The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain. – Opening sentence IT by Stephen King is a beast of a book! At 1,153 pages, it left my arms physically aching when I attempted to pick it up, so I ended up reading the majority of it on my kindle instead (this also made my commute much easier!). I’d already seen the 1990 miniseries and the 2017 film before I started reading, so I knew what I was getting myself into, but the book had always intimidated me… Other books this size include a lot of ‘waffle’ and ‘filler’ – and I expected the same in this case and that I would have to skim through some chapters to get…
The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
The girl’s head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves. The Chalk Man was my pick for work’s book club. When I was researching scary books for a Halloween-themed post last year (which I didn’t end up writing!), I remembered coming across this book, and seeing lots of positive reviews – many claiming how it was one of the “scariest”. I’ve never read a book that’s truly scared me. I get nightmares from horror movies all the time – but I’ve never had the same response from a book. The closest I got was when I read The Shining – it certainly creeped me out (I almost had to put it down before bed one evening), but I can’t say that it made me feel genuinely scared. So, I picked The Chalk Man, despite some reservations from my fellow book clubbers. Turns out, they needn’t have worried, because The Chalk Man isn’t scary AT ALL. I feel…