You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight – Kalynn Bayron
Slasher horror
Charity has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business.
But the last weekend of the season, Charity’s co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity’s role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real.
If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they’ll need figure out what this killer is after.
As they unravel the bloody history of the real Mirror Lake, Charity discovers that there may be more to the story than she ever suspected.
“This is one of the top three nights of the season, hands down.”
Faith of Dawn – Kristin Dearborn
Monster horror
Private Investigator Amanda Lane thought she’d gotten her life together after losing her leg in Afghanistan, but a crumbling marriage and PTSD showed her that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Because of this, she decides to go back to the odd little Florida town where she lived as a girl-not to reconnect with family, but because the cold case of two missing college students seems to point there. If she can solve this case, she reasons, her estranged husband will see her as a hero, and will have to take her back.
However, in the heart of the Ocala National Forest, almost 700 square miles of pine scrub and swamp, waits a horrifying truth about her childhood that will push her the edge of her sanity.
She will confront both human and inhuman monstrosities, and endure earth-shattering revelations which she, and the world as we know it, may not survive.
“…it felt very important that she make herself as small as she could get.”
We are Wormwood – Autumn Christian
Psychological horror
Ever since she was a child, Lily has been tormented by a strange girl with wormwood eyes.
As she grapples with her mother’s descent into madness and the heartbreak of losing her first love, Lily’s own sense of reality begins to unravel.
As Lily grows into adolescence, so does the wormwood-eyed girl, whose presence threatens to plunge Lily into total insanity.
Yet something much more dangerous is haunting both of them. To survive, Lily must turn to the very demon she’s feared her entire life.
“A tiny golden beetle wriggled through the window and into my eye as I slept.”
Seth – Christy Aldridge
Small town horror
In the winter of 1966, a small southern town becomes entangled in a horror they never anticipated.
With birds attacking the townfolk, the people only have one person to turn to; a five-year-old boy who proclaims to be prophet.
He makes his claims of being sent by God to rid them of their sins. Everyone is falling for this little boy and his judgments.
But one boy knows differently. He’s seen what this little boy is doing and he’s determined to stop him. He’s determined to make sure no one else knows the pain he’s known.
As things begin to grow colder and the little boy’s influence only grows stronger, everyone begins to wonder: Who is Seth?
“…new families didn’t move to Rawhead without a reason.”
Sorrow’s Point – Danielle DeVor
Supernatural horror – Book 1 of The Marker Chronicles
When defrocked ex-priest, Jimmy Holiday, agrees to help an old friend with his sick daughter, he doesn’t expect the horrors that await him.
Blackmoor, his friend’s new residence, rests upon the outskirts of the town of Sorrow’s Point. The mansion’s history of magic, mayhem, and death makes it almost a living thing – a haunted mansion straight out of a Stephen King novel. Jimmy must decide if the young girl, Lucy, is only ill, or if the haunting of the house and her apparent possession are real.
After the house appears to affect him as well with colors of magic dancing before his eyes, rooms warded by a witch, and a ring of power in his voice, Jimmy is met by a transient who tells him he has “the Mark”.
Whatever being “marked” means, Jimmy doesn’t care. All he wants to do is help Lucy.
But, helping Lucy means performing an exorcism.
“My daughter needs help and I don’t know what to do.”
About Rage – Erin Banks
Serial killer horror
Explores the inner journey and murderous exploits of serial killer Emily Sand and her alter ego, the Rider.
Emily must soon come to grips with a mysterious stranger entering her life. Has he been watching her every move… or watching over her? And if so, for what purpose?
Together with unlikely allies, including a therapist whom Emily abducted to better understand her compulsions, she confronts the betrayals and abuse of her past to navigate her present situation, and battle a seemingly omnipotent enemy.
“As I awaken, I immediately experience the discontent.”
Take Your Turn, Teddy – Haley Newlin
Psychological horror
Nothing has been normal for Teddy, not since discovering the harsh identity of the monster he had been living with his whole life: his own father.
Teddy and his mother leave that behind to start over in a small Indiana township. But as Teddy begins to learn of humanity’s monsters, he unveils an otherworldly evil he calls “The Shadow”. The Shadow tests Teddy’s vulnerability and growing sense of isolation, poisoning his mind and conjuring a vile killer-in-the-making.
A year later, Officer Leonard Strode is called in to offer consultation on a case similar to the most brutal and scarring of those he’s worked on before. One is the case of Jackie Warren, the other, Theodore “Teddy” Blackwood – two missing children. As he and two other officers follow the trail of clues, Strode is haunted by the ghosts of his own past and is horrified to find them wreaking havoc on his present.
“Go and never come back.”
Dangerous Ledges – Fallon Raynes
Psychological horror
Liza McAllister is newly divorced when she’s talked into going on a cruise with her friend Chrissie. Determined to put her crazy ex behind her, Liza throws caution into the wind and indulges on some new clothes and a spacious cabin on the cruise ship.
But someone else has other plans.
Ledge McAllister is hell-bent on reclaiming what is rightfully his. His life was turned upside down the day his wife walked out of his home. He will not lose her again.
She belongs to him.
“Her recollection of how she had come to be in this room was fuzzy.”
Tooth and Nail – Jessica Raney
Dark fantasy horror
Delilah Monroe is desperate for a change.
She lives in a trailer with her cousin and spends her days working at the local grocery store. She’s worked hard to get out of her dead-end job in a backwoods Appalachian town and make a better life for herself, away from her dysfunctional family and trappings of a desperate small town.
When someone she cares about makes a terrible mistake, Del must choose between helping him or helping herself. Along the way she must negotiate a world of vice and crime inhabited by all kinds of monsters, some supernatural and some mundane.
Her choices make her wonder if she’s ever really known who she is or what she’s capable of doing. Can she transcend her situation, or will she be permanently drawn into a life of violence and crime?
“Got out, did ya?”
Hollow Girls – Jessica Drake-Thomas
Supernatural horror
Twenty-four years ago, Olive and Stacia went into the woods. Only Olive returned, with no memory of what happened.
Now, Olive’s father has vanished, leaving behind research which indicates that he has found out what lives in the woods.
It wakes up every twelve years, taking only children. It has been doing so for at least two hundred years. And it is waking again.
Forced to return to her hometown, Olive finds her memories returning.
What she remembers from the days leading up to Stacia’s disappearance is magical, almost impossible to believe, but she knows that she must return to the woods: to face what lurks there, to save her father, and to find out what happened to Stacia.
“I miss Stacia. She was the only person I’ve ever met who truly understood me.”
When the Reckoning Comes – LaTanya McQueen
Ghost horror
More than a decade ago, Mira fled her small, segregated hometown in the south to forget.
With every mile she traveled, she distanced herself from her past: from her best friend Celine, mocked by their town as the only white girl with black friends; from her old neighborhood; from the eerie Woodsman plantation rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves; from the terrifying memory of a ghost she saw that terrible day when a dare-gone-wrong almost got Jesse, the boy she secretly loved, arrested for murder.
But now Mira is back in Kipsen to attend Celine’s wedding at the plantation, which has been transformed into a lush vacation resort. Mira hopes to reconnect with her friends, and especially, Jesse, to finally tell him the truth about her feelings and the events of that devastating long-ago day.
But for all its fancy renovations, the Woodsman remains a monument to its oppressive racist history. The bar serves antebellum drinks, entertainment includes horrifying reenactments, and the service staff is nearly all black. Yet the darkest elements of the plantation’s past have been carefully erased, rumors that slaves were tortured mercilessly and that ghosts roam the lands, seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who tormented them, which includes most of the wedding guests.
As the weekend unfolds, Mira, Jesse, and Celine are forced to acknowledge their history together, and to save themselves from what is to come.
“How long, did you think, after all of this, it would be before their souls finally came for you in the night?”
Sebastian – P.D. Cacek
Psychological horror
The son of a world-renowned photographer, Morgan Riley is familiar with his mother’s creative eccentricities.
Having been the subject of one of her photographic series, he knows all too well how focused she can become with a new project.
So, he’s not overly concerned when his mother shows him her newest series that spotlights a small, featureless white plastic manikin the size of a two-year-old child that his mother has named Sebastian.
However, as Morgan watches his mother’s obsession with the manikin grow, he begins to question her sanity and fear for her safety.
“His name’s Sebastian,” she said, taking his hand. “Well, what do you think?”
Much Too Vulgar – Viggy Parr Hampton
Psychological horror
Disturbed pre-med student Keely Rexroth is unable to take ‘no’ for an answer when she is denied entry into a prestigious research program.
As her ambition curdles into dark mania, she embarks on her own curriculum of twisted experimentation, fighting to keep her secrets from a campus priest who is too perceptive for his own good.
If she can’t get what she deserves on her own merit, she’ll eliminate her competition.
“I twirl the letter opener around and around in my hands, my fingers flirting with its sharp point.”
Vanishing Daughters – Cynthia Pelayo
Psychological horror
It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side.
The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark.
Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.
A serial killer has claimed the lives of fifty-one women in the Chicago area. When Bri starts researching the murders, she meets a stranger who tells her there’s more to her sleepless nights than bad dreams, they hold the key to putting ghosts to rest and stopping a killer.
But the killer has caught on and is closing in, and if Bri doesn’t answer the call of the dead soon, she’ll be walking among them.
“I did it again. I woke myself up screaming.”
The Hills Know – Breanna Leslie
Psychological horror
When Mel’s mother passes away, she and her husband are tasked with sorting her estate.
The affair is long and tedious, but when she and her husband, Jamie, discover Mel’s inherited property in West Virginia, they have no idea that life would drop them right in the middle of those lonely hills.
Amid the move, a career change, and a surprise pregnancy, unexpected disturbances rattle Mel to her core and leave her shaken while questioning her mental state.
But when she discovers the bloody truth about her new home, there’s no going back. Something tragic happened, but the truth of it, only the hills know.
“…you are now the owner of a property in West Virginia.”
Sister, Maiden, Monster – Lucy A. Snyder
Apocalypse horror
A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces pull a small group of women together.
Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good?
Savannah, a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters.
Mareva, plagued with chronic tumors, is too horrified to acknowledge her divine role in the coming apocalypse, and as her growths multiply, so too does her desperation.
“Home felt safe. The outside world? Not so much.”
The Broken Girls – Simone St. James
Ghost horror
Vermont, 1950. There’s a place for the girls whom no one wants – the troublemakers, the illegitimate, the ones too smart for their own good. It’s called Idlewild Hall, and local legend says the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their friendship blossoming, until one of them mysteriously disappears.
Vermont, 2014. Twenty years ago, journalist Fiona Sheridan’s elder sister’s body was found in the overgrown fields near the ruins of Idlewild Hall. And although her sister’s boyfriend was tried and convicted of the murder, Fiona can’t stop revisiting the events, unable to shake the feeling that something was never right about the case.
When Fiona discovers that Idlewild Hall is being restored by an anonymous benefactor, she decides to write a story about it. But a shocking discovery during renovations links the loss of her sister to secrets that were meant to stay hidden in the past, and a voice that won’t be silenced.
“She heard no sound behind her, but just like that, she knew.”
The Laughing Policeman – Elizabeth J. Brown
Supernatural horror – Book 1 of Brimstone Chorus
Thirty-four years ago, a supernatural horror was summoned into the world, leaving nothing but mutilated corpses in its wake.
Until the day the trail went cold.
Now it’s back, and the fate of a young Traveller girl and her mother hang in the balance.
Their only hope of survival rests in the hands of cynical ex-detective Charlie Haynes. But what chance does a pensioner have against a demon? And if he can’t save them from the clutches of this ancient evil, what will become of mankind?
“The figure stood motionless, stooped down so that he could stare at her through the doorway.”
The Devil Crept In – Ania Ahlborn
Supernatural horror
Young Jude Brighton has been missing for three days, and while the search for him is in full swing in the small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, the locals are starting to lose hope.
They’re well aware that the first forty-eight hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark’s youth, he knows that, too; he’s seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend.
That, and there was that boy, Max Larsen… the one from years ago, found dead after also disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
And then there were the animals: pets gone missing out of yards. For years, the residents of Deer Valley have murmured about these unsolved crimes, and that a killer may still be lurking around their quiet town.
Now, fear is reborn, and for Stevie, who is determined to find out what really happened to Jude, the awful truth may be too horrifying to imagine.
“His best friend. Now vanished like a ghost.”
Our Share of Night – Mariana Enriquez
Cult horror
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved.
United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.
For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival.
But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?
“Daddy, there’s a lady in there,” he said.
The Madness – Dawn Kurtagich
Vampire horror
With one unexpected email from her estranged best friend, Lucy, Mina Murray’s carefully curated life is turned upside down. Leaving behind her psychiatric practice in London, she returns home to the windswept shores of Wales. Faced with everything she’s left behind, she soon discovers that Lucy’s symptoms mirror those of Mina’s mysterious amnesiac patient hundreds of miles away.
With nothing but an untreatable sickness connecting the two women, and with Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever-deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force at its center; one that has been haunting her for years.
As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina prepares to confront her own darkest secrets and, with them, an evil beyond comprehension. Together with a group of smart, savvy women, Mina seizes one last, desperate chance to stop the cycle that began so long ago. But there are dangers to inviting the attentions of what might not be a man, but a monster.
“She glances back only once, then takes a breath and climbs inside.”
It Will Only Hurt for a Moment – Delilah S. Dawson
Psychological horror
Sarah Carpenter is starting over.
She’s on the run, leaving behind her unsupportive, narcissistic ex-boyfriend and alcoholic, abusive mother, and headed for a new beginning at Tranquil Falls, a secluded artists’ colony on the grounds of a closed hotel. There, with no cell signal or internet to distract her, she hopes to rediscover her love for pottery and put the broken pieces of her life back together.
But when Sarah uncovers the body of a young woman while digging a hole for a pit kiln, things start to fall apart. Her fellow artists begin to act in troubling ways. The eccentric fiber artist knits an endless scarf. The musician plays the same carousel song over and over until his fingers bleed. The calligrapher grins with ink-stained teeth. Not to mention the haunting dreams Sarah has night after night.
When she discovers glass shards in her clay, Sarah wonders if someone is out to get her—or if she’s losing her grip on reality out here in the wilds, where the pounding of the waterfall never, ever fades. As she investigates the beautiful valley and the crumbling resort looming over them all, she unearths a chilling past that refuses to remain buried.
“When you’re running away from someone, it’s best to be utterly inaccessible.”
The Girl from the Well – Rin Chupeco
Ghost horror – Book 1 of The Girl from the Well Series
Okiku is a lonely soul.
She has wandered the world for centuries, freeing the spirits of the murdered-dead. Once a victim herself, she now takes the lives of killers with the vengeance they’re due. But releasing innocent ghosts from their ethereal tethers does not bring Okiku peace. Still she drifts on.
Such is her existence, until she meets Tark.
Evil writhes beneath the moody teen’s skin, trapped by a series of intricate tattoos. While his neighbors fear him, Okiku knows the boy is not a monster. Tark needs to be freed from the malevolence that clings to him. There’s just one problem: if the demon dies, so does its host.
“I am where dead children go.”
Victorian Psycho – Virginia Feito
Psychological horror
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess.
She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children.
But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.
Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning.
“It’s crushed in paint. It’s papered on the walls. Everywhere, death.”
The Haunting of Aberdeen Manor – C.K. Smith
Psychological horror – Book 1 of The Aberdeen Hauntings Files
The Aberdeen Manor estate has always been shrouded in mystery; a sprawling property with a dark history hidden within its brick walls and shadowed halls. For Maeve and Ethan Adams, their family home is more than just an inheritance; it’s the heart of their shared past, their bond, and their darkest fears.
But when long-buried secrets resurface, and the horrifying legacy of their biological father, Eric Stephenson, a sadistic serial killer, is revealed, Maeve and Ethan are forced to confront a nightmare far more sinister than they could have imagined. What was once a place of comfort becomes a haunting ground for survival.
Cameras line the estate now, installed to keep intruders away, yet they capture something else—movement in the shadows, a figure lurking just beyond the walls. With the property under constant threat and the scars of the past still raw, Maeve and Ethan must unravel the truth behind the horrors that took place there and face a new terror stalking them in the present.
When the line between past and present begins to blur, the siblings must rely on their unbreakable bond to protect their family legacy and uncover the secrets of Aberdeen Manor before the shadows consume them for good.
“The estate wasn’t just another decaying mansion with a haunted reputation. It had secrets.”
Come Closer – Sara Gran
Psychological horror
A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults.
Amanda, a successful architect in a happy marriage, finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she’s doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette.
At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.
The new voice in Amanda’s head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life.
A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child.
Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed.
“The tapping went on for the rest of the winter.”
Wylding Hall – Elizabeth Hand
Psychological horror
After the tragic and mysterious death of one of their founding members, the young musicians in a British acid-folk band hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with its own dark secrets.
There they record the classic album that will make their reputation – but at a terrifying cost, when Julian Blake, their lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen again.
Now, years later, each of the surviving musicians, their friends and lovers (including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager) meets with a young documentary filmmaker to tell his or her own version of what happened during that summer. But whose story is the true one? And what really happened to Julian Blake?
“I was the one who found the house.”
Something in the Walls – Daisy Pearce
Folk horror
New child psychologist Mina has little experience. In a field where the first people called are experts, she’s been unable to get her feet wet. Instead, she aimlessly spends her days stuck in the stifling heat wave sweeping across Britain, and anxiously contemplating her upcoming marriage to careful, precise researcher Oscar.
The only reprieve from her small, close world is attending the local bereavement group to mourn her brother’s death from years ago. That is, until she meets journalist Sam Hunter at the grief group one day. And he has a proposition for her.
Alice Webber is a thirteen-year-old girl who claims she’s being haunted by a witch. Living with her family in their crowded home in the remote village of Banathel, Alice’s symptoms are increasingly disturbing, and money is tight. Taking this job will give Mina some experience; Sam will get the scoop of a lifetime; and Alice will get better, Mina is sure of it.
But instead of improving, Alice’s behavior becomes increasingly inexplicable and intense. The town of Banathel has a deep history of superstition and witchcraft. They believe there is evil in the world. They believe there are ways of… dealing with it. And they don’t expect outsiders to understand.
As Mina races to uncover the truth behind Alice’s condition, the dark cracks of Banathel begin to show. Mina is desperate to understand how deep their sinister traditions go–and how her own past may be the biggest threat of all.
“What you said in there, about your brother – did he – did he ever come back?”
This Cursed House – Del Sandeen
Gothic horror
A young Black woman abandons her life in 1960s Chicago for a position with a mysterious family in New Orleans, only to discover the dark truth: They’re under a curse, and they think she can break it.
In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago, and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over.
But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Their tenuous hold on reality extends to all the members of their eccentric clan, from haughty grandmother Honorine to beautiful yet inscrutable cousin Fosette. And soon the shocking truth comes out: The Duchons are under a curse. And they think Jemma has the power to break it.
As Jemma wrestles with the gift she’s run from all her life, she unravels deeper and more disturbing secrets about the mysterious Duchons. Secrets that stretch back over a century. Secrets that bind her to their fate if she fails.
“Some things are best left buried.”
My Darling Dreadful Thing – Johanna Van Veen
Gothic horror
Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth, strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries, is the light of Roos’ life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos’ backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.
Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air at night, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable.
Then, someone is murdered.
Poor, alone, and with a history of ‘hysterics’, Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she’ll have to prove who – or what – is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.
“Every séance I conducted with Mama followed a pattern.”
The Year of the Witching – Alexis Henderson
Witch horror
In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet’s word is law, Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy.
Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement.
But a mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood surrounding Bethel, where the first prophet once chased and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still lurking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle: the journal of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood.
Fascinated by the secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realizes the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And she starts to understand that if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her.
“As for the girls like Immanuelle … well, the Scriptures never mentioned them at all.”
