Reads and Recommends

I'm too sick with fever to actually write a post or a review, so I thought I'd just talk about the stuff I'm reading right now. And stuff I wish you people would read too. Ugh, my mouth feels like cotton balls.
GOTH (novel by Otsu-ichi)
This is the cover of the manga released by TokyoPop, featured rather than the original novel cover because this one is pretty! The story is rather creepy, though. Non-linear, well-written, with two strange characters you  can't help but love and shudder at.

Synopsis: A notebook that leads to murder – a refrigerator filled with hands… a pit of dead dogs… an accidental suicide… a boy buried alive – and where two teenagers linked by an obsession with murder and torture explore the recesses of humanity’s dark side.


ULTRAVIOLET by R. J. Anderson


This hasn't been released in the US yet. I read the UK version, and loved it. I picked it up because it also deals with synesthesia, the subject of my current novel Scatter. Wish the UK version has a better cover though.

SYNOPSIS

Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. This is not her story. Unless you count the part where I killed her. Sixteen-year-old Alison has been sectioned in a mental institute for teens, having murdered the most perfect and popular girl at school. But the case is a mystery: no body has been found, and Alison's condition is proving difficult to diagnose. Alison herself can't explain what happened: one minute she was fighting with Tori -- the next she disintegrated. Into nothing. But that's impossible. Right?


GRAVEMINDER by Melissa Marr


Detailed review coming, was a little disappointed with this one. Although I like how Marr went from fey to such a great concept. Just wish there was more to the story.

Three sips to mind the dead . . .

Rebekkah Barrow never forgot the attention her grandmother Maylene bestowed upon the dead of Claysville, the small town where Bek spent her adolescence. There wasn't a funeral that Maylene didn't attend, and at each one Rebekkah watched as Maylene performed the same unusual ritual: She took three sips from a silver flask and spoke the words "Sleep well, and stay where I put you."

Now Maylene is dead, and Bek must go back to the place she left a decade earlier. She soon discovers that Claysville is not just the sleepy town she remembers, and that Maylene had good reason for her odd traditions. It turns out that in Claysville the worlds of the living and the dead are dangerously connected; beneath the town lies a shadowy, lawless land ruled by the enigmatic Charles, aka Mr. D. If the dead are not properly cared for, they will come back to satiate themselves with food, drink, and stories from the land of the living. Only the Graveminder, by tradition a Barrow woman, and her Undertaker—in this case Byron Montgomery, with whom Bek shares a complicated past—can set things right once the dead begin to walk.

Although she is still grieving for Maylene, Rebekkah will soon find that she has more than a funeral to attend to in Claysville, and that what awaits her may be far worse: dark secrets, a centuries-old bargain, a romance that still haunts her, and a frightening new responsibility—to stop a monster and put the dead to rest where they belong.