I Read Horror for 72 Hours and Here’s How It Went

I participated in the 72 Hours in the Haunted House readathon, which was hosted by Cassidy, Mel, Ry, Lexie, and Cailey. The point of the readathon was to read horror and/or thrillers over the course of 72 hours and there was a wheel of prompts for each genre. I stuck to the horror wheel and managed to read five books!

If you don’t want to watch this video, I completely understand, so I am will summarize my thoughts on these five books here!

My first spin landed on psychological and I went with Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin. This book is aptly named as it felt like a fever dream and is a book I am still thinking about. I think it is one I will need to reread to fully understand but the experience of reading it was both horrifying and bewildering. You might wonder how a book with a horse on the cover could be classified as horror, but this certainly is. I listened to this on audio, but from what I can tell the story is told entirely through dialogue, which helps with the pacing. It is a conversation between a woman on her death bed and a young boy and they are reflecting on how she ended up here. It is wild! One of my goals for 2023 is to read more translated fiction and this title is translated from Spanish into English. I will definitely read more from the author.

For my second spin, I landed on SciFi horror. Final Girls was my first book from Mira Grant and it will not be my last. I cannot tell you how excited I am to finally read Into the Drowning Deep! This was a good reminder that I love SciFi horror but I don’t know where to go from here. I would love to hear any recommendations you may have! I think the conversations about virtual reality and therapy are interesting and it is fascinating to think about the ethics behind manipulating a person’s mind in that way. I have mixed feelings about the twist but I understand why she included it!

I was so excited to land on Haunted House and finally have the chance to read something from Darcy Coates! All of the hosts of the readathon adored Gallows Hill, so I figured this was the perfect time to pick it up. While I did enjoy this book, I think I built it up too much in my mind. I love a Gothic haunted house story, but I almost wanted this to be more atmospheric. I think that the nature of a book like this makes it so that the main character has to be frustrating to the reader in order to find themselves in these terrifying situations over and over again! I would definitely call this a slow-burn horror. I still enjoyed this and would recommend it and want to read more from Darcy Coates. The ending was fantastic! I wonder if her short novels would work better for me!

My fourth spin landed on Gothic and I was thrilled because A Dowry of Blood was the one book I really wanted to get to during the readathon! This was one of my five star predictions for 2023 and, spoiler, it was a glowing five stars! Everyone is right about this book. It is haunting, it is beautiful, and it is painful. I appreciate flowery writing when it feels like it is saying something, and that is certainly the case here. I love that it is told as though Dracula’s first bride, Constanta, is writing him her final love letter. She never actually names him, which is so subtle but so powerful! This book is incredibly quotable and I want to buy another copy that I can annotate because I didn’t want to mark up my gorgeous Fairyloot edition.

My final spin was supernatural and I wasn’t sure I wanted another ghost story, but then I remembered that When the Reckoning Comes was recommended to me recently! I would consider this horror in that was that humanity can be horrifying. This was a slow burn in a way that truly worked for me. I wish those who deserved a true reckoning got what was coming to them, but I understand why the author took this book in the direction she did. I will definitely read more from LaTanya McQueen!

YouTube | Instagram | Twitter | Goodreads