Suspense Horror Fiction

Warning: You may have a huge, invisible spider living in your skull. This is not a metaphor. You will dismiss this as ridiculous fearmongering. Dismissing things as ridiculous fearmongering is, in fact, the first symptom of parasitic spider infection - the creature secretes a chemical into the brain to stimulate skepticism, in order to prevent you from seeking a cure. That’s just as well, since the “cure” involves learning what a chain saw tastes like. You can’t feel the spider, because it controls your nerve endings.

Ethan Dove’s family has moved to a new home in a safe community, and it’s exactly the fresh start they need. Not only is his marriage to Emma hanging by a thread, but his son, Dylan, and twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, deserve to have a happy childhood. After Rose is bullied by the boys across the road, Ethan is relieved when the woman who lives next door steps in. Fiona Smith has come into their lives at just the right moment, and when she offers to look after Rose during the school holidays, Ethan and Emma can’t believe their luck.

Nobody Owens is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place - he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their ghostly teachings - such as the ability to Fade so mere mortals cannot see him.

Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn't tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself.

This forest isn't charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina's is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn't reach the bunker in time.

West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, 19-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary....

In Frankenstein: Lost Souls, Dean Koontz puts a singular twist on this classic tale of ambition and science gone wrong, to forge a new legend uniquely suited to our times. It is a story of revenge, redemption, and the thin line that separates human from inhuman.

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are on the verge of adolescence, spending their days biking in search of adventure. The chalk men are their secret code, stick figures they draw for one another as hidden messages. But one morning, the friends find a chalk man leading them to the woods. They follow the message, only to find the dead body of a teenage girl. In 2016, Eddie is nursing a drinking problem and trying to forget his past, until one day he gets a letter containing a chalk man — the same one he and his friends saw when they found the body.

Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.

High up on the windswept cliffs of Pale Peak, Faye and Felix celebrate their new engagement. But soon, a chorus of ghastly noises erupts from the nearby woods: the screams of animals, the cries of children, and the mad babble of a hundred mournful voices. A dark figure looms near the windows in the dead of night, whispering to Faye. As the weather turns deadly, Felix discovers that his terrified fiancée isn't just mumbling in her sleep—she's whispering back.

What do you wish for most? It's a question that Oswald, Sarah, and Millie think they know the answer to. Oswald wishes his summer wasn't so boring, Sarah wishes to be beautiful, and Millie wishes she could just disappear from the face of the earth. But in the twisted world of Five Nights at Freddy's, their hearts' deepest desires have an unexpected cost. In this volume, horror master Scott Cawthon spins three sinister novella-length stories from different corners of his series' canon.

On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead. Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story.

Darkness lives within.... Cash strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be.

Le rêve brisé que je traîne derrière moi: le ballet. Je m’appelle Sarah et, autrefois, j’en faisais. Oh, je danse toujours...mais nue. Dans un bar. Ça reste de la danse. Voilà ce que je me répète sans cesse pour ne pas m’écrouler, pour tenter d’oublier à quel point ma vie est misérable.... En plus, je dois de l’argent à Carl, mon patron. Cinq mille dollars! Où vais-je bien pouvoir trouver une telle somme?

Vera Harlow is a survivor. After a chance encounter led to her being held captive in a disgusting house of horrors, she fought tooth and nail to escape the clutches of a man known only as The Slob. But while she may have fled the disastrous situation, the details of her struggle are now carved into her flesh and soul. Vera’s son is the product of utter depravity. Harold, the sinister seed left by the man who took everything from her, continues to blossom in nauseating fashion. His features and habits are stomach-churning, vividly familiar, and becoming more disturbing by the day.

A group of boyhood friends in the summer of 1977. An annual rite of passage in a dark and alluring Pennsylvania wood. The channeling of a malevolent Presence. And a childhood game about to go terribly wrong.... Two brothers in the summer of 1995, reunited by the unspeakable nightmare of their past. A bewitching tavern proprietress and psychic intuitive from New Orleans. The revelation of an apocryphal prophesy.

The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everyone's cell phone. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature...and then begins to evolve.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

All the stories in this collection from Stephen King are related to the Vietnam War. King fans will recognize echoes of The Dark Tower series in the collection's first story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats." As the characters develop over the next four stories, King's version of the Vietnam War becomes one of his most frightening tales ever.