What I'm Reading

A couple days ago, my Kindle and I were digging around on Amazon trying to find something to read. I'd read Stephen King's newest book a few weeks ago and loved it, and so I wasn't exactly looking for a Pulitzer Prize novel or anything. Just something to pass the time. And something cheap.


Part of the problem with cheap on Amazon, though, is that a lot of it sucks. I mean really and truly awful fiction.

But I like to support independent artists, and this includes musicians and authors, so I still try.

I've been on a horror kick for a while and have read some pretty shitty horror books lately. Fun, but yeah, shitty. I love a good ghost story, though, and so when I saw Caraliza listed for sale and saw it was free, I said to myself, "Self, why not?" Do not let the cover of the book fool you. The cover makes it look like some kind of half horror/half shitty porn. It's not. It's so not.

From Amazon:

A seventy-five year old secret waits in a lovely old portrait studio, at the end of a street in New York City's Lower East Side. It is a secret, that drove to madness, a renowned photographer, 'Papa' Menashe Reisman, and left him to waste and die in his own studio, but haunted by every photograph he tries to take. When his great-grand daughter, Shelly, begs to have the old building, for a new renovation, she awakens more than any secret that Papa kept. She also awakens something darker, more evil, across the street, under the stoop, down a foul stair; where Caraliza was kept prisoner for two years; until the horrid events of that summer, in 1919.

I would like it stated for the record here and now that I LOVE this book. I am now 63% of the way through it and it is just beautiful. It is indeed a ghost story, but it's also a historical fiction story, and it's also a love story - but not one done in any kind of cheap, romance novel kind of way. The writing is just gorgeous and I'm losing myself in it, rereading paragraphs over and over just to feel them again. I feel like I must be going crazy.