Horror Thriller

Owls Hoot in the Daytime & Other Omens is the 5th and final volume of Night Shade Books' five volume "Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman." This volume contains all of the John the Balladeer stories (sometimes better known as Silver John), Manly's most famous character.

Jeannie Parker married a serial killer. She didn’t know it at the time. But she blames her own demons for steering her into such a black orbit. Now, she’s running for her life... Stumbling through the frozen woods, she’s mad-lucky to find the decrepit cabin. But she can only hide so long. Their final showdown awaits. At least she’s stopped lying to herself about his depravity—so impossible to withstand, let alone outwit. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to get away given her complicity over the years. Still, a budding survival instinct within, Nag, disagrees with her assessment.

Matt is being punished for a crime he saw, but didn't commit. Instead of being locked up, he is being sent to the middle of nowhere to live with a new foster mom, as part of a government scheme called The Leaf Project. But Matt's new home provides anything but peace and quiet. His new guardian is involved in very sinister things, and the whole town seems to be on her side. The truth is much bigger than Matt or the town, but Matt is the only person who can stop the ultimate evil from being unleashed.

A dark and sweeping adventure, Dreamcatcher is set in the haunted city of Derry - the site of Stephen King's It and Insomnia. In it, four young boys stand together and do a brave, good thing, an act that changes them in ways that they hardly understand. A quarter-century later, as grown men who have gone their separate ways, these friends come together once a year to hunt in the woods of Maine.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life....

Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children move to Steuben, North Carolina, with high hopes. But Step's new job with a software company turns out to be a snake pit, and 8-year-old Stevie's school is worse. As Stevie retreats into himself, focusing more and more on a mysterious computer game and a growing troop of imaginary friends, the Fletchers' concern turns to terror.

EarthCore is the company with the technology, the resources, and the guts to go after the mother lode. Young executive Connell Kirkland is the company's driving force, pushing himself and those around him to uncover the massive treasure. But at three miles below the surface, where the rocks are so hot they burn bare skin, something has been waiting for centuries. Waiting...and guarding. Kirkland and EarthCore are about to find out first-hand why this treasure has never been unearthed.

Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where "Fun is Guaranteed!" But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success.

From Charlaine Harris, the best-selling author who created Sookie Stackhouse and her world of Bon Temps, Louisiana, comes a darker locale - populated by more strangers than friends. But then, that's how the locals prefer it. Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It' s a pretty standard dried-up western town.

Joe works at a facility that performs human experimentation. His work just followed him home. The government wanted to unlock hidden abilities in the human mind. They put subjects in extreme sensory deprivation. All the test subjects went violently insane. But the research continued. Today it has been perfected. Almost perfected.

A masterful, intensely suspenseful novel about a reader whose obsession with a reclusive writer goes far too far - a book about the power of storytelling, starring the same trio of unlikely and winning heroes King introduced in Mr. Mercedes. "Wake up, genius." So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades.

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?” When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the question over and over, Bela understands that unless she says yes, her family will soon pay. Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe, but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is about to unravel.

Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His horror memoir of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity — and skepticism.

Located off a desolate stretch of Interstate 50, Desperation, Nevada, has few connections with the rest of the world. It is a place, though, where the seams between worlds are thin. And it is a place where several travelers are abducted by Collie Entragian, the maniacal police officer of Desperation. Entragian uses various ploys for the abductions, from an arrest for drug possession to "rescuing" a family from a nonexistent gunman.

Four chiller novellas set to keep listeners awake long after bedtime. One Past Midnight: "The Langoliers" takes a red-eye flight from LA to Boston into a most unfriendly sky. Only 11 passengers survive, but landing in an eerily empty world makes them wish they hadn't. Something's waiting for them, you see.

Located on the Long Island Sound, random attacks by unknown creatures are terrorizing local residents. The question: Who is going to do something about it? Marine biologist Katie DiNardo and ichthyologist Nick Tanner have seen the damage caused by their mystery creatures, but are at a complete loss as to the attacking species. All they know is that they need to get to the bottom of this - and fast.

In Room 217 of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, something has awakened. Something evil. Brady Hartsfield, perpetrator of the Mercedes Massacre, where eight people were killed and many more were badly injured, has been in the clinic for five years, in a vegetative state. According to his doctors, anything approaching a complete recovery is unlikely. But behind the drool and stare, Brady is awake and in possession of deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.

Vampires have always lived in Eastern Europe. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, they began to spread across the continent, then the world, turning whole populations into vampires - or human cattle. Having overrun India, the far East, and the great cities of North and South America, the forces of Night are now spreading into the countryside to consolidate their conquest.

She believed she was given a second chance. What she found was a waking nightmare. Sixteen-year-old Heather’s life changes forever after a seemingly innocent accident plunges her into darkness. After a tragic incident, Heather dies for five minutes. In recovery, her parents cling to hope that she’s safe and the ordeal is over—but the nightmare has only just begun. Slowly, Heather realizes her old life is gone, and something dark has come back with her. She begins to see things that shouldn’t be there—dead things—and they see her too.