The Buried Curse – Donovan A. Parsons
Psychological horror
Mark, a twenty-one-year-old college student, is drowning in grief. The death of his grandfather has left him unmoored, desperate to escape a life that no longer feels like his own.
A weekend camping trip with old friends offers that escape, a chance to disappear into the wilderness deep within the forest that rests on land his grandfather once owned and feared. But the woods are not as empty as they seem.
Stricken by nightmares born from the fables his grandfather once told him, Mark becomes haunted by visions of an ancient entity known as the Dread Form. What he once dismissed as delirium begins to return with unsettling clarity, no longer a story, but a warning he was never meant to ignore. A curse buried deep within his bloodline is beginning to stir.
As fear tightens its hold and reality begins to fracture, the man Ashley loves starts to slip away from himself. Memories blur. Violence erupts without reason. And the land begins to remember what was buried beneath it.
The Caretaker – Marcus Kliewer
Supernatural horror
Follow the Rites… Nothing less than the survival of humanity is at stake.
A young woman accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater, and more dangerous, than she ever could have imagined.
EXCITING OPPORTUNITY: Caretaker urgently needed. Three days of work. Competitive pay. Serious applicants ONLY.
Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting grabbed her attention. It had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all; vaguely ominous.
But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she’s not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for.
Besides, it’s only three days’ work…
Three days, cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness.
What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property, and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity.
Come Sing for the Harrowing – Dan Coxon
Horror collection
18 stories invoking the sense of natural surreal found in Midsommar, always a little to the left of what’s expected.
A young man working at a tourist attraction is singled out for unholy transformation, a gang of burglars are ambushed with something unworldly when they attempt to rob a local farm, and a daughter seeks revenge on her abusive father after his death.
May the Dead Keep You – Jill Baguchinsky
Gothic horror
There’s nowhere Catie East would rather be than the redwood forest that surrounds her family’s unusual historic home, the Heights.
She prefers being alone in the forest. People are complicated. But when a scientist and his son move into the estate’s cottage, planning to study the woods around them, the boy catches Catie’s eye. And when a dead woodpecker miraculously comes back to life in his precious hands, he captures her heart.
Necromancy isn’t the only strange thing happening in the Heights. There’s an unfamiliar face in the mirror. Blood on the floors. Eyes in the wallpaper. And the men around her, including her once-sweet nature boy, are becoming something else. Something possessive and frightening. Something violent.
As the Heights’s dark history starts to come to light, Catie discovers that the home she loves is imbued with pain. And even though the pain isn’t her own, it will corrupt her and the people around her all the same, unless she can stop it.
Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King – Caroline Bicks
Horror nonfiction
After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maineʼs inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process, most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?
Bicks focuses on five of his most iconic early works – The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift – to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.
Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.
October Rust – Ray Van Horn Jr
Ghost horror
Mickey Pelligrini has put her life together after running with the wrong crowd in her teen years and committing numerous street crimes including first degree assault.
Now an adult in her mid-twenties, Mickey holds a steady job and she is engaged to the love of her life, Hector Suarez. If Mickey has any adversities in life, however, it’s alcohol addiction.
That, and an entity stalking her every turn. What first emerges as a shadow being capable of verbal communication, the relentless phenomenon tormenting Mickey reveals even more horrible attributes, including the ability to delve physical harm.
It will take Mickey’s new family-to-be, plus a local paranormal investigator to fight the evil shade, a literal ghost from the past intent on destroying her life.
Odessa – Gabrielle Sher
Historical horror
In Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave.
Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother’s anxiety, her father’s rules, and the path that’s been laid out for her, she craves freedom, the edges of which she doesn’t know. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.
Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned, but although she looks the same, she is not the girl she once was. Yetta senses there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, something that may be of her father’s making, and a being that has plans of its own.
Older Than Ghosts – Brandon White
Supernatural horror
In the middle of the night, Daniel and his mother flee their burning home in Mississippi for a bus bound to Chicago. There they find brief peace and safety at his grandparents’ house. But Daniel’s mother cannot resist the siren call of a tumultuous relationship and soon abandons Daniel to go back to her abusive partner.
At thirteen, Daniel believes he’s almost a man. So it’s his responsibility to rescue his mother.
When an ancient spirit attached to his family becomes interested in his quest, their partnership will both test and temper the love between family members and the lengths they’re willing to go to save one another.
The Spirit Room – Nicole Givens Kurtz
Southern gothic horror collection
12 stories from the world left by crumbling plantations, Jim Crow, and generational poverty.
Gone are the ancient mansions and good ol’ boys, replaced with southern streets and battles for justice.
A celebration of the Southern heart, the pride and persistence that keeps fighting no matter what pain it endures.
Split Scream: Cursed Places – Sonora Taylor and Matthew Pritt
2 x curse horror novelettes
Sonora Taylor’s Passing Glance: Washington, D.C.’ s sprawling and storied Moore Mansion is built upon intrigue and secrecy, playing host to both political elites and the merely curious alike. Its labyrinthine rooms and passageways, festooned in eclectic art and mysterious mirrors, captivate all who explore them.
Dylan arrives at the mansion for her friend’ s 30th birthday party at a crossroads of her own: adrift, eager to reunite with old friends, and seeking to rekindle a long-held lust for one of the group. But tonight she will discover the true terrifying secrets of Moore Mansion: a house built to be a city, and one which unfolds like a trap.
Matthew Pritt’s Lash Egg: The people of the Doe’ s country walk in the Balance, attuned to the land and guided by their benevolent nature spirit. For Ben, a refugee who narrowly escaped the madness-infested Bear’ s country to the south, the Doe remains a mystery. Ben has never heard the Doe speak, and marvels at his neighbors’ firsthand experiences with his new home’ s Protector.
Fortunately his ten-year-old daughter, Lydia, doesn’ t share his struggles, and adapts to life in the Doe with ease. But when a mysterious wasting plague attacks the local wildlife, Ben suspects he is the cause of it. As the plague spreads and threatens to collapse the Doe’ s entire ecosystem, Ben must discover how he has offended the Doe, or risk losing the only safe place he and his daughter have ever known.
Thrall – Rebecca Mahoney
Vampire horror
A young woman looking for a transformative college experience is bitten by a vampire and teams up with his other living victims to hunt him down.
Lucy Easting has at last broken free from her grim home life and is ready to truly live. But her long-awaited new beginning at Rollins University isn’t what she expected. After attending the first campus party of the year, Lucy awakens the next day with a memory block, and two puncture marks on her neck.
She tries to piece together what happened that night, but every lead brings her to another dead end. Until she receives a handwritten note from the campus radio station, inviting her to call. When she does, the host’s soothing voice over the line confirms her worst fear, and the simplest explanation of what’s happening to her: she’s turning into a vampire.
Lucy teams up with the show’s host, who narrowly escaped an attack her sophomore year, and a beautiful archery champion who, while exactly Lucy’s type, is as likely to shoot her as kiss her. They believe their “friend with the cold hands” is responsible for the disappearance of several women in town, and they’ve been tracking him via the airwaves since long before Lucy arrived.
As the vampire’s sway over Lucy grows and his plans become clear, she realizes she must fight for a future of her own, or she may not have any future at all.
The Urbex Trip – E.M. Lund
Psychological horror
Eloise Tiller didn’t murder her cheating boyfriend. Too bad nobody believes her. When no charges are brought against her, all she wants is to escape the whispers and start over, so she moves six thousand miles away to teach English in Japan. The only problem? The violent intrusive thoughts she’s been having – knives, blood, betrayal – have come with her.
When she’s invited to the tropical island of Okinawa for an eight-person urban exploration, Eloise agrees to the “urbex trip” in the hopes of getting to know her crush better. Their destination is an old resort atop remote cliff that was abandoned in the mid-seventies under shadowy circumstances.
Soon, the bad thoughts take over. After a violent storm leaves the group stranded in the resort, they find Eloise’s crush unconscious and brutally injured. And when wakes, he implies it was Eloise who attacked him. As the others seem to turn against her, Eloise begins to have strange visions of a corpse-like young woman appearing throughout the resort. Her only ally is an offbeat backpacker who doesn’t seem to care what anyone else thinks.
And, as it happens, he’s also seen dead people in the resort.
More members go missing one by one, and Eloise’s only hope of getting out alive is to figure out what’s real, and who to trust-her alleged friends, the mysterious stranger she’s oddly drawn to, or her own broken mind.
The Wendigo Hunter – Kathleen Greer
Creature horror
Deep in the forests surrounding Lake Winnipesaukee, something ancient stalks its prey. Once it was a man. Now a Wendigo.
A demon of hunger and cold, the creature prowls the wilderness, driven by an insatiable craving for human flesh.
But the monster in the woods is only part of the nightmare.
Robert Radnor, known throughout Boston as “The Phenomenon” for exposing fraudulent mediums, spirit-talkers, and occult charlatans, has come to the Big Lake seeking a quiet summer with his wife Jo and her sister Isobel. Their destination is Miramar Hall, the sprawling lakeside estate of Radnor’s former Civil War commander.
Yet the moment they arrive, Rob senses something deeply wrong.
The family that rules Miramar Hall hides secrets older than the house itself. Strange happenings plague the surrounding forest. And whispers of a terrible creature begin to surface, something hunting in the dark woods beyond the lake.
As Radnor digs deeper into the mystery, the lines between superstition and reality begin to blur. Corruption, greed, and long-buried sins converge in a deadly conspiracy that may awaken forces far more dangerous than any ghost story.
And somewhere in the forest, the Wendigo waits.
Wildcat Thicket – Elford Alley
Creature horror
In the dying Texas town of Lagoe, Ry and Erin are just trying to survive.
Trapped in a crumbling trailer, dogged by debt, and surrounded by ghosts of a better future.
When their reclusive landlord vanishes deep within the woods of Wildcat Thicket, and something starts creeping towards their home at night, knocking, whistling, mocking; they realise their worst fears aren’t late bills or speeding fines.
Something is out there waiting for them, something pre-historic, mimicking, hungry.
