Small Horrors

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.

Small Bites exists at the fulcrum of the idyllic and the dreadful. It invokes the pleasant and mundane memories of the not-so-distant past and violently interrupts them with immediate and visceral terror. These 13 offerings beat from the corroded heart of Americana and prey upon the innocence of our cherished nostalgia. More than a horror anthology, this is a canvas oozing with living paint, pigments selected from our collective nightmares, and imprisoned within this listening experience.

Nothing much ever happens in Millville, a small, secluded middle-American community - until the day Brad Carter discovers he is unable to leave. It's not just the nearly bankrupt real estate agent who's being held prisoner; every other resident is also being confined within the town's boundaries by an invisible force field that cannot be breached. As local tensions rapidly reach a breaking point, a set of bizarre circumstances leads Brad to the source of their captivity.

Silent Witness begins in 1967, in a small Midwestern town. Seventeen-year-old Tony Lord, Lake City's star athlete, seems destined for great things. His driving ambition is precisely what attracts Alison Taylor, the daughter of the town's leading family, and it is what sets Tony apart from his two closest friends: Sam Robb and Sam's girl, Sue Cash. Suddenly, everything changes. Alison Taylor is brutally murdered, and Tony is the number one suspect. The town turns against him. His friendship with Sam is destroyed. And Tony leaves Lake City, vowing never to return.

Menace awaits. Sleath. Quiet, peaceful. A small village hidden away in the Chiltern Hills, almost forgotten by the modern world. Nothing much seems to happen here; little disturbs the centuries-old tranquillity. Until the ghosts begin to appear and frighteningly bizarre events start to occur. Psychic investigator David Ash, a man burdened by the dark secret of his own past, is sent to Sleath to investigate the phenomena and his discoveries there drive him to the very edge of his own sanity.

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.

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 young Daniel Whitman is killed at a high-school party, the community is ripped apart. The death of Sanctuary's star quarterback seems to be a tragic accident, but everyone knows his ex-girlfriend Harper Fenn is the daughter of a witch - and she was there when he died. Was Daniel's death an accident, revenge, or something more sinister? As accusations fly, paranoia grips the town, culminating in a witch-hunt...and the town becomes no sanctuary at all.

The Grimes sisters aren’t normal—even by witches’ standards. For weeks, Fiona has been having chilling visions of death, and Eleanor sees restless spirits nearly everywhere she goes. It doesn’t help that Mountain Shadow is a strange place to begin with, where rumors of curses fly as fast as saltwater taffy on a warm summer day. When a string of gruesome murders rocks the small town, Fiona and the rest of her coven begin to worry that a fellow witch may be the killer. Even worse? A witch hunter has just moved in next door, and he suspects the coven.

In a small town tucked away in the Midwestern corn fields, the adults whisper about Tornado Day. Our narrator, a high school sophomore, has never heard this phrase but she soon discovers its terrible meaning: a plague of sentient tornadoes is coming to destroy them. The only thing that stands between the town and total annihilation is a teen boy known as the tornado killer. Drawn to this enigmatic boy, our narrator senses an unnatural connection between them. But the adults are hiding a secret about the origins of the tornadoes and the true nature of the tornado killer.

A Mysterious Incident at the Mental Institution is a spooky, chilling tale from Nikolai Leskov based on a true incident.

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.

Edward Smalls got the nickname Sawbones by cutting people up. For a bloke called Robert, who is Eastern European. Now, small time dope pusher Alfred Leonard wants Edward to star in a snuff film. With additional fuckery.

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 time for Blue Plum's annual historical festival, and everyone-including Kath and her spunky fiber and needlework group, TGIF-is getting in on the action. Expert spinners are being gathered, and a businessman has approached Kath about using the second-floor windows of her store for part of a reenactment. But the reenactment ends in real-life bloodshed when local baker Reva Louise Snapp is shot-with a bullet from a modern-day gun.

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.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

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.

Jacob Reese enjoys the quiet life, running a coffee shop and renting out his cottage in The Hollows, Vermont. But the calm is shattered when a woman who looks eerily similar to his ex-girlfriend Laura turns up to stay in the cottage, and leaves a mysterious note in the guest book. Now Jacob’s seeing Laura everywhere - a glimpse of her face across the street, her music box left outside his house, a gift he gave her years before hanging from the trees. But it can’t be Laura. Because Laura’s dead.

Five years ago, the demon Azazel tricked Ben Spencer into giving him possession of his body. After countless frustrating and heartbreaking dead ends, Ben’s family and his girlfriend Katy Ruskin have finally located him. Will their daring rescue attempt work, and will they be able to free Ben from the demon? And with Ben free, is everything truly over…or is it only just beginning? A Pattern of Shadows brings the Small Things trilogy to a stunning conclusion that pits Ben and Katy and their families against the very forces of heaven and hell itself.