Small Horrors

Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower. Olivia figures she’ll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow. If Olivia’s going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she’ll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm’s otherworldly powers and find Sunflower.

A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake. She introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's a small town in the center of the state - the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: It's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

In a small Arizona town, a man counts his blessings: a loving wife, two teenage daughters, and a job that allows him to work at home. Then "The Store" announces plans to open a local outlet, which will surely finish off the small downtown shops. His concerns grow when "The Store's" builders ignore all the town's zoning laws during its construction. Then dead animals are found on "The Store's" grounds. Inside, customers are hounded by obnoxious sales people, and strange products appear on the shelves.

Lucia and her sisters grew up on the edge of Mockbeggar Woods. They knew it well—its danger, but also its beauty. As a lonely teenager, Kate was drawn to these sisters, who were unlike anyone she’d ever met. But when they brought her into the woods, something dark was awakened, and Kate has never been able to escape the terrible truth of what happened there. Now, Kate is returning home for the first time in years—for Sam and Chloe’s wedding. But the woods are stirring again, and Kate must reconnect with Lucia, her first love, to protect Chloe, the village, and herself.

Always up for trying something new, Kath and her friends from the fiber and needlework group TGIF - Thank Goodness It's Fiber - are visiting Cloud Hollow Farm for the day to learn the fine art of dyeing. With spring in the air, the friends head out to greet the sheep. But the sheep are more interested in something else - two bodies spread under a tall tree. And one of those bodies is someone they know. Kath's friends nudge her to investigate.

Intruder in the Dust is at once an engrossing murder mystery and an unflinching portrait of racial injustice. Set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, it is the story of Lucas Beauchamp, a black man wrongly arrested for the murder of Vinson Gowrie, a white man. Confronted by the threat of lynching, Lucas sets out to prove his innocence, aided by a white lawyer, Gavin Stephens, and his young nephew, Chick Mallison.

Dean is a best-selling writer who struggles with writer's block ever since the scandal. Between the accident and the public scandal, no publisher wants to work with him anymore—until his agent calls him one day to tell him he managed to sign a deal with a small publisher. Dean isn't thrilled, but his lack of excitement turns into frustration when he learns that his deadline to come up with an idea for a book is 30 days.

It’s fall 1985, and Dustin Henderson is starting his freshman year at Hawkins High School. After the tragedy at the Starcourt Mall, he’s ready for life to return to normal, but things feel different. Some friends have moved away. Others are still in town but growing distant. Dustin thinks entering a science competition will make everything like it used to be, but will Lucas and Mike join him? Or will he have to rely on a charismatic metalhead named Eddie? Join Dustin on a road trip filled with inventions, heavy metal, and a new understanding of his place in Hawkins.

After the tragic death of their father and surviving a life-threatening eating disorder, eighteen-year-old Ellis moves with their mother to the small town of Black Stone, seeking a simpler life and some space to recover. But Black Stone feels off; it's a disquieting place surrounded by towns with some of the highest death rates in the country. It doesn't help that everyone says Ellis's new house is haunted—everyone including Quinn, a local girl who has quickly captured Ellis's attention.

It's 1825, four generations after Berggrund Island's women stood accused of witchcraft under the eye of their priest, now long dead. In his place is Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild young daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, oppositional, increasingly obsessed with the lore and legend of the island's dark past and their absent mother, whom their father refuses to speak of. As the girls come of age, and the strictures of the community shift but never wane, their rebellions twist and sharpen

Caleb Cantrill still can't find where he hid the bandit's gold or his cavern of riches. The only thing it seems he can find is more and more of the monstrous blight he unleashed on the peaceful valley he now calls home. Adding to his troubles, his twenty-four-hour reprieve from the gang is up soon, and the bandits will be returning, looking for their gold, or his life is forfeit. Kitty Welch is swept up in a corrupt scheme which may result in her arrest and deportation back to Scotland. Though she wants to flee, there is something keeping her in the valley.

When the Kings move from LA to a secluded small town, 15-year-old Xander is beyond disappointed. He and his friends loved to create amateur films, but the tiny town of Pinedale is the last place a movie buff and future filmmaker wants to land. But he, David, and Toria are captivated by the many rooms in the old Victorian fixer-upper they moved into - as well as the heavy woods surrounding the house.

When five friends are invited to a religious celebration in a small, isolated town, they are initially showered by the townsfolk with gifts and attention. As the days go by, however, it becomes clear that the community is not as innocuous as it initially presented itself. Mysterious, robed figures violently beat people who express different opinions, strange rituals take place in the church at night, and armed gunmen patrol the town perimeters–all under Prophet Martin’s orders.

The elite warriors of the Hereford-based SAS know all about pain and the enduring of it. Syd Spicer, ex-SAS trooper, has found himself back in the regiment - this time as its chaplain, responsible for the spiritual welfare of the hardest men in or out of uniform. Faced with a case which would normally be passed discreetly to Hereford diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins, Spicer is forced, for security reasons, to try and handle it himself - and is coming close to a breakdown.

In November 2014 Arla Macleod bludgeoned her mother, father and sister to death with a hammer. Now incarcerated at a medium-security mental-health institution, Arla will speak to no one but Scott King, an investigative journalist, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation. King finds himself immersed in an increasingly complex case, interviewing five witnesses and Arla herself as he questions whether Arla's responsibility for the massacre was a diminished as her legal team made out.

The small town of Harrod’s Reach has seen its fair share of the macabre, especially inside the decrepit old train tunnel around which the town was built. After a young boy, Sully Dupree, is injured in the abandoned tunnel and left in a coma, the townspeople are determined to wall it up. Deputy sheriff Beth Gardner is reluctant to buy into the superstitions until she finds two corpses at the tunnel’s entrance, each left with strange calling cards inscribed with old lullabies. Soon after, Sully Dupree briefly awakens from his coma.

Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.

Hamming it up with equal parts history and histrionics, Phillip leads an archaeological dig of the farm's original dump site - until one student stops the show by uncovering some human bones. When a full skeleton is later excavated, Kath can't help but wonder if it's somehow connected to Geneva, the ghost who haunts her shop, and whom she met at this very site. After Phillip is found dead, it's up to Kath to thread the clues together before someone else becomes history.

It's 1997. Scarclaw Fell. The body of teenager Tom Jeffries is found at an outward bound centre. Verdict? Misadventure. But not everyone is convinced. And the truth of what happened in the beautiful but eerie fell is locked in the memories of the tight-knit group of friends who took that fateful trip and the flimsy testimony of those living nearby.