Literary Horror

Compulsively listenable and stylistically stunning, Black Dog Summer begins with a murder, a farmstead massacre, in the South African bush. Thirty-eight-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele; her brother-in-law and unrequited love, Liam; her niece, Bryony; and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy.

On a June night in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, Marit Deym prowls her land, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the van from the Dangerfield Zoo. When it finally comes - hours late - five wolves leap out onto the sprawling wildlife refuge Marit has created. And then one night, the wolves bring a stranger to her door. A poetry instructor at a school for the blind, Gabriel Frankman lives in self-imposed exile after the death of the girl he loved. He visits her grave every weekend. He carries sunflower seeds in his backpack and his friends are the birds.

Jane Eyre remains a classic of 19th-century English literature and is the most famous and influential novel by Charlotte Bronte. Published in 1847, one of the most popular of all English novels, the story tells of the rise of a poor orphan girl against overwhelming odds. It is a work of fiction with memorable characters and vivid scenes exploring themes that have as much relevance today as in the time it was written.

Benedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem.

In the spring of 1844, the Wells family receives a letter from a distant relative, the wealthy landowner Nicholas Van Ryn. He has invited one of their daughters for an extended visit at his Hudson Valley estate, Dragonwyck. Eighteen-year-old Miranda, bored with her local suitors and commonplace life on the farm, leaps at the chance for escape.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

The Black Knight Chronicles: lots of vampires. No sparkles. Serious snark. This bundle includes books one through there: Hard Day's Knight, Back in Black, and Knight Moves.

The woman is Talulla Demetriou. She's grieving for her werewolf lover, Jake, whose violent death has left her alone with her own sublime monstrousness. On the run, pursued by the hunters of WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena), she must find a place to give birth to Jake's child in secret. The birth, under a full moon at a remote Alaska lodge, leaves Talulla ravaged, but with her infant son in her arms she believes the worst is over - until the windows crash in, and she discovers that the worst has only just begun.

First Glen Duncan gave us his monstrously thrilling, genre-reinventing The Last Werewolf: the tale of Jake, a werewolf with a profoundly human heart, considering bringing to an end the timeless legend of his kind.... Then Talulla Rising: Jake’s werewolf lover, mother to newborn twins, on the run from those who want her destroyed... And now By Blood We Live: a stunningly erotic love story that gives us the final battle for survival between werewolves and vampires.

Light and dark—this is the cursed birthright placed upon Clara and Natasha by their godfather, Drosselmeyer, whose power and greed hold an entire city in his sway. Charming Clara, the favorite, grows into a life of beauty and ease, while ignored and unloved Natasha is relegated to her sister’s shadow. But the opportunity for revenge announces itself one Christmas Eve, when Drosselmeyer arrives at their family gala with the Nutcracker, an enchanted gift that offers entry into an alternate world: the Kingdom of Sweets.

When 21-year-old NYU student Jeff Converse is convicted of a brutal rape and murder that he did not commit, his nightmare has just begun. Jeff is just the latest innocent man to be made a target of the society that controls the underground hell called the Manhattan Hunt Club.

"Eve looked out the window. She wondered, why did she continue to come here? All the while her doctor drolled on and on about her goals for the week. Her depression lingered over her entire life, like a swarm of flies. Constantly ticking and buzzing in her ears, crawling over her skin, biting her where she couldn’t reach. She thought once she stopped taking chemical medication and moved on to talk therapy things would improve, so far they remained about the same. She just had more homework assignments"...

Luci LaBang is a star: For decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit musical. But as time takes its toll, Luci fears her star is beginning to dim. When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene: Luda, whose fantastical beauty and sinister charm infatuate Luci immediately . . . and who bears a striking resemblance to Luci herself at a much younger age.

One summer night, a boy and his beautiful cousin plunge naked into the moonlit waters of a rural quarry. Twenty years later, the boy, now grown, flees the wreckage of his life and returns to Arden, Wisconsin, in search of everything he has lost. But for Miles Teagarden, the landscape he knew so well has turned eerie and threatening. And the love he shared has become very, very deadly....

An underground classic, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways", experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister then the last.

Lady Sophia Kendall, 32nd in line to the throne of Anglion, is only days away from finding out if she will be blessed - or perhaps cursed - with magic. When a vicious attack by Anglion's ancient enemies leaves the kingdom in chaos, Sophia is forced to flee the court. Her protector by happenstance is Lieutenant Cameron Mackenzie, a member of the royal guard, raised all his life to be fiercely loyal to the Crown.

Octubre de 1932, penitenciaría de Cold Mountain. Los condenados a muerte aguardan el momento de ser conducidos a la silla eléctrica. Los crímenes abominables que han cometido les convierten en carnaza de un sistema legal que se alimenta de un círculo de locura, muerte y venganza.

The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert.

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.

For 25 years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can’t remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her off on her personal journey toward redemption.