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, GOTHIC FICTION SCARY STORIES, SOUTHERN, RURAL, OR ISOLATED |
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by Alisa Alering
In 1980s Appalachia, sisters Sheila and Angie couldn't be more different. In turns both terrifying and otherworldly, author Alisa Alering opens the door to the hidden world -- a mountain that sighs, monsters made of ink, rabbits dead and alive, and ropes that won't come undone. Unsettling, propulsive, and wonderfully atmospheric, Alering's stunning debut novel renegotiates what is seen and unseen, what is real and what is haunted. |
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by Taylor Brown
In the mill town at the foot of the mountains - a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car racing - Rory is bewitched by the mysterious daughter of a snake-handling preacher. His grandmother, Maybelline "Granny May" Docherty, opposes this match for her own reasons, believing that "some things are best left buried." |
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by S. A. Cosby
Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. |
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by Andy Davidson
Dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda's peculiar and precarious life. And when a preacher makes an unthinkable demand, it sets Miranda on a desperate, dangerous path, forcing her to consider what she is willing to sacrifice to keep her loved ones safe. |
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by Tananarive Due Both riveting and enlightening - this debut collection of short fiction takes to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghosts; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness. |
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by Shea Ernshaw
Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Often hired by families as a last resort, he takes on the case of Maggie St. James--a well-known author of dark, macabre children's books -- and is soon led to a place many believed to be only a legend. |
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by Daryl Gregory
In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy. |
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by Samantha Hunt
A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. |
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by Meagan Jennett
Two hours before he vanished, Mark Dixon stole a glass of wine. That's what bartender Sophie Braam tells the cops when they question her about the customer whose mutilated body has just been found. What she doesn't tell them is that she's the one who killed him. |
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by Carole Johnstone
When she was five years old, Maggie announced that a man on the remote island of Kilmeray in Scotland's Outer Hebrides -- a place she'd never visited -- was murdered. Her unfounded claim drew media attention and turned the locals against each other, creating rifts that never mended. Now, nearly twenty years later, Maggie is determined to discover what really happened |
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by Stephen Graham Jones
Follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way. |
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by Kelly Link
Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance -- and what has brought them back again. |
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by Lee Mandelo
Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers. Only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn't know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. |
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by Ann Pancake
A collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, featuring characters who are intensely connected to their land -- sometimes through love, sometimes through hate -- and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. |
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by Hannah Pittard
Mark and Maggie's annual drive east to visit family has gotten off to a rocky start. By the time they're on the road, it's late, a storm is brewing, and they are no longer speaking to one another. When they are forced to stop for the night at a remote inn, completely without power, Maggie's paranoia reaches an all-time and terrifying high. But when Mark finds himself threatened in a dark parking lot, it's Maggie who takes control. |
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by Cherie Priest
State Road 177 runs along the Suwannee River, between Fargo, Georgia, and the Okefenokee Swamp. Drive that route from east to west, and you'll cross six bridges. Take it from west to east, and you might find seven. But you'd better hope not. |
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by Karen Russell
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family's island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos.
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by Anjali Sachdeva
From science fiction to American Gothic to magical realism to horror -- these stories are united by each character's brutal struggle with fate. Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime. Along the way, they must navigate the borderland between salvation and destruction. |
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by Rivers Solomon
Vern -- seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised -- flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. |
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by Tiffany Quay Tyson
Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water. Until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes. Not drowned, not lost . . . simply gone. |
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