Family Horror

It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up.

Nine-year-old Olivia Friel is delighted to be spending the summer at Greyfriars House, a place where her parents, their family and friends are always happy. But this year there's an underlying tension that Olivia doesn't understand. Then one night she sees something she's not meant to, and accidentally lets slip a devastating betrayal. Charlotte Friel gets a call from her ailing mother, asking something she's never asked before: for Charlotte to come home. There are things Olivia needs to tell her daughter before it's too late, secrets to be shared about forgotten relatives and a mysterious house.

One of Canada’s most acclaimed horror writers, Gemma Files presents a mosaic of interconnected stories about interconnected families. After fleeing Scotland, five clans settled in the fictional town of Dourvale in northern Ontario. Known as the Five-Family Coven, they are the descendants of witches and witch-children, none of whom were spared persecution in their native country. Now shamans, spellcasters, singers, and thieves, the members of the Devize, Druir, Glouwer, Roke, and Rusk families survive by trading their occult powers and talents.

Best friends and high school seniors Sadie and Logan make their first mistake when they ditch their end-of-year field trip to the amusement park in favor of exploring some old, forgotten backroads. The last thing they expect to come across is a giant, abandoned corn maze. But with a whole day of playing hooking unspooling before them, they make their second mistake. Or perhaps their third? Maybe even their fourth. Because Sadie and Logan have definitely entered this maze before. And again before that.

As the seasons change and spring arrives, the marigolds once again come into full bloom, and with them the haunting echoes of the past work their way into destroying Anne's perfect world. Murder and madness lurk around every corner, driving some to the point of no return.

Ruth has returned to Edinburgh after many years of exile, left rootless by the end of her marriage and career and now the death of her father, from whom she had long been estranged. She is faced with the daunting task of clearing his house, believing he had removed all traces of her mother. Yet hidden away in a barely used top-floor room, she finds he had secretly kept a cupboard full of her possessions. Sifting through the ancient papers, Ruth discovers the diary and letters written by her ancestor from the 18th century, Thomas Erskine.

Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future, and more particularly, for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement.

Since the publication of his first novel 30 years ago, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life real figures. The Body Artist is DeLillo's haunting and profoundly moving new novel.

Written in haunting, lyrical prose, Kit’s Wilderness examines the bonds of family from one generation to the next, and explores how meaning and beauty can be revealed from the depths of darkness.

Conceived in love and possibility, Bonaventure Arrow didn't make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. No one knows that Bonaventure's silence is filled with resonance - a miraculous gift of rarified hearing that encompasses the Universe of Every Single Sound.

Call me Drood, Eddie Drood. Some know me as Shaman Bond and most simply don' t want to know me at all. For centuries, my family has been keeping the things that lurk on the darker side of existence as far away as possible from humans like you, without you even knowing we' re there. Unfortunately for us, not everybody appreciates what we Droods do. Recently, I personally managed to survive yet another attempt on my life, but the rest of my relatives weren' t so lucky.

Ghostgirl features Charlotte Usher, a high-schooler who can't help but feel no one knows she's alive. Then her nagging fear is confirmed. One day she no longer just feels invisible - she is, in fact, dead and literally haunting the halls.

Lili St. Crow staked her place among writers of dark fantasy with the release of Strange Angels, the first book featuring night hunter Dru Anderson. Here teen Dru returns, a little wiser but still beset by supernatural terrors that would have most girls her age running for cover. What else would you expect for someone with nonhuman blood coursing through her veins?

Shortly before Halloween, Lucely and her best friend, Syd, cast a spell that accidentally awakens malicious spirits, wreaking havoc throughout St. Augustine. Together, they must join forces with Syd's witch grandmother, Babette, and her tubby tabby, Chunk, to fight the haunting head-on and reverse the curse to save the town and Lucely's firefly spirits before it's too late.

Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It's true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of 19th-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a 16-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey's life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school. Everything changes when Joey's mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known....

Growing up, Cori, Maz, and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for pop culture, Halloween, and arcade games. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead, and Maz has good reason to believe he was kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine? These days, all Maz wants to do is party and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori hides under the bubblegum veneer of a high school queen bee. But then Sam returns—still twelve years old, while his best friends are now seventeen.

Wanda has uncovered a dark secret that could shatter the image of her perfect family. Attempting to force the situation back into the societal framework shed strived for years to present, events spiral out of control. Secrets threaten to emerge from a carefully suppressed past and become public. To save her family's reputation, Wanda succumbs to a madness no one could have expected.

Alexis is thrilled when her sister joins a club; new friends are just what Kasey needs. It's strange, though, to see how fast the girls in The Sunshine Club go from dorky and antisocial to gorgeous and popular. Soon Alexis learns that the girls have pledged an oath to a seemingly benevolent spirit named Aralt.

Every October, Cara and her family become inexplicably and unavoidably accident prone. Some years it's bad, like the season when her father died, and some years it's just a lot of cuts and scrapes. This accident season - when Cara; her ex-stepbrother, Sam; and her best friend, Bea, are 17 - is going to be a bad one. But not for the reasons they think.

All you must know is that today she will become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark her and place the red hood on her head. With her sisters, she will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain—an evil which has already killed nine of her village’s men.