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The Ellis Awards 2023 - My Top Books I Read In 2023

     Hello everyone in the distant future whenever you are reading this. It is just before four in the afternoon on New Year's Eve, 2023! Welcome to my no-stakes award ceremony for the best books I have read this year . Disclaimer: these books aren't necessarily published in 2023, they are simply books that I read this year. This year has been unbelievably productive for reading. I have been a Goodreads user since 2015 when I was twenty-going-on-twenty-one. I grew up a reader but didn't read much once I reached High School. I fell back in love with reading in 2015, two years after I graduated and have been using Goodreads to track my books ever since. This is my ninth year reading as an adult and the first year I have actually put a best of the year blog together! So, to build some anticipation I am going to do a quick ranking of my top five books I read each year from 2015-2022, and then I am going to do my top books of this year.  Statistics Information       In the nine

Welcome!

       Welcome to the Hastings Shop of Horrors!      Welcome to my blog to those of you who have somehow stumbled across this page! This blog is a combination of a book/movie review and personal news about my writing. I am a voracious reader of multiple genres, though the majority of what I read and will review on here will be one of the multitude of sub-genres of Horror/Weird fiction. I am also a history major, so I may include some non-fiction that is relevant to horror and the macabre. So, while about 10% of the reviews I post on this blog aren't technically horror books/movies, they will all have strong elements of the macabre. So... let's hit some keypoints!  Who Am I?     My name is Ellis Hastings. I'm a rapidly aging (or aged, depending on when you're reading this) millennial who was born in 1994 in the eastern suburbs of Atlanta. There are three things I love the most in this world (not counting my wife) dark/horror fiction, cats, and spicy food hotter than the