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HORROR FICTION
because pandemic life is scary
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by P. Djèlí Clark
The story begins in 1922 on the Fourth of July, with the Ku Klux Klan literally on the march in Macon, Georgia. At first glance, everything looks very much the way it did in real-life history. But some of the white-hooded crowd are demonic carnivores known as "Ku Kluxes. The task of drawing out, hunting down, and killing the Ku Kluxes falls to three fearless Black women: sharpshooter Sadie, Cordelia Lawrence, nicknamed “Chef,” and their leader, Maryse Boudreaux, whose way with a sword is as fearsome as her ability to commune with spirits.
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by Scott Carson
It's been nearly 80 years since the town of Galesburg was flooded to build the Chilewaukee Reservoir ("The Chill), and the town didn't go easy. A small contingent of people rebelled, leading to shocking acts of violence. Since then, an otherworldly evil has been waiting for the right time to take revenge against those responsible for destroying the town, which, on a clear day, can still be glimpsed just under the surface of the Chill.
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by Emily M. Danforth
Gothic horror! Hollywood satire! A creepy girls school under a turn-of-the-century curse.
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by Andy Davidson
Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm. But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda's peculiar and precarious life.
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by Grady Hendrix
When James Harris moves in down the street, the women (in this Charleston suburb) are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does the demented Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia's nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she's just a housewife.
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by Ilze Hugo
In the aftermath of a deadly outbreak -- reminiscent of the 1962 event of mass hysteria that was the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic -- a city at the tip of Africa is losing its mind, with residents experiencing hallucinations and paranoia. Is it simply another episode of mass hysteria, or something more sinister? In a quarantined city in which the inexplicable has already occurred, rumors, superstitions, and conspiracy theories abound.
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by Stephen Graham Jones
Four young Blackfeet men ignore the hunting boundaries of their community and fire into an elk herd on land reserved for the elders, but one elk proves unnaturally hard to kill. Years later, they’re forced to answer for their act of selfish violence, setting into motion a supernatural hunt in which predator becomes prey. A violent tale of vengeance, justice, and generational trauma.
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by Alma Katsu
Someone, or something, is haunting the ship. Between mysterious disappearances and sudden deaths, the guests of the Titanic have found themselves suspended in an eerie, unsettling twilight zone from the moment they set sail. Several of them are convinced there's something sinister -- almost otherwordly -- afoot. But before they can locate the source of the danger, as the world knows, disaster strikes.
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by Jess Kidd
Bridie Devine is no stranger to the seedy underworld of Victorian London. An accomplished detective with medical training, she sometimes helps the police by examining bodies to determine the cause of death. Bridie recently failed to find a lost child, and when she's approached about another missing child, the daughter of Sir Edmund Berwick, she isn't enthusiastic about taking on the case. But Christabel Berwick is no ordinary child.
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by T. Kingfisher
A door to another world appears in a museum of oddities, but it’s no gateway to Narnia. Rudderless after her divorce and terrified at the prospect of moving back in with her parents, 34-year-old Kara returns to where she grew up, quaint Hog Chapel, North Carolina, to stay with her beloved, kindly Uncle Earl, who calls her Carrot and owns the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy.
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by Katrina Leno Following her father's death, Jane North-Robinson and her mom move from sunny California to the dreary, dilapidated old house in Maine where her mother grew up. All they want is a fresh start, but behind North Manor's doors lurks a history that leaves them feeling more alone ... and more tormented.
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by Josh Malerman
In a surreal, Wild West take on Sleeping Beauty, storied outlaw James Moxie must save his one-time lover Carol Evers from being buried alive. Only a few people aside from Carol's shifty husband, Dwight, know that she suffers from a condition that periodically sends her spiraling into a coma resembling death and a place she calls Howltown.
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by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
1950s Mexico. Inquisitive 22-year-old socialite Noemi Taboada adores beautiful clothes and nights on the town in Mexico City with a bevy of handsome suitors, but her carefree existence is cut short when her father shows her a disturbing letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina. In the letter, Catalina begs for Noemi's help, claiming that she is “bound, threads like iron through my mind and my skin,” and that High Place is “sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment.”
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by Hiroko Oyamada
Asa does her best to quickly adjust to a new life - the remoteness, the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his new job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time. One day she finds ... a hole.
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by Emma Rous
1980: Beth Soames is fourteen years old when a kind couple finds her playing the violin at her orphanage's yearly fund-raiser. The Averills take her home with them to Raven Hall, a rambling manor on the Norfolk coast. There she runs wild with their daughter, Nina, and they become fast friends. At times, Beth even dreams she's truly part of the family...until she's asked to take part in what seems like a harmless game -- and nothing is ever the same.
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by Matt Ruff
A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, this book is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism -- the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.
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by Karen Russell
Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe. She is the Slumber Corps' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in crisis -- one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the ability to sleep.
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by Chelsea G. Summers
There is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.
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by Lawrence Wright
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons--microbiologist, epidemiologist--travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca.
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by Miri Yū
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.
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