All Hallows Eve – Ellen Datlow (editor)
Halloween horror anthology
19 original short stories from a world-class line-up of the masters of horror, delving into the histories and traditions of the spookiest season of the year.
Halloween, Samhain, Día de los Muertos – festivals across the world where we can commune with those we have lost, when spirits can cross over, and when the boundary between the living and the dead is far, far too thin.
A young boy encounters a woman with an ancient and terrifying link to the holiday, a group of college students attend a Halloween party to die for, and a troubled girl exploits a local urban legend to try and turn her life around.
From America to New Zealand via the rural Romanian wilderness, this anthology explores our worldwide obsession with the spookiest season of the year, when the veil is lifted and the spirits come alive.
Black Arts – Megan Giddings
Horror collection
Over the course of thirteen stories, we navigate complex family relationships, romances both troubled and charmed, and events that straddle the supernatural and the all-too-real.
Including disintegrating husbands, seductive ghosts, and artists communing with the supernatural to find their voice.
Darling – Mercedes M. Yardley
Southern gothic horror
Cherry LaRouche escaped the claws of Darling, Louisiana, at sixteen. When she returns after her mother’s death, Cherry and her children are forced into a nightmare where evil spreads like infection and the house itself demands her bones.
While Cherry tries to separate fact from fantasy, the locals discover the bodies of several murdered children. When Cherry’s own daughter goes missing, she’s forced to face everything she had fled from and confront the true monsters of Darling.
Daughter of Rot – Rios de la Luz
Psychological horror
When the Velasquez family moves into a quaint adobe home surrounded by forest, it’s the beginning of Isela’s dream life. Isela Velasquez is a pathological liar with strange impulses that terrorize her at night. She wants the perfect family, but she regrets becoming a mother.
Olivia Velasquez is four years old when she first meets the house. Spending most of her days alone, Olivia befriends the house and looks after it. At night, the house whispers into Olivia’s dreams, creating a bond between them.
The house takes on a maternal role after it gives birth to a brand new room. An immaculate conception, turning the two-bedroom house into a three-bedroom home. The new room lures Isela inside and shows her pieces of herself that she’s refused to look at in her adult life. It teases her. It haunts her. When Olivia gathers the courage to enter the newly born room, she finds warmth and safety. The room creates lush and vibrant ecosystems right before her eyes.
Driven – Mason Coile
Psychological horror
Jamie Newcross wants to disappear. His wife and baby girl have abandoned him, and his only wish is to retreat from society. Because, as it turns out, Jamie Newcross is also being haunted. Every house, condo, or apartment he moves into is plagued with ghosts, at the end of the bed or when pulling back the shower curtain. He hasn’t been able to sleep in weeks.
But Jamie has a plan. He posts queries online and finds someone wanting to get rid of their Lion – the world’s most advanced self-driving car – a sleek, private, contained vessel that is one-hundred percent safe. Or so he thought.
Because now, Jamie has woken up to the Lion speeding down a dark road, the hood is dented and the car will not respond, or stop, or let him out.
As the miles rack up and Jamie becomes increasingly complicit in his car’s choices, he’s forced to face the tragic past he has kept buried.
He Who Has Done Evil – Jack Finn
Historical supernatural horror
In 1914, Irish policeman Woodrow Tierney joins the British war effort and is sent to Antwerp. Before reaching the front lines, he is assigned a secret task: interrogate two veterans of the Anglo-Zulu War who claim a Zulu demon is hunting and killing the last survivors of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.
As the German assault on Antwerp intensifies, Woodrow questions the men in the ammunition vaults beneath the fort’s gun turrets. Their account of the demon begins to mirror the nightmares that have been tormenting him.
How to Survive Camping: The Ancient Things – Bonnie Quinn
Cosy summer camp horror – Book 3 of How to Survive Camping
Every year, campground manager Kate sends out a pamphlet titled “How to Survive Your Camping Experience.” In it is a list of rules to help campers have an enjoyable experience and hopefully survive any encounters with the campground’s…other…inhabitants.
With the land turning ancient, it is no longer just the campers who are in danger. Kate is the key and every inhuman entity is out for her blood. All the lesser creatures are making attempts on her life, but Kate isn’t willing to let her land go without a fight. If these creatures are going to hunt her, then she’ll hunt them in turn and eradicate everything from her land that cannot coexist with humanity. With the help of both her inhuman and human allies, it looks like Kate might actually have a chance at controlling the campground. But ancient land attracts ancient things, and the town has a bad history with ancient creatures.
A new entity has come to the campground, bearing an old grudge against one of the inhabitants. Its malevolent designs will put the entire land at risk, unless Kate can stop it.
A Mother’s Rage – John Evans
Revenge horror
Deep in the Alaskan wilderness, a wrong has been committed.
After a severely injured mother loses her two kids to arrogant hunters, she slowly goes crazy and fixes her sights on revenge.
But what’s a little murderous rampage when you have nothing left to lose?
Pictures of You – Josh Malerman
Psychological horror
A woman becomes the unknowing subject of an artist’s dangerous work.
After a magical night out on the town with her boyfriend Jack, Emily wakes alone in a huge bed in a beautiful, well-lit room. But the pink ceiling, the mauve walls, and the deep, dark corners are nothing like the hotel she and Jack rented.
More worrisome yet: Emily has no memory of this place from the night before.
A woman’s voice directs her to remain in bed.
And beyond the end of the bed, a picture frame upon an easel, a frame with no canvas, no painting, no art.
Only there is the silhouette of a person Emily does not recognize. A person emanating demand, danger, evil. And the way the woman talks, and the things she says… She’s acting as if Emily herself is the painting. The still life. The art.
Emily is as scared as she is confused. But it’s immediately clear Jack’s life is on the line with her own. And if she attempts to escape the bed and the wood frame of this nightmare masterwork, neither will survive the experience.
Emily is fierce, independent, brilliant, but to get out of this, she’ll have to think like an artist herself.
The clock is ticking. For Emily. For Jack. For being forever trapped.
The Quiet Resurrection of Sister Evelida Livingston – Nick Wallin
Supernatural horror
Witchcraft was just a game. Until the bodies started piling up.
Cinnamon Christine Carmichael doesn’t remember the killings. Not at first. But the blood on her hands, the whispers in her head, and the smile on her best friend Hedda’s face say enough. Something has been unleashed, and it’s using them to grow.
Two teenagers are burned alive in a corn maze as the crowd watches, paralyzed, filming every second. It’s the latest in a string of ritualistic murders that defy explanation. Sheriff Henry McGinty has seen a lot in his time, but nothing like this.
So he calls in Sister Eve.
Eve sees what others can’t: echoes of the dead, glimpses of the future. But this time, the visions are fragmented. Wrong. As if something is blocking her sight. Something old. Something evil. Something wearing the face of her mother, reincarnated in the body of a teenage girl.
As Halloween nears, Cinnamon’s coven races to complete a ritual that could bring the Devil himself to earth, and Eve, Henry, and irreverent deputy Fink may be the last line of defense between our world and utter damnation.
Once the spell begins, it can’t be undone.
And Hell is already watching.
A River Wide – Amanda J. McGee
Supernatural horror
Mountains have deep, dark hearts, and those hearts are carved by water.
Deep in the shadowed hollers of Appalachia, Rhia Blackburn has always kept her powers and her heart buried. Around here, the river whispers dark secrets, the earth remembers every cut, and survival is a skill women pass down in blood.
But when her cousin Amey is kidnapped up the mountain, Rhia is forced to confront the terror of her home and her own troubled history.
To save her, Rhia must trust her powers-and herself-because in Appalachia, family comes first and water always finds a way.
She’s a Doll – Barbara Truelove
Psychological horror
Lucy isn’t like other girls. She’s a doll on a mission: to find the man who killed her and return the favor.
Lucy McQuinn has been murdered, but she’s not about to go quietly.
If she doesn’t get to keep breathing, then neither does Kyle, her killer. Possessing the body of an antique doll, she sets out on a quest for revenge. But it’s hard when you’re eighteen inches tall and made of porcelain.
For help, she turns to Nicola, a human and fellow outsider with her own reasons to hate Kyle. But in their small idyllic town, no one wants to hear the truth, especially not about such a promising young man. If they can’t expose his crimes, Lucy will have to roll up her lacy little sleeves and teach him a lesson the old-fashioned way, as slowly and painfully as possible.
Strange is the Light – Sarah Maria Griffin
Psychological horror
A group of estranged childhood friends are called back to the island where they spent their summers to play the next round of an uncanny tabletop RPG with a mind of its own.
Daphne McSharry was forever waiting for the summer as a child–an escape from a dreary Dublin council estate to the wild freedom of the coastal village Valentia, where she and her inseparable friends ran gloriously feral.
As an adult, Daphne hasn’t returned to Valentia for nearly 20 years, nor seen the faces she once knew better than her own. Back then, an off-season visit that began with an invitation to test a tabletop RPG, one set in the secretive, cherished imaginary world they’d created as children.
Unbeknownst to them, they’d been playing not just with each other, but with something much stranger at the table, too…and each roll further tore apart the fabric of time and space, warping their perception and bleeding into the real world.
When Daphne’s final turn was played, she made a choice she could not reverse, and her defiance had a terrible cost.
Now, the four remaining players must return to Valentia to face the secrets and betrayals of the past to decide who, if any of them, will be allowed to have a future.
The Wellness Retreat – Dawn Kurtagich
Psychological horror
At an exclusive health retreat on a remote Scottish island, miraculous treatments offered to wealthy clientele may not be precisely what they seem.
Perfection comes at a cost.
Jaimie Vane used to measure her life in concert halls and standing ovations. Now she measures it in symptoms. The chronic illness that ended her career as a cellist doesn’t have a name or a cure, just a long list of things her body can’t do anymore.
When her wild child younger sister Sybil reinvents herself as a live-in staffer at an ultra-exclusive wellness retreat, Jaimie assumes it’s another phase.
Until her messages stop.
Until the voucher arrives.
Talamh Dhubh, a black-sand island in the middle of a wintery sea and home to Saoghal Spa, is a place for guests to be reborn. The founder, the enigmatic and glamorous Cyan Blache, promises restoration. Clarity. Transcendence. Whatever ails you, Saoghal will draw it from you. For guests willing to surrender completely, body and soul, the results are nothing short of miraculous.
Jaimie tells herself she’s only there to find Sybil. Not to drink organic detox smoothies or pour herself onto canvas in art therapy. Not to lie in the mineral baths and bask in the curiously soothing black mud. Not to believe the guests and staff who say Saoghal changed their lives.
But the longer she stays, the lighter her body feels. The quieter her pain becomes. The easier it is to forget what she was like before she got sick.
At Saoghal, healing is real.
And so is the cost.
Because the island doesn’t merely cure the visitors who revel in the embrace of its rich, black mud…it ensnares them. And the ones who arrive broken don’t always leave.
Wildwood – Ashley Woo
Gothic horror
It seems like divine intervention when newly pregnant and freshly unemployed Elinor unexpectedly inherits Wildwood, her family’s estate. She convinces her husband to move to the sprawling wilderness of rural Vermont to make a home and raise their baby.
Estranged from her extended family since childhood, Wildwood is a mystery to Elinor. She’s an outsider to the townsfolk and to the prominent Brook family who control the town and its history. Knowing little of the house or its past, save for snapshots of childhood memories, she becomes entranced by an eerie nineteenth-century mural in the primary bedroom she calls “the Forest of the Dead.”
But instead of growing more settled in her new home, Elinor feels increasingly isolated and uneasy. She begins to have dreams that feel like memories, phantasmagorical visions of something terrible that happened long ago. Haunted by the mystery of why her family fell apart, she’s determined to uncover the secrets of her ancestry buried deep in the past and even deeper in the woods. secrets kept by powerful forces within the house and within the town.
Obsessed with finding the truth, Elinor knows she must answer when “the Forest of the Dead” calls her. Someone wants her to know they were there first, and someone else is trying to get in. As the nightmares creep into her waking hours, Elinor embarks on a journey that takes her back and forth in time, to the dark recesses of memories, to the streets of modern Salem, and to the haunted corners of this otherworldy house.
The Forest of the Dead is calling. Can you hear the whispers?
