A Penance for Crows – Shannon Morgan
Gothic horror
On a remote Irish island, an artist is caught between deadly secrets, ancient superstition, and echoing madness.
Off the southern tip of the Beara Peninsula lies Beanna Dubh, an island of savage beauty, its jagged cliffs lashed by Atlantic winds and infested by thousands of crows. Untouched by 21st-century advances, the islanders live under the strict rule of the church, while clinging to old superstitions of the crows as harbingers of disaster. To this desolate, unforgiving place Grizela Urquhart fled, seeking sanctuary from brutal bullying in her native Glasgow.
40 years on, Grizela still remains an outsider, the eccentric painter viewed with distrust and barely tolerated. The feelings are mutual, for she has discovered there are as many secrets on Beanna Dubh as there are crows.
When she stumbles upon the body of a young priest with a diabolical symbol drawn on his chest, the crows darken the skies, and Grizela is plagued by demonic whispers only she can hear. The islanders’ suspicions fall on her, but she fears the answers lie in her tortured past.
As mass hysteria grows, Grizela scrambles to protect the innocent, a quartet of young girls she has taken under her wing. When she uncovers dark truths behind the girls’ mysterious midnight gatherings, her grip on reality unravels and she is faced with an impossible choice: do the unthinkable to protect the girls as the whispers urge, or come out of hiding to face the sins of her past.
Calliope Street – Josh Hanson
Psychological horror
Jack and Avery’s new home on Calliope Street is a fixer-upper’s dream. The lurid collage of pornographic clippings on the basement wall seems like a quirky (and campy) feature.
But once the house awakens, what seemed harmless becomes as horrifying as the blood seeping from the carpet.
The house is alive. It is intelligent. And it demands homage.
Close to the Bone and Other Strange Curations – CS Jones
Horror collection
Curtis Fisher steals an invitation into the social event of the decade, but are Luther Reinhardt’s Strange Curations all they seem?
Bernie Davies is a petty criminal who wants one last haul before Christmas, only something has followed him. Something evil that will change the course of his life forever.
After a bank robbery goes terribly awry, Hector, The Devil of the Deep South, kidnaps an old man who holds a dark secret of his own.
Deep in the woods, a door has been opened. What lengths would a father go to see his daughter again? And what would he offer for such a chance?
A band of German deserters come across an old woman they believe to be the old Slavic witch of legend. What starts out as an escape quickly descends into a race for survival.
The Forsaken – Christian Francis
Vampire horror movie novelization
Sean is supposed to do one simple thing: drive a Mercedes from Los Angeles to Miami without a scratch, with one rule: absolutely no hitchhikers.
Then he picks up Nick.
Nick is armed, dangerous, and hunting a vicious breed of vampires known as the Forsaken. After a savage roadside attack leaves Sean infected, he’s dragged into a desperate race against time, because vampirism is a virus, and the only cure is killing the monster who started it.
Now, with the infection spreading through his body and the Forsaken closing in fast, and for Sean, the dawn may be the only thing more dangerous than the monsters who are after him.
Kemberton – David Moody
Body horror
When Kemberton was four, he witnessed something horrifying. He hasn’t spoken since.
Life moves on, but not for him. Several years have passed, and he’s struggling to keep up. The gulf between him and the rest of the world is widening. He’s in real danger of falling through the gaps.
He needs support, but he’s getting the complete opposite. Aiden, his stepdad, is playing with fire. He’s a low-level racketeer, with ideas way above his station. He’s got himself involved with people he really has no business messing with, and if things go wrong, they’re going to really go wrong. Aiden can’t afford for there to be any complications right now, and Kemberton’s increasing unpredictability is proving to be a concern.
With everything on the line and the odds increasingly stacked against him, how far is Aiden prepared to go to stay in control? And who’ll be left to pay the price?
What Kemberton witnessed all those years ago was awful. What’s going to happen next could be even worse.
The Séance Garden – Juliet Blackwell
Ghost horror
After a cheesy ghost tour in one of California’s oldest towns stumbles upon an actual haunting, a skeptical historian of the occult becomes entangled in solving a murder case.
When Professor Harper Grae loses a bet with a friend, she finds herself on a local nighttime tour of “haunted” locations in Monterey. Harper’s a lifelong non-believer in the occult, though her academic career is devoted to the historical and societal significance of witchcraft, ghosts, and medicinal poisons of all sorts. But her skepticism immediately gets tested when the tour stumbles on the body of local artist Delilah Mason—who’s found murdered on the grounds of a nearly two-hundred-year-old mansion, once home to the infamous Perles family.
On the night Mason’s body is found, Harper catches sight of something in the house that she can’t shake, something that’s impossible to explain, at least not rationally. Soon the murder investigation reveals that this is the second time a woman has been found murdered beneath a sprawling cypress tree in the gardens of the Perles Mansion. And when Harper’s closest friend is questioned by the police, Harper fears the authorities will fail to uncover the real killer.
As Harper asks questions around town and digs deeper into the supernatural speculation and rumors surrounding the murders – two women killed in similar circumstances, separated by nearly two centuries – she sees evidence she can’t ignore that the notorious mansion truly is haunted by the ghost of Isabel Perles.
The Wetworks Miracle – Caleb Sierra
Dark fantasy horror
Under eternally gray skies the Wetworks harvests nutritious waste from the “Root”, the only plant humanity found after we fled through a gate to escape our home world’s ecological collapse. When a bloody accident at the sawmill births a new kind of person, this strange realm finally has someone who transcends the sins of the last one.
Every petal and stalk of the Root is listening and whispering. Through this transfigured being, Jon Heap, we can hear what the all-plant says. We already depend on the Root, but it wants to give us something new: fresh fruit our priests will bless, our farmers will reap, and our mothers will bear. The Root will alter our bodies as it desires and despite the pain we will call it a miracle.
