A Selection of Horror Books Released, 21 to 27 Jul 2024
Themes: Psychological, ghosts, noir, body, cult, dystopian, dark fantasy, and vigilante horror
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Table of Contents
Bleeding Hart – Conor Metz
Noir horror
The city of angels is hiding a few demons.
At San Diego Comic-Con, Chris Hart wants nothing more than to meet his favorite actress, Marie LeBeau. But someone else wants her dead.
When Chris manages to stop an attack from what can only be described as a ninja, Marie finds herself impressed by his martial arts prowess and offers Chris a job on her personal security team. Little does he know she has ulterior motives for wanting him close and may not be the person he thinks she is.
Everything changes when people associated with Marie start turning up decapitated. While Chris finds himself more vulnerable to Marie’s charms than ever before, he realizes that being with her may not only put his life at risk, but his very humanity.
The Body Harvest – Michael J. Seidlinger
Body horror
Will is a fraud. Olivia is a wreck. They meet at a grief share group and quickly bond over their brokenness.
They also have a peculiar hobby; they seek out sickness. Will hunts for the latest strain of flu. Olivia doesn’t feel comfortable in her body if she isn’t suffering from a fever. They become virus chasers, finding confidence in their ability to conquer every affliction they come across.
They soon discover an online community of chasers called The Source and realize that their hobby isn’t all that odd when seen from the right distance. And then the mysterious Zaff literally walks into their life, claiming that he has the goods, knows where the latest outbreak will drop.
Intrigued, Will and Olivia decide to take their hobby to the point of obsession, believing that if they can conquer the newest strain, nobody can hurt them.
Chisel the Bone – Renee S. DeCamillis
Cult horror – Part of: Encyclopocalypse Originals
Dory, a mental patient out on safety release, finds herself as the single witness who can bring down a horrifying cult of drug addicts from her past as well as their supernatural puppeteer.
Dory’s unwavering need for justice against the Bone Cutters who tormented her and assaulted her in the psych hospital leaves her blind to the dangers lurking outside her door. After realizing someone is stalking her, Dory’s vision for justice turns red and morphs into an intense desire for revenge, sending her down a path of uncanny supernatural discoveries.
Now, Dory finds herself, again, on the run from the cult who wants to chisel her bones into dust to satiate their addictions and keep her from bringing their secrets to light.
The Deading – Nicholas Belardes
Dystopian horror
Dystopian novel about the downward spiral of a seaside town that becomes infected by a mysterious ocean-borne contagion.
If you want to stay, you have to die.
In a small fishing town known for its aging birding community and the local oyster farm, a hidden evil emerges from the depths of the ocean. It begins with sea snails washing ashore, attacking whatever they cling to. This mysterious infection starts transforming the wildlife, the seascapes, and finally, the people.
Once infected, residents of Baywood start “deading”: collapsing and dying, only to rise again, changed in ways both fanatical and physical. As the government cuts the town off from the rest of the world, the uninfected, including the introverted bird-loving Blas and his jaded older brother Chango, realize their town could be ground zero for a fundamental shift in all living things.
Soon, disturbing beliefs and autocratic rituals emerge, overseen by the death-worshiping Risers. People must choose how to survive, how to find home, and whether or not to betray those closest to them. Stoked by paranoia and isolation, tensions escalate until Blas, Chango, and the survivors of Baywood must make their escape or become subsumed by this terrifying new normal.
The Dissonance – Shaun Hamill
Dark fantasy horror
In high school, Hal, Athena, and Erin were students of the eccentric Professor Marsh, trained in a secret system of magic known as the Dissonance, which is built around harnessing negative emotions: alienation, anger, pain. Then, twenty years ago, something happened that shattered their coven, scattering them across the country, stuck alone in mundane lives.
Now, terrifying signs and portents (not to mention a pointed Facebook invite) have summoned them back to Clegg, Texas. There, their paths will collide with that of Owen, a closeted teenager from Alabama whose aborted cemetery seance with his crush summoned something far worse: a murderous entity whose desperate, driving purpose includes kidnapping Owen to serve as its Renfield.
As Owen tries to outwit his new master, and Hal, Athena, and Erin reckon with how the choices they made as teens might connect to the apocalyptic event unfurling over the Lone Star State, shocking alliances form, old and new romances brew, and three unsuccessful adults and one frightened teen are all that stand between reality and oblivion.
Impulse – Megan Stockton
Psychological horror
Jason is having a midlife crisis, but not the kind where you go buy a boat or motorcycle. He’s been binging porn and meeting up with casual encounters at a nearby motel for months, and it just isn’t enough anymore.
After scheduling another hookup, he picks up a hitchhiking teenage girl on the side of a desolate road.
What first seems like an opportunity for him to take advantage of her, quickly turns on its head when he realizes she is the real predator.
In the Lonely Hours – Shannon Morgan
Ghost horror
The new inhabitants of a centuries-old castle perched on a remote island in northwest Scotland must confront its tragic and terrifying history.
On a small island in a remote corner of northwest Scotland lies Maundrell castle, owned by its wealthy namesake family for centuries, until now. Edwina Nunn is shocked to learn a relative she never heard of has bequeathed the castle and its land to her. What awaits Edie and her teenage daughter, Neve, is even more startling, for the castle is home to a multitude of ghosts.
Yet there’s a strange beauty in the austere architecture and the eerie, bloody waters of Loch na Scáthanna, the Lake of Shadows. Beguiled by a frightened ghost who gazes longingly out of the castle’s windows, Edie and Neve are drawn to the legends shrouding the island and the mystery of the Maundrell Red, a priceless diamond that disappeared decades before.
Is the gem really cursed, and the cause of the family tragedies that have all occurred on Samhain—Scottish Halloween?
As Samhain approaches once more, Edie and Neve race to peel back the dark secrets entwining the living and the dead – a twisted story of bitter cruelty and hidden love – or they will become another Maundrell tragedy trapped in the lonely hours.
Keys of Demented Memories – Paul Grammatico
Psychological horror
After their Grandmother’s death, Alexis and her siblings arrive at her house to clean and tidy up the vast, two-story French Colonial.
During their purging and rearranging, Dante ignores his cleaning duties and discovers a sizeable antique jar filled with various skeleton keys.
He convinces his sisters and his wife to select and explore the house to find which keys open any of the doors within the hallways of the neglected mansion.
As each family member selects a key, it opens doors to their terrifying memories from which there is no escape.
No Road Home – John Fram
Ghost horror
A young father must clear his name and protect his queer son when his wealthy new wife’s televangelist grandfather is found murdered.
For years, single father Toby Tucker has done his best to keep his sensitive young son, Luca, safe from the bigotry of the world. But when Toby marries Alyssa Wright, the granddaughter of a famed televangelist known for his grandiose Old Testament preaching, he can’t imagine the world of religion, wealth, and hate that he and Luca are about to enter.
A trip to the Wright family’s compound in sun-scorched Texas soon turns hellish when Toby realizes that Alyssa and the rest of her brood have dangerous plans for him and his son. The situation grows worse when a freak storm cuts off the roads and the family patriarch is found murdered, stabbed in the chest on the roof of their sprawling mansion.
Suspicion immediately turns to Toby, but when his son starts describing a spectral figure in a black suit lurking around the house with unfinished business in mind, Toby realizes this family has more than murderer to conceal, and to fear.
As the Wrights close in on Luca, no one is prepared for the lengths Toby will go in the fight to clear his name and protect his son.
The Ragpicker – Joel Dane
Dystopian horror
The Ragpicker – a man, bonded into a mysterious ‘secondskin’ that has prolonged his life after the digital apocalypse – wanders the lush, deserted Earth, haunted by failing avatars and fragmented texts.
He’s searching for traces of his long-dead husband, but his journey is interrupted by a girl, Ysmany, fleeing her remote village in order to save a baby orphaned by a military grade secondskin, ‘The Server,’ the fanatical ruler of their town.
Together they cross the flourishing, treacherous landscape towards sanctuary. Yet the signals and static of the previous age echo in the Ragpicker’s mind and whisper in the girl’s dreams, drawing them toward the gap between map and territory, while offering precious hope.
So Witches We Became – Jill Baguchinsky
YA psychological horror
For high school senior Nell and her friends, a vacation house on a private Florida island sounds like the makings of a dream spring break. But Nell brings secrets with her. Secrets that fuse with the island’s tragic history, trapping them all with a curse that surrounds the island in a toxic, vengeful mist and the surrounding waters with an unseen, devouring beast.
Getting out alive means risking her friendships, her sanity, and even her own life. To save herself and her friends, Nell will have to face memories she’d rather leave behind, reveal the horrific truth behind the encounter that changed her life one year ago, and face the shadow that’s haunted her since childhood.
Easier said than done, but when Nell’s friends reveal that they each brought secrets of their own, a solution even more dangerous than the curse begins to take shape.
The Vermin Sleep – James Watjen
Vigilante horror
Haunted by a traumatic childhood with an abusive father and a mother’s death, Alex Fulmer, struggles to find his footing in life while targeting pedophiles scattered throughout Chicago.
Alex eventually lands the job of his dreams as a set builder on a children’s television show. Everything seems to be going great until he discovers a director’s sinister intentions towards a child actor and becomes entangled in a dangerous game of vigilante justice – a game that could lead him into the horrors he knew as a child, and into the pit of the vermin he despises.
Published: 27 July 2024
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