What Not To Skip For Adult Summer Reading

What not to skip...Horror

For many of us, the word horror evokes cliche thoughts and images such as Night of the Living Dead, almost any Stephen King book, or Frankenstein.

Horror books can deliver more than just a scare, they can also deliver stories that are spine-tingling, heart-wrenching, mesmerizing, provocative, intriguing, and thrilling...

Dead lines
by Greg Bear
Now he ventures into decidedly more frightening territory in a haunting thriller that blends modern technology and old-fashioned terror, as it charts one man's inexorable descent into a world of mounting supernatural dread. For the last two years, Peter Russell has mourned the death of one of his twin daughters who was just ten when she was murdered. Divorced, despondent, and going nowhere in his career, Peter fears his life is circling the drain. Then Trans comes along. Trans is a transcendent marvel: a sleek, handheld interpersonal communication device capable of flawless operation anywhere in the world, at any time. After a chilling encounter with his own lost child he begins to grasp the terrifying truth: Trans is a Pandora's box that has tapped into a frequency not of this world . . . but of the next. By turns spine-tingling, provocative, and heart-wrenching, Dead Lines marks a major turning point in the consistently dazzling storytelling career of Greg Bear.

Lullaby: a novel
by Chuck Palahniuk
Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle who specializes in selling haunted houses and who lost a child to the culling song years before–for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city." But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns.

The Historian: a novel
by Elizabeth Kostova
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian.The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive.

The Messenger of Magnolia Street
by River Jordan
". . . when I look I see an open gate where there should be none. And what longs to enter through it, darkness and devastation. And I can feel that evil longing emptying out the good of Shibboleth, pulling on it with every rancid breath as it stands waiting for the gate to open farther." The Messenger of Magnolia Street tells the haunting story of three childhood friends who reunite to fight the unnamed presence that is slowly draining their beloved town of goodness and light. Nehemiah Trust fled his hometown of Shibboleth twelve years ago, after the death of his mother. Now chief of staff for a powerful senator, Nehemiah has washed his hands of Shibboleth. But one night his older brother Billy and childhood friend Trice appear at his front door. Something is wrong, they tell him. Nehemiah is needed back home. This mesmerizing novel of love awakened, purpose abandoned, and legacy reclaimed begins as slow and easy as a southern Sunday, but as the town of Shibboleth begins to sense the approaching darkness, the three friends must race against time to save the lifeblood of the place they call home. The solution requires a willingness to sacrifice everything.