Wow. This might be my favorite Megan Shepherd book ever! I loved how thoight provoking this one turned out to be. I loved the slightly paranormal and strange things that were going on and I absolutely loved the revelations we got towards the end.
I'm hoping for more from this world because I need to know what happens next!
I cannot wait to see art inspired by these characters as well because they all sound so interesting!
Thank you so much to the publisher for a review copy!

I throughly enjoyed this novel. In fact, it’s one of the few lately that has held my attention throughout the entire story. While I could see a few things coming, I never felt like rushing though it. I would definitely recommend it to friends.

Haven moves into her father's house after his passing. She finds a manuscript that isn't like his usual books. She decides to illustrate the manuscript. She starts to think the house might be haunted.
Starts a little slow but then becomes suspenseful.
Thank you Netgalley and Hyperion Avenue for this ARC.

Two big thumbs up for this creepy horror novel. When Haven moves into her late father's house, it's not the fresh start she was looking for. She finds a hidden manuscript that her father had written, full of terrifying monsters, and she feels compelled to illustrate it. Then murders and other creepy things begin to happen. Is anyone in this town trustworthy? Hopefully Haven can solve this mystery before it's too late.
Horror books don't often get to me, but there was one particular scene in this novel that made me put the book down and watch something lighthearted for a while. Very creepy to read after dark. The twists were fully unexpected. The ending seems to leave room for a sequel, and I, for one, cannot wait to see where this story goes next.

This was a creepy, engaging read that had me sleeping with the covers up to my ears and my feet and arms firmly away from the edge of the bed. The only negatives I can say is that, while the book started and ended with a great pace, the middle sagged a bit. Stick with it though! The end is wild!

This was a great collision between horror, psychological thriller, and fantasy / magical realism. Well developed characters and a unique plot - Malice House will keep you reading late into the night to find out what happens next!

I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK!

From the very first page, I was HOOKED. To me, this was like an adult version of Goosebumps, where the characters from a book come to life. It had that kind of vibe but definitely not in a juvenile way.

A haunted house setting in a creepy town with nosey people, a history of murder, and old family curses? YES PLEASE. This one DELIVERED.

I truly loved the atmosphere the author created and the voice she gave our main protagonist, Haven. Right away you can tell Haven hasn’t had the best childhood nor adulthood. She recently left what we can automatically assume was an abusive marriage and she’s running from that and the memory of her dad. Although the more time she spends in that house, the more questions she wants answered.

Especially when the photos keep getting put face down and the deal breaker…when something attacked her from under the bed.

Along the way Haven meets her dad’s Uber obsessesive book club friends, the Ink Drinkers, who all seem keen on getting her dad’s unpublished manuscript. For themselves? Haven can;t tell. But right away she knows she does NOT wants them to get their hands on it.

Then there’s her friend, Kiley, who runs a forgery business but seems like she has good intentions, even if she asks weird questions and shows up wherever Haven seems to be.

Lastly, her hot neighbor Rafe. Even though she hit him with her car and he has bonfires at 3 AM, he seems normal enough and is a friendly face to spend time with. He’s also the one person who hasn’t thrown her art to the side like it was garbage, but instead encouraged her to keep drawing due to her immense talent.

The author had a way with her words that painted the perfect picture, scenery and all.

"Entering a bookstore always reminded me of stepping into another world. It didn't matter where you started-you could be on cobblestone streets of a Greek island or the blustery sidewalk of Chicago's East Side, but the moment you stepped across the threshold, you might as well have been stepping into every bookstore. They all held the same feel, the same smells. Ink, paper-like dry tea leaves."

Saying too much will be sure to give SOMETHING away and this is one book I can honestly say, you will NOT guess anything about, I won’t ruin that for you because every single page is worth your own discovery.

Come the end, I was utterly shocked about more than one mystery (and there were quite a few.)

This book came out yesterday so add it to your cart ASAP, it is the PERFECT Halloween read!

Five shining stars from me, this has been added to me “Top of the Line Faves” as it satiated a craving I didn’t even know I had. This is EXACTLY the type of read I needed in my life.

SO SATISFYING.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Hyperion , for providing this digital ARC with me in exchange for my honest opinion. This review is based on uncorrected text which did not sway my feedback either which way. All thoughts are my own.

Please check out this review (publishing 10/28) and many others on my blog, sweetbooksomine.com

Lately I have been delving a bit into the horrors side and grabbed this book. This spine tingling, nightmare inducing book that’s inside another book had me looking over my shoulder for a week. Make sure you read this one with the lights on.

I really wanted to like this book. It felt so naturally scary and reminiscent of Paul Tremblay, in a way. But I ultimately felt like I wanted more. There was a lot of gore for gore's sake and there were a few times where i felt the plot was predictable.

In the end, I think the book was missing something for me and I cannot put my finger on what it was.

I ended up putting this one down about 51% through - I *kind of* liked it when I sat down to read, but I found myself actively avoiding actually sitting down to read because I just didn't really care. Haven seems like a bit of an idiot, the characters are all sketchy and weird, and none of them, or the plot, is really engaging enough to make it worthwhile. I know many really loved this book, it's just not for me.

Was given this book for free on NetGalley. Horror is not my go to genre, I'm usually a romance reader. But when I read the synopsis, it sounded super intriguing. Now that I've read it, it was absolutely worth the hype I gave it in my head. Toast has never been so creepy, and the monsters were not one dimensional. The more you thought about them, the more scary they became. It was a slower build, starting off creepy and building to scary. But by the middle of the book things got rolling and it was a super easy read. Well written, and I'm super glad I bought it for my library, and for my personal collection, and for my horror reading best friend.
Posted review on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5045069668

There were a lot of reasons I was sad to see Sci-Fi Magazine close down so unceremoniously. A major one was knowing I no longer had the same platform as before to cover books I wanted to tell people about. Malice House, frankly, is one I wish I could have given some ink in my book review column before it all went away.

It also came at a very odd time in my life—a time where, like protagonist Haven Marbury, I found myself in the shadow of a late patriarch, picking through his works, trying to make sense of the seeming madness that made up the final year of his life. Malice House was a book I had to stop and start, because of how close to home it hit. But there's something about that closeness that turned much of its terror—for me, at least—into a sense of strange camaraderie. This is a story of many things. It's a story of family, a story of inspiration, a story of stories. But it's also a story of a unique brand of grief: the grief that follows dementia, the grief that can take months or even years to actualize itself enough to be confronted. A shattered vase that can't be glued together 'til you've found all the pieces, a book that can't be edited until you've put the pages in order.

But that's just the jumping-off point, and going forward, I'll have to be very careful what I say and what I omit, because so much of Malice House's value is in the discovery.

Haven is the artist daughter of Amory Marbury, a celebrated author whose books she never engaged all that heavily in. His final years were colored by dementia: stories of voices in the night and demons in the walls as he lived alone in Malice House. Said house is now the property of Haven, who has escaped a sham of a marriage and is now moving to Lundie Bay. The town is populated by die-hard Marbury fans, whom she initially avoids, preferring to spend her time compiling and illustrating horror movie summaries as her side hustle. But when she discovers a previously unknown manuscript unlike anything her father had ever written, the locals take notice.

"Bedtime Stories for Monsters" and its unearthly cast of characters occupy Haven's thoughts, and she begins illustrating her father's stories. All is going well for a bit. She meets Rafe, a handsome young peanut butter magnate, and the two hit it off. She's even considering a posthumous father/daughter collaboration, publishing "Bedtime Stories for Monsters" alongside her own art. But then things get weird... and not just because the Ink Drinkers, a local collective of Marbury experts, seem obsessed with getting their hands on this manuscript while also excluding her illustrations from it.

Strange deaths begin occurring around Malice House, and inside it, Haven starts to see and hear some of the odd sights and sounds Amory related. For their part, the locals are acting pretty weird, too. As Haven attempts to investigate the oddities encroaching on her, the world becomes less and less real. When the penny finally drops, everything changes: the true nature of the Ink Drinkers, the reason behind Amory Marbury's madness, even deep truths about Haven's identity and extended family.

Malice House pivots from small-town chiller to otherworldly horror both suddenly and in a slow-burn. Much like the secrets behind the final Marbury manuscript, just because the truth hits you out of nowhere doesn't mean it wasn't lurking in the shadows all along. Malice House has replay value, a rarity for books with this sort of twist.

Each chapter commences with a short passage from "Bedtime Stories for Monsters"—not enough to overshadow Haven's narrative, but enough to give us a feel for the story-within-a-story. Haven herself fills in any gaps, spinning out her father's tale of Malice. The untold tale is one I'd love to read in full, quite honestly.

In the end, Malice House is multifaceted. It's about grief, as I said before. But it's also deeply about the creative process: the compulsion to create, the worlds we build, and the impact those worlds can have. Too, it's a story of what it means to be human, what it means to be a father's daughter, and (most strikingly to me) what it means to be a fatherless daughter when the shadow that's been over you for decades fades.

There are a few aspects that feel truncated. The ending is vast and sprawling, and narrows quickly. I wish we'd been able to spend more time in these final moments, that Haven had had a little more breathing room to explore these revelations with us. Saying "I wish we'd had more" has always felt like a strange critique, but it feels apt here. Even a chapter more, just to contend with a little bit of what came hurtling at us.

But, and hopefully I can say this without giving too much away, perhaps that's just another layer of it. Malice House touches on the idea that fictional characters "live" in a very narrow, confined world. What feels at one moment like a rush to the finish feels the next moment like a clever meta-commentary. Perhaps it's in the eye of the beholder.

Malice House is one that I recommend with care. If you've just lost someone, and if dementia had a hand in that loss, approach this story cautiously. Even though Amory Marbury's end was far more complex once the full truth came to light, the depiction of that grieving and processing is so acute that you may see your loved ones reflected in it. Even though I offer that as a warning, I also mean it as a compliment.

Malice House is spooky season reading at its best. Not only is it super creepy, but it’s also fresh and unique. This isn’t one of those books that anyone is going to be able to say that the plot reminds them of anything else. For all of us that have every been worried about monsters under the bed or in the closet, it definitely has me double-checking tonight to make sure the coast is clear! I did feel that the plot dragged a bit in the middle third of the book, but that’s also possibly due to the fact that I can be an impatient reader when I absolutely must know how it ends, and it ultimately didn’t affect my overall opinion of the book., which is that it’s a must read for lovers of spooky season fiction!

Just in time for Halloween, Malice House will give you chills up your spine, have you seeing monsters in your dreams and put your imagination into overdrive. For those who love twists and turns haunted houses, monsters, and a good mystery…enter at your own risk! You will not be disappointed.

Haven Marbury is cleaning out her late father’s house, Malice House. Her father was a best-selling author with a cult-like following. An illustrator herself, she has never quite understood the lure her father had to readers. Although his career included a Pulitzer Prize, his final year was filled with dementia, hearing voices in the walls, under the bed and seeing monsters.

But as Haven is up in the attic, she finds a handwritten manuscript called Bedtime Stories for Monsters. As she begins to read the stories, she can’t tell if they were created years ago or in her father’s later years when his mind was beginning to go. Why was the manuscript hidden away?

Haven, who needs money desperately, as she has just left her abusive husband, decides she will sell the manuscript to a publisher, hopefully making enough money to assist her own career as an illustrator and give her the financial freedom she needs. She goes to the local coffee shop where she knows the couple who own it helped her father get his other stories published. But they become quite obsessed with seeing the manuscript which makes Haven nervous. She’s not sure she can trust them.

She makes the decision with the help of an employee at the coffee shop to make her own calls and sell the manuscript as a package of sorts with her illustrations, sort of like a father, daughter collaboration. And then she begins to draw replicas of what she feels the monsters in the stories would look like.

And that’s when things begin to get really weird.

She uncovers a group who call themselves the Ink Drinkers who meet and are obsessed with her father’s writings. A barista at the coffeeshop goes missing. And then the deaths begin. Some supposedly caused by an animal in the woods. All the while she has decided she has a bit of a crust on her next-door neighbor after she accidently hits him with her car. Cute, but a bit quirky, she sees him out in the middle of the night doing something in his backyard.

Haven soon discovers nothing in her own life is what she has always been led to believe and monsters are unfortunately real, and they are looking to kill her. Because her father kept terrible secrets, she now must pay the price, perhaps with her own life and everybody’s around her. Who are the monsters and what did she do to call them?

Malice House is spooky, haunting and includes everything you want in a story to go bump in the night. Boo!!

Thank you #NetGalley #HyperionAvenue #MegaShepherd #MaliceHouse for the advanced copy.

If you're in the mood for a creepy haunted house story, Malice House is one to check out. It's dark, it's twisty, and certainly, a story that will make you think twice about reading in the dark.

Haven arrives at her late father's remote seaside house to clear it out. An aspiring artist, she discovers Bedtime Stories for Monsters, a handwritten manuscript. She decided to begin illustrating the creatures in hopes of selling the story as a collaboration between father and daughter. And then the creepiness begins.

There were certain points when I felt like the story was moving a bit too slow, and I do think it could have been about 50-100 pages shorter, BUT it didn't stop me from enjoying the read. It had twists coming that I definitely never expected and kept me on the edge of my seat. I could also picture this as a movie... very easily.

Overall, a great spooky read.
Thank you Hyperion Avenue and NetGalley for the granted wish and eARC!

I really enjoyed Shepherd's "The Madman's Daughter" series and was looking forward to reading Malice House. Thankfully, it doesn't disappoint. Shepherd is great at writing unreliable narrators and seemingly normal characters with sinister motivations. I didn't expect any of the major twists, which made this a perfect book to read this spooky season.

Finding an early, unpublished manuscript of dark, adult fairy tales, Haven Marbury hopes it can be a posthumous collaboration between the author, her deceased father, and herself, an aspiring illustrator. Her fathers last days were spent in Malice House, hearing voices and seeing monsters as he sunk into his own nightmare of dementia.
A wonderfully creepy story ensues, as Haven begins to experience the same frightening phenomenon and seeks to discover why. It took me a little bit for Haven’s character to grow on me, but once I was fully involved with the story the twists and turns kept me reading, and the ‘character’ of Malice House itself was so well drawn I could see myself there. A story of how what we see in our lives can manifest itself, I highly recommend it for lovers of the horror genre. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy.

A spooky house with some creepy creatures lurking around!

Thank you to @netgalley and @disneybooks for a copy of this book!

Haven finds her recently passed father's unpublished manuscript in his house. She ends up drawing some illustrations to her father's stories and then some strange things start happening. Mysterious deaths, strange noises, and loss of reality.

I went into this one super excited but things ended up being a little lackluster for me. It's told from one POV and it started out really good, but then things just lagged and got really boring to me in the middle. It took me so long to read this book.

There was some great atmospheric details to this book that made the overall vibe very spooky and perfect for October. It was a very 'visual' book for me.

Overall, a decent horror book with an overlying mystery element. I was getting Goosebump vibes while reading this!

I didn't realize there would be a fantasy element to this story and I didn't care for it. I'm cool with supernatural/paranormal horror, but this took a weird turn. I also thought it was MUCH too long. I really think it could have been improved by a snappier pace.

Malice House is a fantastic story about a woman who goes back to settle the estate of her father who was a famous writer. This one is so good, it has all the scares, absolutely bonkers characters (Uncle Arnold andPinchy immediately come to mind) and so many twists and turns you will for sure be surprised. I hope the author revisits some of the characters in another book, there are some cool possibilities there. I loved this one, it is the perfect book for a dark and stormy fall night.