Between These Walls and Other Traps – Stephen Barnard
Horror collection
The walls are closing in.
Not necessarily the physical, but the barriers we create for ourselves emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Or those restrictions we have thrust upon us by others, by situations, by life…
14 short stories exploring the contents of these cages, and the horrors we might find in there.
Caroline – living on the frontier of the new world with her meanspirited husband – feels the walls closing in, until the day the devil comes to Hardplace.
Alan Ray Reed Jr should be in prison, but now he’s woken up in a room that might make him wish he was back in his filthy cell.
Joe feels trapped by the life created for him by his oppressive parents, and even more so at Christmas time. However, things are about to change when his Father’s boss comes around for the annual festive feed.
Kane Pettison is a petty criminal, a slave to the routine of street theft. He pawns whatever he steals, but this time he’s taken more than just a handbag from his victim. Something he can’t give back. He’ll just have to reap what he sows…
Blood of Mine – Shawn Wayne Langhans
Psychological horror
As far back as she could remember, she always wanted to be a mother. This would have been her fairy tale ending.
Somewhere in Santa Barbara, between the drugs and the crimes committed to afford them, Lydia lost sight of that. By the time her boy was born, she had already lost him due to her own addiction that she had shared with the newborn.
Not long after the powers that be took her baby James, she would lose her freedom as well. Her parents, long ago having disowned their daughter, the disgrace, would raise this child in her place. They would deny their new son knowledge of their daughter’s existence. This lie, it would destroy the lives of everyone it touched.
With a twenty-year prison sentence ahead of her Lydia bode her time, waiting for the day she would return to her son.
This is not her fairy tale, nor does everyone ever really live happily ever after. This is the story of a mother and her lies, her son and his, her parents and theirs.
Burning Palms – Jess Hagemann
Psychological horror movie novelization
5 interlocking stories unfold across the sun-bleached sprawl of the city, each one probing a different taboo, each one drifting deeper into moral freefall.
A father’s bond with his precocious daughter curdles into something problematic.
A woman’s romantic devotion is dismantled by a single request in the bedroom.
A privileged couple imports a human life as casually as a fashion accessory.
A group of unsupervised boys invents games no one should play.
A lonely woman confronts her attacker and asks for something unthinkable.
Devil Inside – Clay McLeod Chapman
Psychological horror
A man who’s back from the dead meets a woman who’s from somewhere even worse.
After a traumatic accident that almost cost Jordan his life, he’s finally starting to feel normal again. Well, maybe not normal. Everything tastes like ash, and when he looks at the people around him, their faces start to melt. At least he’s not dead, right? His friends are doing their best to get him back on his feet, maybe find someone to talk to, perhaps even find someone to take his mind off his last failed relationship.
Then he meets Lilith. The two share an instant connection but after a wild and passionate night together, she ghosts him. Jordan searches the city for Lilith, desperate to see her again. But when a woman claiming to be Lilith shows up, wearing a different face but knowing intimate details about Jordan, he worries he’s losing his grip on reality. As he grows closer to this mysterious woman, he discovers that happily ever afters sometimes come at a cost. How far will Lilith take him, and how much darkness will he embrace to find love?
Dreamland – Olivie Blake
Supernatural horror
The headlines are calling it the “summer of exsanguination” in LA: girls are being murdered, the Santa Ana winds are blowing a strange energy into the city, and all signs point to fire season.
More pressing for Anya Morris, though, is the drudgery of living at home, working part time at the family store, and contending with her mother’s disdain for the acting career Anya knows she’s destined for but that feels more impossible by the day.
It’s in this suffocating late summer heat that Anya receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, an invitation to work for the de Witt family, one of LA’s most influential film dynasties. Soon, she’s spending her days and nights at their strange villa high in the Hollywood Hills, where she meets Jude, a recluse who is both the family’s heir apparent and its most closely guarded secret.
There’s a magnetism to Jude that Anya cannot resist, despite warning signs that scream like sirens in the night. Because the villa holds generations of bloodstained history, and an occult family curse may even live within its walls―or within Jude himself.
In this city, everyone cuts a deal with the devil. When Anya comes face to face with a devil of her own, she’ll learn just how far she’s willing to go to get everything she’s ever wanted.
Godfestation – Jendia Gammon
Gothic folk horror
Following the death of her father, Ivy “Fern” Fernberg encounters monstrous beings and strange people.
Initially brushing them off as hallucinations brought on by grief, she soon realizes that she is not the only one experiencing these things, and her father could somehow be involved.
The Last House on Earth/Death Walks South Boston – Christoph Paul
Sci-fi / Supernatural horror
Aliens return to a desolate Earth with enslaved humans to enter a haunted house, and a mummy wakes up in South Boston with only drug dealers and a YouTube film snob to stop it, in this double creature feature.
The Last House on Earth: An abducted couple, who love each other more than life itself, find themselves under the thumb of nearly omnipotent aliens. These aliens use a group of humans to navigate a celestial haunted house said to hold the secrets of life and death. Can the couple survive the house and the aliens to finally find peace in their love?
Death Walks South Boston: A crew of outcasts, including a drug dealer and a struggling YouTube streamer, face an ancient ancestral evil that has come back from the dead to take over the world of the living. If they can’t stop it, Death will walk through the entire world and make it into its image.
Mountains Will Wave a Long Goodbye – Ruth Miranda
Dark fantasy horror – Book 5 of The Borun-Ma
After waking up alone in the Holy Man’s lair, with no trace of Nan Jun around but for a cryptic note, Shai Tan realises he must return to Yunau’s Citadel and face Cheng Lan – if he wants his man back.
Meanwhile, Nan Jun braves the world across the portal as he ventures into Chan’Dhu in search of the one thing he believes can save Shai Tan’s life, only to realise he may have placed himself in the arms of danger and lost his chance of ever returning to his world.
Nest of Tongues – Randy Ribay
Vampire horror
A brother and sister fight to protect their secrets, their community, and most of all, each other.
As Filipino vampires known as manananggal, Lily and her brother Caleb understand the value of a secret. After all, to hide is to survive. To lie is to live. They’d never harm another person—but people only believe their worst fears around creatures of myth. So the siblings stay quiet. They follow their community’s rules.
Until a monster hunter turns up and kills a fellow manananggal, anyway.
Until Caleb is marked as the hunter’s next prey.
Suddenly, he and Lily realize there’s always been more at stake than the lives of their people. Because when doing everything “right” is still a death sentence, what can they take as truth? As the hunter nears, the siblings must decide if they’ll be driven from the only home they’ve ever known, or fight to protect a community that may already be lost.
A Plagued Sea – Kim Bo-Young
Cosmic horror
While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. Screens throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the coast. Despite the danger, Mu-young boards the train with her niece: she’d rather face the earthquake than leave the girl in her mother’s care. That choice haunts her for the rest of her life.
Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fishy monsters, and the government’s lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Mu-young’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble.
Reliquary – Hannah F. Whitten
Psychological horror
A young woman is lured to her late fiancé’s remote island estate only to uncover eerie family secrets, a haunting past, and a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea.
When Claire’s fiancé mysteriously dies of an unknown neurological illness, she’s prepared to sink back into the lonely life she lived before. Orphaned by a freak boating accident in her childhood, she never expected to find connection like she did with Elias, anyway. Their relationship wasn’t perfect – his coldness, his secrets, his strange aversion to the ocean – but what relationship is?
When Elias’s family reaches out – his incredibly wealthy family, from whom he was estranged – and invites Claire to a three-day wake at Harrow Point, their family home on a private island, Claire is given the chance to find family again. To belong to something, just like she’s always wanted. Just like Elias knew she was desperate to have.
Even if that family is a little strange. Even if their coastal home stirs up memories of the accident that killed her parents and sister. Even if Ash, Elias’s older brother, seems insistent on Claire leaving as soon as possible.
As she dives deeper into the world of Harrow Point, she will uncover the nature of her own traumatic connection to the ocean. There is something swimming in the bowels of Harrow Point, and it is hungry.
Saint Delilah – Isabelle Spotts
Supernatural horror
Delilah is dead. But her story is far from over. She will find her peace and give hell to the man who killed her.
Delilah’s death was not swift or painless. A ghost at nineteen, business entirely unfinished, her last breath was angry. Someone killed her, but she doesn’t know who.
Undead creatures stalk Delilah’s spirit, eager to feed on her soul until nothing is left but a frightening poltergeist. She can’t pass on until the violence of her death is balanced with a life for her life.
Her killer must be killed.
If anyone can find her murderer and keep the darkness at bay, it’s Magda, the owner of the strip club where Delilah danced, and a powerful spirit medium. And when a young man comes to town seeking Magda’s supernatural services, he can see Delilah. He can hear her, touch her, and make her feel alive again.
The three come together to search for Delilah’s murderer. As the creatures close in, Delilah’s soul weakens but her power as a poltergeist grows, allowing her to affect the living.
Delilah may be dead, but she won’t waste this second chance; she’ll take those who’ve harmed her down with her.
She Haunts Me Still – De Elizabeth
Supernatural horror
After surviving a shadowed childhood marked by ghost stories and loss, Mallory Webb is ready to start fresh as a theater major at her mother’s alma mater, a sanitarium turned liberal arts university in Rhode Island. Landing the lead role in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet feels like a dream—until the blood-soaked spirit she suspects caused her mother’s death resurfaces after years of quiet. With nothing to go on but cryptic symbols in an old college notebook, Mallory hopes the reason behind her mother’s haunting lies somewhere on campus, and resolves to find answers before she meets the same fate.
She’s surprised to make an unexpected ally in Ezra Pierce, the magnetic fourth year directing the play, and takes solace in their undeniable chemistry. But Ezra is a master secret-keeper, and it’s clear he knows more than he’s letting on about Saskia Garin, Mallory’s elusive understudy whose past eerily mirrors her own.
When an ancient, bloodthirsty evil calls to collect on a bargain that dates back to the New England vampire panic, Mallory, Ezra, and Saskia will have to untangle the tragic ways in which their histories are linked, and face the devastating consequences of their own star-crossed love story.
Stay Buried – Jennifer McMahon
Ghost horror
A woman must confront decades of secrecy and superstition to learn the truth about her mother’s death.
Some towns stay isolated for a reason.
1919: Frankie O’Massey has always been the black sheep of isolated Boone’s Ferry, Vermont. Her uncle, Dr. Thomas Endicott, has been training her in the science of medicine, something the townspeople are wary of. When a mysterious illness strikes the town, and the community suspects supernatural forces, the two desperately search for a logical explanation. Patient zero seems to be the town’s knackerman: a recluse who collects dead and dying farm animals to make use of their parts.
2016: Siblings Ashley and Malcolm lost their mother two years ago. When their grandmother dies, they inherit a property in Boone’s Ferry – a place they’ve heard of but their grandmother has always refused to talk about – and embark on a trip to their ancestral home. The idyllic town is full of autumnal décor, picturesque farmland, and small-town charm. But some of the townspeople aren’t very welcoming – and they have some unsettling traditions, like leaving offerings to a vengeful spirit four times a year.
Them – W.H. Chizmar
Monster apocalypse horror
A top-secret government project hits upon a revolutionary idea for transporting matter across the vast reaches of the universe, and it succeeds in bringing something back. Something alive. Soon, mankind’s reign comes to an abrupt halt when a truck hauling a very special shipping container overturns and rolls off the highway, unleashing an otherworldly horror upon an unsuspecting New England countryside, where it cannot be contained.
Several years later, an unidentified man emerges from the rubble of humanity, seeking other survivors and a shred of hope amid an eerie and lonely landscape. He travels by night up the rural East Coast, discovering Americana ruins and encountering monsters the likes of which no one has survived. Scarred and molded by the cruel horrors of this new natural order, he must face his own dwindling humanity and pray that any others out there have not become monsters themselves.
Where All Light Dies – Michael Penning
Supernatural horror – Book 1 of Gravewardens
Some wrecks are graves. This one is a prison.
When a cutting-edge submersible is discovered adrift in the North Atlantic, U.S. Coast Guard Commander Freya Keating is tasked with a routine recovery. It should be simple, but what she doesn’t expect is a deadly mystery.
The vessel is intact. No damage. No distress call. But its entire crew has vanished.
The sub was exploring the wreck of the SS Celestine, a World War II passenger liner lost under suspicious circumstances and long shrouded in dark rumors. Official records call it a maritime tragedy. But deep inside its shattered hull lies something the Nazis were willing to kill to possess.
And it was never meant to be found.
As Freya takes command of the investigation, the mission spirals fast. Crew members lash out without warning. Critical systems fail. Fear spreads through the ship, turning trained professionals into violent threats.
With a storm closing in and her crew fracturing around her, Freya must descend into the wreck herself to stop whatever was sealed inside before it escapes the deep… and reaches the world above.
