Being a bibliophile, I sometimes get asked (especially during this time of year) what books I would recommend to get in the spirit of Halloween. Of course, I could say Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Amy Cross, Robert McCammon, Peter Straub, and Willow Rose, which are all fine and gory but then I would say, “Modern writers are great, but don’t forget the classics.”
If you own a Kindle or simply carry the free Kindle app on your phone, access to digital library content are just finger clicks away. I am such a book geek that I not only read hard copy books, but I have an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, Kindle app on my phone, and Kindle Cloud Reader on my laptop. It is kind of embarrassing to say, but I would rather be reading than do just about anything else.
50 Masterpieces of Gothic Fiction Vol. 1 is a fantastic collection of unabridged classic horror novels, novellas, and short stories. Not only do you get the Bram Stoker Dracula (which is to be expected) but you also get Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars which revolves around an Egyptian mummy, archeology, and feminist themes. Of course, there are several Edgar Allan Poe stories, along with Charles Dickens, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
You get classic monsters such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo who demonstrated that sometimes the truly monstrous is not the one that appears that way.
Included are novella-length ghost stories such as the Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Also, there are several stories from the weird such as Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, and the Dunwich Horror, and William Hope Hodgson’s The Voice in the Night.
There are almost 4000 pages for 99 cents. I love this collection. I have not read all the stories here, but I have read enough of them to feel really happy I bought the collection. Again, 99 cents for almost 4000 pages of content.
The Classic Authors Super Set Series: (by Shandon Press) is not exclusively a compilation of horror writers. In volume 1 shown above you will find Jane Austen: The Complete Novels; Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels; Zane Grey: The Collected Works; Robert E. Howard: The Collected Works; H.P Lovecraft: The Complete Fictions; Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales and poems; and Mark Twain: The Complete Novels.
This massive compilation of 8 authors and their collective works is a whopping 31,940 pages. It is currently available at 49 cents for the entire volume! As always when you have such a massive amount of content, navigation becomes a little more challenging, but as long as you return to the table of contents, it should be manageable. I do not skip around, so I have not had any difficulty, but I know how to do it if my OCD would allow it.
Slow Burn is a 9 book zombie apocalypse series written by Bobby Adair that includes a novella, tenth piece. The entire series is 1800 pages and costs only 99 cents on Amazon. It is well-worth the price, which means that at 99 cents it is a bargain.
The story is told through the eyes of Zed Zane who is trying to survive the zombie apocalypse while being a normal almost anti-heroic character. The story is filled with action and pathos. The reader falls in love with characters that are present one minute and gone the next. The scale is epic and heavy on the blood and gore.
As is common in books like this, there are ups and downs, moments of hope and redemption, as well as despair and agony. This was my first experience with Bobby Adair and I can unequivocally state that I have purchased several other of his series as a consequence of reading and enjoying this one.
Well, I think that this will do it for me for now. I hope that you will avail yourself of some of the suggestions I have made here. Hell, to be honest, I think that this is so affordable that you should get them all.
The 50 Masterpieces of Gothic Fiction are 99 cents. The three volumes of The Classic Authors Super Set series by Shandon Press are 49 cents each which are one dollar and 47 cents in total for more than 84,000 pages of classic novels. Then, the Bobby Adair zombie apocalypse Slow Burn series which is almost 2000 pages for 99 cents on Amazon Kindle. You will get lost for hours in your Reading Sanctum, the way I do.
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The Mustache and The Beard 