Horror Town

Tucked away in the foothills, surrounded by pine forests, loaded with kids who still play outside, Millwood is the small town everyone knows. For Heather Bradley, it's a place that keeps her family safe; her biggest worries are the daily grind of her job and the kids coming home late. She doesn't know that unfathomable forces are set to converge on her town and thrust their neat lives into darkness, but when her oldest son Stuart opens a one-sided door in the woods and a black cloud pours out, the Bradleys and their whole town find themselves locked in a desperate struggle for survival.

Bryan and Ellie Stockton hope they left behind their demons when they move to their idyllic new home in southern West Virginia. Above all, they want a fresh start for their young son, Derrick, who witnessed the tumultuous first years of their marriage—years that were rife with substance abuse, rage, and resentment. Their bright hope for the future is darkened when a child disappears from their neighborhood. The couple becomes suspicious of a reclusive resident with a degenerative brain disorder.

Back in the summer of 1988, a young Richard Chizmar was catapulted into the center of a living nightmare as the serial killer Joshua Gallagher—dubbed by the media as “The Boogeyman”—stalked his tranquil Maryland town. A lot has changed in the intervening years. These days, Chizmar enjoys a certain level of celebrity and notoriety himself, being the only person that an incarcerated Josh Gallagher will speak to on or off the record.

Caleb Cantrill still can't find where he hid the bandit's gold or his cavern of riches. The only thing it seems he can find is more and more of the monstrous blight he unleashed on the peaceful valley he now calls home. Adding to his troubles, his twenty-four-hour reprieve from the gang is up soon, and the bandits will be returning, looking for their gold, or his life is forfeit. Kitty Welch is swept up in a corrupt scheme which may result in her arrest and deportation back to Scotland. Though she wants to flee, there is something keeping her in the valley.

In the summer of 1988, the mutilated bodies of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town. The grisly evidence leads police to the terrifying assumption that a serial killer is on the loose in the quiet suburb. But soon a rumor begins to spread that the evil stalking local teens is not entirely human. Law enforcement, as well as members of the FBI, are certain that the killer is a living, breathing madman - and he’s playing games with them.

Sensing his mother’s failing health, a struggling teenager pours out his worries in a letter and drops it through the mail slot of an abandoned show house. He’s surprised when a response arrives, promising good fortune for the price of just one name: someone he hates. He’d give anything for his mother. But the true cost may be more than he’s willing to pay.

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate - the Savoyard Plantation - and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

A man falls from the sky. He has no memory. He has no sense of self. What lies ahead are a series of tests, each more brutal than the last, and if he gets through them all, he might just reach a town called Discovery.

Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.

Once he was a hero of the Great War, and then a member of the dreaded Black House. Now he is the criminal linchpin of Low Town. His name is Warden. He thought he had left the war behind him, but a summons from up above brings the past sharply, uncomfortably, back into focus. General Montgomery's daughter is missing somewhere in Low Town, searching for clues about her brother's murder. The General wants her found, before the stinking streets can lay claim to her, too.

When Gregory Tomasov moves into an abandoned farm on the edge of McGuane, Arizona, he discovers a terrible secret buried in the walls of the old building.

Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

Barton Dawes' unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant where he works - and right over his home. Dawes isn't the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His steadfast determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his life.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated - and sinister - than Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast ever could have anticipated. Pendergast, together with his ward, Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton.

After losing her young son in an accident, Rachel Kennan throws herself into her career as police chief of a small Virginia town to avoid focusing on her grief. Meanwhile, her husband, Finn, a washed-up writer whose alcoholism led to the devastating tragedy that changed everything, struggles to redeem himself before his family completely falls apart. Their two daughters are the only things keeping Rachel and Finn together, but the girls have demons of their own. At the same time, a disturbing crime rocks their tightknit religious community.

Nightshift clerk and high-functioning insomniac Jack is back to work, trying his best to keep out of trouble. But when his chain-smoking coworker discovers a mysterious radio signal revealing the guarded secrets of their town, Jack will learn that an annoying new dayshift manager is far from the worst of his problems. In this second installment of the Gas Station saga, Jack finds himself entangled in his most harrowing adventure yet.

Marshall Miller would’ve remembered her face even if he hadn’t seen it on a MISSING poster. When a young woman disappears in his small town, the investigation hinges on Marshall’s haunted sighting of her, crying in the back seat of a police car driven by a cop named Maddox. There’s only one problem: no local cop named Maddox exists. But the speeding ticket he handed to Marshall certainly does.

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.

In "Long Way Home", a young soldier returns from the Middle East and discovers that there is another - and much stranger - war to be fought in his hometown. In "Mister Pockets" a young paperboy discovers that a random act of kindness may have greater consequences - especially as night falls in Pine Deep.