11pm – Amy Cross
Ghost horror – Book 4 of The Haunting of London
As the curtain falls on another performance of Creep the Night, Tilly Warner races to get to the theatre. Desperate to hang onto her job, she arrives just in time to help put everything away, but one by one her colleagues depart until Tilly’s the only person left backstage.
Or at least, the only living person.
Creep the Night is notorious for using a real human skull in its performances. As she prepares to leave for the night, Tilly starts to notice something moving in the shadows. Soon she’s convinced that she has company, but is she being followed by an obsessed ex-boyfriend, or by something far more sinister?
Soon Tilly finds herself caught in a battle for her survival and her sanity. The Connaught-Lincoln is one of London’s oldest theatres, but with great age comes a terrifying history filled with dark secrets. Something has been lurking in the wings and waiting for its chance to strike, and now Tilly might be the victim it craves.
Cathedral of the Drowned – Nathan Ballingrud
Body horror – Book 2 of The Lunar Gothic Trilogy
There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp’s brain.
One is in a jar stranded on Jupiter’s jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home to the woman he loves. The other half is still locked in his body, hanging from a wall in Barrowfield Home on Earth’s own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage.
On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed Cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called the Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronaut-clergy inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while more Moon Spiders prepare to be born.
Darker Days – Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Psychological horror
In a gilded street in a Pacific Northwest town, the charmed residents have made a frightening deal.
In Lock Haven, a quiet little town in Washington State, Bird Street is a special place. The residents of this pretty cul-de-sac on the edge of the woods are all successful, healthy, and happy. Their children are prodigies; well-mannered, and unnaturally smart.
But come November, the “Darker Days” descend, bringing accidents, bad luck, conflict, and illness. Luana and Ralph Lewis-da Silva prepare for this, and so do their children Kaila and Django. It is in November when a stranger appears to collect on a longstanding debt. A price must be paid for the good fortune they enjoy the rest of the year. A sacrifice must be made.
So it has been for over a century. To assuage their guilt, the residents of Bird Street choose carefully who will be sent into the woods. Usually, it is an elderly or terminally ill individual who wishes to die with dignity and is content to be helped on their way.
But this year, things don’t go to plan, and events take a terrifying turn.
Dead by Dawn: The Files of Virgil Everness – N.R. LaPoint
Western horror collection
10 short stories.
The year is 18XX. The great frontier is overrun. Not by bandits and outlaws, but by monsters, sorcerers, and things that shouldn’t exist.
Across the canyons of Colorado to the dark, unforgiving forests of the North, America has become a hunting ground.
Virgil Everness doesn’t flinch. A man of quiet faith and lethal skill, he and his wife pursue the wicked, their blessed weapons turning back the tides of Hell itself.
When every town is a potential graveyard, and the darkness comes in a hundred twisted forms, only one thing is certain: There is no place evil can hide from the aim of Virgil Everness.
Dee Snider’s Strangeland – Christian Francis
Psychological horror movie novelization
The Internet was supposed to connect people. For Captain Howdy, it’s the perfect hunting ground. Behind the screen waits a sadist who lures teenagers into his world of ritual piercing, body suspension, and unrelenting torment.
To him, pain is truth.
Flesh is canvas.
And his victims are masterpieces.
When Detective Mike Gage’s daughter disappears, the hunt leads the police into a nightmare of needles, hooks, and cages. A carnival of body modification ruled by a madman who believes he’s a prophet.
But Howdy isn’t just another predator; he’s a believer, and his gospel is written in pain.
Fenek the Survivor – Nicholas Grady
Zombie horror
After losing his family, a young Eastern Cottontail rabbit by the name of Fenek is forced to survive on his own. The only problem? He doesn’t know how to, at least not yet.
As Fenek slowly learns to live independently, he notices strange things happening in the suburban neighborhood where he resides. At night there are sounds of sirens, gunshots, and screams coming from the other side of the privacy fence that borders the backyard that he inhabits.
Not long after that, he begins to hear eerie human voices making groaning noises that send shivers down his spine. Something is happening to the human population that surrounds him, and it isn’t good.
Fenek is eventually forced to leave his backyard home when faced with an unavoidable threat and must venture out into the world in order to stay alive.
As Fenek fights for survival in a world gone mad, he observes everything changing around him as he travels across an urban, zombie infested landscape in search of a safe place that he might be able to call home.
It Came From The Flower Shop Down Under – Chris Heinicke & Kate Reedwood
Halloween horror
Australia, 1976. A nightmare is waiting to hatch.
When nineteen-year-old American Ian Thomas is banished to live with relatives in the Adelaide Hills, he expects hard work, sheep shearing, and endless teasing at his expense. What he doesn’t expect is an eight-legged nightmare with flower petals and fangs.
On the run from an abusive ex, brilliant scientist Fiona is offered safe haven by the Thomas family. But she isn’t traveling alone. She carries a secret: Charlie, a genetically altered spider with a mind of her own and a mission written in venom.
When Halloween collides with the town’s annual shearing festival, blood will spill, lives will shatter, and the shadowed bushland around Hahndorf will become a deadly hunting ground. As Fiona witnesses the carnage Charlie unleashes, she’s left with one question: will anyone survive?
King Sorrow – Joe Hill
Occult horror
Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll, and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot, is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.
Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself.
Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others, brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen, don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.
But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year, or become his next meal.
The Pale Hunger – Angel R. Sanchez
Supernatural horror – Part of The Mortal Coil Universe
They came searching for the missing. What they found was hunger.
When four friends enter the forest to uncover what happened to Owen and Elenor Holloway, they expect grief, maybe even death. But the woods greet them with silence, and something worse.
Symbols carved in bark. Bones arranged like rituals. Creatures that watch from the dark.
Each step draws them deeper into a fracture in reality, where memory fails, and the soul begins to erode.
Something ancient is stalking the trees. It remembers the cold.
And it remembers the taste of flesh.
She Had Glass Eyes – C.S. Schiavone
Historical horror
When Dr. Joseph Faber unveils his eerie invention in 1846 London, a mechanical marvel that simulates human speech, the public recoils. But one witness listens too closely.
Deliverance Edvane, a solitary undertaker with a mind sharpened by disdain, sees in the invention not horror, but possibility.
What begins as fascination soon spirals into obsession, as she plots to take the machine for herself.
The Sister’s Curse – Nicola Solvinic
Supernatural horror
When mysterious drownings plague her small town, a detective haunted by her serial killer father must uncover whether revenge, ancient legends, or something darker lurks beneath the surface.
Lieutenant Anna Koray thought she’d finally found solid ground and escaped her past as the daughter of a notorious serial killer. A loving boyfriend, a loyal dog, a life that almost feels normal, except darkness has a way of seeping in. When she saves a boy from drowning, the strange marks on his body tell a disturbing story: something in the depths tried to drag him under.
Days later, another victim surfaces with identical marks and Anna’s instincts scream that these are no accidents. Both victims are connected to the Kings of Warsaw Creek, men of the town’s wealthiest and most influential families. And they have enemies.
Others whisper that there are witches in Bayern County, seeking revenge for a long-ago murder. Perhaps it’s the work of Vivian Carson, the enigmatic bartender who’s rumored to cast hexes on those who wrong her. Or maybe it’s a secret coven who’s been leaving serpentine symbols and skulls behind at the scenes of the drownings.
But Anna’s investigation reveals an even more sinister truth: something is stirring in the water, and it wants the Kings to pay.
With time running out and more victims appearing, Anna must separate superstition from truth. But in Bayern County, where legends and curses run deep as the water itself, one wrong step could drag her into the depths, this time for good.
