You are currently viewing Time for the ‘Your Darkest Fears’ Book tag

Time for the ‘Your Darkest Fears’ Book tag

What are you afraid of?
Dare to share your darkest fears, the bookish way.

There are so many booktags going around for Halloween that it’s hard to choose which ones to do.
So I decided to make my own.. with a twist.

Fears aren’t something most people like to name.. or think about, really.
We know what we don’t like, what bothers us, and mostly choose to avoid those things.
Others? They live for it.

Either way, we’re all afraid of something.

I chose ‘Fears’ for this tag because I think we forget sometimes that we’re not on our own in the darkness..
There’s a certain amount of comfort in that.

So enjoy.. and know you’re not alone.

Have an incredible Halloween.
Do try to stay safe out there.
And always remember to have an alibi on hand!

Happy Reading!

Rules:

  • Show some support by linking back to the creator’s page, Sheri @ ReadBetwixtWords
  • Answer each question with a book, title, or character that fits best!
  • Tag a friend (or two)
  • And just have fun with it!


“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves..”

(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Any purchases made through these links may earn me a small commission with no additional cost to you. In other words.. You will not be charged for using my links.)


Claws and Teeth
A book with an unsettling literary creature/monster:

Fever by Karen Marie Moning 5/5

Book 1 of 11: Fever Series

MacKayla Lane’s life is good. She has great friends, a decent job, and a car that breaks down only every other week or so. In other words, she’s your perfectly ordinary twenty-first-century woman. Or so she thinks . . . until something extraordinary happens.

When her sister is murdered, leaving a single clue to her death—a cryptic message on Mac’s cell phone—Mac journeys to Ireland in search of answers. The quest to find her sister’s killer draws her into a shadowy realm where nothing is as it seems, where good and evil wear the same treacherously seductive mask. She is soon faced with an even greater challenge: staying alive long enough to learn how to handle a power she had no idea she possessed–a gift that allows her to see beyond the world of man, into the dangerous realm of the Fae. . . . 

As Mac delves deeper into the mystery of her sister’s death, her every move is shadowed by the dark, mysterious Jericho, a man with no past and only mockery for a future. As she begins to close in on the truth, the ruthless Vlane—an alpha Fae who makes sex an addiction for human women–closes in on her. And as the boundary between worlds begins to crumble, Mac’s true mission becomes clear: find the elusive Sinsar Dubh before someone else claims the all-powerful Dark Book—because whoever gets to it first holds nothing less than complete control of the very fabric of both worlds in their hands. . . .


Exposure
A character betrayed/revealed:

Keep Me Safe by Maya Banks 4.5/5

Book 1 of 6: Slow Burn Novels

When Caleb Devereaux’s younger sister is kidnapped, this scion of a powerful and wealthy family turns to an unlikely source for help: a beautiful and sensitive woman with a gift for finding answers others cannot.

While Ramie can connect to victims and locate them by feeling their pain, her ability comes with a price. Every time she uses it, it costs her a piece of herself. Helping the infuriatingly attractive and impatient Caleb successfully find his sister nearly destroys her. Even though his sexual intensity draws her like a magnet, she needs to get as far away from him as she can.

Deeply remorseful for the pain he’s caused, Caleb is determined to make things right. But just when he thinks Ramie’s vanished forever, she reappears. She’s in trouble and she needs his help. Now, Caleb will do risk everything to protect her—including his heart. . . .


Ghosts
A book or character that haunts you still:

Dark Dance by Tanith Lee 4/5

Book 1 of 3: The Blood Opera Sequence

Rachaela has never known her father – he was a taboo subject as far as her mother was concerned. All Rachaela’s mother had ever said was ‘Keep away from the Scarabae’, her father’s tribe. Were they bad people, or simply disapproving of the woman who’d born his child?

After her mother’s death, Rachaela realises she is being stalked by agents of the mysterious Scarabae family. They want to meet her. Despite her instincts to keep away from the Scarabae, she ultimately relents and is taken to the rambling, isolated house near the sea, where the Scarabae live in baroque seclusion.

The inhabitants of the house are very old, and most are extremely eccentric, if not demented. And how many of them are there, exactly? The fading splendour of the house closes around Rachaela like a stifling womb, and she’s given no explanation for this ménage of bizarre oldsters, who are like creatures from an earlier age, and certainly not normal. Is there something supernatural to the Scarabae, or are they merely lost in delusion?

When Rachaela finally meets Adamus, a beautiful and apparently young man who claims to be her father, events take a darker turn. The Scarabae have a purpose for Rachaela – but this is nothing like she’d imagined. The family has been hounded across centuries and continents, until finally, the last of them, mostly weak and old, have ended up in this hidden corner of England, with only a reluctant, fearful ally to aid them. Rachaela must decide what to do – comply, or run while she still can. Her greatest fear is that she does not have a choice.


Blood
A book with blood in the title or on the cover:

Gypsy Blood by Kristy Cunning 3.5/5

Book 1 of 6: All the Pretty Monsters

I’m not all that special, really. Or uncommon. I’m sure there are a lot of girls with old gypsy blood who see the dead, have killer cults hunting their family, and turn into something that gets scary when they panic. Yep. Completely unoriginal, if I do say so myself.
Move along. Nothing to see here. Nope. I’m just an ordinary girl.

I wish people would believe that.

I’ve been labeled as one thing or another for most of my life:
Death Girl.
Crazy Gypsy Girl.
Gothic Chick.
Monster…

It took my mother’s death for me to finally start getting answers about what’s really been going on. Unfortunately, most of the answers come from men…who aren’t just men. Somehow, I’ve gone and landed myself in a world truly filled with monsters, and I’m starting to think this is where I should have been all along.

Only…I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m walking into the middle of a story that’s thousands of years old, and I’m the new girl on the block who doesn’t have a clue how this world even works. My only guides happen to be the most lethal of the bunch.

They decide who lives or dies. They decide who gets stabbed or tortured.
Yeah…

I’ve gone and drawn attention to myself, and the ones paying attention are the ones everyone else seems to fear.

How do these things always happen to me?


The Dark
A book that had you turning the lights on:

Phantoms by Dean Koontz 4/5

Standalone

They found the town silent, apparently abandoned. Then they found the first body, strangely swollen and still warm. One hundred fifty were dead, 350 missing. But the terror had only begun in the tiny mountain town of Snowfield, California.

At first they thought it was the work of a maniac. Or terrorists. Or toxic contamination. Or a bizarre new disease.

But then they found the truth. And they saw it in the flesh. And it was worse than anything any of them had ever imagined…


A Killer:
A character with zero remorse:

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford 4.5/5

Standalone

My Review

Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson—and they quickly strike up an affair. Soon, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover, and eventually she comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.


The Unknown
A book that had you wondering.. Wtf did I just read?:

Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage 4/5

Standalone

My Review

MEET HANNA: 
Seven-year-old Hanna is a sweet-but-silent angel in the eyes of her adoring father Alex. He’s the only person who understands her. But her mother Suzette stands in her way, and she’ll try any trick she can think of to get rid of her. Ideally for good.

MEET SUZETTE: 
Suzette loves her daughter, but after years of expulsions and strained home schooling, her precarious health and sanity are weakening day by day. She’s also becoming increasingly frightened by Hanna’s little games, while her husband Alex remains blind to the failing family dynamics. Soon, Suzette starts to fear that maybe their supposedly innocent baby girl may have a truly sinister agenda.
A battle of wills between mother and daughter reveals the frailty and falsehood of familial bonds in award-winning playwright and filmmaker Zoje Stage’s tense novel of psychological suspense, Baby Teeth.


A Threat:
A book or character that legitimately freaked you out:

Endless Night by Richard Laymon 4/5

Standalone

Jody is sleeping over at a friend’s when the killers break in. They slaughter the family but Jody escapes, killing a man on the way out. All rapist and murderer Simon Quist has to do now is dispose of the one eyewitness to the massacre. And he can’t wait to get his hands on Jody… but does he know her father is a cop?


Rejection
A book that you just couldn’t finish:

Survive the Night by Riley Sager DNF

Standalone

It’s November 1991. Nirvana’s in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father—or so he says.

The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s jittery mistrust merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?

One thing is certain—Charlie has nowhere to run and no way to call for help. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to win is to survive the night.


Death
A character that is Death, was dead, or will die:

Greywalker by Kat Richardson 4/5

Book 1 of 9: Greywalker

Harper Blaine was your average small-time P.I. until a two-bit perp’s savage assault left her dead for two minutes. When she comes to in the hospital, she sees things that can only be described as weird-shapes emerging from a foggy grey mist, snarling teeth, creatures roaring.

But Harper’s not crazy. Her “death” has made her a Greywalker- able to move between the human world and the mysterious cross-over zone where things that go bump in the night exist. And her new gift is about to drag her into that strange new realm-whether she likes it or not.


Small Spaces
A book that you wanted more of/ended too soon:

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland 5/5

Standalone

My Review

A dark, twisty modern fairytale where three sisters discover they are not exactly all that they seem and evil things really do go bump in the night.

Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. Ever since they disappeared on a suburban street in Scotland as children only to return a month a later with no memory of what happened to them, odd, eerie occurrences seem to follow in their wake. And they’re changing. First, their dark hair turned white. Then, their blue eyes slowly turned black. They have insatiable appetites yet never gain weight. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful, and inexplicably dangerous.

But now, ten years later, seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school on time–something her two famously glamourous globe-trotting older sisters, Grey and Vivi, never managed to do. But when Grey goes missing without a trace, leaving behind bizarre clues as to what might have happened, Iris and Vivi are left to trace her last few days. They aren’t the only ones looking for her though. As they brush against the supernatural they realize that the story they’ve been told about their past is unraveling and the world that returned them seemingly unharmed ten years ago, might just be calling them home.


The Future:
A book that won’t be released until next year:

Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester

Standalone

There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.

2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.

2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waives her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.

As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.


Yourself
An unreliable narrator:

Phantom Limb by Lucinda Berry 4.5/5

Standalone

My Review

Emily and Elizabeth spend their childhood locked in a bedroom and terrorized by a mother who drinks too much and disappears for days. The identical twins are rescued by a family determined to be their saviors.

But there’s some horrors love can’t erase…

Elizabeth wakes in a hospital, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak. The last thing she remembers is finding Emily’s body in their bathroom. Days before, she was falling in love and starting college. Now, she’s surrounded by men who talk to themselves and women who pull out their eyebrows.

As she delves deeper into the mystery surrounding Emily’s death, she discovers shocking secrets and holes in her memory that force her to remember what she’s worked so hard to forget—the beatings, the blood, the special friends. Her life spins out of control at a terrifying speed as she desperately tries to unravel the psychological puzzle of her past before it’s too late.


Anyone else sit down to write one thing and have it evolve into something entirely different?
Yea, this tag is not at all what it started as.
Then again.. most things aren’t.

What are you afraid of?
(I’ve always found that your imagination can often be the most frightening thing..)
I would love to hear your thoughts!

Any and all are welcome to join this tag! Please leave a comment below if you do and I’ll be sure to check yours out!

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This Post Has 9 Comments

  1. Lady Tessa

    Dean Koontz’s stories have a way of not only making you want to turn the lights on but of staying with you forever. Great post!

    1. Sheri Dye

      You’re not kidding! I started reading Koontz at around 11yrs old and he’s still one of my favorite authors.
      And thank you! It was an interesting one to do..
      Have a fantastic Halloween! 👻

  2. Pooja G

    This was so much fun to read and Baby Teeth sounds like a super scary book!

    1. Sheri Dye

      Thank you, Pooja! Turns out that I quite enjoy making the these things.. and I wouldn’t call Baby Teeth scary so much as it was disturbing. It was hard to wrap my mind around a lot of what goes on between the mother and daughter. If you like twisted.. It has that in spades.

      1. Pooja G

        Yeah it seems like one of those books that sound psychologically disturbing. I don’t know if that’s for me since I’m not a huge fan of kids anyway but we’ll see 😂

        1. Sheri Dye

          It really is a hard read..I wouldn’t blame anyone for passing on it.
          chokes on laughter What? Kids are great! Other people’s kids.. Mostly.. Sometimes..
          No, no, no.. they are pretty great. They’re all the entertainment of adults with no filters, less subtlety, and more attitude. 😆🤭

          1. Pooja G

            Real kids are generally great but the ones in horror books/movies are horrifying!! I tend to avoid horror with kids especially the ones where they creepily sing nursery rhymes 😂😂

          2. Sheri Dye

            Okay, that I agree one hundred percent with.. Kids in horror are ridiculously creepy and the singing is the icing on a whole cake of freaky. Me? I’m out the minute anyone gets all disjointed or.. scuttles. shudders I can’t do it.

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