Starting a paranormal group...again.

I've been under the weather since the last blog post. Long story short, I think I'm lactose intolerant. Anyway...

Do you use vinted? It's a great source for buying used books for next to nothing. I bought the missing Terry Pratchett book I needed for £1.50 (with postage, I think it came under £4). It's good to know they do books, and not just clothes. 

So I'm a hundred pages into The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. It's book two in the Discworld series. So far it's a definite improvement on the first book. I hear they get better after this one. So I'm excited for that. I'm enjoying Rincewind the wizard, and the whimsical narration. Sometimes I have to re read certain paragraphs to keep up with it, but that's okay. 

Now if I can just side step a little bit, I've been thinking about starting a paranormal group again. But soley buying and owning all the equipment so I wouldn't have to rely on the commitments of others. I have a friend who I know will love to jump into this with me. He'd be pretty easy to convince. We pretty much do every project together. I think it will be fun. It has been a dream of mine to have a paranormal YouTube channel and to release a truly awesome paranormal documentary. 

I used to have a small paranormal group nine years ago, but I've been watching so much paranormal shows lately, I've been feeling the old itch.

Now, I just need money. 🤔

Anyways. I hope you all had a great week. Be safe out there. 

P S. I'm not sponsored by vinted. I just thought it was a neat way to buy second hand books. 

An update

Hi all, Dan here. Remember me? Probably not, I've only posted a couple of times and this blog is over two years old; well atleast I'm consistent, albeit consistently absent.

 I guess ever since I started reading books profusely the last seven years I've been going through somewhat of an identity crisis when it comes to what I actually want to do with my writing. I want to be involved in the bookish world, because books are my joy. But writing a book review blog is a difficult ask for me—I'm looking at my Goodreads right now, and the stats are damning: I read on average twenty books a year. That's just a measly twenty posts a year, and my last two written book reviews were in December. I've read three books this year, and we're heading into May. Talk about your slow starts! 

 I want to turn this blog into an old school "I'm a real person trying to read books" blogs. You know, like from the early naughties. People would blog their thoughts, almost like a diary entry, and just post them. I personally prefer that style. 

Believe me, book reviews will be here. Of course they will. This is still a book blog. But I'll be posting some updates on what I'm reading and how I'm finding it, what I didn't finish, in between book reviews. Also I'd like to inject a bit of my personality within these posts and not contrive blogs around specific keywords that are popping right now. I see blog as a potential playground for my writing, a fun way to practice, but also a place to be share my love and passion for the books I read. 

Is this a horror book blog? Primarily it is, but I'm always going to dabble. I'm currently reading my way through Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and reading John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in between. So am I primarily horror? No. In fact I'm not reading anything horror related at the moment. But I will. Just give me time. Every book is kind of a horror in some places. 

I'll leave it here, I just wanted to write and give an update to that one fan I have who also happens to be my dog... He can't read, but writing to your dog is nice. 

Stay classy.

The Warrior Retreat by John Lynch Book Review

BUY IN THE UK

Before now I had never read a horror book written by a real-life army veteran. When I shut my eyes and think of horror, I think of clowns, spider creatures, ghouls, and ghosts. But true horror in this world is born in war, and thank god I haven’t had to see it firsthand, the concept of being in the army or living in a war-torn country scares the living snot out of me. I can’t even put it into words. 

 John Lynch, an army veteran turned author, draws from his days serving in the army, to create a horror story out of characters loosely based on his soldier friends. The book serves as a reminder to seek help for those experiencing PTSD; if the horror genre and mental health awareness need an example of how well the two can work together as a partnership, then look no further than The Warrior Retreat. 

The book is essentially about soldiers coming home and settling into society after spending their prime years being trained and drilled into becoming killing machines for their country. The characters cope differently, one does very well, making a career in streaming video games— others, not so great; one is having night terrors and drowning himself in alcohol every night, and getting himself into fights; another is doing drugs and having constant sex with strippers; sadly… one struggles with depression and commits suicide. It’s the latter that precipitates Simpson, a soldier who started a family and got his life together, to arrange a retreat in the woods so the guys can get together, have a few drinks around a burning fire, talk about old times, and build a community where they could talk through their problems. As good as his intentions were, things go wrong very quickly. 

I immensely enjoyed this short book, I could have read it in one sitting if it wasn’t for my constraints on time. John Lynch has a way with language and has taken a sensitive subject as war, and mental health, composing them humbly into a great horror story, using humor occasionally to describe something terrible. There’s no BS. The language used was like hearing the story firsthand from one of my friends, and I liked that. 

A book worthy of a five-star review. 

Dracula by Bram Stoker Book Review

This book has sharp teeth.

 BUY IN UK

This book has sharp teeth.

Jonathan Harker, an Englishman, travels alone to Transylvania, Romania, in the hope to broker a deal with Count Dracula (a name, owing to the successful legacy of the true horror icon, one naturally doesn’t trust from the start) to purchase a house in England.

 Attacked by wolves, and beset by strange glowing auras in the night, the journey proves arduous and tiring. Upon reaching Dracula’s castle, the all too welcoming, and creepily polite, Count Dracula insists upon Jonathan recuperating with food and a warm bed for the evening— an offer Jonathan is all too happy to accept. It doesn’t take long for things to get vampirey though, and for Jonathan to understand that one night turns into an indefinite imprisonment. We follow the story intimately through Jonathan Harker’s (and as the book continues, a few friends too) diary entries; a format, I believe, compliments the horror genre.

We all know the Dracula story in some format or another, whether it be through the Tree House of Horror, or some other animated Halloween special. One of my personal favorites: the Buffy Vs Dracula episode from Buffy the vampire slayer. Not to mention plays, puppet shows (the count from Sesame Street comes to mind), a chocolate cereal box character, and not forgetting my first stint with Dracula… Count Duckula!  His story has been told and retold several hundred times since the book was released in 1897. A character almost ingrained in our human DNA. 

So before picking up this book, my head was already filled with these misconceptions, it was nice to read and relieve my brain of the embellishments put there by TV, cinema, etc. Imagine my shock when the line “I vont to suck your blood!” was never uttered. 

Strangely though, there were parts that shocked me. The ending, which I won't spoil, was different from how I pictured it to be. I always thought Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing were the main boys, but it’s Jonathan’s wife Mina who steals the show, and I believe the story belongs to Mina in the end. 

I also haven’t seen many Dracula adoptions where he could crawl up and down walls in lizard fashion— that was new to me. But you have your fan favorites in here, sharp teeth, no reflection in a mirror, garlic, garlic, and more garlic. There’s also a surprising amount of decapitations.

It’s not a perfect read. There are a lot of pointless scenes and anecdotes. I’m pretty certain Van Helsing’s accent changes a third way through the book too; it’s almost unbearable when he goes off on one of his ceaseless explanations at that point. Also, in the last third, there’s so much planning before taking action. I felt like it could have been condensed to 300-odd pages, not 400. But hey, I’m no editor. 

But the scene where Dracula’s boat makes it to Whitby, England is the most enjoyable description of a storm I have ever read. I loved that chapter. Also, everything that happens in Dracula’s castle in the first 60 pages was just fascinating reading. Bram Stoker was truly a genius, and it’s quite right we have an annual horror writers award named after him. 

It sounds trite, but it truly is a must-read for any horror— and let me use another cliche: it’s a classic for a reason. 

Moving from Wordpress to Blogger.

Well, I suppose this is a test blog. I've just started a blogger account after a whole year of trying to make wordpress work for me. So far, I'm impressed with blogger. It has enough features for what I want to do without confusing or trying to charge me for something I don't need.

I realized I was trying to make my wordpress into a fancy blogger account, and I understand that if I host my own wordpress blog, then I own my platform and no outside force could ban me, or destroy my site if I break any terms of conditions. But literally, anythign could happen in life, Blogger is cheap and effective for what I want to do, and that's just talk about books and writing. My next hosting bill on wordpress is tripple digits!

I don't need a fancy wordpress site for that! Infact I found myself not blogging anything because the SEO game was too much. Whcih while I'm on the subject,  I wont be caring too much about Search Engine Optimisation. These are my thoughts and feelings, and I'm not editing them to reach a keyword target, or worry about my paragraph lengths. 

This blog is my authentic self, and as you can tell, I have issues.

This will be about books and writing, but this first post had to be said.

Plus it's a test post anyway.