Short stories are tough—for writers as well as readers. With only a little time to make an impact, many end up falling flat and forgettable. Thankfully for us readers, Dan Coxon knocks it out of the park with the short stories in Only The Broken Remain, his collection of dark and disturbing fiction featuring the downtrodden of the world.
Short stories are tough—for writers as well as readers. With only a little time to make an impact, many end up falling flat and forgettable. Thankfully for us readers, Dan Coxon knocks it out of the park with the short stories in Only The Broken Remain, his collection of dark and disturbing fiction featuring the downtrodden of the world.
Coxon has an extensive publishing history, and it’s easy to see why editors are snapping up his stories. They are unique and well-written, and not a little unsettling. Although the overarching theme of Only the Broken Remain is loose, no story feels out-of-place and each feels a little like a dream—or a nightmare.
There are several stand-outs amongst these fourteen stories, not least of which is the opener, “Stanislav in Foxtown.” In it, an immigrant works day in and day out at a local chicken joint, until he befriends some foxes that live in the area. Stan and his foxes grab your attention immediately, and the descriptions in this story are indicative of the amazing prose that permeates the entire collection.
Coxon’s skill as an editor—his anthology was nominated for a Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award—is apparent in the story order. Sometimes, especially in single-author collections, I find it hard to differentiate between one story and the next, but Coxon doesn’t hit that pitfall. From one story to the next, you encounter different narrative styles, different themes, and different vibes.
Not every story landed for me, though. Particularly towards the middle of the collection, I found that some stories didn’t commit to their premises, and the ending was a little too vague. A set-in-stone ending isn’t necessary for a short story, but in a couple, like “Far From Home,” the beginning of the story didn’t intrigue me and the ending also failed to make an impression. On the bright side, these stories were few and far between, and didn’t take away too much from my experience as a whole.
Without a doubt, I’d have to say that my favorite story was “No One’s Child,” a story about a young English girl who is sent to the country during the London air raids who finds a creature in her guardian’s cellar. The descriptions in this story, the setting, and the absolute brutality were absolutely phenomenal and this is a story that will stick with me for awhile.
If you are a fan of horror short stories, this is definitely a collection you should pick up. There is a story for everyone here, and Coxon will amaze and disturb you with Only the Broken Remain.
Ring Shout was my very last read of 2020, clocking in around 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and what a fantastic way to end the year! Upon finishing this horror novella, I immediately went and bought all of P. Djèlí Clark’s backlist, that’s how much I loved it.
Ring Shout was my very last read of 2020, clocking in around 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and what a fantastic way to end the year! Upon finishing this horror novella, I immediately went and bought all of P. Djèlí Clark’s backlist, that’s how much I loved it.
Before I can talk about all the wonderfulness that is Ring Shout, though, I have to plug “Night Doctors” by the same author. This is a short story originally published in 2018, and then reprinted in Nightmare Magazine last November, and it was my first introduction to Clark’s writing. Similarly to Ring Shout, it had an immediate cause and effect—as soon as I finished, I put Ring Shout on hold at my library. In this short story, a young black man arrives in Durham in 1937 as part of his work with the Federal Writers’ Project, but what he’s really interested in are former slaves’ stories about Night Doctors: men dressed all in white who snatched away slaves to experiment on. You can read the whole story over at Nightmare Magazine’s website. I’ll wait here.
Welcome back! Now is the easy part: if you enjoyed “Night Doctors,” you’ll enjoy Ring Shout. The novella follows the narrative of young Maryse Boudreaux, a bootleg whiskey runner in Prohibition Georgia and monster hunter. You’re thrown right into the action as she and her friends conduct a monster hunt at a Klan rally, but it’s not non-stop action till the end, you get a few chances to breathe (personally, I prefer a bit of downtime in my fiction). Clark spends time focusing on monsters, on friendships, on Maryse’s community, and on a bit of history about Georgia in that time period.
Of course I wanted this novella to be longer! There were points where it did feel rushed, but all in all I do think the pacing was pretty good. Even in its short format, there was enough time for every necessary scene to happen, I just would have enjoyed a few more unnecessary scenes to set the mood a little more. Clark threw in a whole bunch of worldbuilding and I’m crossing my fingers for a sequel to flesh it out more, but I think that he didn’t dedicate enough time to really explore some of the interesting tidbits he brings up. Similarly, there are a few cases where I would’ve preferred a more concrete explanation for things that were left vague for space.
One of my favorite aspects of Ring Shout was the historical setting—without sacrificing social commentary on racism that is applicable to today’s world. Although I’m not always a fan of historical fiction, I’m finding that I really enjoy it in horror books and especially books with social commentary. Another novella in this vein is The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle—I think that if you enjoyed that, you’ll enjoy Ring Shout and vice versa.
An important thing to note about Ring Shout, though, is that it is horror, and Lovecraftian horror at that. There’s tentacles here. I do think that it would appeal to a wider audience, but for fantasy fans who have never dipped their toe into dark fantasy or horror, it may be a little too much to swallow, although I still highly encourage you to check it out. Again, though, I must refer back to the “Night Doctors” short story, which gives a little preview of the kind of horror Clark leans into. Really, I can’t stress it enough, if you’re on the fence about Ring Shout, just go read “Night Doctors.” It really is like a mini-Ring Shout in tone and setting.
I loved this little novella so much and I’m so excited to dig in to P. Djèlí Clark’s backlist, especially the Fatma el-Sha’arawi series since A Master of Djinn will be hitting shelves this spring. I hope you’ll pick up this little novella and give it a shot, because I really think that you’ll enjoy it.
If you’re looking for new talent, look no further. Anoka by Shane Hawk is short, clocking in at only 84 pages and with only six short stories, but packs a big punch. Featuring the town of Anoka, Minnesota—purportedly the Halloween capital of the world—and exploring universal human themes through the lens of indigenous life, Anoka is a debut with astounding power.
If you’re looking for new talent, look no further. Anoka by Shane Hawk is short, clocking in at only 84 pages and with only six short stories, but packs a big punch. Featuring the town of Anoka, Minnesota—purportedly the Halloween capital of the world—and exploring universal human themes through the lens of indigenous life, Anoka is a debut with astounding power.
The crowning jewel of Hawk’s arsenal is his prose. I didn’t completely have my bearings in “Dead America,” but his prose pushes you through page after page. You can see the amount of love and care that he puts into each and every sentence, leaving no word untouched and ensuring that every word counts, especially in the two flash pieces, “Soilborne” and “Orange.” In fact, one of the critiques that I have is that he might learn to restrain himself in some instances; at times the stories feel overworked, offering either too much or too little for the reader. At times the meaning is hidden a few too many layers beneath the surface, and at other times the reader picks up on the twist much sooner in the story than necessary.
My greatest grievance with Anoka is its length. I hemmed and hawed at holding this against it, since I know that Hawk had some technological issues which led to the abbreviated length; but at the end of the day we just didn’t get enough time with this collection. Where this is especially noticeable is the somewhat flimsy connection to the town of Anoka: although some stories really lean into the setting, like the finale, “Transfigured,” others make no mention of it at all and it seems difficult to truly feel like this is a collection of stories in and around Anoka. That’s not to say that the stories that didn’t explicitly mention Anoka don’t belong—they’re excellent—but additional stories might have established the setting more firmly.
And besides that, you just want more time with this writing. When reading collections and anthologies, I’m rarely surprised when I turn the page and encounter the end, since they are short stories, after all, and there’s an ending every few pages. But at the end of Anoka, I was surprised that we were done so soon. Perhaps this is partially because I found the finale to be underwhelming; I think a more definite and stronger ending would have fit better and rounded off the collection nicely. The open ending—the promise of a new beginning to a story—didn’t quite work for me.
Ultimately, although Anoka had its faults, this is absolutely a book to pick up if you’re on the hunt for new voices in horror. I think that Hawk is definitely carving out a space in the genre for himself, and this is not the last we’ll hear from him.
Also—I didn’t find a way to slide it into the review naturally, but I always try to pick a favorite story, and my favorite from this collection was “Imitate.”
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Disclaimer: I am friendly with the author, Shane Hawk. I have done my best to try to review this book fairly and without bias, but it is inevitable that this has affected my reading experience.
It’s that time of year when people start posting lists of their anticipated new releases! However, when browsing around the internet, I found surprisingly few lists of new horror releases, so rather than a list of anticipated reads, I’ve compiled a list of 50+ planned horror releases of 2021. Not an exhaustive list—I have no doubt that we will see many horror books that aren’t on this list, but after scouring the internet this is the majority of what I found. When possible, they’ll be linked to their Goodreads listing, and I’ll post their covers and summaries, but for some of these books we don’t know very much. I also decided to cut a few books that seemed to be thrillers or dark fantasy, just for the sake of limiting the list a little bit, but I’ve added all of the books I found in my research to this Goodreads list: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/155807.2021_Horror_Releases
Although the majority of these books are adult fiction, there are some Young Adult and Middle Grade releases. I know a lot of people are only interested in one target age, so I have separated each age range. Click here to skip to Young Adult or to Middle Grade. Within each age category, books are listed by release date.
In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fiancé back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she’s eager to settle down. Lilydale’s motto, “Come Home Forever,” couldn’t be more inviting. And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village. The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can’t shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall. So does the sinister secret of a little boy who vanished decades ago. And unless Joan is imagining things, a frighteningly familiar figure from her past is on watch in the shadows. Her fiancé tells her she’s being paranoid. He might be right. Then again, she might have moved to the deadliest small town on earth.
They whisper about her in Chicago. Men come to her with their hopes, their dreams–their fortunes. But no one sees them leave. No one sees them at all after they come to call on the Widow of La Porte. The good people of Indiana may have their suspicions, but if those fools knew what she’d given up, what was taken from her, how she’d suffered, surely they’d understand. Belle Gunness learned a long time ago that a woman has to make her own way in this world. That’s all it is. A bloody means to an end. A glorious enterprise meant to raise her from the bleak, colorless drudgery of her childhood to the life she deserves. After all, vermin always survive.
Carol and Nessa are strangers but not for much longer. In a luxury apartment and in the walls of a modern hospital, the evil that was done continues to thrive. They are in the hands of an entity that knows no boundaries and crosses dimensions – bending and twisting time itself – and where danger waits in every shadow. The battle is on for their bodies and souls and the line between reality and nightmare is hard to define. Through it all, the words of Lydia Warren Carmody haunt them. But who was she? And why have Carol and Nessa been chosen? The answer lies deep in the darkness…
It’s an ordinary assignment, nothing more. The cargo? Fifty boxes filled with Transylvanian soil. The route? From Varna to Whitby. The Demeter has made many trips like this. The captain has handled dozens of crews. He dreams familiar dreams: to taste the salt on the skin of his men, to run his hands across their chests. He longs for the warmth of a lover he cannot have, fantasizes about flesh and frenzied embraces. All this he’s done before, it’s routine, a constant, like the tides. Yet there’s something different, something wrong. There are odd nightmares, unsettling omens and fear. For there is something in the air, something in the night, someone stalking the ship.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Cicero’s Circus in Saint-Ferdinand, the village struggles to get back to normal. The massacre was the final straw for many inhabitants triggering a mass exodus with little thought given as to the cause of the tragedy. To those who know the truth however, that a malevolent god unleashed its wrath upon the village, it’s only a matter of time before events repeat themselves.Venus McKenzie ventures deeper into the pit of secrets left in death’s wake, praying that what she’ll find will help her against the dark forces that have slipped her tenuous grasp. Someone did catch what she couldn’t hold however. Someone with plans and dark intent.
Death is rarely the end in Savannah. Sometimes it’s only the beginning. Clementine is ready to live her best life, starting with a new job at O’Hara’s Pub. But working as a server isn’t easy for a lifelong wallflower. She encounters a sympathetic ally in Rosemary, but there’s a problem: Rosemary’s a ghost, a former slave trapped for eternity in the pub. The girls form an unlikely friendship. Clementine offers compassion to the lonely ghost, who defends her by playing harmless pranks on rude customers and cruel co-workers. Their activities soon attract another spirit—Deadeye Abernathy, the madman who murdered Rosemary 150 years ago. Deadeye joins the fun, turning the pranks into gruesome attacks. Clementine must find a way to stop him before he destroys her friends and the new life she loves. But how can a human survive a battle between two ghosts in the Most Haunted City in America?
Nurse Stitch has her mouth sewn shut and her memory erased. John Doe has undergone ‘nightmare surgery’, his memory also erased, replaced by crippling trauma and delusions. Mahmoud Farouz is a captured insurgent from Iraq who is going to be used by a special Black Op organization to make America feel fear again. When these three prisoners of a secret underground torture facility band together to escape, they cannot realize that not only has their torture been orchestrated, but so too will be their path to freedom.
Kait Brecker can’t remember the last time she didn’t feel like busted glass. Her volcanic temper’s scared off her friends, and a miserable breakup with her boyfriend Lutz left her crippled with guilt and painful memories. So when she learns her childhood best friend is planning a sojourn to a secluded mountain cabin, Kait jumps at the chance to tag along, convinced that rekindling this fractured friendship will fix whatever’s breaking down inside her. She should have known… Lutz would never let her go that easily. After a chance roadside meeting, he pursues her into the foothills, revealing the monster under his skin for the first time: a malevolent body-snatching entity bent on tearing Kait’s life to pieces. Now, with miles of silent forest between them and salvation and Lutz overpowering one terrified camper after the next, Kait must unite her estranged friends against this horrifying threat before the shadows of her past devour her life for good.
In ‘Replacements’, a woman adopts a monstrous pet, with unforeseen consequences. In ‘Born Dead’, a stillborn child mysteriously continues to grow just like a living one. ‘My Pathology’ (whose ending Thomas Tessier has cited as one of the best in the history of horror) explores the sinister results of a couple’s alchemical experiments. And a book lover in ‘The Book That Finds You’ has her life changed in strange ways by the discovery of a rare horror book at a second-hand bookshop. In these weird and chilling tales, Tuttle is at her diabolical best.
A SERIES OF STRANGE BIRTHS – A young woman is rushed to the hospital with stabbing pains. The chief surgeon performs a C-section, and delivers a catastrophically malformed foetus that is somehow alive…
A DEVASTATING ATTACK – Sewage engineer Gemma is plunged into a ghostly darkness in the tunnel where she works. She escapes, but her boss goes missing in the chaos. He is later found alive… but his legs have been severed and his eyes pulled out.
A SUPERNATURAL THREAT – DC Jerry Pardoe and DS Jamila Patel of the supernatural squad must team up once more to solve the mystery and save the city. But, if they are to succeed, first they must delve into the dark arts of witchcraft…
An event is taking place at Paradise Club that wasn’t on the brochure: a dangerous game pitting the hotel’s guests against a gang of bloodthirsty maniacs. Elliot Harper – family man and FBI agent – is about to find out how fast heaven can become hell when every single vacationer is forced to become a ruthless killer in order to survive. A team of killers have been unleashed, and they won’t stop until every single guest is dead.
Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself. Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find some peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.”
This horrifying retelling of the Pied Piper fairytale set in present-day Chicago is an edge of your seat, chills up the spine, thrill ride. When Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister’s body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he’s looking for payment he’s owed from her. Lauren’s torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise she made long ago with her sister’s murderer. She may have to ruin her life by exposing her secrets and lies to stop the Pied Piper before he collects.
Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new novella, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.”
While looking for a secret place to smoke cigarettes with his two best friends, troubled teenager Mark discovers a mysterious shack in a suburban field. Alienated from his parents and peers, Mark finds within the shack an escape greater than anything he has ever experienced. But it isn’t long before the place begins revealing its strange, powerful sentience. And it wants something in exchange for the shelter it provides.
The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine – as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.
Salvage vessel Cortes tracks the Lonely Orphan, a planet with no star system to call its own. Somewhere on this hostile rock is a payload fit for a king. To attain it, though, the crew of the Cortes must brave razor rock, poisonous vapors, treacherous footing, and… the most mind-numbing horrors imaginable. Struggling to stay alive, they are beset at every turn by horrors from their own nightmares. Now, they have discovered that they are not alone on the planet, and the other inhabitants welcome them… as sacrifices to an elder god. Stranded on a vicious, murderous, seemingly intelligent planet, the crew of the Cortes must reevaluate what it truly means to survive, and what they are willing to do in order to spare their own lives.
It’s been a year and a half since the Anomaly, when They tried to force their way into the world from the shapeless void. Nick Prasad is piecing his life together, and has joined the secretive Ssarati Society to help monitor threats to humanity – including his former friend Johnny. Right on cue, the unveiling of Johnny’s latest experiment sees more portals opened to Them, leaving her protesting her innocence even as the two of them are thrown together to fight the darkness once more…
The author of the acclaimed novel The Brief History of the Dead now gives us one hundred funny, poignant, scary, and thought-provoking ghost stories that explore all aspects of the afterlife. A spirit who appears in a law firm reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, a man haunted by the trees cut down to build his house, nefarious specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows in which they live, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead–these are just a few of the characters Kevin Brockmeier presents in this extraordinary compendium of spectral emanations and their wildly various purposes in (after) life. These tales are by turns playful, chilling, and philosophical, paying homage to the genre while audaciously subverting expectations. The ghosts in these pages are certain to haunt you well after you’ve closed the book.
Twins Anna and Adam live in an abandoned commune in a volatile landscape where they perform devotions to a world-ending event they believe is imminent. Adam keeps watch by day, Anna by night. They meet at dawn and dusk. Their only companion is Koan, the commune’s former leader who still exerts a malignant control over their daily rituals. When one of the former commune inhabitants returns, everything they had known to be true is thrown into question.
This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street. All these things are true. And yet they are all lies… You think you know what’s inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you’ve read this story before. That’s where you’re wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it’s not what you think…
Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened. But there will be no turning back. Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice: They are not alone.
A decade ago, Emily Carlino vanished after her car broke down on a California highway. She was presumed to be one of serial killer Ronny Lee Jessup’s victims whose remains were never found. Writer David Thorne still hasn’t recovered from losing the love of his life, or from the guilt of not being there to save her. Since then, he’s sought closure any way he can. He even visits regularly with Jessup in prison, desperate for answers about Emily’s final hours so he may finally lay her body to rest. Then David meets Maddison Sutton, beguiling, playful, and keenly aware of all David has lost. But what really takes his breath away is that everything about Maddison, down to her kisses, is just like Emily. As the fantastic becomes credible, David’s obsession grows, Maddison’s mysterious past deepens—and terror escalates. Is she Emily? Or an irresistible dead ringer? Either way, the ultimate question is the same: What game is she playing? Whatever the risk in finding out, David’s willing to take it for this precious second chance. It’s been ten years since he’s felt this inspired, this hopeful, this much in love…and he’s afraid.
One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors. Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely—smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it’s a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it’s something else—something far more ancient and powerful. As Father Moreno’s obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her “bruja Craft crew” and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.
Author Eric LaRocca brings together two chilling never-before-published novelettes which explore the darker aspects of humanity – a world in which horrible things can and will happen in the light of day. In “You’re Not Supposed to Be Here,” a married couple and their infant child find themselves at the mercy of a seemingly benevolent couple who are eager to play a game with horrifying consequences. In “Where Flames Burned Emerald as Grass,” a widower and his daughter meet a peculiar gentleman in the Costa Rican rainforest with sinister intentions. Shocking and disturbing, A Bright Enchanted Suffering plumbs the depths of human depravity and showcases the most fearsome monster of all – our fellow man.
When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined. In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.
Richard doesn’t have a past. For him, there is only the present: a new marriage to Tamara, a first chance at fatherhood to her son Elijah, a quiet but pleasant life as an art teacher at Elijah’s elementary school, and the dream of becoming a real artist some day. Then the body of a rabbit, ritualistically murdered, appears on the school playground with a birthday card for Richard tucked beneath it. Richard is shocked; he doesn’t have a birthday…but Sean does. Sean is a six-year-old boy in 1980s Virginia. His father has just walked out and his mother is juggling multiple jobs on food stamps. Meanwhile, all the grown-ups in his life seem worried. Cult leaders, serial killers, and stranger danger is on the rise, with moral crusaders and televangelists stoking the fires of panic. In this pressure cooker environment, Sean’s school sends a note to parents alerting them that a teacher is under investigation. Sean likes Mr. Woodhouse, but when his mother asks if the bruises caused by the school bully were really caused by Mr. Woodhouse, a few small lies spiral into a terrible tragedy. Now, thirty years later, those lies are coming back to haunt Richard, because someone knows who he really is–and they’re out for revenge. Inspired by the McMartin preschool trial and the Satanic Panic of the ’80s, the critically praised author of The Remaking delivers a nuanced portrait of parenthood and mass hysteria.
Joe is done with the cities. He’s done with the muck and the posers, done with Love. Now, he’s saying hello to nature, to simple pleasures on a cozy island in the Pacific Northwest. For the first time in a long time, he can just breathe. He gets a job at the local library—he does know a thing or two about books—and that’s where he meets her: Mary Kay DiMarco. Librarian. Joe won’t meddle, he will not obsess. He’ll win her the old-fashioned way . . . by providing a shoulder to cry on, a helping hand. Over time, they’ll both heal their wounds and begin their happily ever after in this sleepy town. The trouble is . . . Mary Kay already has a life. She’s a mother. She’s a friend. She’s . . . busy. True love can only triumph if both people are willing to make room for the real thing. Joe cleared his decks. He’s ready. And hopefully, with his encouragement and undying support, Mary Kay will do the right thing and make room for him.
Mattie can’t remember a time before she and William lived alone on a mountain together. She must never make him upset. But when Mattie discovers the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, she realizes that they’re not alone after all. There’s something in the woods that wasn’t there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws. When three strangers appear on the mountaintop looking for the creature in the woods, Mattie knows their presence will anger William. Terrible things happen when William is angry.
Homeless, hunted, and desperate to escape a bitter storm, Keira takes refuge in an abandoned groundskeeper’s cottage. Her new home is tucked away at the edge of a cemetery, surrounded on all sides by gravestones: some recent, some hundreds of years old, all suffering from neglect. And in the darkness, she can hear the unquiet dead whispering. The cemetery is alive with faint, spectral shapes, led by a woman who died before her time…and Keira, the only person who can see her, has become her new target.
Kinch Na Shannack owes the Takers Guild a small fortune for his education as a thief, which includes (but is not limited to) lock-picking, knife-fighting, wall-scaling, fall-breaking, lie-weaving, trap-making, plus a few small magics. His debt has driven him to lie in wait by the old forest road, planning to rob the next traveler that crosses his path. But today, Kinch Na Shannack has picked the wrong mark. Galva is a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and handmaiden of the goddess of death. She is searching for her queen, missing since a distant northern city fell to giants. Unsuccessful in his robbery and lucky to escape with his life, Kinch now finds his fate entangled with Galva’s. Common enemies and uncommon dangers force thief and knight on an epic journey where goblins hunger for human flesh, krakens hunt in dark waters, and honor is a luxury few can afford.
A MONSTER. A MISSING BOY. AND NOWHERE TO TURN. Just as things are finally looking up for Aaron and Ellen Dreyer, tragedy strikes close to home when a neighbor is brutally murdered and a mysterious figure begins to lurk in the woods outside their home new home. Then their five-year-old son went missing in broad daylight. With the police offering little help, they are forced to take matters into their own hands and venture deep into the woods, only to uncovering truths more sinister than anything they could have imagined.
Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust. Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW. It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.
It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana’s in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer. Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father. Or so he says. Like the Hitchcock heroine she’s named after, Charlie has her doubts. There’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t seem to want Charlie to see inside the car’s trunk. As they travel an empty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly worried Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s suspicion merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?
The Final Girl Support Group is an “homage to slasher films” and follows six girls who belong to a survivors support group that has been meeting for nearly two decades. The girls, the publisher elaborated, “managed to survive the unthinkable—and now someone is coming for them.”
Aaron Decker’s life changes one December morning when his wife Allison is killed. Haunted by her absence–and her ghost–Aaron goes through her belongings, where he finds a receipt for a motel room in another part of the country. Piloted by grief and an increasing sense of curiosity, Aaron embarks on a journey to discover what Allison had been doing in the weeks prior to her death. Yet Aaron is unprepared to discover the dark secrets Allison kept, the death and horror that make up the tapestry of her hidden life. And with each dark secret revealed, Aaron becomes more and more consumed by his obsession to learn the terrifying truth about the woman who had been his wife, even if it puts his own life at risk.
A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.
Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo is mesmerized. Atl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn’t include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in.
Jade feels like she’s trapped in a slasher film as tourists go missing and the tension between her community and the celebrity newcomers to the Indian Lake shore heads towards a tipping point, when she feels the killer will rise. Jade watches as the small town she knows and loves begins to head towards catastrophe as yachts compete with canoes and the celebrity rich change the landscape of what was designated park lands to develop what they call Terra Nova.
Nick Grevers and his climbing buddy Augustin are drawn to the Maudit, a remote mountain peak in the Swiss Alps. Documentation on the mountain is scarce, its slopes are eerily quiet, and when they enter its valley, they get the ominous sense that they are not alone. Something is waiting for them…
Not long after, Nick wakes from a coma to find Augustin dead. Nick’s own face is maimed and wrapped in bandages. A long rehabilitation awaits, but Nick soon realizes that it isn’t just the trauma of the accident that haunts him. Something has awakened inside of him…
At an abandoned Japanese manor, five friends – still together despite secrets and fraught histories – gather to celebrate a wedding. Having always wanted to get married in a haunted house, the bride-to-be insists they play a game to tease the dead from their rest. But they needn’t have called. The house already knows they are there.
Up the Chimney Down by Joe Hill
Little is known about Joe Hill’s new release, except that it was supposed to come out in 2020 and was delayed.
Eleanor has not seen or spoken with her family in years, not since they sent her away to Saint Brigid’s boarding school. She knows them only as vague memories: her grandfather’s tremendous fanged snout, the barrel full of water her mother always soaked in, and strange hunting trips in a dark wood with her sister and cousins. And she remembers the way they looked at her, like she was the freak. When Eleanor finally finds the courage to confront her family and return to their ancestral home on the rainy coast of Maine, she finds them already gathered in wait, seemingly ready to welcome her back with open arms. “I read this in the cards,” her grandmother tells her. However, Grandma Persephone doesn’t see all, for just as Eleanor is beginning to readjust to the life she always longed for, a strange and sudden death rocks the family, leaving Eleanor to manage this difficult new dynamic without help. In order to keep the family that abandoned her from falling apart, Eleanor calls upon her mysterious other grandmother, Grandmere, from across the sea. Grandmere brings order to the chaotic household, but that order soon turns to tyranny. If any of them are to survive, Eleanor must embrace her strange family and join forces with the ghost of Grandma Persephone to confront the monstrousness lurking deep within her Grandmere-and herself.
1952. On a school trip to France teenager Dominic Sheldrake begins to suspect his teacher Christian Noble has reasons to be there as secret as they’re strange. Meanwhile a widowed neighbour joins a church that puts you in touch with your dead relatives, who prove much harder to get rid of. As Dominic and his friends Roberta and Jim investigate, they can’t suspect how much larger and more terrible the link between these mysteries will become. A monstrous discovery beneath a church only hints at terrors that are poised to engulf the world as the trilogy brings us to the present day…
Kara Thomas meets Twin Peaks in this supernatural thriller about one girl’s hunt for the truth about her mother’s disappearance in Kate Alice Marshall’s most commercial book yet. Our Last Echoes is an eerie collection of found documents and written confessionals, in the style of Rules for Vanishing, with supernatural twists that keep you questioning what is true and what is an illusion.
In 17th-century Paris, 19-year-old Catherine Monvoisin is a well-heeled jeweler’s wife with a peculiar taste for the arcane. She lives a comfortable life, far removed from a childhood of abject destitution—until her kind spendthrift of a husband lands them both in debt. Hell-bent on avoiding a return to poverty, Catherine must rely on her prophetic visions and the grimoire gifted to her by a talented diviner to reinvent herself as a sorceress. With the help of the grifter Marie Bosse, Catherine divines fortunes in the IIle de la Citee—home to sorcerers and scoundrels. There she encounters the Marquise de Montespan, a stunning noblewoman. When the Marquise becomes Louis XIV’s royal mistress with Catherine’s help, her ascension catapults Catherine to notoriety. Catherine takes easily to her glittering new life as the Sorceress La Voisin, pitting the depraved noblesse against one other to her advantage. The stakes soar ever higher when her path crosses with that of a young magician. A charged rivalry between sorceress and magician leads to Black Masses, tangled deceptions, and grisly murder—and sets Catherine on a collision course that threatens her own life.
Sequel to Blood Countess, but I believe they are standalones.
New girl Rachel Chavez is eager to make a fresh start at Manchester Prep. But as one of the few scholarship kids, Rachel struggles to fit in, and when she gets caught up in a prank gone awry, she ends up with more enemies than friends. To her surprise, however, the prank attracts the attention of the Mary Shelley Club, a secret club of students with one objective: come up with the scariest prank to orchestrate real fear. But as the pranks escalate, the competition turns cutthroat and takes on a life of its own.
Jake Livingston is one of the only Black kids at St. Clair Prep, one of the others being his infinitely more popular older brother. It’s hard enough fitting in but to make matters worse and definitely more complicated, Jake can see the dead. In fact he sees the dead around him all the time. Most are harmless. Stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they don’t interact often with people. But then Jake meets Sawyer. A troubled teen who shot and killed sixteen kids at a local high school last year before taking his own life. Now a powerful, vengeful ghost, he has plans for his afterlife–plans that include Jake. Suddenly, everything Jake knows about ghosts and the rules to life itself go out the window as Sawyer begins haunting him and bodies turn up in his neighborhood. High school soon becomes a survival game–one Jake is not sure he’s going to win.
Something is wrong in Snakebite, Oregon. Teenagers are disappearing, some turning up dead, the weather isn’t normal, and all fingers seem to point to TV’s most popular ghost hunters who have just returned to town. Logan Ortiz-Woodley, daughter of TV’s ParaSpectors, has never been to Snakebite before, but the moment she and her dads arrive, she starts to get the feeling that there’s more secrets buried here than they originally let on.
When Tess and Eliot stumble upon an ancient book hidden in a secret tunnel beneath the school library, they accidentally release a devil from his book-bound prison, and he’ll stop at nothing to stay free. He’ll manipulate all the ink in the library books to do his bidding, he’ll murder in the stacks, and he’ll bleed into every inch of Tess’s life until his freedom is permanent. Forced to work together, Tess and Eliot have to find a way to re-trap the devil before he kills everyone they know and love, including, increasingly, each other. And compared to what the devil has in store for them, school stress suddenly doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Summer, 1989. Four best friends—Gabe, Kimberly, Charlie, and Sonya—are preparing for their last summer together before senior year, after which they’ll all be splitting up to start college in different parts of the country. They make a promise to always find their way back to each other, no matter how far away from their sleepy Pennsylvania hometown they get. But their plans are destroyed when a plane crashes right on top of their favorite hangout outside of town—and right on top of them.
Would you sacrifice your soul to stop a killer? Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity. Despite the unbearable summer heat, his threadbare clothes, and his constantly empty stomach, Alter still dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows. Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next.
It’s five months since the nightmare Year Six School trip to Crater Lake, and something has gone very wrong in Lance’s home town of Straybridge. There’s been an explosion at the University, a mysterious test creature is missing and no one is allowed in or out of the town. On top of this Lance has lost touch with his friends since starting at his new school. And now his mum has been acting strangely since they started decorating the Christmas tree… As he goes door to door trying to reunite his team, Lance realises how bad things have got. Now he, Katja, Max, Chets and Ade, plus new friend Karim, must think bigger and bolder if they are to save their families. But there’s something else out there too – something straight out of their nightmares…
Twelve-year-old Lily moves to a creepy old house in a Florida swamp and finds out that the house isn’t empty: it’s packed full of the previous occupants’ trash, keepsakes, and, Lily begins to suspect, maybe even their ghosts.
*Denotes a book published by Simon & Schuster or one of its imprints. Due to Penguin’s recent acquisition of Simon & Schuster, books contracted by them may end up encountering delays or problems in 2021, although their CEO claims that Simon & Schuster will continue to publish the same volume of books.
The Library Cryptid 