#tasha coryell

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Review: Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell.

An aimless young woman starts writing to an accused serial killer while he awaits trial and then, once he’s acquitted, decides to move in with him and take the investigation into her own hands in this dark and irresistibly compelling debut thriller. Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back.

A book with a very good plot but characters that make me question my sanity, Love Letters To A Serial Killer is definitely one of those books that maybe is perfect for a beach read or a cosy autumn night in the future that from page one really does try and grab you.

For me the plot does drive this book really well, it's captivating and being told backwards you see where this book is heading but it really keeps a grip on you and makes you keep turning the page even if the twists seem to be inevitable - it doesn't stop being a good book, I'll definitely be recommending it to a few people.

For me though, the characters let it down especially for me our protagonist just makes the most questionable decision making skills throughout this story that makes me question my own mind and the characters. I think that bad decision making can be part of a plot, but this felt so unrealistically bad honestly.

I think it is a good book, it's entertaining, it's gripping, it's gonna be devoured in hours, but if you want a book that doesn't make you sometimes want to chuck it across a room (or in my case, screen) cos it can be quite frustrating then avoid.

3/5

[myriad--starlings]

I'm not as frightened as I should be, though I am frightened, which is a relief. I always appreciate when I feel the emotions I'm expected to feel in any given situation, like when I bake a cake and it looks like it the picture from the recipe when I pull it out of the oven.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell

[the-worlds-between-pages]

Love Letters To A Serial Killer By: Tasha Coryell

Published by: Berkley Publication Date: 6/25/2024 Alright, first off, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher. I received an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to them . Next important note: I DNF’d this book. Not that deep in either. Around 10%. Now to the review. You’re telling me this woman is supposed to be in her 30s? She’s annoying and it reads like someone who is…

[jenmedsbookreviews]

Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell

Today i am sharing my thoughts on Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell. @tashacoryell @orionbooks #books #bookreview #loveletterstoaserialkiller #bookstagram #booksofinstagram

Today I am sharing my thoughts on Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell, a book I picked up an arc of up at Harrogate last summer. My thanks to publisher Orion for the copy. It’s the author’s debut novel but, based on this, I’m definitely going to be back for more. Here’s what it’s all about: Continue reading Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell

[haveyoureadthispoll]

When handsome lawyer, Wesley, is arrested for a series of murders, recently ghosted thirty-something Hannah begins writing him letters as an outlet for both her frustration at her failure to launch, and her feminist rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first - until Wesley writes back. Their correspondence tips Hannah's interest in the case from curiosity to obsession, leaving space for nothing else as her life implodes around her. Hannah is the first person Wesley calls upon his release, and they quickly fall into a routine of domestic bliss. Well, as blissful as one can feel while secretly investigating their partner for serial murder...

[klainesheilen]

books read in September

In September I was able to get so much reading done. 10 books yet most of them were for uni. I will give my thoughts mostly to my personal reads but I will add the uni reads too, who knows maybe you are interested in sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome.

read

Unlearn Patriarchy 2 by various authors

Started the month strong with a 5 star read. I listened to the first part as an audiobook and really enjoyed it, so I obviously had to get my hands on the second part. One again there are various authors talking about various topics: law, finances and disability, just to mention some. These were topics where I could already see how patriarchy is represented in the society and how an why this could/has developed through time. It was interesting to learn and see new views, that helped me reflect on myself. But when I started the chapter about architecture, I am not gonna lie, my first thought after the introduction was “ok, but mayyyybe we are getting a little too far into fuck the patriarchy here”. Surprisingly no. There is no “too far” of unlearning patriarchy, when it benefits just a handful of people and disadvantages so many more.

It is a really nice and easy read to see what and where the problems are in our (yet mostly German focused) society.

Lysistrate by Aristophanes

This was a uni read, but it was the only one that I had to read that I actually enjoyed. It’s a play in which women go into a sex strike to force their men to find a solution to the war that is going on. It has some funny moments and it is easy to read. Besides that it really shows the power dynamic between women and men, which makes it sad because we still have this power structure going on OVER 2000 YEARS LATER. In my opinion I’d like someone else more if they told me that they read Lysistrate rather than Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

This. Was. Amazing. I was hooked from start to finish. It does a great job in portraying how it is to be a women. Surely, the time it takes place is a different one, but I could see myself in the main character represented. It shows how journalism can fail someone, because they are focusing at the wrong topics, as well as the failure of police work. 4.75 stars.

Kosoko Jackson’s The Forest Demands Its Due

I think that I am just so done with “I am just an ordinary person, so why ME?” fantasy books. I read way too many of these books when I was a teen and YA. Surely, mostly of them were about white 17y/o girls, so I am happy that we are getting more books with queer and/or bipoc people as the main character. Yet the trope stays the same. If you aren’t fed up with this trope yet I’d still recommend it to you. Especially now at this time of season I’d say it’s a great read ! 3.75 stars for me, but objectively it’s a 4 star.

Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell

This one is tough. I enjoyed reading it, but only because I read most of it as a satire. You can’t convince me that THIS is supposed to be a thriller. The main character doesn’t use her brain. AT ALL. She sees the read flags, recognizes them and still decides to do nothing. Also the plot twist was predictable and what happened at the last few pages throw me completely off. 2.5 stars.

uni reads

Catull’s Carmilla: various poems about sexuality, love, sex

Platon’s Symposion: various people (mostly men) talking about the meaning of Eros

I read a book of essays by Chrostoph Horn that are about Platon’s Symposion

Hippolytos by Euripides

Apuleius’ Metamorphose: I hated to read it. The whole time I complained to my bf about it. So many adventures that are not linked to another. Slow pace. Thou, I can recommend the Armor and Psyche tale which is told.

current reads

The End of Alice by A.M Homes

This is disgusting to read. It reminds of Lolita, but the author does such a great job to make it so uncomfortable to read that I had to take breaks, because I couldn’t believe what my eyes just read.

dnfed

Complete collection of E.A. Poe

It’s good to read Poe’s works one at a time and not one after another. So I don’t know if I can really say that I dnfed it or rather paused it. Because I do enjoyed them, but I am not that kind of person who likes to get in and out of short stories so quickly. It destroys the dark, creepy feeling one gets while reading it.

[rosemarylust]

This week's book review of Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell.

⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[marypicken]

Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell @orionobooks

Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell: A Darkly Entertaining Page-Turner

Source: Review copyPublication: 4 July 2024 from OrionPP: 336ISBN-13: 978-1398716711 My thanks to Orion for an advance copy for review Hannah Wilson is embarrassingly unlucky in life and love. Her only comfort comes from the true crime forums she trawls, desperate for more news about the case of serial murders she’s obsessed with. After all, she can’t save herself from more disappointment, but…

[queenmobs]

Old Women and their Rolling Bags

She was knitting when it happened. She was nearly always knitting. She couldn’t focus unless she was doing something with her hands and then, once her hands were occupied, she thought only about the movement of her fingers.

Elaine was making a sweater for herself. She only ever made things for herself. She wasn’t married, had no children, and her brother had died in a car accident fifteen years prior. In addition to knitting, Elaine was shopping around her novel manuscript about a single older woman with no children who avenged her brother’s death in a car accident by killing the drivers of the other car. By shopping around she meant that she took the novel manuscript with her wherever she went in a rolling briefcase for whenever she ran into a writer or editor that could help her get the novel published. A person could find writers nearly everywhere if they looked hard enough. She sat through readings and talks, yarn spinning around her fingers until the author was finished speaking and then, when the writer was left exposed, she would thrust the pages of her novel into their empty, vulnerable hands. Elaine had given out dozens of copies of her book this way. She sat around waiting for the phone to ring with a book offer, knitting herself sweaters and listening to the white noise of the printer making a new copy of her novel.

No one told her that work was cancelled when the apocalypse happened, which she found mildly irritating because she could’ve used the commute to make further progress on her sweater. The following three days she called into the office to see if work was still cancelled and when no one picked up she settled in her lazy boy chair with her knitting needles and yarn. It was not unlike her yearly staycation that she took every spring in lieu of flying somewhere to visit someone as she had no one to go see. Elaine only began to feel a sense of panic when she ran out of yarn and realized that the craft store was also closed and the craft store was never closed on a Friday at 4pm. It felt like the end of the world to Elaine. This was because it was. She did not speak in hyperbole.

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[whiskeypaper]

COUPLES by TASHA CORYELL

His roommate called him a love junkie. There are words for too much sex, but not too much loving. Imagine being a nymphomaniac who loved everyone he banged and loved people he had never touched at all. The longest he had been single in the past five years was for three disastrous weeks. He didn’t sleep. He spent a lot of time thinking about his father.

She wonders how he had so many fucked up friends before. No one she knew in high school had gone to rehab for heroin and then relapsed repeatedly. It didn’t matter, at least he wasn’t fucked up anymore. He had never tried heroin, but she remembers a couple years earlier when he drank vodka straight out of the bottle and collapsed with his pants down in the bathroom all because he was sad. That was the first time she ever saw his penis. It embarrasses her, even now, to think of it that way: small and deflated. She’s never been sad like that before. When she’s sad she goes to the gym and runs on the treadmill until she feels better. He’s started going to the gym now too. He wears pajama pants because he doesn’t own any gym clothes.

She was a lesbian until her girlfriend got a gun. She argued, “Do you really need to have that in here and can I hold it?” The weight surprised her. The weapon that could shoot someone in the face and bang them over the head. There weren���t any bullets inside, but when the girlfriend handed her the gun, she practiced pulling the trigger.

The girlfriend put in some bright orange blanks, pointed the gun forward, and threatened to shoot her in the face. When the gun finally went off there was a faint pop and the orange plastic blank lay passively on the ground. Her girlfriend fingered the metal casing of the gun, practicing the insertion and removal of the bullets. It made her nervous the way her girlfriend held it, as if an extension of herself. The girl with gun hands.

She made the girlfriend put the gun in the trunk where no one could see it. There was nothing worse than being robbed with a weapon that’s yours. Nonetheless, while lying in bed she could feel the pistol pushing into her back as her girlfriend spooned her. She had only slept with a man once, but she could remember how his sleeping yearnings woke her up in the night, pressed against her back, hard and urgent, I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot. In the morning she woke up her girlfriend and said, “Get the gun and climb on top of me.” Her girlfriend replied, “I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot.”

Everyone tells him he’ll never find a girl like her again. He knows this. He doesn’t want a girl like her again.

It is rumored that his ex-girlfriend took her dildo, wet with her insides, and rubbed it on everything in his room. She, the new girlfriend, thinks about this sometimes as she touches his things. The claimed lamppost. The still unwashed sheets. Everyone talks about the wolf leaving its mark, but no one ever says what to do when everything has been peed on. What happens when a new wolf comes and pees in the same place? One time she read in Cosmo that it’s sexy when a girl wipes some of her vaginal fluid on her neck. When she reaches down between her legs, she doesn’t rub it on herself, but on the bed frame, marking all four posts.

She never expected that love would be like this: a constant ache that felt like the tearing of raw flesh. Perhaps wolf is the wrong animal.

He was an Older Man. They didn’t have sex, not for a while anyway. Instead they did this thing with their hands. It wasn’t holding hands exactly, it was more like a transference of energy with all ten of their fingers pressed together, sometimes their index fingers gently rubbing and she could feel this static between them, something she tried to pass off as their molecules touching, though she didn’t know anything about science. Once, as she pulled her hands away she tripped forward over a power cord and their lips almost fell together. She was glad that when it actually happened it was more purposeful, but she did feel guilty about it. Certainly this made her a Bad Person. He had kids that she had never met, in his house that she had never been to. One time, while they were sitting in a coffee shop they drew a picture of themselves turning into cats. That’s how they would know when they could really be together, he said. They would be animal.

::

About the Author: Tasha Coryell is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. She is currently working on a novel about sorority girls. She’s had work at [PANK], The Collagist, and Sundog Lit. More work from Tasha can be found at tashacoryell.com. You can also find her tweeting under @tashaaaaaaa

Story Song: "Clench My Teeth"  by Caroline Smith & The Good Night Sleeps

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Clem/Poppy and Pinecone

[myriad--starlings]

My mood dampened a little when I got a text from Meghan calling for a rain check on our happy hour drink plans. She didn’t say why, but I knew it was because of her boyfriend. It was always because of her boyfriend. For so long, the two of us had pined over men together and she had gone and gotten herself a man without me. Sometimes the deepest betrayals were things that women did to one another.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell

[effyeahshortstories-blog]

People are so good at being relentlessly themselves.

From "Love Like Cheeto Residue That Never Comes Off the Fingers," by Tasha Coryell.

[myriad--starlings]

They were upset, but they were excited too or maybe that was just me projecting my own emotions onto them. That's what was nice about people online. They felt whatever I wanted them to feel, their emotions an extension of my own.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell

[myriad--starlings]

In another lifetime, I told myself, that could’ve been me. That was a lie, of course. It was never going to be me. There was nothing that I could’ve done to make Max love me. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were thinner or smarter or more mysterious. He didn’t love me because he didn’t love me.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell

[myriad--starlings]

I checked my mailbox when I left for work in the morning and looked forward to arriving home so that I could check it again at night. On the weekends, I made excuses to go downstairs to see if anything had arrived. For the first time in my life, my laundry was always clean, because I had to walk past the mailboxes on the way to the washing machines. I used to consider what it was like to live without the constant pressures of a cell phone, an existence that I’d experienced briefly in my childhood, and my obsession with my mailbox taught me that people had always been confined, just in different ways.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell

[myriad--starlings]

Sometimes I feel like we’re split between people who are promised a life that they’ll never be able to achieve and people who are living the promised life and don’t want it. Then again, it’s possible that this is what you wanted all along. You’re famous now. ... Who do you want to play you in your movie? Someone handsome, no doubt. You just better hope that you live to see the ending.

— Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell