Random Books from the Bookshelf

Demonfire by Kate Douglas

The first page reads:

Sunday night

He struggled out of the darkness, confused, disoriented…recalling fire and pain and the soothing voices of men he couldn’t see. Voice promising everlasting life, a chance to move beyond hell, beyond all he’d ever known. He remembered his final, fateful decision to take a chance, to search for something else.

For life beyond the hell that was Abyss.

A search that brought him full circle, back to a world of pain – to this world, wherever it might be. He frowned and tried to focus. This body was unfamiliar, the skin unprotected by scales or bone. He’d never been so helpless, so vulnerable.

Darkness Dawns by Dianne Duvall

The first page reads:

A strident screech pierced the predawn quiet.

The hair on the back of her neck rising, Sarah Bingham surveyed the meadow around her. The sky had gone from black to charcoal gray, a harbinger of sunrise that did little to alleviate the gloom. In the nine months North Carolina had been her home, she had heard some creepy animal calls, but the one had sounded downright human.

Couldn’t have been. She lived way out in the boonies with no nearby neighbors.

Struggling to shake off her unease, she impaled the soil with a shovel, turned it over, then repeated the process that would ultimately culminate in a vegetable garden. The unseasonable heat she had hoped to avoid by starting early added a glimmer of moisture to her skin as she grappled with the drought-hardened ground.

Spider’s Bite by Jennifer Estep

The first page reads:

“My name is Gin, and I kill people.”

Normally, my confession would have elicited gasps of surprise. Pale faces. Nervous sweat. Stifled screams. An overturned chair or two as people scramble to get away before I buried a knife in their heart – or back. I sucking wound was a sucking wound. I wasn’t picky about where I caused it.

“Hi, Gin,” four people chorused back to me in perfect, dull, monotone unison.

But not in this place. Within the walled confines of Ashland Asylum, my confession, true though it might be, didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow, much less shock and frightened awe. I was relatively normal compared to the freaks of nature and magic who populated the grounds. Like Jackson, the seven-foot-tall albino giant seated to my left who drooled worse than a mastiff and gurgled like a three-month-old child.