It’s time for Ebook Review Central to return to Samhain Publishing to look at their October 2011 titles.
And there are some hellish surprises in store, but they are all the good kind. Contradictory? Not really when you look at this month’s featured titles.
Samhain Publishing released 30 ebooks in October, including the start of their new Samhain Horror line which launched in October 2011. But the hottest books this month all featured some link with the “fires down below” and I’m not necessarily referring to sex.
The first featured title is Alisha Rai’s Hot as Hades, and it’s a re-telling of the Persephone myth. So the Hades in the title is exactly who it refers to, the Greek deity himself, Hades. This re-imagining of the classic tale has Hades as the ultimate ‘bad boy’ and Persephone turning to him to protect her from something even worse. This book was reviewed pretty much everywhere, and the reviews were not just positive, but they all agreed that the book was just plain “fun”. This one sounds like a winner.
Mummy Dearest by Josh Lanyon is the second featured title for this month. Yes, I typed ‘Mummy’, this is a paranormal, and it takes place at an Egyptian mummy exhibit in a very small museum. This is a Halloween romp where a low-budget cable TV show meets an Egyptology professor at a low-budget museum and tries to get the professor involved in saying there’s a curse on the mummy. Instead, the two men get involved with each other. All of the reviewers, including USA Today and Library Journal, had a terrific time with this one, the start of the XOXO Series. The tag line for this new series, “The truth is out there, Way, way, way out there!”
And last, one of Samhain’s new horror line generated a ton of reviews. Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland is a mixture of horror and western, using Native American myths and folklore to generate its chills. One reviewer said it would be hard to beat as “one of the best books of the year”. Another reviewer compared the work to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Certainly Samhain’s Horror publishing has brought them a whole new audience and this work in particular was reviewed by a large and completely different audience than their previous output. If you’re interested in trying one of their horror books, this definitely looks like the one to pick!
And that chillingly concludes the Samhain Publishing feature for this month. We’ll be back next week with Amber Quill Press, Astraea Press and Liquid Silver Books.
