Literary Horror

When Ariadne helped Theseus escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth with the aid of a ball of thread, she led the way for the bewildered victims of a twenty-first century Minotaur. Trapped in an endless maze of Internet chat rooms, a group of mystified strangers find themselves assigned obscure aliases and commanded by the Helmet of Horror, the Minotaur himself.

30-year-old Bronwyn Artair, feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist, much to the dismay of her mentor, Diane Fenwick. After a year of living alone in Southern New Hampshire, enduring the indignities of her job, dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers her deep connection to the natural world has given her an ability to affect natural forces. When she finally accepts she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell?

In November 2014 Arla Macleod bludgeoned her mother, father and sister to death with a hammer. Now incarcerated at a medium-security mental-health institution, Arla will speak to no one but Scott King, an investigative journalist, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation. King finds himself immersed in an increasingly complex case, interviewing five witnesses and Arla herself as he questions whether Arla's responsibility for the massacre was a diminished as her legal team made out.

Panic has seized New York City. Someone is brutally murdering women, a killer the media dubs the "Sickle Man" thanks to the way he disfigures his victims. People think he's the next Son of Sam, but because the Sickle Man's viscerally seductive voice forms one strand of Love Is Red, we know how he thinks and how he feels...and that the city has never seen anything like him.

Natalie and Rose are transported in their imaginations to the Atlantic Ocean in 1943, where one of their ancestors survived in a lifeboat for 50 days. Natalie struggles when her daughter, Rose, is diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, but the researching and retelling of Grandad Colin's story provides them both with a way to fight through. Louise Beech has always been haunted by the sea, and regularly writes travel pieces for the Hull Daily Mail, where she was a columnist for ten years.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

Still the Night Call is about Calem Dewayne Honeycutt, a 32-year-old Missouri dairy farmer of few words. But just because he's quiet doesn't mean he's simple. In fact, Calem's internal voice eloquently leads us through his wondrous yet tortured past, his fears for the future of his beleaguered rural world, and his carefully laid plans to remedy the vicious Night Call that haunts his present. All he has to do is get through one last day on the farm, then he can free himself of being a straight, white, middle-aged man with nothing in his possession but a gun and a prayer.

This ghost story is about a governess who, caring for two children at a remote estate, becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted.

Seduta alla finestra Rosa parla al corpo di Vincenzina, la madre, che giace ormai immobile nel letto "e spreme nel cielo di Capodimonte una specie di energia". Ai piedi della collina, Napoli brulica, antica, attorta, di carne e di drammi, e Rosa rivive la storia di sua madre: i soprusi subiti e inferti, le macerie del dopoguerra, l'incontro con Rafele, suo futuro padre.

From the author of the classic novel Wake in Fright comes a chillingly brilliant short novel that's part Wolf Creek and part Duel. Fear Is the Rider is a nail-biting chase into the outback, towards the devil lurking at its centre. It was quite silent in the scrub. No breeze stirred the leaves and no bird moved, except for the kite hawks wheeling silently, eternally, high in the hot air. She smelt her attacker before she saw him.

This is the story of a drug deal gone bad. Having committed the crime of selling a potent poison to a desperate youth, a destitute apothecary must decide how to spend his ill-gained fortune. Resolving to start his career afresh, he flees to the city of Verona to set up a new shop of medicinal healing and alchemical discovery. Plans go awry when he finds himself in the middle of a woeful tragedy he had unwittingly helped to cause.

Sapien is a relic of a bygone age, searching for meaning in a world where his outdated allegiances to a time long past have left him isolated and hopeless. Seeking peace and quiet, he retires to a beach house at Barren Cove, a stately Victorian manor even more antiquated than he. He becomes increasingly fascinated with the family whose lives are entwined with the home - angry and rebellious Clark; flamboyant Kent; fragile, beautiful Mary; and, most of all, Beachstone, the mysterious man whose history may hold all the answers Sapien has been searching for.

It would be easier for Thomas Mullen to move on from what he'd seen if Sarah stopped calling. It would be even better if she stopped appearing to him, and only him, to remind him of what he was powerless to stop. But months later, after Thomas loses his phone and the random woman who recovers it arranges to return it to him, his predicament intensifies. This woman tells him that while she's had his phone, his mother has called. His mother really needs him to call her back. And who is Sarah?

In the remote Andean village of Colibrí, a boy discovers what appears to be the body of an angel. But in the face and wounds of the dead, winged woman, Dr. Gregory Moreno sees something even more disturbing: an uncanny resemblance to his beloved late wife that cannot be mere chance. And in American anthropologist Sophie Lawson, still more echoes of the doctor's lost love stir...igniting the superstitions of the townspeople, and an elusive killer's deepest desires and despair.

Many creatures lurk in the dark, weaving on top of one another, roiling together like waves on the night sea. The darkness forms in layers to encompass the land, fill the corners, and obscure angles. Untold mysteries lie just beyond reach told in many tongues, many inflections, many rhythms. The stories are many. Innumerable. Legion.

Henry Fleming is a young private in the Union army during the American Civil War - a farm boy untested by battle. Faced with charging rebels, he flees. With his ideals shattered and his heart burdened by shame, Henry seeks an opportunity to redeem himself, even hoping for a wound - a "red badge of courage" - to prove his bravery.

After Maureen Coleman is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, her children bring her to live at Summerhome. As her condition deteriorates, siblings Sean Spencer and Meghan Coleman are unsure if they have made the correct decision.

This house has decided to divide and conquer. Pear was playing with the girl. She's not quite alive, but Pear doesn't mind. Pear is four years old, but now, she can't find her parents. Or her nanny. Or her odd-eyed cat. Can they find her, before she's forced to play with her new friend for an eternity?

The Black Knight Chronicles: lots of vampires. No sparkles. Serious snark. This bundle includes books one through there: Hard Day's Knight, Back in Black, and Knight Moves.

Jesse thinks he’s caught a break when he, Emma (the girl of his dreams), and her friend are assigned by their newspaper to cover the opening weekend of a sprawling new state park. But the construction of the park has stirred an evil that has lain dormant for nearly a hundred years, and the three young people - as well as every man, woman, and child unlucky enough to be attending the Algonquin Falls grand opening - are about to encounter the most horrific creatures to ever walk the earth.