Between Writing Reading

The Diviners by Libba Bray Evie O'Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City--and she is pos-i-toot-ly thrilled. New York is the city of speakeasies, shopping, and movie palaces! Soon enough, Evie is running with glamorous Ziegfield girls and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is Evie has to live with her Uncle Will, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult--also known as "The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies." When a rash of occult-based murders comes to light, Evie and her uncle are right in the thick of the investigation. And through it all, Evie has a secret: a mysterious power that could help catch the killer--if he doesn't catch her first. -Plot summary borrowed from Goodreads I almost passed this one by. 1920s? New York? Eh, cool, but not really my thing. But I kept being drawn back in by The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult- and I...

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story... Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead. So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay. When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, but now stained red and dripping blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who ...

Does the media in your life ever start to meld into weird little personal sub-genres? Mine does. I'm not even sure what I want to call this one, but maybe if you read this entry and look into/already know some of these stories, you'll see what I mean. I encountered most of the following books, musical artists, and other things before, but watching the first few seasons of the CW's Supernatural is what really kicked me off thinking about this new (entirely made up) sub-genre of mine. The show is soooo atmospheric and pretty much everything that makes me think of these as linked can be found on Supernatural. Small, run-down towns, the (lonely) open road, deserted buildings, half-forgotten folklore, demons (personal or otherwise), vintage.... stuff, the blues, America, and, it almost goes without saying, the supernatural. There are other things I could tack on- urban fantasy, folklore/-music, sometimes rustic (or even rust-belt) settings with a strong and authentic sense of pl...