Six Stories: A Thriller: 1

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Readers of Kathleen Barber’s Are You Sleeping and fans of Ruth Ware will enjoy this slim but compelling novel’ Booklist Yeah actually come to think of it, there was this one really cute time where I had a daughter and he chopped my head off,” Anne Boleyn says sharply. Throughout King’s investigation it is never really in doubt who killed Elizabeth Barton. The evidence against her killers is overwhelming. But the questions that King wants to discover is why they killed her, and if possible, the men’s differing levels of culpability. To do this, he is soon looking into both killers and victim and discovering that not everything is what it seems. The story has always been that Elizabeth was a beautiful, popular, and kind person involved in charity work; her killers’ oddballs and loners. That Elizabeth’s killers murdered her at least in part due to jealousy (the other reason being that one of them believed her to be a vampire). But King soon finds other perspectives, that Elizabeth had secrets and that the killers were not the cardboard cut-out villains they had been portrayed.

Scott King’s podcast investigates the 1995 cold case of a demon possession in a rural Yorkshire village, where a 12-year-old boy was murdered in cold blood by two children. Book six in the chilling, award-winning Six Stories series. Enter elusive investigative journalist Scott King, whose podcast examinations of complicated cases have rivalled the success of Serial, with his concealed identity making him a cult internet figure. In a series of six interviews, King attempts to work out how the dynamics of a group of idle teenagers conspired with the sinister legends surrounding the fell to result in Jeffries’ mysterious death. And who’s to blame… All of which is more or less true. Yet after making this critique of itself, Six then proceeds to do nothing with it.Elizabeth Barton and Lizzie B. The frozen girl. Who froze? Elizabeth or Lizzie? Vampires and beasts. The Beast from the East. Who was the vampire? Gothic fantasy or flesh and blood? Tankerville Tower. Haunted? Or the space where fear is perpetuated and used for our own means.

Interspersed with the six podcast episodes you also get to see the research that Scott has done on the case and snippets of Elizabeth and her YouTube channel too. A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! *** Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies. This review can also be found on my blog The Tattooed Book Geek: https://thetattooedbookgeek.wordpress...

Some stories are inherently more tragic. “People say Henry was stone-hearted. Uncaring,” Jane Seymour (Abby Mueller) says. “And I’m not sure he was.” First of all, it was delightful to read about the North East of England, where I grew up! It’s always a weirdly awesome feeling, reading about somewhere you know – or is that just me? Not only that but having lived through the ‘Beast from the East’, there was a great sense of reality to this book. It made me feel even more invested. Some say the duo were possessed by a demon. Some say they were cursed by a witch. One thing is for sure that in the weeks leading to the murder, some strange and inexplicable incidents took place in the village. If you haven’t tried any of the Six Stories series before then it’s fine to start here. There are a few references to the previous investigation but you don’t need to know what went before to become uncomfortably mesmerised by what happens here. A popular young woman, a rising star among social media influencers, is lured to her death in an old ruin during a crippling winter storm which blew in from Siberia.

Elusive online journalist Scott King investigates the murder of a teenager at an outward bound centre, in the first episode of the critically acclaimed, international bestselling Six Stories series… Six is constantly at risk of sliding into syrup: its feminist message is the lightest and most easily consumable one possible, some of the lyrics and lines are a little heavy handed, and the whole thing is so music-forward that the brief dialogue scenes threaten its collapse. But under international associate director Grace Taylor and Australian associate director Sharon Millerchip, the performers know when to lean into the charm and when to modulate into something softer. In case you’re not familiar with Six Stories: last year I wrote a review of Deity for Sublime Horror that also acts as an overview of/intro to the whole series.) There are a lot of elements in play in Beast, all contributing to a plot that is both rich, complex and utterly fulfilling. We have the horror element with the vampire legend, which definitely adds the right dose of suspense and creepiness to the story. We have the social media angle, which is absolutely fascinating and definitely on point. In Elizabeth we see just how far the need for likes, comments and statistics can go and both her character and those surrounding her help show how social media really can take over and potentially destroy lives... We also have the bullying, abuse and manipulation, which is of course partially related to the whole social media element in the first place. And this story also talks about other elements including animal cruelty, mental illness and piromancy. This seems like a lot to juggle in just one story, but each element is incorporated flawlessly into what is an absolutely brilliant read. The story coursed the imaginary boundary between real and supernatural well, I was left in a swirling maze from where I knew not whom to believe in. A truly compelling read, giving the other side of social media and its fake world, the writing captivated me and brought out a weird craving that I need more of this author's books.The setting and the sense of place that you get whilst reading Beast is tremendous and you are transported to the rundown coastal town of Ergarth. Ergarth is a claustrophobic small town where Tankerville Tower ‘The Vampire Tower’ a decaying monolith on the outskirts casts a forbidding shadow over the whole town. It is an area that has been forgotten by the government with no money and no jobs available. It is a place where life has been drained, leeched away, bleak and drab where the colour is muted and has turned to grey. It is a community where everyone knows each other and where gossip and rumours are rife. It is a town with history, the Ergarth Vampire a story that has been passed down through the centuries and from one generation to the next. Beautifully written, smart, compassionate – and scary as hell. Matt Wesolowski is one of the most exciting and original voices in crime fiction’ Alex North What really did happen the night Jeffries disappeared, and why did it take a year for his body to surface? Was someone supposedly innocent actually guilty, or was there a supernatural force at play? Can our memories, our interpretations of events which occurred so long ago, particularly when we were young, be trusted, or is everything open to manipulation? Can the person who weaves the threads of the stories together be trusted either? I’m also curious about the protagonist himself. Not many details were shared about the aftermath of Book 3. I mean, surely there would have been a huge fallout given what a big mystery the case was and how it was resolved? Not to mention the possible implications of how everything was executed? Yet it seems this is the point. Sometimes there is no real answer. Investigating a mystery can result in confusion rather than clarity. Here, the 'six stories' are not puzzle pieces slotting together, but a jumble of contradictions that overlap and obscure one another. This is, in its own way, as important a lesson as the one we learned in Changeling, but it is certainly less satisfying.