Truth or Dare (11) Friday the 13th Edition!

Yes! Truth or Dare is BACK on the blog! My apologies to those who participate in this challenge and have been missing the opportunity to link up here. I was a BAD blogger in November, but now I am back and have plenty of challenges in store! Check out the updated challenge list HERE.

If you know how to play the game Truth or Dare, then you probably know how this feature works: Each week I provide a pair of “Truth” and “Dare” challenges for bloggers. Each week you may choose to do either the “Truth”, the “Dare” or BOTH!

These challenges are listed in advance to help participants plan their posts. Most options are quick and easy – but they still provide plenty of opportunity for great content! – and others are a little more… daring.

For more info and a complete list of future Truth {or} Dare challenges, click here.

Got that? Good! Let’s get started!

This week I chose to do the TRUTH.

In 2013, I had the honor of reading the scariest book I have ever read. This coming from someone who is never scared by books, too. Movies? Yes, I am a MAJOR wimp when it comes to visual horror. But books? NEVER. Not even the words of Stephen King, Anne Rice or Douglas Preston and Lincold Child have managed to scare me.

But this year, all that changed and this is the little book that did it:

Engines of the Broken World
By Jason Vanhee
November 5, 2013
Ages 12 and up
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Author’s Website
Order on Amazon

Merciful Truth and her brother, Gospel, have just pulled their dead mother into the kitchen and stowed her under the table. It was a long illness, and they wanted to bury her—they did—but it’s far too cold outside, and they know they won’t be able to dig into the frozen ground. The Minister who lives with them, who preaches through his animal form, doesn’t make them feel any better about what they’ve done. Merciful calms her guilty feelings but only until, from the other room, she hears a voice she thought she’d never hear again. It’s her mother’s voice, and it’s singing a lullaby…

Engines of the Broken World is a chilling young adult novel from Jason Vanhee.

THIS BOOK, you guys!!! THIS BOOK!!!

Let me give you a sample of what I endured (and loved even as I wanted to cower under my sheets in bed and sleep with the light on)…

Engines of the Broken World by Jason Vanhee, Chapter 8, Pages 79-80:

…With just the tip of my thumb and pointer I reached for the fold of the cloth there. I was breathing fast and shallow and thinking that the body would move, that she would move even before I touched her, but it didn’t happen. I got the edge of the sheet in my hand, and I pulled it down and then flipped it away from her legs.

And there it was, clear as day. There it was. Dirt on the bottom of her socks, both of them: the freshly darned one that I knew was lean or the Widow wouldn’t have put it back on, and the other: both of them dirty from the floor of the cellar.

My mama had been walking around.

But it didn’t make me feel good to be right. It made me feel terribly alone and afraid because I was down here by myself, and there was a body that maybe didn’t want to be stay put not a foot away from where I crouched down. The lantern that was throwing light over me and the little puddle of glow from upstairs were the only two things making me not just scream and run off or fall down dead.

The light flickered something wild, as if there was a wind. The sheet was billowing, and the body began moving, and I meant to scream, only a hand clamped down over my mouth, a hand cold and growing too soft, and a voice whispered in my ear, “Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, you know your mama was born to die.”

Ahhhhhh! Seriously?! A little girl, alone in a cellar with this?! And so much of the book is full of this sort of thing. But it is so good. So, so terrifyingly good.

And that is why Engines of the Broken World is the scariest book I have read to-date.