If you’re like me, you don’t like to think about the microbe-encrusted surfaces you encounter every day. Maybe you don’t want to look like a fussy little germ-phobic person with your arsenal of cleaning wipes, gloves, and distrust of public spaces. Maybe you think germs won’t get you, because you’re tough and cool. Perhaps, like […]

 A dilapidated girls boarding school in small-town Vermont called Idlewild is the setting for a truly scary gothic mystery.  The Broken Girls, by Simone St. James, moves between 1950, when we meet four troubled school girls at Idlewild, and the present when Fiona Sheridan is investigating a plan to re-open the school, where Fiona’s sister was […]

Some people like to watch scary movies all year-round. Those people must be very brave. I myself think it best to save the frights for the Halloween season, and as a  meek and scare-averse human, I generally need the presence of a sturdy shoulder to cringe against when the going gets too spooky. My best […]

A dramatic, engrossing historical novel, set primarily in post-WWII Germany, The Women in the Castle, by Jessica Shattuck, tells the intertwined stories of three widows whose husbands were involved in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler. The aristocratic Marianne promised her husband that she would find and help the other wives of conspirators, so […]