What better way to wrap up spooky season than with this terrifyingly bad poem?

Paradise Lost has been my white whale since freshman year of college -- in all my years of schooling it was the only assigned work I didn't read. Now, fourteen years later, I've finally freed myself of guilt.

All that being said, this really is fucking awful. Milton's self-righteous pretentiousness is matched only by his slavering devotion to a cruel and insane god. How anyone could read this (or the bible, while we're at it) and remain christian is fully beyond me.

I loved the hatred relationship between Gideon and Harrow. It was an unexpected and unusual dynamic that powered so many decisions. I do wish I had had a moment where I cared about Harrow, but I never got there.

Muir built a fascinating world. I loved that all the magic was necromantic, and it was so ecstatically gory. Meeting all the different people from the houses and seeing their magic put to the test was wild.

I never felt like I had a sense of the world. It was like the characters were all so sharply defined and HD, but the world was a grainy black and white TV. My friends promise me the second book fixes this, and I am excited to dive into it.

A spooky, surprisingly emotional story about a gay couple who star in a ghost hunting tv show and their adopted teenage daughter Logan as they bring her back to their teeny tiny homophobic hometown -- for reasons they can't quite explain to her. So she teams up with the golden girl of said teeny tiny town to hunt for answers.

She finds them. She also finds ghosts.

It has some typical YA elements like the underage party in the woods, etc, but Logan is so refreshingly un-shy that I enjoyed them in spite of myself. It also does a great job of shedding light on the darkness in each of us.

You don't have to like Sam. I don't like Sam.

But the fact that Annie literally tortured him with magic until he bled, and then didn't feel the slightest bit guilty, or even ask if he was okay?

Now THAT is beyond fucked up.