And both of them have typos.

I checked out a couple books from the library the other week, and today I finished the last of them. Supposedly they were both horror books, but I didn't think they were that scary. Maybe I'm just not easily scared? I never really thought that was the case. I wish I could just find a good book that scares the living daylights out of me.

The first one I read was Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum (which is important to specify, because that's apparently a fairly common book title). Super quick read, only 164 pages. It's told in first person, and it's about this guy named Dave, I think. Maybe it was Dan. The first half is about how he meets these 3 kids (2 girls, one guy) who are staying in his town for the summer. They all become friends, but they're definitely a bad influence on him. Mostly it's just set up for the 2nd half of the book, which is where they decide to play a game of hide and seek in an abandoned and rumored to be haunted (although Dave/Dan starts a couple of those rumors himself) house at midnight.

The scariest it gets, imo, is when he's in the basement looking for one of the girls and he can't see anything. Obviously, since it's supposed to be a horror book, something bad happens to him, so most of the fright comes from trying to guess what's waiting down there for him. But eventually you find out what happened down there in the basement, and then the rest of the read isn't scary, it's just kinda vicious. Overall though, I liked it. I thought it had a good plot and it was written well enough.

My second book that I just finished this morning is called Last Days by Brian Evenson. It's also a pretty short book, though longer than Hide and Seek. It has a really nice writing style to it. The story is told very smoothly, and the beginning hooked me in very well. It's about a cop who gets his hand cut off and then a Brotherhood of Mutilation tries (and succeeds) to get him to temporarily join with them so he can solve a murder. It's really interesting, I imagine that Berserk would like it. Although, under no circumstances would I have called this book a horror. It's kinda creepy in the too-religious-and-cult-like way, since there are these two "brotherhoods" that think it's holy to remove a body part, and one of them thinks the more you remove, the holier you are, but I wouldn't call it scary. The ending gets kinda messed up in a psychotic way. There's a lot of killing and it's very bloody, but there's not a lot of detail in the description of the bodies or the actual act of killing. So the faint-of-stomach could still handle it. Probably.

Next I'm on to reading some of the books that were actually on my list before, instead of getting new ones :)

And congratulations to Maku and Missa. In 15 minutes, they should officially have a house.