Well, guys, October is coming to an end and honestly, I’m not ready. It’s been a great reading month with a couple of duds mixed in. So, let’s get to my October 2025 wrap up.
The String of Pearls
Synopsis:
In the early years of the Victorian age, a newly literate class of readers turned to “penny dreadfuls” for escapist fun. Blood-curdling tales, published in installments and costing only a penny, offered gripping episodes of romance, mystery, and horror. The notorious penny dreadful Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls recounts a young woman’s desperate search for her missing sailor sweetheart―a quest that ends in a Fleet Street barber shop, where the proprietor has an unsavory connection with a local baker and the secret ingredient to her delicious meat pies.
My Rating: 5/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2025/10/03/the-string-of-pearls-sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber-of-fleet-street/
The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett
Synopsis:
London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, “a wicked woman” who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. The talk of London Town—even decades after her horrendous misdeeds.
As the woman relays the harrowing account of her life in the unruly and perilous streets of Victorian London, her missives unlock an intricate mystery that brings Miss Gibson closer to the truth, even as that truth may cost her everything. A hair-raising and breathtaking novel for fans of Sarah Waters and Gregory Maguire, The Butcher’s Daughter is an irresistible literary thriller that draws richly from historical sources and shines new light on the woman behind the counter of the most disreputable pie shop ever known.
My Rating: 5/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2025/10/11/the-butchers-daughter-review/
The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
Synopsis:
When Samantha Payne’s grandfather dies, she figures she won’t even get a mention in the will. After all, she hasn’t seen him in fourteen years, not since her father took his own life after being accused of murdering a child at their lakefront cottage. Her grandfather always insisted her father was innocent, despite Sam having caught him burying the child’s body, his clothing streaked with blood.
But when she does attend the reading of the will at the behest of her aunt, she discovers that her grandfather left her the very valuable lakefront property where the family cottage sits. There’s one catch: Sam needs to stay in the cottage for a month. To finally face the fact she was wrong and her father was innocent, in her grandfather’s words.
Traveling to Paynes Hollow, Sam is faced with the realities of her childhood and the secrets kept hidden in the shadows of her memories. When her aunt goes missing a couple days into their stay, Sam begins to question everything again. Plagued by nightmares and paranoia, she begins hearing sounds in the forest and seeing shapes crawling from the water as the rippling waves of the lake promise something unspeakably dark lurking just below their surface.
My Rating: 4/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2025/10/17/the-haunting-of-paynes-hollow-review/
The Mist in the Mirror
Synopsis:
For the last twenty years Sir James Monmouth has journeyed all over the globe in the footsteps of his hero, the great pioneering traveler Conrad Vane. In an effort to learn more about Vane’s early life–and his own–Sir James sets off for the remote Kittiscar Hall on a cold and rainy winter night. But he soon begins to feel as though something is warning him away at every turn; there are the intense feelings of being watched and the strange apparitions of a sad little boy. And as he learns more about his hero’s past, he discovers that they are only the beginning, for Kittiscar Hall is hiding terrible secret that will bind their lives together in ways he could never have imagined.
My Rating: 2/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2025/10/27/the-mist-in-the-mirror/
E-Books
This is Halloween
Synopsis:
A man learns of a town’s obsession with scarecrows and tries to find the answers as to why they are so important.
Children move through familiar streets and find that Halloween makes everything different.
Tis’ the season when ghosts are real, witches soar through the night, and things in the Beldam Woods are not always what they seem.
Sometimes it’s the monsters that wear the masks.
My Rating: 1/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2025/10/29/this-is-halloween-review/
October Screams
Synopsis:
October Screams brings you twenty-seven tales of the greatest holiday of all, Halloween! Featuring stories from authors like Brian Keene & Richard Chizmar, Jeremy Bates, Kealan Patrick Burke, Clay McLeod Chapman, Philip Fracassi, Todd Keisling, Gwendolyn Kiste, Red Lagoe, Ronald Malfi, Bridgett Nelson, Rebecca Rowland, Steve Rasnic Tem, TJ Cimfel, Cassandra Daucus, Ryan Van Ells, Patrick Flanagan, Brennan Fredricks, Larry Hinkle, Larry Hodges, Kevin Kangas, Evans Light, Gregory L. Norris, Frank Oreto, Robert Stahl, Cat Voleur and Jacqueline West.
Terrifying, fun, creepy and poignant, this volume contains stories for every craving! This is one book that will deliver all the tricks-and-treats that you’d want in celebration of All Hallows Eve!
My Rating: Not Yet Rated
My Full Review: Coming Soon
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Synopsis:
Perhaps the marker of a true mythos is when the stories themselves overshadow their creator. Originally published under a pseudonym as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories gave America its own haunted mythology. This collection of larger-than-life tales contains Washington Irving’s best-known literary inventions—Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, and Rip Van Winkle—that continue to capture our imaginations today.
My Rating: 4/5
My Full Review: https://wildwoodreads.com/2021/10/26/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-review/
Audiobooks
Everything is Tuberculosis
Synopsis:
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
My Rating: 5/5
My Full Review: As depressing as this book could have been it surprisingly wasn’t. Sure, it was sad, but he managed to present it in a way that was informative without being bleak or dense. I really enjoyed it.
DNFS
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
This wasn’t the vibe I was going for this Halloween. I think it would be a good horror story just not for me. Apparently, I’m not ready to read books set during Covid.
The Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens
Lastly, I dnfed The Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens. It’s not that I disliked it but most of them were set at Christmas.
So that’s my October 2025 wrap up. What did you read this month?
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