I have been in a horrific review slump since June. Maybe longer than that. I’ve got a huge backlog of books that I haven’t written reviews for, and it’s holding me back. Every time I think I should just push forward and forget about the books I’ve read in the past, I feel like I’m holding myself back because I feel the responsibility to go back and review all those books. So, for the next few months, I’ll be posting a mini review round-up every Tuesday until I’m all caught up, and then I’ll hopefully be back in the swing of things! This week I’ll be reviewing five apocalypse books.
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
Jane McKeene has been trained from childhood to hunt Shamblers, folks who have died and risen from the grave. But something is afoot in Baltimore, and even though all Jane wants to do is return to her mother’s home in Kentucky, she can’t help digging in to the mystery.
I’ll admit I didn’t have high hopes for this book. I’m not a big fan of zombies or YA or historical fiction, But I decided to give this a shot on audiobook and I actually did enjoy it! It was a little slow and not as much of a page-turner as you might expect from a zombie book, and it really felt like the first half and the second half were completely different from each other. At another time I might have been more annoyed by this, but in this case it didn’t bother me too much.
I think what I enjoyed with this book was the worldbuilding and characters. I think the late 1800’s is my sweet spot with historical fantasy, having read The Conductors earlier this year and enjoyed it as well (also, I do like 19th century fiction). I just love the technology that is around, because it’s not medieval but it’s not so advanced that it doesn’t feel historical. I really liked Jane as a character and her relationship with her friend Katherine, which developed over the course of the book and was a great payoff. Perhaps the clearest sign that I enjoyed this book, I was highly tempted to pick up the sequel right away, which I pretty much never do.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
The only people left in near-future Toronto are the poor. Money no longer has value for them; they have rediscovered bartering, farming, herbal medicine. Outside of the city, though, the rich play their own political games—and they’re about to turn to the inner city for their human organ needs.
Brown Girl in the Ring has been on my radar for a very long time, but I have to admit that I didn’t really know anything about it when I started it. I don’t even remember if I knew it was apocalyptic. I certainly had no idea that it was based on Caribbean folklore (thankfully I already had a general idea of some of the folklore, or I may have been more lost). It just happened to find its way onto my audiobook TBR and I picked it up to give it a go. Although the pacing was a little strange (it felt very 90’s), I did end up enjoying it. It was really interesting to me to see a near-future apocalypse, where the collapse of society is due to its inevitable decline rather than a big world-ending event. It felt so realistic which is where the true horror in this book comes from. Although this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I did like it well enough and would be interested in reading more from Hopkinson.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled-in subdivision in the remnants of Los Angeles. The world outside their walls has devolved into general anarchy, where fire-loving drug addicts and gangs roam the streets. Money is scarce to come by, and few people have legitimate jobs; people have turned to growing their own food and utilizing the barter system to get by. As her father tries to keep their community together, Lauren deals with hyperempathy and records her thoughts about a new religion in her notebook.
Parable of the Sower was published before Brown Girl in the Ring, so my apologies to Octavia Butler for thinking the former resembles the latter when the opposite is true, but that’s the order I read them in. Really, though, they could practically take place in the same universe—the similarities are striking. It was happenstance that I read them so close together, since Parable of the Sower was one of my book club reads, but I’m really glad I did. It was really cool (and by cool I mean absolutely fucking terrifying) to see two authors come to the same conclusion about where we’re heading as a society!
This was a pretty slow-going book, and a pivotal event listed in most blurbs doesn’t actually happen until halfway through. Even though it’s a medium-sized book, it felt really long to me, and I’m not sure if I’d have finished it without a book club deadline to keep me going. However, I think it was really effective as apocalyptic horror because it really made me think about what I’d do if I were to find myself in the same situation. Could I feed myself? Keep myself and my family safe? I live in an apartment, so no. But I think that’s really the mark of great apocalyptic fiction, because it means that the setting was so realistic that you feel like it could happen.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
The power is out—again. At first, no one thinks anything is amiss. Then two young people manage to find their way back to their Anishinaabe community, speaking of chaos in the south, where society is collapsing following the loss of power. In the face of mounting catastrophe and unexpected visitors, Evan and his community turn to Anishinaabe tradition to survive.
This was such a wonderful little book and totally got me in the mood for winter. Rice’s love for his community and traditions really shines through this novel, and even when the plot seemed completely bleak that love kept me moving forward. Like The Parable of the Sower, this book really made me think about what I would do in an apocalypse, so it was really thought-provoking in that way. I also really loved the balance between suspense/horror and a more quiet, subdued feeling. The title and season of the book was perfectly portrayed through the writing style which made this so successful in my eyes.
I am bummed that it was so short—I blew through this audiobook in just two days, and that’s probably just because I started it toward the end of the work day on the first day. I am super excited for the sequel that is tentatively scheduled for 2022, and I’m so glad that the story isn’t over.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton
S.T. is a domestic crow on a mission: to find a cure for his owner, Big Jim, whose eyeball has fallen out and seems to have succumbed to the disease affecting all of humanity. Along with Big Jim’s dog Dennis, S.T. will traverse Seattle and learn how to bridge the gap between animals and the human culture he loves so much.
This was a quick-witted and unique take on the zombie apocalypse. As a kid, I was a big fan of animal-centered fantasy like Redwall and Warriors, so this was right up my alley, and I was thrilled to discover the ecological bent to the story. I did struggle a bit with the pacing, since S.T. is fairly directionless for a large portion of the novel, and Buxton fell back on a technology-is-evil messaging that frustrated me. However, the character development was top notch and I had a great time with this book from beginning to end. Although I won’t pick it up right away, I am looking forward to the sequel, Feral Creatures.
I have been in a horrific review slump since June. Maybe longer than that. I’ve got a huge backlog of books that I haven’t written reviews for, and it’s holding me back. Every time I think I should just push forward and forget about the books I’ve read in the past, I feel like I’m holding myself back because I feel the responsibility to go back and review all those books. So, for the next few months, I’ll be posting a mini review round-up every Tuesday until I’m all caught up, and then I’ll hopefully be back in the swing of things! This week I’ll be reviewing six new releases from the first half of the year.
The Project by Courtney Summers
Years after their parents die in a car crash, Lo Denham tries desperately to make contact with her sister Bea, who has disappeared into the folds of the cult known as the Unity Project. This YA mystery-thriller has met with some lukewarm reviews, and I think that’s primarily because it’s not particularly thrilling. I didn’t think it was a page turner with tons of cliffhangers that propelled me to the next chapter, but I did think it was one of the most accurate depictions of a cult that I’ve read.
Not all cults are Jonestowns or the Manson Family. Most people assume that they’d never end up in a cult, that only stupid people do and that they’re too smart to be caught up in it, and it’s simply not true. Cults are insidious, they are not straight out of your favorite thriller book, and they are extremely dangerous and ensnare people from all walks of life. So personally, I’m glad this book wasn’t a page turner! Although it did move a bit too slowly at times, I loved how accurate-to-life it was, so it’s absolutely a book I’d recommend, although I think people should curb their expectations a bit going in to it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo
After an incident at her boarding school, Eleanor Zarrin returns to her family home in Maine, from which she was banished as a child. When she invites her maternal grandmother to the home to help get settled, the Zarrins’ lives are turned upside down, and Eleanor discovers just how monstrous her family can be.
This YA horror was one of my most anticipated reads of the year! I love werewolf books and the author is queer so I had very high hopes. However, I found that it floundered a bit with the plot and with the creature feature. It was very much a family drama and I found myself intrigued by certain plot points, but it ended up a little predictable and I didn’t feel like I got the catharsis at the end that I was looking for.
All that being said, I did enjoy it well enough and would recommend if you’re looking to try out a little YA horror, especially with a Gothic lean to it. This was Szabo’s debut and I’m looking forward to reading more of their work.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The Lost Village by Camilla Sten
Decades after the citizens of Silvertjärn disappeared and left only a crying baby and dead woman in their town, Alice Lindstedt—whose grandmother once lived there—returns to film a documentary about the disappearances, and hopes she’ll find out what happened to her ancestors.
This is another book I was so excited for! I studied abroad in Sweden and I just love it there, so I was thrilled to read some Swedish fiction. There were some aspects to this book I enjoyed—for one thing, it has a dual timeline that I actually did really enjoy, even though it’s not usually my thing. It also had some really good commentary on mental health and especially the stigma against people who struggle with it.
Unfortunately, that’s where my pros end and cons begin… to start with, I just could not get that suspension of disbelief with this book. I just thought it was so unrealistic. Also, even though I did enjoy the timelines, it always drives me crazy when the past and present aren’t evenly distributed, which they weren’t in this book. Finally, although this was pitched as a found footage-style book, it pretty much wasn’t and I think if it had been it would’ve made a much better book. The book ended up mostly being a disappointment for me.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman
In the present day, a new teacher discovers a rabbit ritually murdered on the school grounds and notes in his classroom with a mysterious allusion to his past. In the 80’s, a young boy responds to his mother’s questioning without really knowing the consequences, leading to the rise of what is known as the Satanic Panic.
If you are looking for a fast-paced popcorn thriller with some 80’s nostalgia, this is the book for you. For me, though, it was a complete disappointment. It was predictable, and unrealistic, and shallow. I do think it would’ve been more enjoyable if I had read it in one sitting, but every time I put it down I struggled to feel the desire to pick it back up again. By the end of the book, I realized that I would’ve had a significantly better time if I had just picked up a nonfiction book about the Satanic Panic, rather than reading a fictionalized account that tried to use a dual timeline to generate edge-of-your-seat thrills.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon
Wyatt was thrown out of the Fae kingdom of Asalin when he used his witch powers to wreak devastation. Now, settled into the human world and post-transition, his ex-fiancé Emyr wants him to return to Asalin to help Emyr secure the Fae throne. I don’t read a lot of paranormal romance, but when I do, this is the kind I read (The Witch King‘s agent is Rena Rossner, who also represents Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys, which I read and loved in 2020; the vibes are very similar).
I will admit that I listened to this on audiobook, and I’m not sure that I’d have liked it as much if I had eyeball-read it. It felt very juvenile and the writing quality wasn’t quite up-to-par, but on audio, none of that bothered me the way it would if I had eyeball-read it. However, it’s something to be aware of going in.
This is not a story about fluffy perfect people doing good things. It is a story about morally gray characters who fuck up, and whose relationships can be unhealthy or even toxic. It’s very coming-of-age—there’s a lot about Wyatt learning how not to be an asshole. And I really loved those aspects and ended up super invested in Wyatt and Emyr’s relationship. I ended up enjoying this book a ton and I can’t wait for the sequel, The Fae Keeper, to come out next year.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Nella is thrilled when another black girl starts working at Wagner Books—she’s been the only one in a white-dominated industry for way too long. Then Nella receives a note on her desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW. Could it be the other black girl? Or is there something more sinister going on?
This was another of my highly anticipated 2021 releases. It was compared to Stepford Wives a ton in the marketing campaign (as well as Get Out, but let’s be real, horror books by authors of color being compared to Jordan Peele are a dime a dozen and I don’t put much stock in it), which is a super accurate comp. I’d read Stepford Wives just a couple weeks before I picked this one up, so it was fresh in my mind when I read it, and I thought the comparison was very on-the-nose.
Unfortunately, I think where this book fails is its pacing. Harris simply fails to develop a tight, fast-paced narrative, and I think that’s really key for this kind of book. It moved extremely slowly (Nella doesn’t even receive the pivotal note until a third of the way through the book) and didn’t hold my attention. There was an interesting social commentary, but ultimately it just didn’t make for a very entertaining read.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
And those are the mini-reviews for today! Check back next week for a round-up of apocalyptic fiction.
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 Indifferent Stars Above is narrative nonfiction about the trials and tribulations of the Donner Party, emigrants to California who, in winter 1846-47, got stuck in the Sierra Nevada and had to resort to desperate measures…
My first read for Nonfiction November! The Indifferent Stars Above is narrative nonfiction about the trials and tribulations of the Donner Party, emigrants to California who, in winter 1846-47, got stuck in the Sierra Nevada and had to resort to desperate measures.
This tale absolutely grips you from beginning to end. Although it doesn’t start snowing until about a third of the way in, the descriptions of life on the Oregon Trail really hooks you in the first section. This book graces the top of many horror nonfiction lists—including my own—and for good reason, since even the descriptions of various ways emigrants died along the trail edges into body horror, and of course it only gets worse as the elevation rises.
As a narrative, I think it somewhat suffers from Daniel James Brown’s choice to focus on one member of the party, Sarah Graves. Although Sarah certainly proves to be a sympathetic and relatable “main character,” information about her is simply few and far between. Although Brown claims to focus on her story, most of her story consists of statements like, “We don’t know what Sarah did or thought at this point but here is a guess.” I don’t have so much an issue with these statements—I think it’s good when historians admit what we don’t actually know, rather than passing guesses off as fact—but I don’t think Brown should have claimed that the book was all about Sarah. Since we know so little about her, you can’t write a complete book about her experience without shifting the focus to other characters frequently. I think Brown did himself a disservice claiming to be focused on her, and should have instead focused on the Graves family as a whole (which he did, in practice).
However, this didn’t detract from the book much as a whole; there were just sections in the beginning and at the very end where I feel like Brown focused too much on it. As a whole, this book was exactly what I was looking for: a harrowing and informative narrative about a doomed mountain expedition. It’s not for everyone; there are gruesome details here, and it’s very disturbing. I’m not sure that I would ever re-read it, and I think it might be a once-in-a-lifetime book. But I was totally hooked all the way through and I think it was fantastic.
I’ve been completely unproductive this election week and realized last night that I didn’t even have a post lined up for today. Luckily, it’s about time for a horror wrap-up!…
I’ve been completely unproductive this election week and realized last night that I didn’t even have a post lined up for today. Luckily, it’s about time for a horror wrap-up! I took a few weeks off from book club to catch up on ARC’s, but I’m back on track with a full November schedule.
I’m also excited to announce that our book club has launched its website! You can check out posts by our members, reviews of books we’ve read, and even join our Discord! Check it out at howlsociety.com.
The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle
Instead of being arrested, the police bring Pepper to a psych ward and involuntarily commit him, even though he doesn’t belong there. Soon, Pepper finds out that there are monsters lurking within the halls.
I went into this book with high hopes after reading The Ballad of Black Tom a couple months ago, but I think I was let down mainly because this isn’t quite the genre I was expecting. This is what I would call literary horror, and it really would be literary fiction if not for some very descriptive body horror that I think pushes it into genre fiction. And I wouldn’t really say it’s a bad book, but if that had been what I was expecting going in, I think I would have enjoyed it a bit more. Still not a perfect book—LaValle tries to squeeze a little too much imagery in—but it would have improved.
4 stars
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
Seven years ago, all the crew and passengers on the Atargatis died at sea—eaten alive by killer mermaids. Now, the company in charge of the ship is sending the best and brightest to find out more about the dangers lurking in the depths of the sea. But can they avoid the same fate?
This book was, if nothing else, entertaining. It took a little while to get the ball rolling, but once the pace picked up it was a great time. I also really loved the LGBT rep and disability rep (for both autism and deafness). Although this wasn’t a perfect book, it’s certainly one that I’d be willing to read again, just because it was such a delight.
4 stars
‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
This is one of the earlier King books, published in 1975, and largely considered to be one of his best. It was also, in a way, my first Stephen King; I read the Bachmann books many years ago, but this is the first book I read not under his pen name. It is something of a riff off Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so it’s probably inevitable that I enjoyed it, since that is one of my favorite classics.
I really enjoyed the way this fleshed out all the citizens of ’Salem’s Lot, especially because I didn’t find the main character, Ben, to be particularly interesting. There are a lot of King archetypes here—the writer, the alcoholic, the adulterer—but with such a large class it makes sense to fall back on general archetypes (although, this early in his career, they may not have been established yet).
In general I did enjoy this “first” foray into Stephen King, and it makes me inclined to read more of his work, which has not been the case in the past. I’m thinking of reading everyone’s favorite, Pet Sematary, or some pandemic lit with The Stand.
Our horror club keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we’re reading more and more interesting horror books! We are even in the stages of compiling an anthology of our members’ work, and building a website! It’s been a lot of fun. This month, I participated in three reads, which included winners from the categories “Werewolves,” “Folk Horror,” and “Religious Horror.”
How to describe this book? Something of a coming-of-age story, sort of a slice-of-life, not quite a monster story. Our narrator is a young werewolf–or, at the very least, his aunt and uncle and grandfather are werewolves, and he might be, but he has to wait until he’s older to see if he’ll change. His aunt and uncle bounce from place to place with him, always in the South (snow always blows a werewolf’s cover, because of the footprints), always moving on once something goes awry. Sometimes somebody clues in on the fact that they’re werewolves, sometimes it’s because they’re caught stealing or can’t make rent payments.
In a way, being a werewolf becomes a sort of metaphor for a number of things. In the beginnings, it’s reminiscent of a child’s life growing up with alcoholic parents, but as the story progresses, the werewolves’ lives reflect the realities of growing up in poverty and of the author’s childhood and experience as a Native American. Stephen Graham Jones talks a little about this in a talk he gave a few months ago, and which you can check out here:
In many ways, Mongrels breaks out of genre conventions, but I think it belongs solidly in the horror category. There is a fair amount of gore and horror elements, and although I think you could definitely get through it if you aren’t a fan of horror, definitely don’t go into this book expecting that it’s just a slice-of-life werewolf story and not horror.
Want an unlikeable narrator? This is the book for you!
Harvest Home is about Ned Constantine, who moves to the tiny village of Cornwall Coombe in upstate New York with his wife Beth and daughter Kate after quitting his job in advertising. The people of Cornwall Coombe are stuck in their ways; their lives revolve around planting and growing corn, and they shun modern farming techniques, for the most part. At first, the Constantines are enthralled by the village’s quaintness, but Ned starts to uncover disturbing details about the festival they call Harvest Home, which occurs once every seven years.
There are two big issues with this book. First of all, it’s so slow until the last quarter of the book. It’s a 400 page book, but you could easily lob off a hundred pages or so just to move the story along; the components of the mystery get revealed about three times apiece. Secondly, Ned is just awful. I’m not sure we ever came to an agreement about whether Tryon made him horrifically sexist on purpose or whether it was the author’s views shining through his prose. Most of the women were one-dimensional tropes—the seductress, the crone, the—well, Beth isn’t really the good virgin, but she’s the good innocent wife. He also does some pretty reprehensible things throughout the book, and by the end I just wanted this guy to die.
The strengths of this book lie in the setting and the mood. If you are in the mood for a good autumn read, or a good cult read reminiscent of Midsommar, this would probably be a fun book to pick up. This would be a great read just as the leaves turn colors, or in early October.
I had the great advantage going into this book of never having read or seen The Exorcist, nor having been exposed to the plot too much via pop culture. So, in this day and age, I managed to go into this book almost completely blind.
The theme for this week of reading was “religious horror,” and The Exorcist is most certainly that. The book focuses on the dichotomy between secularism and religion, and Blatty has said that he intended for this book to help people come back to their faith. The beginning of the book presents Chris, a recently divorced actress who berates her secretary for speaking about God to Chris’ eleven-year-old daughter, Regan. Chris focuses on her job to the detriment of her marriage and surrounds herself with profane drunkards. I found it a bit heavy handed, and since Blatty basically admitted that he wrote it in order to bring people back to the Church, it rubbed me the wrong way. Not to mention some serious antisemitism vibes I was picking up.
As for the horror aspects, it was interesting. As I said, I haven’t seen the movie. I actually watched half of it after we finished the book but I got pretty bored (I have a terrible attention span when it comes to movies). There were definitely parts that were creepy—at one point Blatty describes the possessed person as crawling around bent over backwards, with her tongue licking the secretary’s ankles and following her wherever she went, and that was awesome and a lot of fun to read about. The descriptions of the possessed person (I’m being vague in case you, too, are an Exorcist virgin) were awesome and graphic and creepy. However, the story wasn’t particularly, especially since we know, from the title, that there is going to be an exorcism. Additionally, it took so long to get to the end! We spent a lot of time trying to medically diagnose what was happening, and of course we know that there will be an exorcism and it’s really a demon, so it was tiring to have to go through all that.
In the end, there were really good parts and really bad parts, so there’s really no place for this book to land except three stars. It was a fun experience though, and I’m glad I got to experience this bit of pop culture without having to watch the movie!
For the month of July, our horror book club decided to focus entirely on black voices in the horror genre. Here are some mini reviews!
For the month of July, our horror book club decided to focus entirely on black voices in the horror genre. In addition to the picks below, we also read Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. Since Catherine House is a new release, I decided to give it a full review, which you can read here, and since Who Fears Death was on my list of Books by Black Authors I Want to Read by the End of 2020, I am planning on writing a full review for that, too. Here are the mini reviews of the rest!
Octavia Butler’s final novel about a young black girl who wakes up with amnesia, only to find out later that she is actually a 53-year-old vampire, and is the sole survivor of the brutal massacre of her family. The amnesia mechanic works well to introduce the reader to the intricacies of vampire—or, as they are called in the novel, Ina—society, but falls into the trap of infodumping rather than presenting information organically.
Overall, I think I just didn’t really get this book. Butler introduces a component of vampire saliva that compels bitten humans to obey the vampire who bit them, which, combined with the sexual nature between a vampire and their “symbionts,” creates a relationship in which the concept of consent is questionable. It’s clear that Butler was attempting to flip real world power dynamics—the main character, Shuri, has all the power in her relationship with her symbiont, although by appearances she is a young black girl and he is a fully grown white man—but I failed to see the value in switching these dynamics when the result is just that the man was taken advantage of instead of the girl.
It seemed like Butler introduced a lot of interesting concepts but didn’t bring them to any satisfying conclusion. Part of that may be because she planned for this to be the first book of a series before her untimely passing, but on its own I didn’t feel like this book stood up very well. Besides the weird sexual elements, I wasn’t very compelled by the plot so this just ended up a disappointment, which is a bummer since this was my first Butler.
I have read more short story collections in the past three months than I have in my entire life ever, but luckily they’ve all been a delight, and Ghost Summer is no exception. Tananarive Due has an excellent reputation as a horror writer, and she’s definitely on my list to read more of! So many of these stories have stayed with me since reading this collection.
This collection is divided into four sections: “Gracetown,” “The Knowing,” “Carriers,” and “Vanishings.” “Gracetown” features two short stories and one novella about a haunted town in Florida, “The Knowing” features five stories about people with dangerous knowledge, “Carriers” has two standalone stories and a three-story trilogy about pandemics, and “Vanishings” has two short stories about death and disappearances.
Overall I think “Gracetown” was the strongest section, although I was caught off guard by the novella since I wasn’t expecting it. I love when stories connect to each other without being directly related, so this was a stellar section for me. I was also really touched by the pandemic stories, although I didn’t like the Nayima trilogy as much as the first two stories. Although I would say that the “Vanishings” section was probably the weakest, I can’t think of a story that was bad or that I didn’t enjoy at all.
Okay, I titled this post “Black Voices in Horror,” and this is obviously not horror by a black author, but in fact horror from a terrible racist who sucks. According to several accounts, “The Horror at Red Hook” is the most racist Lovecraft story, and although I haven’t read any other Lovecraft, I wouldn’t hesitate to believe that.
It’s clear that what Lovecraft finds horrific are immigrants and non-white people, and a lot of page time is dedicated to complaining about the various inhabitants of diverse neighborhoods in New York City. If you look past the racism and try to enjoy this story while ignoring those aspects, it falls flat; the horror elements aren’t really there and the storyline isn’t compelling. Overall, this is definitely a Lovecraft you can skip, but if you really want to read it, you can read it here for free.
Luckily, reading “The Horror at Red Hook” was worth it because it made my reading of The Ballad of Black Tom much richer. I definitely wouldn’t have appreciated the nuances of this novella without some prior Lovecraft knowledge, which I had basically none of. This story takes the bare bones of “The Horror at Red Hook” and transforms it into a fascinating examination of the ramifications of racism in 1920’s New York.
Since it is such a short book, I don’t think there’s much I can say about it without spoiling anything, but I will say that this was such a well-crafted book. I am very glad that I read it with the book club because a lot of things probably would have gone over my head if others hadn’t pointed them out to me. I would highly recommend reading “The Horror at Red Hook” first just to build your background knowledge, and that is the only reason I would ever recommend that story. This was a really satisfying read and I highly recommend it, especially if you are a fan of Lovecraft’s works.
The Library Cryptid 