Occult Horror Fiction

Struggling with money, raising a child alone, and fleeing a volatile ex, Jess McMachen accepts a job caring for an elderly patient. Flo Gardner–a disturbed shut-in and invalid. But if Jess can hold this job down, she and her daughter, Izzy, can begin a new life. Flo's vast home, Nerthus House, may resemble a stately vicarage in an idyllic village, but the labyrinthine interior is a dark, cluttered warren filled with pagan artefacts.

After a recent string of disappearances in a small Connecticut town, a grieving widower with a grim secret is drawn into a dangerous ritual of dark magic by a powerful and mysterious older gentleman named Heart Crowley. Meanwhile, a member of local law enforcement tasked with uncovering the culprit responsible for the bizarre disappearances soon begins to learn of a current of unbridled hatred simmering beneath the guise of the town’s idyllic community.

The city streets are no longer safe. They are filled instead with the living dead, rotting predators driven only by a need to kill and eat. Some of the living still struggle to survive, but with each passing day, their odds grow worse. Some survivors have fled, frantically searching for a place to escape, even briefly, the slaughter around them.

When Nathan Garrett’s friend seeks his help investigating a bloody serial killer, the pattern of horrific crimes leads to a creature of pure malevolence, born of hatred and dark magic. As powerful as he is, Nate fears he may be overmatched, but when evil targets those he cares about and he is confronted by dire threats both old and new, Nate must reveal a secret from his recently remembered past to remind his enemies why they should fear him once more.

Five bachelors left. Four mystical families to meet and territories to explore. Four chances to avoid a supernatural war. Kimmie-Jayne thought discovering the bachelors were supernatural was tough, until she finds out she has to spend the week with their families. Now she's whisked off to meet four of the most powerful families of Azar. If she can survive dragon lords, daunting angels, the intrigue of Fae court, and the Underworld, she'll end up with the man of her dreams. Or so she hopes. But nothing is as it seems in each of these households.

The parish of Manningtree and Mistley has a dark history. In 1644, Cromwell's Witchfinder General tortured scores of women there, including Liza the herbalist, whose cottage still stands. Some say the spirits of his victims still haunt the old shop on the High Street. Emma Dickson gave up her high-flying career to live in Liza’s cottage, but as Halloween approaches, visions of a terrible past are driving her to madness. In despair, Emma turns to the local rector for help, but he, too, is in the grip of something inexplicably dangerous.

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist-and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject's-in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

A year or so before the beginning of World War I, a young woman named Lisa la Giuffria is seduced by a white magician, Cyril Grey, and persuaded into helping him in a magical battle with a black magician and his black lodge. Grey is attempting to raise the level of his force by impregnating the girl with the soul of an ethereal being — the moonchild.

No train has run on this railroad since the end of the Civil War—a railroad built by the servitude to perfect evil—and its trusted tracks run right behind the house. Justin Collier expects his respite in Gast, Tennessee, to be relaxing if not a bit dull, but he will find out soon enough that those same train tracks once led to a place worse than Hell.

When detectives James Manning and Covina "Dewey" Duwai are called in to investigate a series of bizarre murders, they make a shocking discovery: the legend of the hidden righteous ones, the 36 who preserve the world from destruction, is no legend at all. They are real, and they are being murdered. As the bodies pile up and the world tilts into chaos, Manning and Dewey must protect the righteous ones from a ruthless killer able to beguile his victims and command them against their will.

Dorian Lake spent years cornering the Baltimore hex-crafting market, using his skills at the hermetic arts to exact karmic justice for those whom the system has failed. He keeps his magic clean and free of soul-corrupting Netherwork, thus avoiding both the karmic blow-back of his practice and the notice of the Presidium, a powerful cabal of practitioners that polices the esoteric arts in America.

National Book Award winner Ann Arensberg brings listeners a modern horror story about evil descending on an insular Maine town. It begins with the theft of six candles from the church altar, a few herbs found strewn in the local graveyard. In the summer of 1974, the prosperous farming community of Dry Falls, Maine, is hit by a brutal heat wave. Crops fail. Drought blights once-verdant lawns. Men inexplicably lose all interest in sex, while women complain of erotic nocturnal visitations.

After sending their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson Selway and his wife, Ellen, travel to London to escape their empty house. But their quiet hotel has guests other than those on the register, and the vacation turns into a journey not only to another city but to another time. As Selway is drawn into a series of mysterious encounters with a young girl who died in a fall from his hotel window sixty years earlier, the characters of her life become more real to him than those of his own.

Father John has lived his whole life without knowing a woman's touch. Hard at first, his self-denial grew easier over time, as he learned to master his urges with a regimen of prayer, cold showers, and jigsaw puzzles. That changes the day that Debra Rocks enters his confessional. A rough-talking adult film actress, she has come to ask him to pray for a murdered costar.

Theology student Hudson has just won the lottery, but not just any lottery—Satan’s lottery. Only 11 people in all of human history have been so honored since Lucifer’s fall from Heaven in 5318 BC. All Hudson need do is say “yes” and he will receive an all-expenses-paid tour of Hell, and his tour-guide is the damned soul of H.P. Lovecraft, the greatest horror writer of all time....

I’ve spent my whole life seeing monsters, but they could never see me back...until now. Turns out, I’m not crazy like I’ve spent my whole life believing. Too bad it took being locked in a cage and tortured almost to the point of insanity to realize that. But I’m not alone. In a cage to my left, there’s a monster who’s given up hope. He stays in the shadows and moves with chains wrapped around him, but his golden eyes watch. To my right, there’s a girl with purple wings and familiar gray eyes.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers and listeners of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn. Quinn's short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales's original publication run.

When Eleanor Harper becomes the director of a renowned artists' retreat, she knows nothing of Cliffside Manor's dark past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, a "waiting room for death". After years of covering murder and violence as a crime reporter, Eleanor hopes that being around artists and writers in this new job will be a peaceful retreat for her as much as for them.

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées - Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer?

My name is Medley Bell, and if you had told me this time last week that I was demon, then I’d have said you were nuttier than a squirrel turd. Of course, that was before I started seeing the strangest things. I’ve always been a little off, but it took stumbling into a backwater bar to understand how different I really am. So when two drool-worthy guys stop by to tell me that I’m Hell spawn just like them, I’m more relieved than shocked. I mean, it sure does explain a lot.