The Horror Movie Book Tag

Happy Spooky Month, friends! 🎃 Today marks my annual month-long celebration of all things spooky: horror, gothic, paranormal, even things that are a little creepy, we’re celebrating it all!

I have a pretty jam-packed October ahead of me so I wanted to ease into this month with a tag and what better than one about one of my favourite things in the world – horror movies! If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that I’ve been participating in the 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days challenge and I have been up to my eyeballs in blood and guts.

This tag was created by Royal Reader!

zombie apocalypse: a book you would save when civilisation ends

Usually, I would say Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and while that is still one of my absolute favourites, I’m leaning more towards Vicious these days.

vampire: a book you would stake through the heart

If you know me, you’ll know that I have a serious grudge against A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. This was the first book I studied for university and I absolutely hated it. In fact, a large majority of my class hated both this book and Joyce so much that it surprised the lecturers. Modernist literature just isn’t for me and this book (plus a couple of excerpts from Finnegan’s Wake) cemented that.

haunted house: a book that still haunts you

I don’t scare very easily anymore, but there are parts of Uzumaki that will stick with me forever. Junji Ito has ways of making things scarier than they should be and the fact that it’s visual means that I always have a picture to freak me out.

psychological thriller: a book with a twist you did not see coming

I’m usually quite good at spotting twists, but I didn’t see the twist in Final Girls coming at all. I won’t give away any hints as to what it is, but it’s not what I expected at all

creepy doll: a book that seems innocent but isn’t

I don’t like The Great Gatsby but a lot of the culture surrounding the book makes you think that it’s about people having fun in the 1920s, going to parties and just being young and rich but there’s a lot more to it. The book is a pretty scathing swipe at the upper-class people of the time and elitism and shows just how shallow people could be back then.

monster: a book you could barely tackle/defeat

Believe it or not, the first time I read Dracula it took me an entire year to finish it. I was 14 years old and was a newbie to classics so it’s really no surprise. I could probably read it a lot faster now, but I’d need to be in the mood for that.

comedy-horror: a book with mixed genres that worked (or didn’t)

The Last Smile in Sunder City is a detective story set in a fantasy world and it works very well because the setting makes the typical hardboiled detective story feel fresh and new. My library has the next two books in the series and I really want to read them, but I still have my mountain of unread books I own to get through first.

(cliched) teen horror: a book you found super cliched/stereotyped

It’s probably not very fair of me to call Twilight cliched or stereotypical, but you can argue that it invented some of those cliches in the first place. Apparently plain teenage girl moves to a new place, meets a mysterious boy who tells her to piss off, the mysterious boy turns out to be some kind of supernatural creature, but the girl doesn’t care, and they fall in love, lather, rinse, repeat.

demonic possession: a book so gripping you needed an exorcist to escape it

I could say that any of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books are gripping, but Certain Dark Things is especially gripping and you should definitely read it if you think that Mexican Gothic would be a little too slow for you.

science fiction: a precious book you would permanently sacrifice to aliens for the good of mankind

I really struggled with this prompt because there aren’t really any books that I love enough to not ever read again, but I guess I could sacrifice Uglies. It’s an eternal favourite of mine but I could also go without never reading it ever again.

talk to me!

I’m not going to tag anyone, but you can say that I tagged you if you want!