After Dark, Volume 2 – Aaron Crocker (editor)
Horror anthology – Book 2 of After Dark Collection
Historical fiction, fantasy, post-modernism, and much more in chilling and new visions of vampire and werewolf traditions.
The Moon climbs high.
She floods the night with a cold glow as we return, once again, to the safety of our campfire to confront horrors born of eternal curses that thrive far beyond the flames’ reach.
Here, the cursed lurk in shadows, predators, rebels, waiting to exact revenge, wanderers bound to darkness. Or, perhaps, some would like to drag you into the curse.
Ballad of the Bone Road – A.C. Wise
Dark fantasy horror
In the glittering city of Port Astor, where fae roads criss-cross human highways and ghosts whisper to the living, nothing is ever as it seems.
Port Astor is a city of ghosts. Once home to the beautiful, brutal courts of the fae, forty years ago they vanished without explanation – and Port Astor decided to forget.
Brix and Bellefeather are paranormal investigators, working to keep Port Astor’s wraiths and spectres from consuming the city. Both have hauntings of their own: Belle shares her body with a demon, Belizial; Brix has trapped the soul of his dead fiancée in the world of the living, unwilling to let her go.
While investigating the glamorous and notoriously haunted Peony Hotel, Brix and Belle come across a young couple tangled up in one of the city’s most infamous tales. Jimmy Valentine, silver screen idol and one-time favorite of a fae queen, has returned to haunt the Peony. But Jimmy is no mere ghost, and Brix and Belle soon realize his return is more intimately tied to their own hauntings than they could ever have imagined.
The fae have not forgotten that Port Astor once belonged to them. And their Hollow Queen won’t give up her kingdom so easily.
Don’t Look Away – Robert W. Kirby
Psychological horror
A shocking find. A search for answers. And a journey to the brink of madness.
When her older brother, Felix, dies in a motorcycle accident, Nora Lambert is left to clear out his London flat, home to his prestigious artwork and life’s work. But among his possessions, she stumbles upon something far more disturbing.
A hidden USB stick. A file marked “Nobody’s Eyes.” Something she was never meant to see.
What she watches is beyond comprehension. A collection of disturbing clips that appear to be real snuff footage. And the most terrifying part? She thinks Felix might be in the film.
Is this a twisted art project or something far more sinister?
Determined to uncover the truth, Nora plunges into a shadowy world of dark web conspiracies, underground collectors, and depraved obsessions. The deeper she digs, the more she realises someone doesn’t want her asking questions.
Because some doors should never be opened, and some secrets are worth killing for.
The Exorcist Code 2: Haunted – William Massa
Supernatural horror
A haunted mansion with a deadly past. A ghost-hunting robot built to uncover the truth. An exorcist terrified of what machines can become.
After surviving the Michael incident, Father Frank Callum vowed he’d never stand beside another synthetic occult investigator. But when the Vatican orders him to oversee LUX, a cutting-edge spectral detection unit, on its first field test, he has no choice.
The location: the secluded estate of missing tech visionary Warren Perron, a place whispered about in Silicon Valley for the things he experimented on before he vanished.
And as the investigation begins, Callum realizes the house isn’t just haunted, it’s waiting. And LUX may be exactly what it’s been waiting for.
The First Parasite – Angel R. Sanchez
Space horror
Yuri Volkov never imagined that witnessing an impossible event over Earth would change his fate forever.
Aurora Station was humanity’s greatest achievement, a floating city, a sanctuary in space. Until something crossed the void.
First came the malfunctions. Then the hallucinations. And then the infection.
A parasite. The first parasite.
It devours flesh, corrupts minds, and evolves. The crew is no longer alone or fully human.
But this didn’t start aboard Aurora. It started on Earth.
The Veil is broken. The void looked back. And something got in.
Now, they must do the impossible to stop it before it reaches home.
Funeral Song – Carly Racklin
Supernatural horror
No one mourns the living dead.
In the isolated town of Cairney, the Angel of Death, under specific circumstances, allows the dead to return to life, but not always as desired. For Friede Inkerman, pianist to Cairney’s sacred funerals, Death’s gift is a curse, not a blessing. All she wants after being murdered by her wife and resurrected against her will is to finally rest in peace, free from the grief and suspicion that ostracize her from the rest of her death-worshipping town.
On Allhallowsmas, Friede’s hope of passing on to eternal rest is dashed when Death’s sacred relic is stolen and the acolyte who guards it is brutally slain, putting all the dead souls in Cairney at risk of fading into oblivion at sunset. Friede also can’t ignore how much the murder resembles her own, an echo too haunting to dismiss.
Clinging to her last happiness, her oldest friend Bastian, Friede descends into Cairney’s secrets to set things right and see her last wish granted. But Cairney is a town where nothing stays buried forever, and Friede’s search for answers unearths a plot born of ritual magic and twisted devotion that threatens everything she holds dear in her dead heart.
Humboldt Cut – Allison Mick
Eco horror
A Black woman returns home to the redwood forests of northern California, only to unearth the monsters that lurk among the trees.
Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, battling her own demons, caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly, who was once her best friend, Jas has chosen self-isolation to protect herself, even if it means denying herself a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry Lewis.
When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redceder for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside, ripping and raping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profits. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, falling prey to the dangers of their job and to the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather who was lynched for his crimes.
And buried in the haunted woods are even more dark secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts giving birth to entities made of human flesh and petrified bark, seeking to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land. It is an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family, and her very sanity.
I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 – Robert Brockway
Supernatural horror
To bright and anxious eight-year-old Kay Washington, the worst thing in the world is being alone with the quiet. That’s why Eddie Video makes the perfect imaginary friend: He’s smart, he’s loud, he loves pulling pranks, and he’s always there to chase away the silence.
To mid-forties, down-on-his-luck Ivan, the worst thing in the world happened when he lost his imaginary friend. Now cursed with the ability to see everyone else’s, Ivan makes a living by killing the imaginary friends of adults who couldn’t let go. But when one of Eddie Video’s “pranks” goes too far, Ivan agrees to make an exception and help Kay.
Only Ivan will soon learn that Eddie Video is nothing like the talking ostriches, star bears, and goblin princesses he’s encountered in the past, and it’s going to take a lot more than clumsy haymakers and steak knives to bring him down. A balance of comedy and catharsis, this dual-narrative tackles both the fear of growing up and the scars our childhood leaves behind.
On Sundays She Picked Flowers – Yah Yah Scholfield
Gothic horror
A woman escapes into the uncanny woods of southern Georgia and must contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself.
When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.
Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.
But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.
Pendergast: The Beginning – Preston & Child
Supernatural horror
It only took six months for the life of Special Agent Dwight Chambers to crumble around him. First, he lost his partner, and then, tragically, his wife. Returning to work at the New Orleans Field Office, Chambers is dismayed to find himself saddled with mentoring a brand new FBI agent, a certain A. X. L. Pendergast. As Chambers tries to pull himself together, his enigmatic and exasperating junior partner pulls an outrageous stunt that gets both of them suspended.
Pendergast welcomes the banishment, because it gives him the opportunity to investigate a peculiar murder in Mississippi that has captured his fancy. Chambers grudgingly goes along. What starts off as a whimsical quest swiftly turns into a terrifying pursuit, as Chambers and Pendergast uncover a string of grisly, ritualistic killings that defy any known serial killer profile.
Thanks in large part to Pendergast’s brilliance and unorthodox methods, they solve the case and find the killer, and that is when the true horror begins.
Persona – Aoife Josie Clements
Psychological horror
A trans woman discovers pornography of herself she has no memory of making, only to find herself led to an unimaginably deeper evil.
A feral shut-in discovers a disturbing internet porn video of what seems to be herself. A seance of coked-up artists summons unearthly forces in a studio apartment. The staircase of an exurban marketing company descends endlessly beneath the earth.
Return to Silent Hill – John Passarella
Horror movie novelization
When James receives a mysterious letter from his lost love Mary, he is drawn to Silent Hill, a once-familiar town now consumed by darkness.
As he searches for her, James faces monstrous creatures and unravels a terrifying truth that will push him to the brink of survival.
The Soil is Calling – C.P. Bearden
Psychological horror
There’s something in the swamp outside Harlsboro, Georgia.
Becca sensed it as soon as she crossed back over the county line: a heaviness in the air-and not just the humidity. She tells herself it’s nothing and that she’ll only be there long enough to help her mother get back on her feet after a venomous snakebite. Then Becca can go back to her life up north and forget about her small, podunk hometown.
But the longer she stays in Harlsboro, the more she feels herself start to unravel. Visions of her daughter, who’s been missing for five years, haunt her by day, and an incessant scratching sound keeps her up at night.
As Becca digs for answers, she only finds more questions. Like why does her mother keep trying to run away into the swamp? Who is behind the recent string of grisly murders, and why does the sheriff refuse to investigate them? What does her cousin mean when he says the land is cursed?
Whatever’s plaguing the town, it already has Becca’s family in its clutches. Now it wants her too.
This House Will Feed – Maria Tureaud
Gothic horror
Amidst the devastation of Ireland’s Great Famine, a young woman is salvaged from certain death when offered a mysterious position at a remote manor house haunted by a strange power and the horror of her own memories.
County Clare, 1848: In the scant few years since the potato blight first cast its foul shadow over Ireland, Maggie O’Shaughnessy has lost everything, her entire family and the man she trusted with her heart. Toiling in the Ennis Workhouse for paltry rations, she can see no future either within or outside its walls, until the mysterious Lady Catherine arrives to whisk her away to an old mansion in the stark limestone landscape of the Burren.
Lady Catherine wants Maggie to impersonate her late daughter, Wilhelmina, and hoodwink solicitors into releasing Wilhelmina’s widow pension so that Lady Catherine can continue to provide for the villagers in her care. In exchange, Maggie will receive freedom from the workhouse, land of her own, and the one thing she wants more than either: a chance to fulfill the promise she made to her brother on his deathbed: to live to spite them all.
Launching herself into the daunting task, Maggie plays the role of Wilhelmina as best she can while ignoring the villagers’ tales of ghostly figures and curses. But more worrying are the whispers that come from within. Something in Lady Catherine’s house is reawakening long-buried memories in Maggie, of a foe more terrifying than hunger or greed, of a power that calls for blood and vengeance, and of her own role in a nightmare that demands the darkest sacrifice.
A Veritable Household Pet – Viggy Parr Hampton
Psychological horror
Darla Gregory received a lobotomy at 11 years old … and she was never the same.
[Scribe’s note: This is my sister Darla’s story, as dictated to me. I have tried to remain as faithful to her diction and voice as I can, while also making it intelligible and coherent. Darla has progressed considerably since the lobotomy, but she is still unable to write by herself. I have added notes, interpolations, and supporting documentation where necessary to clarify or explain, or to add my own experience if relevant.
If you’re wondering why it took so long for you to read this, I’d encourage you to keep your bratty thoughts to yourself. You’re lucky I’m telling you the truth at all. This is the last thing I have to do for her, and I hope you’re finally mature enough to handle it.]
Vigil – George Saunders
Ghost horror
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments.
But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone – Ronald Malfi
Horror collection
Twenty haunting stories.
A man leaves rehab and tries to make a new life for himself, only to find the past closing in on him.
A married couple on holiday have a bizarre encounter with a shiver of sharks.
On Halloween night, a young boy learns the truth of the world from the strange and unsettling Mr Trueheart.
From London to Baltimore and many places in between, these stories claw through reality to find the horror deep within.
Wrong Choice – Jessica Lynn Sorensen
Psychological horror
A birthday game where colors kill.
To celebrate turning another year older, Taylor and her closest friends head to her uncle’s casino, chasing thrills, luck, and one unforgettable night.
But later that night when the doors lock behind them, the casino reveals its true purpose: an underground game where chance decides who lives and who dies.
Forced into a twisted version of roulette, Taylor is made to choose colors on the wheel, each sealing the fate of someone she loves. The house always wins, and the cost of losing is far more personal than she ever imagined.
