Monster Fiction

Nearly six months after Kate and August were first thrown together, the war between the monsters and the humans is a terrifying reality. In Verity, August has become the leader he never wished to be, and in Prosperity, Kate has become the ruthless hunter she knew she could be. When a new monster emerges from the shadows—one who feeds on chaos and brings out its victim’s inner demons—it lures Kate home, where she finds more than she bargained for. She’ll face a monster she thought she killed, a boy she thought she knew, and a demon all her own.

Gargoyle security guard Grayson Lightfoot never celebrates Christmas. It brings back too many bad memories. Besides he's got a job to do—watching over Motham City 24/7 from his rooftop. Maisie doesn't celebrate Christmas either. Orphaned at an early age, she's a sensible human with a mission—to earn enough money to open up a drop-in center for street kids in Motham. So naturally she jumps at a lucrative holiday contract to work as a housekeeper for Grayson.

The time is 1902. The setting, eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men. She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii. Their violent past doesn't concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house, and one she says has killed before. But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels.

"Perfect deadpan marks the opening of Ali Simpson’s The Monster'" writes Susan Merrell of The Southampton Review in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading.

Something is wrong at the Sea. The weeping tide, a carnivorous algae bloom, is eating up all the fish. Beasts are terrorizing the nearby Elsewheres. And Lochmordra, the Legendary Beast, is rising at random and swallowing ships whole. Barclay’s teacher, the famous Guardian Keeper Runa Rasgar, has been summoned to investigate, and as her apprentice, Barclay gets to join too. But Runa’s nemesis has also been called to the Sea, and he’s brought apprentices of his own. When the not-so-friendly competition between them grows fierce, it’s Barclay who can’t seem to keep up.

Carly Beth thinks she's found the best Halloween mask ever. With yellow-green skin and long animal fangs, the mask terrifies the entire neighborhood. Before long, it has a surprising effect on Carly Beth, too. She tries to take it off... but it won't budge! Halloween is almost over, but fright night is just beginning. Now with all-new bonus materials!

A host of the smartest young adult authors come together in this collection of scary stories and psychological thrillers curated by Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea's April Genevieve Tucholke. Each story draws from a classic tale or two - sometimes of the horror genre, sometimes not - to inspire something new and fresh and terrifying. There are no superficial scares here; these are stories that will make you think even as they keep you on the edge of your seat.

Follow Luke as he's transported to a world of magic and monsters. A mysterious goddess has tasked the Earthly game warden with protecting an all-female tribe with strange animal features. Cast off from civilization, he must help this isolated jungle people fortify their village against the rapacious Rakhasa, confound a wicked witch, and breed the next generation of monster children.

What do you do when you accidentally trigger a cross dimensional machine created by a mad scientist and teleport to a different version of Earth every 72 hours? Well, you obviously start recruiting beautiful monster girls and construct a fort, because these worlds are crazy deadly and you’re going to need all the help you can get to survive.

Malem has joined the forces of good and wages war against the vast host of Vorgon, the Balor who has come to destroy the world. Malem has four beautiful women fighting at his side, one of them a former general of Vorgon's army - a night elf tamed by his unique skill. He also has a few hill giants and other monsters ready to follow him to the gates of hell itself.

Ben has saved the dragonkin women’s island from the ancient, ghostly maldungs, so it’s time for his next adventure. But when he and his crew of women set sail again, they discover the orcs have another enemy. A dangerous, fire-breathing, ship-destroying enemy. And Ben wonders if he can tame it.

Grace has a job she loves, a community she adores, and plenty of friends . . . but her lack of bedroom action has left this event planner too horny to think. When one ill-advised night at the bar leads to her giving an exhibitionistic show to an unknown presence outside her bedroom window, she thinks she's hit a new low. When her voyeur turns out to be a nebbishly charming mothman, Grace needs to decide if she can trust her body—and her heart—with this garnet-eyed stranger before he flies out of her life for good.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

Travel writer Amelia Balfour's dream of touring Egypt is halted when she receives news of a revolutionary new surgery for her grotesquely disfigured brother. This could change everything, and it does...in the worst possible way. Surgeon Graham Lambert has suspicions about the doctor he's gone into practice with, but he can't stop him from operating on Amelia's brother. Will he be too late to prevent the man's death? Or to reveal his true feelings for Amelia before she sails to Cairo?

This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.

One night, when Ethan checks under the bed for his monster, he finds a note instead: “Gone fishing. Back in a week. --Gabe” What will Ethan do? He needs a monster under his bed. How is he supposed to get to sleep if his monster is gone? Substitute monsters appear, but none are just right. Herbert's teeth aren't sharp enough, Mack's slobbering induces giggles, Cynthia's tail isn't scary at all, and Ralph has nail polish on his claws! This will never work! How will Ethan ever get to sleep without his monster?

What's it like to be a monster in a town full of monsters, who don't know you're a monster? Complicated and a little scary, but doable. What's it like to be the girl who can't die - that everyone seems to always want to kill? Frustrating as hell. What's it like to accidentally raise a psychotic alpha vampire everyone fears, who drops a lot of bodies on his first day out as a gift for your troubles? Terrifying, if I'm being honest. I really don't know how this stuff keeps happening to me.

An experimental ASI with a terminal case of curiosity reached out and tampered with the universe in a way that it should not have, and unleashed a torrent of energy we would call magic into our galaxy. Humans, and every other intelligent lifeform for that matter, were ill-prepared, physically and mentally, for such an eventuality. In an effort to save itself, the ASI hastily created something it called the Framework to shape and codify this magical energy, and usher in a new world. A world of classes, levels, and extraordinary power. But also a world of monsters.

I’ve always been a scrapper, so when I was snatched from my world by shadow creatures and hauled to another one, I did as I’d always done. I fought. But I still didn’t know anything about where I was. My luck was in, because I quickly had the good fortune of meeting a sexy prophetess and a gorgeous, blue-skinned, redheaded mage who said she was something called a moonwisp. Yeah, magic was a thing. The problem with that? Everyone in the world had some. Magic, that is. Everyone but me. I guess that’s what I get for coming from a non-magic world.

Her entire life, Xo has brought others happiness and love, complete with endings tied in pretty little bows. This year, she wants that for herself. Love. Romance. A happy ending. And there's a grumpy Santa who's more than willing to grant her this wish in exchange for finding his love for Christmas again. Where there are candy canes, there are happily ever afters... and they're both about to find theirs.