GRADY HENDRIX
her bloodlust. Only she’s not a vampire. Every chapter is told from her point of view, but each ends with a section where another character repeats what occurred from a more mundane point of view, replacing Angelina’s operatic flights of romantic gothic fantasy with squalid, pointless little crimes. Is she a vampire or is she a serial killer is the question that haunts this portrait of all-American murder all the way to its end.
is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s
Exorcism, We Sold Our Souls, and the
RAPTURE (Thomas Tessier, 1987): A straightforward writer whose plainspoken narration hides a spare, elegant style that creeps up on you like a cold hand settling on the back of your neck, Thomas Tessier wrote some of the chilliest psychopaths in the eighties, and Jeff Lisker is one of his best. At first, Jeff feels like a parody of an eighties yuppie, and when he stumbles across his old high school friend Bonnie, you’re rooting for him as he decides to woo her the way he wasn’t bold enough to do twenty years ago. Unfortunately, Bonnie is married with a family, so Jeff slyly insinuates himself into her life, and the life of her teenaged daughter. Then he decides that he’s spent so much time and effort being her friend again that she “owes” him love. One of the bluntest books ever written about masculinity so toxic it can only be stored in a steel drum and buried in concrete, this is what Brett Easton Ellis wanted American Psycho to be.
New York Times bestselling The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which is being adapted into a series by AmazonStudios. Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Awar–dwinning nonfiction book, P aperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties. You can uncover more shocking facts about him at: GRADYHENDRIX.COM GRADY_HENDRIX
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SLAY BELLS (Jo Gibson, 1994): Sometimes you want something that’s just plain old fun and I have never read a book that feels more like a corny, campy, cheesy eighties teen slasher movie than Slay Bells, written by Jo Gibson, a pen name for Joanne Fluke, beloved author of the Hannah Swensen baking mystery books. A gang of teens get snowed in right before Christmas at the brand-new Crossroads Mall, the biggest shopping center in Central Minnesota! Wouldn’t you know it? A killer dressed as Santa Claus begins to pick them off one by one inspired by repeated playings of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” that he hears over and over again on the mall’s Muzak system. By the time this book is through there will have been booby-trapped guardrails, deadly smoke breaks, terrible teen fashions, and an escape by snow mobile. An absolute trashy delight.