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The devil crept in : a novel
by Ania Ahlborn
An unforgettable horror novel from bestselling sensation Ania Ahlborn in which a small-town boy investigates the mysterious disappearance of his cousin and uncovers a terrifying secret kept hidden for years. Young Jude Brighton has been missing for three days, and while the search for him is in full swing in the small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, the locals are starting to lose hope. They're well aware that the first forty-eight hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark's youth, he knows that, too; he's seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend. That, and there was that boy, Max Larsen...the one from years ago, found dead after also disappearing under mysterious circumstances. And then there were the animals: pets gone missing out of yards. For years, the residents of Deer Valley have murmured about these unsolved crimes...and that a killer may still be lurking around their quiet town. Now, fear is reborn--and for Stevie, who is determined to find out what really happened to Jude, the awful truth may be too horrifying to imagine.
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Universal harvester
by John Darnielle
This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: it's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets --an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store--she has an odd complaint: "There's something on it," she says, but doesn't elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it's not defective, exactly, but altered: "There's another movie on this tape." Jeremy doesn't want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. So begins John Darnielle's haunting and masterfully unsettling Universal Harvester : the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain.
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| Normal by Warren EllisIn this futuristic psychological thriller, specialists assigned to forecast the future by gazing into "the abyss" may experience psychological breakdowns. After foresight strategist Adam Dearden overloads on the abyss, he checks into a special facility for those who suffer from "abyss gaze." But instead of respite and recovery, he finds chaos after a neighboring patient disappears from his locked and sealed room, his body replaced by a 200-pound pile of live insects. Because he's the most recent arrival, Adam's the automatic suspect; he must form a defensive alliance with other patients when the government investigators arrive. Horror fans will appreciate Normal's forecast regarding the future: "Be very afraid!" |
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| The Apartment: A Novel by S.L. GreySuffering from anxiety after a home invasion, Mark and Steph, a married couple from Cape Town, decide on a getaway to Paris, using a house-exchange website to reduce the cost of the trip. But the Paris apartment has more in common with a haunted house than an idyllic retreat -- and that's before they discover the horror concealed in a closet. Returning to Cape Town (where the Parisian couple never showed up), Mark and Steph's already-shaky relationship worsens as Mark's visions of a dead girl intensify. Authored by Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg under the pseudonym S.L. Grey, The Apartment offers a cinematically descriptive combination of bad-trip vacation and terrifying madness. |
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| Only the Dead Know Burbank: A Novel by Bradford TatumAfter the end of the Great War, a Berlin teenager named Maddy Ulm wakes up undead in a hastily dug grave. After working in a circus for a time, thrilling audiences with her ability to survive deadly injuries, she discovers Berlin's film studios, then works her way to Hollywood and a career as a horror expert for the movies. Only the Dead Know Burbank's cast of characters includes historical figures Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff, as well as early horror directors James Whale and Tod Browning. Readers who enjoy being scared and early fright-film buffs should pick up this "bitingly witty and darkly vibrant" (Publishers Weekly) depiction of Maddy's existence in Hollywood's studios. |
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Don't Miss... Best Horror Reads of 2016 |
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The suicide motor club
by Christopher Buehlman
The Suicide Motor Club knows no boundaries. These vicious vampires ride in a caravan of death that covers America's roads, with nothing and no one to slow them down. Only the wild allure of the open road and the hot thrum of blood calling to them; only burned-out wrecks and dried-out corpses left in their wake. Except, two years ago, they left a witness in the mangled wreck of her family car, her husband dead, her son taken. She remembers their awful faces, and she's coming for them - her thirst for vengeance even more powerful than their hunger for blood..
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The hidden people
by Alison Littlewood
In 1851, within the grand glass arches of London's Crystal Palace, Albie Mirralls meets his cousin Lizzie for the first--and, as it turns out, last--time. His cousin is from a backward rural village, and Albie expects she will be a simple country girl, but instead he is struck by her inner beauty and by her lovely singing voice, which is beautiful beyond all reckoning. When next he hears of her, many years later, it is to hear news of her death at the hands of her husband, the village shoemaker. Unable to countenance the rumors that surround his younger cousin's murder--apparently, her husband thought she had been replaced by one of the "fair folk" and so burned her alive--Albie becomes obsessed with bringing his young cousin's murderer to justice. With his father's blessing, as well as that of his young wife, Albie heads to the village of Halfoak to investigate his cousin's murder. When he arrives, he finds a community in the grip of superstition, nearly every member of which believes Lizzie's husband acted with the best of intentions and in the service of the village. There, Albie begins to look into Lizzie's death and to search for her murderous husband, who has disappeared. But in a village where the rationalism and rule of science of the Industrial Revolution seem to have found little purchase, the answers to the question of what happened to Lizzie and why prove elusive. And the more he learns, the less sure he is that there aren't mysterious powers at work.
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Mr. Splitfoot
by Samantha Hunt
A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning. Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who -- or what -- has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road? In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.
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Hex
by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; translated by Nancy Forest-Flier
In Hex, acclaimed Dutch author Thomas Heuvelt portrays an idyllic Hudson Valley town similar to others in the region -- except that the other villages aren't haunted. Black Spring is home to the ghost of Katherine van Wyler, an alleged witch who was tortured and hanged in the 1600s. Eyes and lips sewn shut, she visits the town's residents, ominously coming and going in their houses whenever she wants. But for residents to leave Black Spring would be to invite disaster, so the town's leaders have taken measures to keep it quarantined. Then a group of boys decides Katherine needs an Internet presence, and horrendous chaos breaks out. "Read it if you dare!" says Kirkus Reviews.
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