Revenge of the Witch (The Last Apprentice, Book 1), by Joseph Delaney

Finally, we finish out the Circulation Services Division week with an exciting and eerie bit of junior fiction from Melissa Simpson. Just the thing for a cold winter’s night.
One of our library users raved about “The Last Apprentice” series by Joseph Delaney. She was checking it out in audiobook and said the reader, Christopher [...]

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Meridian by Amber Kizer

Strange things happen to Meridian Sozu. Her biggest problem does not come from boys, homework, or an unhappy family life. Her biggest problem is the fact that animals tend to drop dead around her. She believes she is causing their deaths, but in truth they just seem to find her when it [...]

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High Spirits, by Robertson Davies

Although we generally associate ghost stories with Halloween and October, there is a long tradition in Great Britain of telling ghost stories around the Christmas season. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a classic example, with Scrooge being haunted by spirits who offer him one last chance to see the error of his ways. Robertson [...]

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Clockwork, by Philip Pullman

There are few writers who are as good at raising chills and creating an atmosphere of unease as Philip Pullman. Although they are shelved in the junior and young adult collections, Pullman’s stories of the macabre should find readers of any age looking over their shoulders on dark autumn nights.
In Clockwork, Pullman starts off as [...]

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The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories

When autumn rolls around, it is always good to pull out a scary story or two. I am generally not a fan of visceral horror writing, where the horizon is strewn with blood and body parts at the end of the tale. I prefer a more mannered, genteel approach to my horror; I look for [...]

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Hell, by Robert Olen Butler

Welcome to Hell. The toilets are backed up, a new Wal-Mart opened today, and the weather forecast calls for scattered sulfurous fiery storms. There are cockroaches everywhere, but no trees or animals (but they don’t deserve to be here, do they?). There are lots and lots and lots of people—Stalin and Hitler (no surprises there) and [...]

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Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev

All the world’s a stage, literally, in this fun romp for stagestruck teens.
ENTER Beatrice (Bertie) Shakespeare Smith, a foundling and a born troublemaker. She has grown up in the Théâtre Illuminata, a fantastical, metafictional theater housing all the Players from all the works of the stage. Bertie gets her clothes from Wardrobe, and her bedroom [...]

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Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Can violence be justified? Can we commit acts of righteous vengeance without being poisoned, perverted by our own violence?
These are the questions considered at depth by Joe Abercrombie’s new fantasy standalone novel Best Served Cold. As the novel opens, Monza Murcatto, a mercenary general, and her brother Benna go to a meeting with their employer [...]

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Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear

It’s no secret that Francis Crawford is my favorite tortured, self-destructive, poetry-spouting, multilingual courtier and spy. But Kit Marlowe, as fictionalized in this Elizabethan historical fantasy, has lately been running a close second.
Stabbed through the eye in a barroom brawl, the infamous Marlowe is pleasantly surprised to wake up not in Hell, but in Rivendell [...]

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The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

The comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, but when Quentin Coldwater is recruited by Brakebills, a magical university hidden in upstate New York, he’s no wide-eyed eleven year old. Smart, anti-social, competitive, and melancholy, he’s designed his life to please Princeton’s admissions office. He took up performing magic tricks so that he could claim an [...]

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