list because I saw the word werewolf, and give me a book with a fluffy wolf in any day! 😂 What I wasn't expecting was the monster thing when the lycanthropes had to move, and live in a ghost town. I still have absolutely no idea what that creature even was, I just know I was rooting for the werewolves, every single step of the way.  

There is a big sense of family and supporting each other throughout this book. Delia is Mummy wolf and tries to do everything she can to keep the pack safe and hidden from humans. When the chips are down, they all look out for each other. Humans by day and wolves by night, no matter what they are, family always comes first - even if the little sister is the most annoying baby wolf there is!

Read this is you like a paranormal horror story, with plenty of scary parts, which especially come to life when you're listening to the audiobook when out walking down country lanes!!! 🐺

Thank you to Blackstone Publishing and Libro FM for the opportunity to listen to and review Good Dogs by Brian Asman.

About the Book

The debut novel from viral horror sensation Brian Asman, Good Dogs is a heartfelt and harrowing story of survival, belonging, found family, and the lengths we’ll go to protect it.

No one ever said being a werewolf was easy. Take Delia, for instance. She’s spent much of her life fighting against her own nature, plagued by nightmares of childhood trauma, and trying to find her place in the world. Many werewolves are just like her: ostracized by their families, forced to live alone and in secret as they await those nights when the Change overtakes them.

Becoming the den mother to an odd bunch of lycanthropes in Southern California isn’t exactly the answer Delia was looking for. But under the strict rules of the house, they are able to manage the Change safely, and hunt without endangering their San Diego suburb. And they aren’t lone wolves anymore, they’re a pack—a family.

But when one member’s carelessness leads to the discovery of a severed leg in their backyard, Delia and the rest of her family are forced to confront the cold, hard fact they’ve known all along—they don’t belong here. Their only option is to cover up the kill and head into the wilderness, far from people. There, hopefully, they can live out their lives without posing a threat to anyone else.

At home, they might’ve been apex predators. But in the wilds around Talbot—a town abandoned for a century—Delia and her pack aren’t the only ones with a savage bite …

About Brian

Brian Asman is a writer, actor, and director from San Diego, CA. He’s the author of the forthcoming expanded edition of Man, F*ck This House (and Other Disasters) as well as Good Dogs, Our Black Hearts Beat as One, I’m Not Even Supposed to Be Here Today, Neo Arcana, Nunchuck City, Jailbroke, and Return of the Living Elves. He’s recently published short stories in American Cannibal, The Dark Waves of Winter, DreadPop, Pulp Modern, Kelp, and comics in Tales of Horrorgasm. 

A film he co-wrote and produced, A Haunting in Ravenwood, is available now on DVD and VOD from Breaking Glass. His short “Reel Trouble” won Best Short Film at Gen Con 2022 and Best Horror Short at the Indie Gathering.

Brian holds an MFA from UCR-Palm Desert. He’s represented by Dunham Literary, Inc. 

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My Review for The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, read by Bernadette Dunne

I think this will become a favourite...

The Haunting of Hill House was one I listened to last October for #classiclitbookclub. I don't usually read or listen to horror, but this sent me down a rabbit hole of defining horror. According to Wikipedia, 'Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare an audience'. According to what I researched, Dracula, Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray can all be classified as horror. I've read all of these, and I wasn't disturbed, frightened or scared by any of them. I was entertained, immersed and enthralled by them all. The things that I class as horror are that vile doll Chucky (was that his name) and The Exorcist, so maybe I need to be a little less judgmental of the horror genre from now on, and perhaps it isn't reading horror that I don't like, it's watching it!

Anyway, back to the review...I liked it, I liked it a lot. The author didn't just create the atmosphere, she was the atmosphere. That makes more sense in my head than it does writing it down, but hopefully you know what I mean. She was the mysterious house, the quirky characters, the annoying Mrs Dudley, who sort of reminds me of Mrs Danvers. This book stayed with me, long after I finished listening to it. The house was a character in itself, sinister and dark and wanting to keep its inhabitants out, or at least scare them away. 

I am going to go back and read this later this year, rather than listen, and see if I can soak up some more of that atmosphere. 

About the Book

The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre. First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting;' Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

About Shirley

Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.

She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse."

Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".

In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.

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