 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. Since it is Friday, I figured I'd bring back this month, just this month, I would bring back top five Friday. So today this is a kind of a part two to a video I did. It's one of my biggest videos. It has over 89,000 views, which is nuts for my channel. The only one that beat that was the one about Dean Coons predicting the coronavirus, which is at 159,000 views. But I figured I'd do a part two to this one, and it is my favorite horror books not written by Stephen King. So let's just go ahead and jump right into it. The first one I have today is The Between by Tanana Reeve Dew, all that glare. Let's wait for it to focus. There you go. This is a tragic and heartbreaking horror novel about a man named Hilton. The book starts off with his grandmother dying and then somehow mysteriously coming back to life and then dying again for real this time. Over the course of his adulthood, he begins to hear, not hear, he begins to receive a racist hate mail and it starts to descend from there. The characterization in this book is amazing. I loved everything about the family. If you like books about families that are not perfect families, this is definitely a book for you. The horror is on point throughout, but it is a character drama more than anything. When I did my original video, I stated some things, which was I look for three things in a horror novel, character pacing and dread and it has, it checks all of those boxes for me, especially in the dread. It has one of the most powerful endings I've ever read next to Stephen King's Pet Cemetery. So I wanted to throw this one in. These are in no particular order. I'm just going through the stack that I have over here. Next up we have Benny Rose, the cannibal king. I thought this one was important to mention. There's a review of both of these books up on the channel already. In fact, all the books I'm talking about today, except for the last one I have reviews up on the channel. I put all those reviews down there in the doobly-doo. You can hear me talk more about them there. But this one is especially cool because it is a book set on Halloween where a group of friends go out to a small neighborhood. I believe it's for a party or get together or something. They get trapped out there because the lake or the river or whatever it is overflows, washes out the road and they are stuck there with a slasher named Benny Rose, one of the more gruesome slashers I have ever come across. The character dynamics are wonderful. Again, character, pacing and dread checks every single box. It's also a super, super short read. I believe it. Yeah, it's only 157, 157 pages, almost in words. But it's 157 pages and it jumps off right at the bat. I love the lore behind Benny Rose, which was very impressive to me. Hailey Piper was able to build up this huge backstory for this character in such a short amount of time and she was able to build up the relationships, the friendships, the individual characters, all that stuff. The ending is pitch perfect when you take into account everything that happened before it. It is brutal. It is gory. It's a slasher. It's set on Halloween. What more do you need? Next up, we have a big chunker. So if you're going to read this one, probably start this one early in the month if you're going to read it for Halloween. And that is Malignant Summer by Tim Meyer. The only thing that I can compare this to is Stephen King's It. It is a small town horror about an entity, a presence in the town that has that has come out of the earth. It called The Mother, I believe it was. I read this one last Halloween. It was my entire month long read. I read like 20 pages a day because this thing 600 pages long. I like to take my time with bigger books. I blow through the smaller ones, but I like to take my time with the bigger ones. The characters, the pacing and the dread. Once again, all fantastic. Tim Meyer went several different places that I was not expecting, but he did pay tribute to numerous small town horror novels within. So if you're a fan of small town horror, if you're a fan of It by Stephen King, definitely check this one out. Next up, we have Devil's Creek by Todd Kiesling. This is probably my favorite horror novel not written by Stephen King in the past decade. When I reviewed it, I called it The Horror Event of the Decade, and I still stand by that statement. It is a vast sweeping narrative populated by real people, not real people, but people who feel real. Some of my favorite characters are not the main characters. I really like it when an author goes into great detail with supporting characters. One of the things that I appreciated about this one is it has so many little Easter eggs. If you're a fan of Junji Ito, The King in Yellow, all these different things that Todd Kiesling wears his inspirations on his sleeve in this book. I really love that, but while it is a tribute to small town horror, it is also a fantastic standalone work that you don't need to read any of the other stuff that he references or pays tribute to. You don't have to have read any of that stuff. It is just a fun, wild ride, and it has one hell of a bombastic ending. Last, but certainly not least, we've pretty much, other than Tananarive, we've pretty much been in indie small press territory, but week three especially will be only top five, my top favorite indie horror novels of all time. That's why I didn't talk about my favorite Hailey Piper book. We'll get to that. But last, certainly not least, is a traditionally published author, and that is Jeff Van Damier's Embergree. This joker, this beautiful book is 800 some odd pages. It collects three different novels. The Mosaic novel City of Saints and Mad Men, the novel Shriek and Afterward, and then finally the novel Finch. Every single one of these novels are written in a completely different style. I am in awe of Van Damier's ability to mimic certain styles. The first one is a mosaic novel, basically a string of novellas all lumped into one novel, all based around the same same things that are going on, and that was cool. But then you jump to Shriek and Afterward, which is written like an Afterward. But in, but there's all different kinds of, in the first one, City of Saints and Mad Men, each one of the novellas are written in a different style also. You have some that read like history textbooks, but they're fun. They are fun to read. Don't get me wrong. You have one that is just a madcap horror novel. You have a very creeping dread story, so many different ones. But then you get to Finch the final book in the Omnibus edition, and I highly suggest you buy the Omnibus edition and read them all together. You're going to catch a lot of really cool Easter eggs for the other stories. I think my favorite out of all of them was The Strange Case of Mr. X or Patient X, whatever that was. That was my favorite one out of the entire collection. Also, Drayden and Love was fantastic. Both of those are in City of Saints and Mad Men. But the final one, Finch, is written like a hard-boiled thriller. It's written in a very succinct, choppy, fragmented way. I would say like a Chuck Pollanik, not Chuck Pollanik, sorry, a Chuck Wendig kind of style. So if you dig Chuck Wendig, you'll definitely dig this one. But that's what I have for you today. Please go check out all of these books. I'll leave links to the reviews and to where you can buy the books down there in the doobly-doo. They are affiliate links, so if you click on them and use that link, I get a couple pennies on every dollar. It's a win-win. Anyways, but that's all I have. If you've read any of these books, any of these books, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been Benny, you've been you. This has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!