At the Hour of Violence – Robert Essig
Supernatural horror
From the outside, Owen’s life is the picture-perfect representation of the nuclear family, all bright and shiny and smiling and happy and hurting and struggling and goddamn when will I get a break from this fucking nightmare?!
But Owen is a good man running a successful business who is there to help his wife through her struggles and help with the kids and he is friendly with the neighbors and clenches his teeth and worries and wonders how much more I can take until I lose my ever-loving mind!!!
All the while, something stalks the night in human form and yet cannot be detected for these beings have no fingerprints, no hair, nothing distinguishable. They wander the streets, frolicking in a land of destruction, harming people for kicks, killing without consequence. They wander into Owen’s neighborhood like a physical manifestation of his inner animus. But what happens when their worlds collide?
Cancel Culture – Matt Shaw
Psychological horror
A creative soul who is stuck in a rut as he watches the online community he once thrived in systemically destroy itself with vocal members demanding for the cancelation of those they perceive to be “problematic”. The constant online bickering and back-stabbing has distracted him from his work and his output has dropped significantly while he ponders whether he even wants to be a part of this world anymore. It’s not just his creative work that’s suffered either.
He’s so wrapped up in what’s happening within the online world that he’s also been neglecting his wife who has, finally, had enough of this lifestyle. The request for a divorce comes out of the blue and sends his mental health spiralling. He was always so worried about being cancelled online that he never expected it would be his wife who’d be cancelling him.
Perhaps, if it had been less of a surprise, he may well have handled it better? And certainly with less violence.
The Corpse Priest – Carson Winter
Dark fantasy horror
Some would call him a warrior, others a priest.
When Corpse wanders into the city of Dross Toll, he runs afoul of a sadistic count hellbent on his destruction.
But when forced to flee into the surrounding forest, he encounters threats darker than a nobleman’s rage.
The Curse of Hester Gardens – Tamika Thompson
Supernatural horror
A mother desperate to protect her sons from gun violence and otherworldly menace in their public housing project.
Nona McKinley raised three boys in the Hester Gardens section of Medford, Michigan, an impoverished community divided by those who follow their faith in God and those who turn to crime to survive. With her drug dealer husband behind bars and her eldest son shot to death at eighteen, Nona has devoted herself to ensuring her other children escape their brother’s fate.
Her second son Marcus is on the right path. He’s a valedictorian heading to an Ivy League school. He can get out.
But then, strange things start happening to Nona and other residents: mysterious footsteps are heard when she’s alone, people have phantom encounters in the streets, unattended appliances go off at all hours. Even more concerning is the state of Nona’s living sons. Her youngest, Lance, is hanging around with a bad crowd, and Marcus becomes moody and secretive. Sometimes he even seems to act like a different person entirely.
Nona has her secrets too. Her affair with the married church pastor has been weighing on her conscience, but that’s not the only guilt haunting her. She fears that someone, or something, is seeking revenge for an act she made in a moment of weakness to protect her family. And now everyone in Hester Gardens must pay the price.
The Fourth Wife – Linda Hamilton
Gothic horror
A young Mormon woman is haunted by a malevolent presence in the decrepit Salt Lake City mansion she shares with her new husband and his other wives.
Hazel Russon’s life in 1882 Utah territory is defined by three things: the Mormon church, polygamy, and the men who control both. She knows she’s supposed to suppress her sinful dreams of a monogamous life with her sweetheart, and her desire for the freedom to play her beloved piano. Every Mormon woman’s duty is to live obediently and meekly, devoted to her husband and her calling as a sister wife. Her eternal salvation depends upon it.
Commanded to become the fourth wife of a man she’s never met, Hazel is relieved that Jacob Manwaring is attentive and handsome. However, she is shocked to discover that instead of living separately as is custom, all of Jacob’s wives and children live in the same house, a large, dilapidated manor that inexplicably fills Hazel with dread.
Despite Jacob’s tenderness, Hazel senses dark secrets and resentments among her sister wives. She hears strange music, sees blood oozing from the very walls, and glimpses apparitions that grow more terrifying every day. And as her nightmares worsen, Hazel can’t be sure if she has more to fear from the living, including her mysterious husband, or from a sinister presence that seems to animate the house itself.
Hostile Architecture – Joseph Murnane
Supernatural horror
He may be homeless but Ben is making the best of things. He has a tent, he has access to food, and even has a couple friends.
However, when a mysterious stranger appears, offering food and safety to him and his friend Connor, his instincts tell him not to trust it, instincts that are proven right when Connor is nowhere to be found the next day.
Someone or something has been culling the vagrant population and nobody seems to notice or care, so when he sees the stranger again, Ben will have to follow him to the source, even if his pursuit of truth brings him all the way down to a Hell he may never escape.
Because The Worm Mother has been waiting for a very long time, and has no intention of letting him go.
Monumental – Adam Nevill
Wilderness survival
Life and death in the wilderness, and extreme survival against supernatural powers.
Disaster strikes quickly and without warning. What should have been a glorious weekend of kayaking and camping, in a secluded beauty spot, is transformed by a scream. The first crisis, initiating a deadly momentum that accelerates as the valley reveals itself to Marcus and his five companions.
They’re trespassing on strictly private land. There’s only one way out. An escape route closed until the next high tide fills the estuary. In twelve hours’ time.
Recreation becomes survival.
Marooned, unable to summon help, harassed by dire and worsening circumstances, the ties that bind the expedition are stretched taut. If they snap, vital cooperation will unravel and the group members’ damning secrets will be revealed.
Only the most courageous and committed have any chance against the area’s inhabitants. But is any mind strong enough to endure a confrontation with the most hideous revelation of all? An ancient evil that coils beneath the valley’s sinister folklore.
Nothing Tastes as Good – Luke Dumas
Psychological horror
He finally got the body he wanted. Now he’s hungry for something worse.
Retail worker Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mold of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. Over three hundred pounds, he carries the weight of his childhood trauma and millennial ennui around his waist and in his soul. After trying every diet under the sun, he remains stuck, in his dead-end job, in love, and in his body.
Desperate for help, he enrolls in a clinical trial for a new weight loss product called Obexity. The treatment is as horrifying as the results are miraculous and as Emmett sheds pounds at superhuman speed, every part of his life improves overnight.
Unfortunately, Obexity comes with some killer side effects, including lost stretches of time and overwhelming cravings. Worse, people who were cruel to him have started disappearing and when the police warn of a cannibalistic killer on the loose, he fears that Obexity is turning him into a monster. But how can he give it up now that people are finally starting to treat him like he’s human?
A Spell for Saints and Sinners – Emily Carpenter
Psychological horror
In a city where ghosts linger in the moss and money buys salvation, a struggling psychic is drawn into Savannah’s glittering elite, as obsession and need curdle the lines between magic and madness, seduction and salvation, pirates and protectors.
In front of an elegantly shabby townhouse on a Savannah side street sits a hand-painted sign: Miss Edie, Psychic. Ingrid White inherited the house and business from her beloved grandmother, a local celebrity in town. But unless Ingrid can find a way to pay for crushing property taxes and mounting repairs, she’s going to lose them both.
Ingrid has faith in the homespun witchcraft Edie passed down to her, yet hope and clients are dwindling. Until Sailor Loeffler’s bachelorette party changes everything. Sailor is local royalty, part of the vast “Savannah Sauce” empire, beautiful and wealthy beyond imagining, and Ingrid’s reading is so accurate that she becomes the bride-to-be’s confidante. To keep that access and all the privileges it brings, Ingrid relies more and more on hexes and dark spells, using the baneful magic Edie always warned her against.
As Ingrid works even riskier spells, she is drawn further into the Loefflers’ inner circle and the obstacles in her path melt away. But is it witchcraft or other, more earthbound forces? Ingrid can feel the lines blurring even as her powers seem to grow, until she must confront the truth about just how far some people, including herself, will go to keep the life they’ve always wanted.
Where No Shadow Stays – Sara Hashem
YA supernatural horror
A homecoming queen and a bad-boy loner team up to break a generational curse.
Seventeen-year-old Mina is always focused on what comes next: exams, school dances, lakeside picnics with friends. Looking to the future keeps her from dwelling on her past and how little she knows about where she comes from. Anytime she asks her father questions about Egypt, or about her mother’s mysterious death, he closes up.
So, when Mina receives an invitation from an aunt she’s never met to visit the Haikal mansion, her mother’s childhood home in El Agamy, she decides it’s time to find her own answers. Mina travels to Egypt in secret, eager to learn more about her roots and what really happened to her mother.
But when Mina returns from El Agamy, she doesn’t come back alone.
