Horror Urban Fiction

The sequel to the best-selling Zombie, Ohio, this explosive supernatural thriller from Scott Kenemore tells the story of three Chicagoans who have been thrown together by a bizarre, interconnected series of events during the first 24 hours of a zombie outbreak in the Midwest's largest city. A partnership is crafted between a pastor from Chicago's rough South Side, an intrepid newspaper reporter, and a young female musician, all of whom are fighting for survival as they struggle to protect themselves and their communities in a city overrun with the walking dead.

Hank Varney’s the name. Miss Clem and me, along with the two Sidewinders from Santa Fe—we’ll get the sharp-toothed vermin cleared out. Now, some people say I’m lucky, but I don’t know if it’ll do me any good, what with the army of trouble me and the crew are facin’. If we don’t live through it, well, there goes Deadwood. Maybe even the whole of the Black Hills.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

India Morgan Phelps - Imp to her friends - is schizophrenic. Struggling with her perceptions of reality, Imp must uncover the truth about her encounters with creatures out of myth - or from something far, far stranger....

Eric Riordan was once a wealthy man leading a comfortable, easy life. Until one day Gabriel, his oldest friend, Marine Corps veteran, and a former mercenary, told him how the world was going to end. He did his best to prepare. He thought he was ready for anything. He was wrong. As the dead rise up to devour the living, one man finds himself struggling to survive in the ruins of a shattered world. Alone, isolated, and facing starvation, his only chance is to flee to the Appalachians and join forces with Gabriel.

Magic is real, and hungry. It’s trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, and only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. She joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad - Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum - and together they stand between humanity and the magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.

Nestor and Nathan Kiklu are the twin sons of Harry Keogh, the Necroscope. United by blood, they also share some of their father's awesome powers - but what they do with those gifts cannot be more different! Nathan takes up the struggle against the metamorphic vampires, while Nestor, fascinated by the vampires' eerie evil, has become his twin's worst nightmare: A Wamphyri Lord! Harry Keogh's sons have become the bitterest of enemies, each determined to destroy the other. When next they meet, one will surely die!

Students are spooked at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts, and Lily is called in to search for possible paranormal activity. In return she's been promised a trunkful of Victorian-era clothes recently discovered in a school storage closet. But Lily finds something else: the body of a wealthy patron of the school. In between running the store and seeing her new boyfriend, Max - a "mythbuster" who is uncomfortable with her witchcraft - she uses her sleuthing skills to try to solve the murder. Soon Lily senses something from the school's vintage clothes, but it's not the smell of mothballs - it's the unmistakable aura of evil intent.

When a mutilated body shows up in their seaside town of Noquitt, Maine, the Blackmoore sisters realize that an ancient relic they'd been trying to locate has been hidden right in their own hometown the whole time.

Once a legendary police inspector, Nicolas Lenoir is now a disillusioned and broken man who spends his days going through the motions and his evenings drinking away the nightmares of his past. Ten years ago, Lenoir barely escaped the grasp of the Darkwalker, a vengeful spirit who demands a terrible toll on those who have offended the dead. But the Darkwalker does not give up on his prey so easily, and Lenoir has always known his debt would come due one day. When Lenoir is assigned to a disturbing new case, he treats the job with his usual apathy- until his best informant, a street savvy orphan, is kidnapped.

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

There’s only so much room on the Island, only so much blood, and Manhattan’s Vampyre Clans aren’t interested in sharing. So when the Vyrus-infected dregs of New York’s outer boroughs start creeping across the bridges, the Clans want to know why. Bad luck for PI Joe Pitt. Joe used to be a Rogue, work off his own dime, pick his own gigs, but tight times and a terminally ill girlfriend pushed him to the renegade Society Clan. Now he has all the cash and blood he needs, but at a steep price.

The ever-popular Mary Stanton always impresses in this series featuring a haunted law firm in Savannah, Georgia. Life has been challenging since Bree started taking cases for the dead. Paying the bills has been especially tough. But when she agrees to defend a teen thief whose father recently died, she’ll find that earning extra cash is the least of her worries.

The third novel in Jewell Parker Rhodes' acclaimed Voodoo series, Yellow Moon finds New Orleans' preeminent voodoo practitioner hunting an African vampire - a wazimamoto. Marie Levant is tired of seeing corpses drained of blood arrive at the hospital each night, and tired of being haunted by their ghosts. It'll take all her skills to expel the deadly spirit in this.

As a child, Henry Cadmus lived on Catalina Island, a scenic vacationland off the Southern California coast. But Henry's experiences were far from idyllic. Today, even though Henry has seen firsthand the horrors of war, the ghastly images that haunt his dreams are ones he associates with his childhood... and the island: a snarling pig-man holding a cleaver; a jackal-headed woman on a high balcony, dripping blood; strange occult rituals... and worse. If it was up to Henry, he would avoid the island entirely.

Two years ago, on the same day but miles apart, Finn Darby lost two of the most important people in his life: his wife Lorena, struck by lightning on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, and his abusive, alcoholic grandfather, Tom Darby, creator of the long-running newspaper comic strip Toy Shop.

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, or why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work, and it's up to her to stop them.

In the wake of their terrifying escape from Fairhaven Hall, sisters Jess and Hannah Ballard find themselves on the run, pursued by the two most powerful groups in the history of the spirit world. On one side, the Durupinen, determined to capture the girls and prevent their role in an ancient prophecy that promises to destroy them and unleash the spirit hordes on the earth. On the other side, the Necromancers, ancient enemies of the Durupinen, hell-bent on bringing the same prophecy to fruition. When the girls are betrayed and one of them falls into the Necromancers’ hands, both face decisions with cataclysmic consequences.

Hell has released its ravening horde of demons, leaving most of humanity a puke-spewing, head-spinning mess of possession. Humanity’s last hope? A team of misfit gargoyles - including a cigar-chomping, hard-ass grotesque - come alive and ready for battle during the End of Days. They guard the last cathedral-turned-sanctuary atop a bald knoll in the North Carolina mountains. Gargoyle protection grudgingly extends to any human who can make it inside the sanctuary, but the power of the stonecutter blood magic may not be enough when a rogue grotesque and his badly wounded ward arrive.

"Okay, so cats don't always land on their feet. I know that better than most. Since rejoining the Pride, I've made big decisions and even bigger mistakes: the kind paid for with innocent lives. As the first and only female enforcer, I have plenty to prove to my father, the Pride, and myself."