Tagged: Book Review

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Epeolatry Book Review: Enough Time by J. Edwin Buja

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Title: Enough Time
Author: J. Edwin Buja
Genre: horror, time travel, paranormal
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Publication date: 2nd May, 2025

Synopsis: In a paranormal tale that blends time travel, reincarnation, and historical horror fiction, you’re too late to save the love of your life from being murdered. This tragic history repeats itself every forty years, but now it’s only been thirty-five years and it’s time to break the cycle.
In 2020, Emma Ranahan laments that her annual torment is about to begin again. Every January, she has horrible nightmares about torture and murder. None of it makes any sense to her. The only thing she remembers clearly are the words Hero, Victim, Beast, and Friend.
In 1865, Colonel Beauregard Kensington, war hero, psychopath, racist, and cannibal, butchers former slave Emmeline Ronaghan. Captain Philip Daweson, pays with his life, but is unable to prevent the murder of the woman he loves. Major Obadiah O’Dale kills the colonel and cleans up the mess.
In 1905, 1945, and 1985, descendants of the original four players re-enact the events with the same tragic results.
Imagine Somewhere in Time with lots of blood.
Having started early, will the scenario play out again, or can the cycle of death be stopped? And is everyone who they think they are?
With a violent paranormal romance and a female protagonist desperate to change her fate, this supernatural horror book will leave readers captivated by its dark and tragic love story.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters by Thomas C. Mavroudis

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters
Author: Thomas C. Mavroudis
Genre: Occult & Supernatural Horror
Publisher: JournalStone 
Release Date: April 25, 2025

Synopsis: Escaping the mounting issues with city life, a couple move into a suburban subdivision that utilizes a special form of security. An ex-con shares her experiences with an obscure cryptid on a late night talk show. Grigori Rasputin conducts a cult under observation by British Intelligence. The personification of Death, bored and lonely, wanders the streets of Denver seeking connection.

Every encounter is a confrontation. Doppelgängers, conglomerate spirits, and other awful things await your acquaintance in Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters, the debut collection from Thomas C. Mavroudis, of whom Bram Stoker award winner Christa Carmen says, “Employs crisp prose, heartbreakingly earnest characters, and a wicked gift for dark humor to absolutely brilliant effect.”

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Epeolatry Book Review: Midnight Streets by Phil Lecomber

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Midnight Streets
Author: Phil Lecomber
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication date: 18th March, 2025

Synopsis: A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.

 

When Cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl’s life on a dark London night in 1929, he doesn’t realise it marks the beginning of an investigation which will change his life forever. The incendiary novel which inspired the girl’s abduction also seems to be linked to a series of grisly murders that are taking place on Harley’s patch, and though he’s delighted to be asked by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again, he could do without the local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he’s a police informant.

 

Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his ‘sherlocking’ in the frowzy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho – the city’s underbelly – peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers, and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes.

 

Here, the midnight streets are black as pitch and, as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the pea-souper smog, he begins to realise he may never find a way out.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Demon Drink by Kris Ashton

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Title: Demon Drink
Author: Kris Ashton
Genre: Occult Horror
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Publication date: 25th April, 2025

Synopsis: A night out becomes a nightmare in this dark supernatural novel that blends demonic possession, occult rituals, and the chilling consequences of temptation.

Times are tough in Black Wattle. Drought and forest fires have ravaged the town and its lifeblood, tourism, is on the wane. Nobody is feeling the pinch more than divorcee Shirley Goodsall, who is trying to keep the historic Ironstone Hotel afloat while quelling animosity between her ex-husband and their teenage daughter. So when the business manager for a microbrewery, Damon Prince, offers her a promotional deal that includes free kegs of beer, it’s a deal that seems too good to be true.

And it is. Shirley’s elation soon turns to horror as she discovers she has unwittingly helped Prince unleash dark forces in her town. Black Wattle’s residents are plunged into a nightmare of infection and blood-curdling transformations. Shirley and a handful of survivors band together to try to foil Prince’s fiendish plot, but Prince is no ordinary man. He will stare into their souls and turn their most shameful personal demons against them…

Fans of King’s earlier novels such as ’Salem’s Lot and Needful Things will revel in every ghastly, page-turning detail of Demon Drink, a master class in small-town horror from Australian Shadows Award Winner, Kris Ashton.

Can you handle your drink? 

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Amusement Park by Jeff Whitehead and Ryan Carr

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Title: The Amusement Park
Author: Jeff Whitehead
Artist: Ryan Carr
Genre: Horror Graphic Novel
Publisher: Storm King Comics
Publication date: 10th June, 2025

Synopsis: Two titans of horror come together for the first time ever, in John Carpenter Presents George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park, the graphic novel adaptation of George Romero’s lost 1973 film of the same name, presented by John Carpenter and Sandy King’s Storm King Comics.

William Lincoln, an impatient businessman in his 20s, casually asks a small-town coffee shop barista about a carousel horse atop its roof. Within earshot, an elderly man asks William if he would like to learn about the history of the sprawling amusement park that once stood on that spot, the carousel horse the final reminder of its existence. They settle into a conversation that immediately disturbs young William. It is the story of an elderly man hoping to experience the amusement park one last time to recapture childhood memories, to relish the rapidly fleeting remaining moments.

Instead of pleasant memories, each attraction becomes a surreal microcosm of aging and its inherent challenges as bodies and minds begin to break down. The elderly man is abused, pushed in a seemingly endless throng of elderly people through attractions that mimic the final stages of life. Finally, he winds up right back where he started, battered both mentally and physically. Instead of being able to leave the park, he realizes he is trapped in a loop, forced to relive the harrowing experience over and over. At the end of the elderly man’s tale, William is puzzled, concerned, and annoyed, irritated to have had his time wasted on such a story.

William quickly realizes that not everything in the coffee shop is as it seems. The elderly man with whom young William has been conversing shares his name. It is William Lincoln. Perplexed and scared now, young William attempts to leave, fleeing through the coffee shop’s front door. When the door closes behind him, William is back in the amusement park, transformed again into his elderly self, still trapped in the loop, forced to reconcile the reality of aging and ultimately, his own mortality.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Eris Ridge Trail by Larry Hinkel

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: The Eris Ridge Trail
Author: Larry Hinkel
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Four Winds Bar Publishing
Publication date: 4th March, 2025

Synopsis:You won’t find the Eris Ridge Trail on any map. You won’t find the people who go missing on it, either.

The Eris Ridge Trail has no beginning. No end. It runs forever, connecting realities across space and time.

Four travelers find themselves lost on the Trail…

A novice reporter who learns that some shortcuts are anything but.

A grieving author who’s reunited with his dead dog in the tunnels beneath a haunted hotel.

A young man who tries a new ride-share app that abandons him in the space between Nebraska and Colorado.

A seasoned hiker and his aging dog who discover the remains of a six-legged rodent near the sign for a trail they’ve never heard of.

Disoriented by an ever-changing landscape and hunted by otherworldly predators, can they work together long enough to find their way home, or will they fall prey to the cosmic beast that guards the Trail?

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Epeolatry Book Review: It’s No Fun Anymore by Brittany Micka-Foos

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: It’s No Fun Anymore
Author: Brittany Micka-Foos
Genre: Domestic Horror
Publisher: Apprentice House
Publication date: 17th June, 2025

Synopsis: “It’s No Fun Anymore” is a collection of eight stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and their attempts to divine meaning from suffering.

 

In “The Experiment,” the murder of a young girl prompts a stay-at-home mother to undertake a desperate bid for agency, drawing unlikely inspiration from a 1950s self-help book. An MLM saleswoman in “Border Crossings” is held captive at the Canadian border, and in her marriage. And “Thumb Stump” introduces a new mother who worries her baby will inherit both her perceived deformity and generational trauma.

 

These stories examine the double binds of motherhood, the sham of “having it all,” the daily struggles. The centralizing thread is the question: How can trauma be transformed?

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Epeolatry Book Review: Savage Hearts by J.T. Geissinger

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Savage Hearts
Author: J.T. Geissinger
Genre: Mafia Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Publication date: 22nd April, 2025

Synopsis: The third book in the scorchingly hot mafia romance Queens and Monsters series by USA Today bestselling author J.T. Geissinger, where John Wick meets Romeo and Juliet.

Savage (adjective):
1) Not domesticated; wild and untamed
2) A brutal or vicious person
3) Malek Antonov

He’s a myth. A ghost. A legend.
A Bratva assassin so feared, some won’t even dare to speak his name.

He comes in search of vengeance for the death of his brother, but what he finds instead is me.

A girl he thinks is someone else.
Someone unrelated to the man who killed his brother.
Except I am.

And when he finds out my true identity, he decides to take me as repayment for what he lost.

Now, I’m a little bird trapped in a cage, and the only way to survive is to make friends with the monster who captured me.

But friendship isn’t what the monster has in mind.

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