A Selection of Horror Books Released, 2 to 8 Jun 2024
Themes: Supernatural, Frankenstein, western, theme park, creature feature, dark fantasy, water, and body horror
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Table of Contents
The Abyss (Paperbacks from Hell) – Jere Cunningham
Supernatural horror
From the deepest mine in Tennessee, enter the darkest pit of hell…
New edition of Jere Cunningham’s The Abyss (1981) featuring a new introduction by Grady Hendrix and the original cover painting by Terry Oakes.
It is the deepest coal mine ever created. But when the miners dig too far, they violate the earth’s most ancient and closely guarded secret.
Now blood flows from faucets, and huge thorns tear the ground apart.
Now grotesque, half-seen creatures terrorize the town, as the stench of sulfur fills the air.
Now the legions of Hell itself raise their unspeakable dominion over heaven and earth from the Abyss.
Counted With the Dead – Peter O’Keefe
YA Frankenstein horror
A Detroit hitman trying to turn his life around is confronted by a monster created from the bodies of his victims.
Jack Killeen is done killing. The Detroit hitman has grown disgusted with his job and wants to turn his life around. Unfortunately for him, it’s too late: A mad surgeon has created a monster from the bodies of Killeen’s victims and the creature is animated by the damaged brain of Jack’s final target, Victor Moravian.
The Mob wants him dead, the cops want a piece of him, and his hard-nosed parish priest refuses to grant him absolution until he atones for his crimes. Complicating matters, Jack is in love with Marlene, Moravian’s widow, who wants him to use his particular set of skills to find her “missing” husband.
Jack’s only ally is his closeted factory worker brother Marty, whose homosexuality has strained their once close relationship and complicated the hitman’s relationship with his Mob bosses. Together they navigate the city’s underbelly and bitter racial divisions as they track the beast through the post-apocalyptic ruins of late ’90s Detroit.
Draw You In: Collector's Item – Jasper Bark
Psychological horror
Can you disappear so completely that only one person remembers you existed?
That’s what comics creator Linda Corrigan asks, when her editor, disappears without a trace. Drawn into an FBI investigation by Agent McPherson, Linda and comics historian Richard Ford unearth a chilling link to the forgotten comic artist R. L. Carver, whose work might just hold the key to a series of mysterious disappearances.
As they explore Carver’s life, they uncover the secret history of horror comics, the misfits, madcaps and macabre masters who forged an industry, frightened a generation and felt the heat of the Federal Government. They also stumble on the shadow history of the United States on a road trip that veers into the nation’s dark underbelly, where forbidden knowledge and forgotten lore await them.
In the Land of the Pigs – Caesar Ruell
Western horror
When the truly evil are transformed into pig creatures in a small Western town, a butcher is offered a deal whereby if he rids the land of these creatures, he’ll get his dead wife back.
Levi Harlen is a butcher in Crow’s River, struggling to get by, running his shop and taking care of his wife, Adeline, who has come down with a terrible illness. Within the wild, wretched town he lives in, Levi also has to contend with the violence and murder that have become startlingly commonplace, as of late. But those on higher plains have been watching, and they’ve decided that a correction is desperately needed.
Soon, a storm sweeps in, and the townsfolk deemed genuinely evil are transformed into pig-creatures – grotesque human-animal hybrids with otherworldly strength and an insatiable bloodlust. The most sinful among them, is a vicious outlaw named Benjamin Sidney, who lost a part of his skull in the war, causing him to speak in Shakespearian dialect, and who is thought to be the leader of the pigs.
When a celestial messenger informs Levi that his wife has succumbed to her disease, at the same time, she offers him a deal – cleanse the land of the creatures, and he will get Adeline back.
Lockjaw – Matteo L. Cerilli
YA supernatural horror
Death is neither the beginning nor the end for the children of Bridlington.
Chuck Warren died tragically at the old abandoned mill, but Paz Espino knows it was no accident – there’s a monster under the town, and she’s determined to kill it before anyone else gets hurt.
She’ll need the help of her crew – inseparable friends, bound by a childhood pact stronger than diamonds, distance or death – to hunt it down.
But she’s up against a greater force of evil than she ever could have imagined.
Malicia – Steven dos Santos
YA theme park horror
Four friends, three days, two lovers, and one very haunted theme park.
On a stormy Halloween weekend, Ray enlists his best friends Joaquin, Sofia, and Isabella to help him make a documentary of Malicia, the abandoned theme park off the coast of the Dominican Republic where his mother and brother died in a mass killing thirteen years ago.
But what should be an easy weekend trip quickly turns into something darker because all four friends have come to Malicia for their own reasons:
Ray has come to Malicia to find out the truth of the massacre that destroyed his family. Isabella has come to make art out of Ray’s tragedy for her own personal gain. Sofia has come to support her friends in one last adventure before she goes to med school. Joaquin already knows the truth of the Malicia Massacre and he has come to betray his crush Ray to the evil that made the park possible.
Small Town Horror – Ronald Malfi
Supernatural horror
Five childhood friends are forced to confront their own dark past as well as the curse placed upon them.
Andrew Larimer has left his past behind. Rising up the ranks in a New York law firm, and with a heavily pregnant wife, he is settling into a new life far from Kingsport, the town in which he grew up. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he has no choice but to return home.
Coming home means returning to his late father’s house, which has seen better days. It means lying to his wife. But it also means reuniting with his friends: Eric, now the town’s deputy sheriff; Dale, a real-estate mogul living in the shadow of a failed career; his childhood sweetheart Tig who never could escape town; and poor Meach, whose ravings about a curse upon the group have driven him to drugs and alcohol.
Together, the five friends will have to confront the memories, and the horror, of a night, years ago, that changed everything for them.
Because Andrew and his friends have a secret. A thing they have kept to themselves for twenty years. Something no one else should know.
Squirm: The Novelization – Richard Curtis/Jeff Lieberman
Creature feature horror – Part of Encyclopocalypse Movie Tie-In Series
A sleepy Southern town doesn’t know what’s hit it when a freak nightmare of a storm brings down the overhead electric power lines which then direct a massive electrical charge into the wet mud.
And that’s just the beginning.
An angry, rampaging mass of carnivorous superworms is the most terrifying threat ever to be unleashed on (or under) the surface of the planet.
Tidal Creatures – Seanan McGuire
Dark fantasy horror – Part of Alchemical Journeys
Someone is killing the moon gods in an attempt to control the Impossible City.
All across the world, people look up at the moon and dream of gods. Gods of knowledge and wisdom, gods of tides and longevity. Over time, some of these moon gods incarnated into the human world alongside the other manifest natural concepts. Their job is to cross the sky above the Impossible City, the heart of all creation, to keep it connected to reality.
And someone is killing them.
There are so many of them that it’s easy for a few disappearances to slip through the cracks. But they aren’t limitless.
In the name of the moon, the lunar divinities must uncover the roots of the plot and thwart the true goal of those behind these attacks: control of the Impossible City itself.
Weird Tales of the Great Lakes – Aleco Julius
Water horror collection
A collection of stories inspired by the legendary lore of the Great Lakes.
These inland seas are home to a mythos of tragedy and beauty, where glaciers have carved out the contours of the land in ages past, and enigmas hide beneath the troubled waves.
An archeology student has an aquatic encounter with an ancient deity. One woman’s shipwrecked fate is mysteriously avenged. Friends on a fishing trip catch something far stranger than they could have imagined. A man becomes obsessed with collecting seashells before realizing the dread significance of their patterns.
youthjuice – E.K. Sathue
Comedy body horror
A 29-year-old copywriter realizes that beauty is possible, but at a terrible cost.
From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE (hee-bee), a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood and named after the Greek goddess of youth, it’s clear something is deeply amiss.
But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence, and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.
Soon, Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle, especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturizer Tree has asked Sophia to test. But when cracks in HEBE’s infrastructure start to worsen and Sophia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youthjuice, she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to stay beautiful forever.
Published: 8 June 2024
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