And just so you know – you’re not alone. Librarians harbor some of the guiltiest reading pleasures out there.  At a recent meeting, a colleague described her reading tastes as “fluffy bloody,” referring to the subgenre of supernatural cozy mysteries – think vampires-turned-amateur sleuths running the village tea shoppe. I can’t think of a guiltier pleasure (or a better name for a new subgenre).

I’ll go ahead and share one of my guilty pleasures – true crime.  From Bundy to Borden, I have always gotten a freakish thrill out of reading about the world’s worst crimes and criminals. Why do I read this stuff?  I don’t want to delve too deeply into what my taste for such grim reading matter really says about me, but I can say that I love the “ripped from the headlines” sensibility of it all and the convergence of investigative journalism, police procedure, and courtroom drama.  And there’s something about the ten or so pages of lurid photos in the middle of almost every true crime book that I just cannot look away from.  Quite simply, I love reading true crime in all its forms.

I first discovered the genre with “modern classics” such as Helter Skelter and authors like Joe McGinniss and Ann Rule.  Then I found Joseph Wambaugh’s classic The Onion Field and that led me to his other works and then to David Simon’s amazing Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.  Pretty soon I was onto In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.  Then I went on a paperbacks-with-lurid-covers binge – Perfect Victim, Deranged, The Night Stalker.  I felt like I needed the equivalent of a literary shower after reading these, so I turned legit.  I read more serious stuff: An Innocent Man, Columbine, Bloodsworth.  After getting serious, I got all artsy and read a slew of books about art theft and forgery: The Rescue Artist, The Gardner Heist, Provenance.  Lately, I have become obsessed with historical true crime, brought on by reading The Devil in the White City.  Recent favorites in this vein include the excellent The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, For the Thrill of It, and Midnight in Peking.

Luckily I work at a place where my peers won’t judge me for my reading tastes (right, guys?) and my guilty pleasure can be sustained.  We have a great true crime section, located in the 364 area of our nonfiction shelves.  And if you’re a true crime fan like me who’s always on the lookout for your next great guilty pleasure, you’re in luck!  We’ve added “Beyond Cold Blood: The KBI from Ma Barker to BTK” to our shelves, a book about the most infamous cases solved by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

Little’s books often revolve around supernatural forces at play in the familiar, everyday world of modern America. His novels are often set in the Southwest, usually Arizona, and have very short titles that reflect the world of the novel — The Association is about a sinister homeowner’s group, The Store is about a big box retailer with evil lurking in its aisles, The Policy is about a deadly life insurance contract. Although he employs seemingly mundane settings, Little’s plot twists and turns can be truly horrifying in a visceral, sometimes repulsive, way. Don’t be surprised to open up one of Little’s books and find yourself among re-animated murder victims bent on revenge, mutilated goats portending the Apocalypse, and murderous clowns who exist in another dimension.

If you’ve read all of Koontz and King and are looking for a fresh voice in the horror genre who employs both the supernatural and the satirical to get at what’s most horrifying in our modern world, give Bentley Little at try.

LPL owns the following:

• The Academy
  Evil stalks the halls and possesses the principle at a newly-formed charter school.
• The Association
  A gated community’s newest residents find that non-compliance with the rules and regulations of the Homeowner’s Association can be deadly.
• The Collection
  Thirty two short stories that showcase the author’s dark, demented visions.
• His Father’s Son
  A man hears his father’s deathbed murder confession and must grapple with the evils unleashed by this long-held secret.
• The Policy
  A salesman offers insurance policies that not only cover accidental death and dismemberment, but often lead to those ends as well.
• The Resort
  A dream vacation at an exclusive destination soon turns into a nightmare for one family.
• The Revelation
  The signs of the Apocalypse are upon a small town in Arizona and salvation may lie with a pregnant woman and fire-and-brimstone itinerant preacher.
• The Store
  A big box retailer comes to a small town and offers jobs and benefits to the area, but at a horrific price.

Okay, so that last one’s not exactly an everyday occurrence, but look around – there are cornfields and dark closets everywhere.  And you will never find me in either one.  Why?  When I was about twelve or  thirteen years old, I found a copy of Stephen King’s short story collection, Night Shift, on the paperback-filled bookshelves of my older sister’s room.

My love for horror fiction and films had been slowly growing for a while, nursed by a steady diet of authors like V.C. Andrews and Caroline Cooney and movies from the summer my parents got HBO – C.H.U.D. and Happy Birthday To Me.  It’s probably no shock that they yanked HBO as soon as school started.  Before I picked up my sister’s tattered copy of Night Shift, I was still flirting with other genres – a little fantasy, a fair number of mysteries, a few romances here and there.  After I discovered King’s macabre short story collection, there was a marked shift in my reading and I embarked on a horror reading binge that lasted for years.

In this course of this binge, I read many, many Stephen King novels and collections, but the one that has stuck with me the most is Night Shift.  Three stories in particular continue to resonate – and by “resonate,” I mean “scare the bejeezus out of me” – and still dictate my actions around cornfields, closets, and industrial machinery:

• Children of the Corn – A couple trying to rekindle their marriage during a road trip take a wrong turn in Nebraska.  They end up in a deserted town, inhabited by youthful members of a church that worships a hulking entity in the cornfield.  I saw the movie adaptation of this story – every few years, my parents would give in and subscribe to HBO again while school was out.  But after school started and they cancelled it once again, I would return to this story for a real scare with Isaac, Malachi, and He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
• The Boogeyman – Hands down, *the* scariest story in this collection for me. It centers on a patient who has suffered terrible trauma and his visit to a psychiatrist.  It is the sort of story that builds slowly to one hell of an ending and along the way touches on our most deep-seated fears, including a slithering nightmare that lives in the closet.
• The Mangler – Sometimes you never realize that something can be terrifying until a writer or filmmaker makes it so.  Think Mexican kudzu in Scott Smith’s The Ruins.  Or crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Or industrial laundry equipment Stephen King’s The Mangler.

It’s almost Halloween and if you are looking for great storytelling that will provide lifelong scars and scares, check out Night Shift.  However, if you enjoy solo strolls through cornfields, hanging out in darkened closets, or getting up close and personal with industrial folding machines, maybe you should skip the three stories I mentioned.  Instead, maybe you should start with Graveyard Shift, Gray Matter, or Lawnmower Man.  But trust me, you’ll never think about rats, beer, or lawnmowers in the same way again.

I doubt that the Douglas County Fair will go this route anytime soon, so I’ll have to make do by catching some of the acts at the annual Busker Fest and of course, reading about carnies, circus acts, and freak shows. No matter what your reading tastes, if you’ve ever dreamed of running away with the circus, then step right up! Come one, come all! There’s a little something for everyone in the Amazing World of the Lawrence Public Library Stacks!

If you like books off the beaten path:

If you’ve always wanted to host a circus-themed book club meeting:

If you like history, mystery, and a little romance:

If you are a classically-trained reader:

If you like a little factual analysis with your funnel cake:

If your coffee table needs a touch of circus:

If reading really isn’t your thing:

In Awakening, a reclusive veterinarian discovers the ancient secrets hiding in an abandoned house inhabited by venomous, exotic snakes.  In Blood Harvest, young girls are being abducted from an English village and the new vicar must figure out how the disappearances are linked to the church and whether strange woman who is said to haunt the church graveyard is involved.  In Sacrifice, an obstetrician relocates to a remote Scottish island and discovers a body in a bog and a strange pattern of  deaths among young women on the island.

With Now You See Me, Bolton introduces Lacey Flint, a young police officer with a shadowy background and extensive knowledge of the Jack the Ripper murders.  When Ripper-like murders start occurring all over London, she is forced to work with DI Mark Joesbury, who has as many questions about Flint’s past as he does about the murders.  In Dead Scared, the pair meet up once again as Flint is detached by Joesbury to go through the Cambridge University gates and deep undercover to investigate an outbreak of suicides among students.

If you like dark and twisty crime fiction, with snakes instead of cats and historic serial killers instead of amateur detectives, give S. J. Bolton and her scary good thrillers a try.  Fans of Minette Walters, Barbara Vine, Val McDermid, and Tana French will be especially pleased at what they find within the pages of her books  – Susan, LPL Marketing

• Birdsong
  A young British executive travels to France on business in 1910 where he meets and falls madly in love with an unhappily married older woman. The two share a brief but passionate love affair, the consequences of which will linger long after he goes back to Britain. Six years later he returns to France as an officer about to enter the brutal trench warfare in the Somme Valley and encounters his former love again.
• Charlotte Gray
  The title character is a young Scottish woman who travels to London during WWII where she falls in love with an RAF pilot. When he disappears on a mission over France, she volunteers for the government’s secretive “G Section” and heads to France to aid the Resistance and locate her lover. This book was adapted into a movie starring Cate Blanchett.
• On Green Dolphin Street
  In 1960, the reserved wife of a troubled British diplomat stationed in America falls for a jazz-loving New York journalist. Their affair unfolds amid some of the 20th century’s watershed events–the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, the escalation of the Cold War, and the dawning of one of the most tumultuous decades in America.
• Human Traces
  This sweeping story takes place at the dawning of modern psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and follows two doctors who meet and discover a shared passion for the workings of the human mind. Both doctors have their own personal motivations and very different approaches to their work, but they share a mutual goal of establishing an innovative treatment facility for the mentally ill. As the pair’s work takes them through Europe, America, and Africa, the reader glimpses each character’s own exposure to illness, tragedy, grief, and madness.

• The Winter Mantle
  by Elizabeth Chadwick
  When William the Conqueror forbids his niece to marry an earl whose allegiances are in doubt, he sets in motion a series of power plays and betrayals that will span two generations of noble families in Norman England.
• The Memoirs of Cleopatra
  by Margaret George
  Sweeping in scope and rich in period detail, this novel presents the life of an historical icon, told in her own voice. Readers follow the Queen of the Nile from age three, when she witnesses her mother’s death, to her own infamous suicide.
• Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane
  by Alison Weir
  Critically praised for her nonfiction accounts of the Tudor period, Weir ventures into fiction with this rich rendering of the coming of age of one of history’s great pawns–Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Days Queen”.
• The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
  by Sandra Gulland
  The first in a trilogy about one of history’s great political pairings, this fictional diary begins with Rose, a humble Creole girl who grows up and transforms herself into Josephine Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon.
• Katharine of Aragon
  by Jean Plaidy
  From one of the masters of historical fiction, this epic recounts the life of Henry VIII’s first wife–from her childhood in Spain to her role in history’s most famous divorce.
• Time and Chance
  by Sharan Kay Penman
  The second entry in a trilogy about power and personality in medieval England, this novel centers on Henry II, Archbishop Thomas Becket, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, a passionate, ambitious, and powerful woman uncommon for her time.
• Empress Orchid
  by Anchee Min
  A young girl in nineteenth century China comes to court as a concubine and through bribery, seduction, and intrigue becomes Empress of China, gives birth to the “Last Emperor,” and rules for decades as regent.

If you’re a fan of Evanovich and her lingerie buyer turned bounty-hunter heroine Stephanie Plum, you might also enjoy one of these series.

• Wollie Shelley series
  by Harley Jane Kozak
  Spunky single gal Wollie Shelley is a greeting card artist and budding private eye who finds herself involved in delightfully screwball, totally outlandish murder mysteries. First in the series is Dating Dead Men.
• Bubbles Yablonsky series
  by Sarah Strohmeyer
  Beautician/cub reporter/amateur sleuth Yablonsky is a divorced single Mom in Pennsylvania with a penchant for Camaros, tube tops, and solving crimes. First in the series is Bubbles Unbound.
• Sam Jones series
  by Lauren Henderson
  Stephanie Plum + Bridget Jones = Sam Jones, a sassy, sexy sculptor who stumbles upon a variety of murders and other crimes while making her way upward on London’s hip art scene. First in the series is Black Rubber Dress.
• Myron Bolitar series
  by Harlan Coben
  A very funny, award-winning series featuring Myron Bolitar, a professional sports agent/amateur gumshoe surrounded by a cast of great characters, led by a charmingly psychotic sidekick with a dandy fashion sense. First in the series is Deal Breaker.
• Heather Wells series
  by Meg Cabot
  After losing her fame, fortune, and waistline, former teen pop idol Heather Wells heads to college, where she takes a job as an R.A. and becomes an amateur sleuth. As she looks for love and searches for criminals, campus hilarity ensues. First in the series is Size 12 Is Not Fat.
• Talba Willis series
  by Julie Smith
  Willis is a computer expert by day and a hip hop poet on New Orleans’ café scene by night. In between, she solves crimes with the help of Eddie Valentino, an aging private eye, and her larger-than-life mama, Miz Clara. First in the series is Louisiana Hotshot.
• Sofie Metropolis series
  by Tori Carrington
  Sofie is a good Greek-American girl, until she’s jilted at the altar and decides to remake her life. She takes a job with her uncle, a P.I. in working-class Queens and finds herself surrounded by screwball crimes and wacky characters, most of whom are in her family. First in the series is Sofie Metropolis.