Small Horrors

Vera Martinez wants nothing more than to escape Roaring Creek and her parents' reputation as demonologists. Not to mention she's the family outcast, lacking her parents' innate abilities, and is terrified of the occult things lurking in their basement. Maxwell Oliver is supposed to be enjoying the summer before his senior year. Instead he's taking care of his little sister while his mom slowly becomes someone he doesn't recognize. Soon he suspects that what he thought was grief over his father's death might be something more sinister.

Mayhem explodes when monsters mix with guns, rednecks and beer. Craig Nybo's second novel, Small Town Monsters, visits the town of DePalma Beach, Montana, a peaceful lake community with a five-star rating in any tour travel guide. Monster hunter isn't in the job description when Kurt McCammus, a Los Angeles homicide detective, leaves the big city and all its violence behind to take a job as chief of police in DePalma Beach. He falls in love with the clean air and peaceful community. That is until a local rancher finds 50 head of sheep mutilated on his spread.

Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile. When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.

Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower. Olivia figures she’ll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow. If Olivia’s going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she’ll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm’s otherworldly powers and find Sunflower.

Sheila Tulane is in love with the resort's pool boy, Teague Harmon, and will do anything to please him - even if it means murdering Guild member Sam Carstens. Meanwhile, Asadi doubts his position in the Guild when he is forced to violate his own personal code. Are his days with the Guild numbered?

From the Bram Stoker Award-winning publisher Crystal Lake Publishing comes the fiction series, Still Water Bay. In the first episode, “The Guild”, we meet Asadi and his pregnant wife, Taqiya, a couple who have just moved to the small Georgia town of Still Water, on the edge of Still Water Bay. Asadi has joined a group for those suffering from grief to discuss the violent nightmares associated with his past. What he doesn’t know is that Still Water Bay is a haven for monsters, and they’re about to make his worst nightmare come true.

Jacob Reese enjoys the quiet life, running a coffee shop and renting out his cottage in The Hollows, Vermont. But the calm is shattered when a woman who looks eerily similar to his ex-girlfriend Laura turns up to stay in the cottage, and leaves a mysterious note in the guest book. Now Jacob’s seeing Laura everywhere - a glimpse of her face across the street, her music box left outside his house, a gift he gave her years before hanging from the trees. But it can’t be Laura. Because Laura’s dead.

Home is where the haunt is. Lexi Darling has always been a city girl through and through. New York is loud, crowded, and just chaotic enough to keep her mind off everything she’d rather not think about—especially the eerily realistic nightmares that have plagued her all her life. So when she...

A reminder from Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy that one might take great caution when pursuing hidden treasure.

In this short story, Zeke had enough of big city life, but something has followed him to the backwoods. Every predator, natural or unnatural, gets only one chance to learn how dangerous it is to push a country boy in the corner.

The elite warriors of the Hereford-based SAS know all about pain and the enduring of it. Syd Spicer, ex-SAS trooper, has found himself back in the regiment - this time as its chaplain, responsible for the spiritual welfare of the hardest men in or out of uniform. Faced with a case which would normally be passed discreetly to Hereford diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins, Spicer is forced, for security reasons, to try and handle it himself - and is coming close to a breakdown.

After her parents' painful divorce, Evie Archer hopes that moving to Ravenglass, Massachusetts, is the fresh start her family needs. But Evie quickly realizes that her new home—known by locals as the Horror House—carries its own dark past after learning about Holly Hobbie, who mysteriously vanished from her bedroom one night. But traces of Holly linger in the Horror House and slowly begin to take over Evie's life. A strange shadow follows her everywhere she goes, and Evie starts to lose sight of what's real and what isn't the more she learns about The Lost Girl.

Khoma Brut had no idea the trouble he would be in when he asked for shelter at a lonely hut, belonging to an old woman. Enjoy this quirky and spooky tale by Nikolai Gogol.

Fourteen-year-old Eric Ross is struggling. His father is in prison for murder. His mother has slipped into addiction. Even if he can survive the bullying and the sudden run of disappearances, he has little hope for a future outside of the sleepy Massachusetts fishing town he calls home. But there is something far more important on his mind. He found her down beneath the local entertainment pier, and she seems just about perfect. Except for the teeth. But she doesn't want to simply be a part of his world. She wants more . . .

Thirteen years ago, Jori Trahan’s boyfriend vanished without a trace. Now, after moving back home to Alabama to care for her ailing grandmother and autistic brother, she comes face-to-face with the deadly mystery behind his disappearance. Jori has a rare form of synesthesia, meaning she can “hear” colors; to her, tones of voice are as unique as fingerprints. With the help of this ability and a sympathetic cop, Jori comes dangerously close to uncovering the truth. But those responsible will go to any length - including murder - to keep their dark secrets buried.

Always up for trying something new, Kath and her friends from the fiber and needlework group TGIF - Thank Goodness It's Fiber - are visiting Cloud Hollow Farm for the day to learn the fine art of dyeing. With spring in the air, the friends head out to greet the sheep. But the sheep are more interested in something else - two bodies spread under a tall tree. And one of those bodies is someone they know. Kath's friends nudge her to investigate.

Dean is a best-selling writer who struggles with writer's block ever since the scandal. Between the accident and the public scandal, no publisher wants to work with him anymore—until his agent calls him one day to tell him he managed to sign a deal with a small publisher. Dean isn't thrilled, but his lack of excitement turns into frustration when he learns that his deadline to come up with an idea for a book is 30 days.

Seventeen-year-old Hylee Williams didn’t ask to disappear. She didn’t ask to move from Kansas City, Kansas out to the suburbs in Missouri. But she did disappear, and not only that, but when she vanished from our world, she materialized in a dark, twisted version of the night that changed her life forever: the night her older brother went missing. Just as Hylee realizes this moment could be the key to unraveling the truth about her brother, she’s yanked away from the dark place back to our world.

When five friends are invited to a religious celebration in a small, isolated town, they are initially showered by the townsfolk with gifts and attention. As the days go by, however, it becomes clear that the community is not as innocuous as it initially presented itself. Mysterious, robed figures violently beat people who express different opinions, strange rituals take place in the church at night, and armed gunmen patrol the town perimeters–all under Prophet Martin’s orders.

Small Bites exists at the fulcrum of the idyllic and the dreadful. It invokes the pleasant and mundane memories of the not-so-distant past and violently interrupts them with immediate and visceral terror. These 13 offerings beat from the corroded heart of Americana and prey upon the innocence of our cherished nostalgia. More than a horror anthology, this is a canvas oozing with living paint, pigments selected from our collective nightmares, and imprisoned within this listening experience.