Review: The Bargaining by Carly Anne West (COYER Challenge #9)

First, thanks to Simon Pulse and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  I didn't remember that this was a ghost story, or I might not have read Horrorstor right before it.  This book also had some pretty scary scenes in it.  Not that it's a bad thing, just that I don't always want to read the same kind of books back to back. 

The main character is Penny, and Penny is what you'd call a troubled girl.  She lives with her mom and has recently been part of a big tragedy where her "best friend" died, as well as another girl getting beat up.  We don't know exactly what happened, although we get filled in a little throughout the story.  Her mother is done with her though, and ships her back to her dad when Penny beats up another girl at school.  The only part that Penny can really stand at her dad's house is her younger stepbrother Rob.  Well when summer comes around her dad has to go out of town for business, and her stepbrother has soccer camp, so she ends up having to go help her stepmom April flip a house up in a small town in Washington state.  The house is nestled in the woods, pretty scary looking woods.  April wants to turn it into a bed and breakfast.  Now April is pretty understanding and nice to Penny.  But Penny starts seeing weird things before they even get to the house.  She's been having hallucinations with her dead friend for awhile, and they get even weirder in the forest.  And when they get to town the people in the town are very unfriendly once they find out what house April and Penny are going to live in. 

There is a cute boy in town, Miller, but he has a connection to the woods, to the very house that they are living in. Miller's family, along with a few others have a secret.  And it has to do with his older brother, along with some other kids who disappeared into the woods, and when they returned, months later, they were changed.  Most of the kids and families moved away from town.  But Miller is still there because he feels it was his fault what happened, and he wants to make it right.  So he is fighting his own demons, just like Penny. 

There were definitely some scary moments, and what could have been a really good back story.  But I feel like while we kind of got the story, I was still a little unsure about what exactly happened.  I don't know if I read through some part too fast and missed it, but I was left with a few questions unanswered.  That left me a bit unsatisfied with the story overall.  I did like the way it ended, very horror movie-esque.  So, if you pick it up and read it, for a great scary story, and you don't have the same questions left that I had, would you come back and let me know so that I can ask you about those things?  Read this for a good scary story for sure!  Oh yeah, and she moved with her mom to Phoenix, and then goes back to her dad in Washington state?  Twilight details much?

Review: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix (TBR Challenge #1)

First I'd like to thank vvb32reads for this book which I won on from a giveaway on their blog.   This was a book I just knew I had to read, as well as own, as soon as I saw it. It was almost fitting for where I live because we just got an IKEA store in town and the book looks like an IKEA catalog and takes place in an IKEA knock-off store.  The book was a pretty original idea in the way it was formatted.  However, the story itself wasn't that original.  In a way it was similar to the background story of the Poltergeist movie, or any other story where a new building was built on top of an old prison/asylum/burial ground/you get the idea.  That doesn't mean it wasn't a good story, don't get me wrong, I just wasn't as blown away as I had expected I would be.  Still, I love the format of the book so much that I won't ever get rid of it even if I don't intend to read it again.  It will be fun to look at the ads and other pictures in it again.

Basically we have the main character, Amy.  She is an employee at the Orsk store, but is hoping to get transferred back to the Orsk store she had worked at before, mainly because she's not a fan of her boss.  Her boss's name is Basil.  And she feels like he is always pushing at her, like he doesn't think she can do her job.  On this day it starts with some weird things happening as the store gets ready to open.  Some doors aren't opening, the escalators don't turn on right away, a couch is found with what looks and smells like someone took a dirty diaper and smeared it all over.  And when Amy tries to sneak around a back way to avoid Basil, she sees a man that she doesn't recognize as an employee in the store before they have opened.  When she gets called to the office, she assumes she is going to get fired.  But another employee, Ruth Anne is also sitting by his office waiting to talk to Basil. And since Ruth Anne is like "the" model employee, Amy thinks maybe something else is going on.  It turns out that the district manager wants them to figure out what is happening to cause these weird things before corporate people stop by.  So Basil asks Amy and Ruth Anne to stay at the store overnight to help him catch whoever might be causing these issues.

The night starts out pretty uneventful.  Other than when Amy keeps going to the bathroom to get away from Basil's annoying talking, she notices graffiti showing up that is new.  And then when they go out to do their rounds, they find that one of the doors won't lock.  When they split up to continue the rounds, Amy and Ruth Anne run into two other employees, Trinity and Matt, who have snuck in to do their own investigating, only they are there to look for ghosts.  Part of the reasoning behind their search for the paranormal is all the people who have received text messages from unknown numbers saying "help" whenever they've had their phones in the store.  Also, Trinity has done research showing that the store was built on land that was once a prison with a bad history.

Of course all kinds of scary things begin to occur, they get separated, and things go from bad to worse.  When Amy tries to call 911 to get the police there, against Basil's initial wishes, the cops can't seem to find the store, their GPS tells them there is no such location.  In the end, not all of them will make it out, and those who do will not know how to go on as if the night never happened.

When I say scary things, I mean extremely creepy things.  I could totally see this as a horror movie, the descriptions of what happen were definitely pretty detailed and like I said, scary.  The catalog pictures go from being pretty realistic seeming types of furniture to horror/torture contraptions that go along with the story.  A fun, scary read, as well as a quick one.