All Things Horror with Sadie

I am joined by a fellow horror book lover, Sadie Hartman. Sadie, how are you? Hi, I'm good. Thank you so much for having me today. Thank you for coming on. I always tell people it's never too early in the year to talk about horror. Halloween is year round for me. And I came across your Instagram, because on Instagram you're known as the mother of horror. And you had like one of those little three book library things, and the house looked, it kind of reminded me of like a Michael Myers house a little bit. And I was like, oh my God, she loves horror like me, this is gonna be great. So Sadie, tell us a little bit about you, where you're from, and what really sparked your love for reading? Yeah, so I'm mother of horror on social media. I am the Bram Stoker award winning author of two books, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered, was my first book. And the next one was Feral and Hysterical, and it's like a compendium of books written by women in the horror genre. And those are just, both of those books are full of book recommendations. I'm also the owner of Night Worms, which is a horror subscription company located here in the Pacific Northwest where I live. And I'm the co-owner of that, my friend and I met on bookstagram. And I just do daily book recommendations on bookstagram. It's like one of my hobbies adjacent to reading horror. And I got started because my mom had like full access for me to her horror library. So she had lots of Anne Rice and Stephen King and Peter Straub, and I got started as soon as I could read, literally. That's amazing that we get like, I love for horror from our mothers, because like my mom, she was a teen, she read a lot of like Stephen King, and then she kind of got into like the horror movies and it passed on to me. And I had another book lover on and they got their love for reading with horror from their mother. And so it's like, the moms are supposed to be so sweet and innocent and they're passing down the horror. It's the spooky mom. I know. And so we have quite a couple of books to talk about that were on your list. A couple I have read, a couple I have tried to read. One of them is The Reformatory by Kenan and Reeve Dew. And I absolutely love that book. That was actually the first book that I had ever read by her. And I was hooked within like the first chapter and just the idea that, you know, this reformatory actually did exist down in Florida and just the horrors that those boys went through. And so tell me a little bit about what drew you to this story. Yeah. So I've been following Kenan and Reeve Dew's like journey through horror, through writing horror. Pretty recently, I want to say, the first book I read by her was called The Ghost Summer or just Ghost Summer, excuse me. And it's a collection of short stories and they all take place in the fictional town of Greystown, Florida which is where this takes place in the 1950s. And she just kind of has a huge variety of storytelling voices and genres within horror. Like she can write post-apocalyptic fiction. She can write a haunted house. She has one called The Good House that's really, really great. And then this one is historical fiction. And it just kind of has that Stephen King vibe for me with the protagonist being a young boy. But this young boy gets in like a really trivial scuffle with a white boy who he was kind of defending his own sister against this white boy. And he just picked the wrong kid to mess with because then he winds up in that reformatory school which I thought was really interesting because like you said, it's based on truth. Colson Whitehead also wrote about it in the Nickel Boys. And that's what triggered this for me was Kenan and Reeve like always talking about how she was researching her lost family member. I think it was, you know, an uncle or a cousin and stumbled upon the fact that he died at this school. So this does have a supernatural twist or a paranormal twist. You know, the young boy does wind up making friends with some unlikely helpers in this book. Yeah, I know like when he first got there and when he was like, you know, when he walked through and he could smell something, like it was burning. And I automatically thought, did they burn those kids? Like, it's just like the little subtle things before you kind of get into the nitty gritty of the horror that those boys went through. And the fact that it didn't close until like a couple of years ago because of all the horrific things and, you know, stories that had taken place. It was like, it took you guys this long to close this school, like really? So that one, even though it was quite, it wasn't too long of a read, but it was really a page turner, just, you know, with the sister trying to get him out and what she went through and how they were terrorized in the town and had to be on the lookout. It was just, you were constantly on pins and needles because you didn't want the family to die. You didn't know who was gonna be next. And so it was just constantly like, you were kind of turning the page with your eyes closed a little bit because you didn't really know what was gonna happen on the other side. Yeah, there's a chapter, there's a chapter called The Fun House. And I texted my friend and I was like, I cannot turn the page. Like I do not want to go into this fun house. But then I eventually turned the page and of course it's a harrowing journey for our, you know, it's just the way that she just kind of infuses the POV from a young child's perspective, really just somebody who grew up reading Stephen King, that really does it for me. You know, like reading it and reading, you know, the long walk and different books that he's written from a child's perspective makes it so much scarier. Yeah, and then like even some of the parts, like with The Fun House, she gave you detail but left quite a bit out because I think she was leaving it to the reader's imagination to kind of be like, okay, what do you think was like maybe the worst thing that could have happened in that fun house? Okay, stick with that. Everybody's version of it may be a little different, which I love when authors do that because then when you chat with other people that have read the book, you can kind of compare notes and be like, okay, what did you think happened? What did you think happened? So her work is just wonderful. And then another one was The Buffalo Hunter. And I will be honest, I tried to get into this book because I saw it all over TikTok after like the whole Sinners movie, that whole riddle came out. And I was like, oh my God, this looks very interesting. When I started reading the prelude, I thought I was having a brain aneurysm. I don't know if like I just wasn't comprehending what was saying, like the writing was a little different. And then when I looked on Goodreads, I saw like a couple other people that were like, we couldn't really get into it, not really knowing what was going on and what they were trying to say. So what did you like about this book? Okay, fair enough. Like I hear this all the time. So my recommendation, my hot tip for anyone who wants to get into Stephen Graham Jones's, that catalog gives a ton of books. And that's how I was able to read this pretty seamlessly because I have read some of his earlier work, but mostly because I read his books on audio book. And it unlocks the experience for you. You can, if you already have a physical copy of Buffalo Hunter Hunter, like my recommendation is to turn that audio book up to about 1.8 speed. That's about two times speed is what your eyes are doing while you're reading and read it while you're listening. And it just kind of unlocks his storytelling style, which tends to be very detailed. And it also is kind of conversational. So there's lots of stops and starts and kind of goes with the flow of how Stephen actually talks. So I've done a lot of in-person conversations with Stephen over the years, and he has like a timber and a cadence that very much goes along with how he tells a story. And this is, like you said, it's a little bit meaty because of the prologue and then it has two different POVs. So you go from the priest who is kind of giving some backstory information as to how he met Goodstab, who is a Blackfeet vampire, essentially. And this vampire is on a quest for revenge due to, I mean, there's this massacre that occurred that is also true. I mean, it is horrific what happens to the buffalo and the people who survive on the buffalo and are very related in the way that they have so much respect for the buffalo. And then here come the colonizers completely decimating the land and the animals and the people. And so this vampire decides to go on a rampage. And it is very closely related to Sinner, like you said, because of the way that colonization and vampirism are being used to talk about how invasive it is for this monster foreign entity taking over your people like a vampire would, sucking everything out of you and taking you over. Yeah, because I'll have to go back, now that you recommended doing the audio book, I'll have to go back and test it out because I wanted to get into it because I had read Blood Slaves by Marcus Redmond. And that was right after the whole Sinner thing was I was just on a vampire kick. And I was like, oh, another vampire book, this seems it's gonna be really good because like I said, it was mixed reviews. And then I was just, I was kind of mad that I couldn't really get into it. But now that you say the audio book kind of helps with that, I think I'm gonna try to give it another go before I'm like, okay, I don't really think, this is my thing. But just like the cover and like the prologue, it was pretty good. But I was like, for the life of me, I just couldn't, I couldn't do it. So now I know do the audio book and I should be good. And so another book that you had is Dark is When the Devil Comes. And I had actually never heard of this one. So tell us a little bit about the synopsis of it and what you loved about it. Yeah, so this is the second novel that Daisy Pierce is the new author on the scene. And this is her second. Her first book was called Something in the Walls and it was also terrifying. And this one scared me really bad and I don't scare very easily. So I did a post on Instagram talking about horror's most scary authors for me. And she made the list just off two books that I read of hers because they're so scary. And I did listen to the audio book for this one too, which was a really immersive experience. But basically it takes, it's a modern story and it's a sister story. So we have these sisters, Hazel is the main character and it's told from her POV. And she has been haunted by something since her childhood. She had this unique experience when she was a child where they did surgery on her to remove like a twin and possibly they didn't get everything. And so she has kind of been haunted by something and she goes back to her hometown to deal with the house of her parents who are, I think they went on a vacation and they have to do something. They have to take care of the cats or something. And she goes back to her hometown and her and her sister don't get along but her sister winds up missing. And so she goes out, well, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Let me back up. She goes missing and the sister who is estranged from her goes to go find it, what happened to her. Okay, so we have two perspectives. We have the sister looking for her sister who's missing and then our main character who finds herself in some trauma. And I don't really wanna go into the detail of what the trauma is because that's the scary part of where she is. And when I tell you that there are moments where I was making a fist and my knuckles were going wide, I was like, I don't like this at all, but I also loved it. Yeah, there's so much going on in this book that are, it kind of had a, you know that movie Saw? I don't watch those movies. But there's kind of a Saw scene in here that made me sweat. Oh my God. Yeah, and then this entity that she has haunting her comes into play because she's under duress. So there is creepy things going on in this house. Also, she's had the human monster terrorizing her, so. Well, that's going on my TBR. So I will be reading that next because I love books that make you wanna sleep with a nightlight and you're looking around the corner because you think you hear something while you're reading. And I feel like it's always when it's stories with kids and twins and you're trying to remove something and it's not all the way gone, I just feel like that's just a disaster waiting to happen. There was actually a movie, I can't think of the name, and I think it was on either Netflix or Amazon Prime. And this girl, she was having like these really bad headaches and she was in an abusive relationship. And when he knocked her into the wall, it woke up the other twin that was like in the back of her head. And like, she started doing weird things. When I tell you, I was like, I'm happy. I asked my mom, are you sure I'm not a twin? I just wanted to make sure. So, you know, nothing pops up. Yeah, if that freaks you out, this is great. This is great because being terrorized by a human monster, first and foremost, is our worst nightmare, right? And then having a supernatural element that is also there, like, will she be able to harness that energy to get herself out of a sticky situation? Or is that energy gonna make things worse? And then is the sister gonna find her? It sort of reminded me of the reformatory where it was like, you get to follow the search for her. Are they gonna make it in time? But also her perspective of being terrorized. So you have two things going and it is fast paced. I just was ripping through those pages. Yeah, well, I'm definitely gonna let you know what my opinion is on that book. So we'll have to talk about that one. So Sadie, before I let you go, because I feel like we can keep going forever and ever, is there anything else that you would like to say to fellow book lovers out there? Oh yeah, so definitely, there's so much out there. We get on every Tuesday, we get at least 12 to 13 new books every pub day of horror and it's just a lot to wade through. So if you want a little bit more of that curation and some more like notes on what you should be reading and what's scary and what's coming out, like you could follow me on social media, I'm Mother Horror, but there are a lot of other horror influencers on there that you could follow for specific book recommendations curated by vibes. Like if you want something spooky and gothic and just kind of like not too much into the gruesome, we can find that for you. If you want something that's historical or if you want something fantasy, like horror has it all. It's not just slash or slice or dice of, there's something for everyone essentially. Yeah, well Sadie, thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with me and other fellow book lovers and continue to do what you're doing on Instagram, just showcasing that there are a lot of books out there and it's not like you said, all blood and gore. A lot of times it's psychological too, which I think sometimes gets people more than just the gory stuff. So Sadie, thank you so much.