The Book Plank

Best Books of 2015 So which books did I enjoy the most? Compared to the other lists this was definitely the hardest one to make. I would have loved to make this a 10 book list but I had to stick to my own set rules. After a lot of contemplation I came down to the following 5 books. Just as with Harry August Claire North/Catherine Webb managed to shock and awe me with Touch a terrific blend of Science Fiction and Thriller. As I said in the review, this book would make a perfect storyline for a movie. The new Bourne series? It has my vote.  Sebastien de Castell wrote a solid entry with Greatcoats  last year but has really outdone himself with Knight's Shadow this year. In every possible way he has raised the bar for himself. The book itself is action packed. Sword fights, arrows zooming through the air and of course magic and gods that walk the Earth. Time Salvager  is the best time traveling book of this year. Welsey Chu had proved himself with the Lives of Tao and ...

Best Horror of 2015 Horror is a genre that I haven't been reading that long, I started a long time ago with Stephen King and read most of his classics. Though there are plenty of horror book published each year I didn't got to reading a lot this year. But from those that I read these five book were my favorites. Horns by Joe Hill was well stunning to say the least. Though I did have Daniel Radcliffe's face in my mind constantly when I read about Ig, however this didn't take away the power of the story and what horns can do.  Next up is The Devil's Only Friend which is already the fourth book in the John Cleaver series. Well it's insane. John Cleaver is by far one of the most insane protagonists that I read about this year. The Devil's Detective was Simon Kurt Unsworths debut this year, he made Hell the playground of detectives and in Hell they don't play by the rules as well (but I think you could have guessed that). Under Ground was one of the book ...

Under Ground by S.L. Grey The Sanctum is a luxurious, self-sustaining survival condominium situated underground in rural Maine. It's a plush bolt-hole for the rich and paranoid - a place where they can wait out the apocalypse in style. When a devastating super-flu virus hits the States, several families race to reach it. All have their own motivations for entering The Sanctum. All are hiding secrets. But when the door locks and someone dies, they realize the greatest threat to their survival may not be above ground - it may already be inside . . . There is a certain theme that gets me really excited: "post apocalyptic " . This can range from a fantasy style to science fiction. What works best for me personally is when you can relate the events to our current time frame. There are doom prophets that say the end is nigh, and when you look at some events that happened over the last years well... Anyway. When I read the synopsis of Under Ground I knew it was the...

Guest Blog: How to hook your reader by SL Grey We were asked to share a few tips on how to make horror writing more believable, but it’s less realist credibility than a suspension of disbelief we aim for when we write. That way, readers can trust what they’re being shown and can get drawn into the story. That’s when we know our writing is working – when we hook the reader in emotionally and physically. These are some of the strategies we try: Do the research Since coffee-swilling writers locked in small garrets don’t make for the most exciting protagonists, at some stage we all have to go beyond the famous advice to ‘write what you know’. In The Mall we drew on our shared fear of shopping malls and consumerism, and in The Ward we mined our collective experiences at the wrong end of a scalpel, but when it came to our third novel, The New Girl , we chose to delve into topics that were way beyond our personal experience, including paedophilia and the phenomenon of reborn ...