Library Loot (2 September 2009)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

I was pretty eager to get to the library this week to pick up books for my first ever reading challenge, RIP IV. However, the library gods were conspiring against me today! I wanted to pick up The Stand and Neverwhere but both were not on their respective shelves. Argh. So, ok, no worries, I thought. There's still plenty more on my list. So I looked under the 'C's for Carroll's Ghost in Love, which (gasp!) wasn't there either. Luckily the next two were. And even more interesting was my spotting of The Strain, which the husband and I have been wanting to read. So what started out as a disappointing loot, turned out to be a pretty darn good one!

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
(RIP IV Challenge)

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

House of Mystery: Room and Boredom - Matthew Sturges

Matthew Sturges, writer of the Eisner-nominated Jack of Fables, and his Jack co-writer Bill Willingham, proudly unlock the doors to the House of Mystery, a series that reinvents a classic DC Comics comic. House of Mystery focuses on five characters trapped in a supernatural bar, trying to solve the mystery of how and why they're imprisoned there. Each one has a terrible past they'd like to forget, and with no books, newspapers or TV allowed in the House, they face an eternity of boredom. But stories become the new currency, and fortunately, the House attracts only the finest storytellers.

The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque - Joyce Carol Oates
(RIP IV Challenge)

In these twenty-five gothic horror tales from the master of the short story, Joyce Carol Oates explores the waking nightmares of life with eyes wide-open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most. From the Kafka-esque "Scars" to a balladlike tale of erotic obsession in "The Crossing," to the mother-daughter bond given a fatal twist in "Death Mother," the stories in The Collector of Hearts illuminate the mysteries of the human experience--both intellectual and visceral. It is a stunning and richly diverse anthology of mood and menace--haunting, elegiac, and compulsively readable.

Fables: Storybook Love - Bill Willingham

Fables: Storybook Love is a captivating tale of romance and adventure. After being hunted and hounded by a savage being called the Adversary, the legendary characters of fables and fairytales were forced to relocate to a magical high-rise in Manhattan. Living in peaceful disharmony for centuries, the literary figures have forged a dysfunctional existence of tentative alliances and allegiances. But when Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf begin an improbable romance, Bluebeard enacts a devious plan to destroy his rivals. Now as Goldilocks mercilessly stalks the two lovers in the Cascade Mountains, Prince Charming confronts Bluebeard in a deadly duel within the confines of the Fables’ New York condominium.

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary - Anonymous

From GoodReads: For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. Spare, unpredictable, minutely observed, and utterly free of self-pity (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their cravenness. And with bald honesty and brutal lyricism (Elle), she tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject. A Woman in Berlin is, to quote A. S. Byatt, essential, and a classic of war literature. 

The Strain: Book One of The Strain Trilogy - Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Eph Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold.
In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing . . .
So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city--a city that includes his wife and son--before it is too late.

Breath - Tim Winton

Breath is a story of risk, of learning one's limits by challenging death. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking teenage boys fall under the spell of a veteran big-wave surfer named Sando. Their mentor urges them into a regiment of danger and challenge, and the boys test themselves and each other on storm swells and over shark-haunted reefs. The boys give no thought to what they could lose, or to the demons that drive their mentor on into ever-greater danger. Venturing beyond all caution--in sports, relationships, and sex--each character approaches a point from which none of them will return undamaged.

See more Library Loot here.