A Selection of Horror Books Released, 11 to 17 Aug 2024
Themes: Supernatural, psychological, splatter western, extreme, isolation, and sword and sorcery horror
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Table of Contents
The Dark We Know – Wen-Yi Lee
YA supernatural horror
Growing up in Slater, Isadora Chang never felt at ease in the repressive small town, even before she realized she was bisexual. But after the deaths of two childhood friends, Slater went from feeling claustrophobic to suffocating. So, Isa took off before the town could swallow her, too. Even though it meant leaving everything she knew behind, including her last surviving friend, Mason.
When Isa’s abusive father dies, however, she agrees to come back from art school just long enough to collect the inheritance. But then Mason turns up at the cemetery with a revelation and a plea: their friends were murdered by an evil that haunts the town, and he needs Isa to help stop it before it takes anyone else.
When Isa begins to hear strange songs on the wind, and eerie artwork fills her sketchbook that she can’t recall drawing, she’s forced to stop running and confront her past. Because something is waiting in the shadows of Slater’s valleys, something that feeds on the pain and heartbreak of its children.
Whatever it is, it knows Isa’s back, and it won’t let her escape again.
Dear Hanna – Zoje Stage
Psychological horror
Hanna is no stranger to dark thoughts: as a young child, she tried to murder her own mother. But that was more than sixteen years ago. Extensive therapy and writing letters to her younger brother has since curbed those nasty tendencies.
Now twenty-four, Hanna is living an outwardly normal life of domestic content. Married to real estate agent Jacob, she’s also stepmother to his teenage daughter, Joelle. They live in a beautiful home, and Hanna loves her career as a phlebotomist, a job perfectly suited to her occasional need to hurt people.
But when Joelle begins to change in ways that don’t suit Hanna’s purposes, her carefully planned existence threatens to come apart. With life slipping out of her control, Hanna reverts to old habits, determined to manipulate the events and people around her.
The only thing worse than a baby sociopath is a fully grown one.
Hell’s Cargo – Michelle Garza & Melissa Lason
Splatter western horror
Religion, attraction, and possession collide in the wild and splatter-y west as a pair of young lovers balance their feelings for one another against their deep calling to serve their faith.
Eve wants to be a nun, and Peter a priest, but is their attraction for one another stronger than the call to serve?
Eve becomes possessed by a demon and this sets off a trail of murder, sex, and fire across Texas, and Arizona as the couple head to California for an exorcism.
Dusty western towns, sunbaked mountains, and forgotten cemeteries prove to be the perfect places for the devil to hide.
Island of the Dead – Brian Keene
Sword and sorcery horror
Einar, an enslaved barbarian, plots his escape from a war galley transporting troops and a mysterious weapon to far enemy shores.
But when an apocalyptic storm at sea leaves Einar and his fellow captives shipwrecked on a strange, uncharted island, friend and foe alike must band together against a steadily growing horde of the undead … and even worse dangers.
Not even death is an escape from the Island of the Dead!
It Came From Inside – D.W. Hitz
Extreme horror – Book 5 of Custer Falls Extreme Horror
The town of Custer Falls never seems to quite heal from past events, but it’s trying. What better way than with love?
David and Ashley’s new job takes them down into the pit where an under-construction church collapsed. Their mission: to map and measure the newly discovered cave system. But what they find down there won’t help anyone rebuild.
Doug, the contractor on both the old church site and a demolition job on a burned-down house, senses the change coming to his town. He’s chosen a side, but the next 24 hours will decide if it’s the right one.
Rae just woke up with a hangover after breaking up with her girlfriend and partying all night. She just wants to move on with her life and get away from all the hassles. If she can just get through the day, she knows everything will be all right.
None of them are ready for what they find inside them. But maybe, just maybe, love can prevail.
The Party – Evan Attivo
Psychological horror
Stephen Bradford is a teenager who continually suffers from inner turmoil both from the family dysfunction he experiences at home as well as complications in school.
He decides he wants to throw a high school party right around the time his mother leaves for a business trip.
On the eve of the celebrations, Stephen begins to notice subtle changes in the atmosphere that call to mind traumatic and horrifying experiences from his childhood that are about to intermingle with the present in the most unexpected of ways.
He soon finds himself becoming manipulated and made an inner pawn in an unrelenting nightmare.
This House Will Never Be Warm – Paul Avery Tindol
Isolation horror
As Confederate soldier Martin Tomball faces death, freezing overnight on a battlefield, Mother Cold comes to make a deal; a deal that will curse his family for generations to come.
In the winter of 2021, Texas is hit with a state-wide ice storm, leaving millions of households without power.
Siblings Jasper and Autumn Tomball are going to have to find a plan to stay warm until the ice thaws, or until Mother Cold comes to collect her bargain.
Through the Midnight Door – Katrina Monroe
Psychological horror
Three sisters. Three keys. Three unspeakable horrors.
The Finch sisters once spent long, hot summers exploring the dozens of abandoned properties littering their dying town, until they found an impossible home with an endless hall of doors, and three keys left waiting for them. Curious, fearless, they stepped inside their chosen rooms, and experienced horrors they never dared speak of again.
Years later, youngest sister Claire has been discovered dead in that old, desiccated house. Haunted by their sister’s suicide and the memories of a past they’ve struggled to forget, Meg and Esther find themselves at bitter odds.
As they navigate the tensions of their brittle relationship, they draw unsettling lines between Claire’s death, their own haunted memories, and a long-ago loss no one in their family has ever been able to face.
With the house once again pulling them ever-closer, Meg and Esther must find the connection between their sister’s death and the shadow that has chased them across the years, before the darkness claims them, too.
Published: 17 August 2024
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