Best of
Gothic-Horror

2020

Hunger Pangs


Scott J. Moses - 2020
    Moses presents thirteen tales of supernatural horror and everyday woe.

The Yellow Wall-Paper


Sara Barkat - 2020
    Now, more than a hundred years later, this image-rich work has been interpreted by artist Sara Barkat—in a manner that combines both philosophical thought and visual intrigue.Sometimes understood as feminist literature, sometimes understood as exploring mental illness, and sometimes understood as both at the same time, this story is oddly poetic even when it is chilling and challenging. The tale contains subtexts that touch upon the nature of Imagination, as well as the act of Writing, and the artist has enhanced these subtexts with the inclusion of Victorian flower symbols, such as thistle for independence and lupine for imagination. Watch, too, for the appearance of some of history’s most imaginative art, refashioned and in dialog with the story at hand, which gives a sense of timelessness and broader societal import to the tale.

Remnants of Atonement (True paths #1)


G.P. McKenna - 2020
    Kilco has to stay in quarantine with Ilya, a red-eyed assassin eternally indebted to Ascot's Royal family, and the two soon become fast friends. Their relationship begins to change as Ilya heals and is preparing to leave the infirmary. Kilco is approached by a stranger who offers her a way to keep Ilya by her side forever.  An offer that will turn their lives upside down forever.

Last Case at a Baggage Auction


Eric J. Guignard - 2020
    Charlie Stewart and Joey Third are skilled in the art of successful bidding, but when Joey lands a mysterious suitcase, the thrill of winning turns to terror once they realize they’ve opened something sinister.Inside the suitcase is an antique gramophone, and the music it plays is unlike anything they’ve heard before. A chanting voice speaks to them in strange words, evoking visions of a dark, frozen land. It’s a voice that makes them sick with addiction, and it continues chanting in their heads even when the record stops playing.Charlie sets out to solve the mystery of the unholy music and how to turn it off forever. But the urge to listen grows stronger, and the more it plays, the more the aural virus spreads, until people begin to vanish . . . feeding an apparition that seeks immortality.

BEAUTIFUL, FRIGHTENING, AND SILENT


Jennifer Anne Gordon - 2020
    After a failed suicide attempt, and more group meetings that he can mention. Adam hears a rumor of a Haunted Island off the Coast of Maine, where “if someone wants it bad enough” they could be reunited with a lost loved one. In his desperate attempt to connect with the ghost of his four-and-a half year old son, he decides to go there, to Dagger Island, desperate to apologize to, or be condemned by, his young son. Adam is not sure what he deserves or even which of these he wants more. While staying in a crumbling old boarding house, he becomes involved with a beautiful and manipulative ghost who has spent 60 years tormenting the now elderly man who was her lover, and ultimately her murderer. The three of them create a “Menage-a-Guilt" as they all come to terms with what it is that ties them so emotionally to their memories and their very “existence”.Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent is a poetic fever dream of grief, love, and the terrifying ways that obsession can change who we are.JENNIFER ANNE GORDON is a professional ballroom dancer by day, and a curly haired neurotic writer by night. She is an actor, a traveler, a photographer, a lover of horror, and a dog mom. Beautiful, Frightening and Silent is her debut novel.

From Daylight To Madness (The Hotel #1)


Jennifer Anne Gordon - 2020
    For many who come here, this island is a sanctuary and a betrayal.This is a place where memories linger like ghosts, and the ephemeral nature of time begins to peel away ...like the sanity of all who have been unlucky enough to step foot on its shore.In the late spring of 1873, Isabelle gave birth to her son Oscar, he cried for three startling minutes, and then went silent. During the months that follow, Isabelle is drugged and lulled into an almost hallucinatory world of grief and fear. Her life begins to feel as though it exists in a terrifying new reality separated from those around her ...When her grieving begins to make her husband, Henry, uncomfortable, he and his mother conspire to send Isabelle away to a Summer Hotel on Dagger Island, where she can rest and heal. While they are adamant that the hotel is not an asylum and that Isabelle will be able to return eventually to her home, Isabelle understands in her heart that it is all a lie. That perhaps, everything about being a woman in this time, may have always been a lie.Her family has lied to her, and she has lied to herself.The Hotel, of course, is not what it seems, and the foreboding Dagger Island begins to feel more like a prison than a retreat. Isabelle hears relentless sounds coming from the attic above her room, and the ever-present cries of small children scream in her head almost constantly. Are they hallucinations, or are they connected to the small cemetery she found, filled with the fresh dirt of little graves, the brokenhearted reminders of people that no one believes ever existed?She meets a fellow guest at the Hotel, a young, enigmatic, and deeply damaged priest, named Francis.Together they teeter on the edges of reality and try desperately to become free from the fates that their pasts have bound them to.From Daylight to Madness is a poetic, and haunting Gothic Fiction novel that is both profoundly unsettling and darkly romantic.

When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk (The Hotel #2)


Jennifer Anne Gordon - 2020
    Francis loses everything he thought his life was, and what it could have become. His heart breaks and his feet run, all the way back to his childhood home, he reaches for a past that may not exist.He is there, in the little house in Dorchester Neck. A place haunted with missing time. He feels the comfort from walls that lean in too close, but then …He feels the trauma that ripped his life in two and in a blink of an eye he is back at the hotel. He can feel the memories fade as the cold fingers of winter wrap around him. He does not know how he got there, or indeed if he ever left.Francis has lived his whole life veiled in the memories that are more alive than his present. The current days fade away before he can hold on to him. Everything he was or thought he could have been is gone. He realizes he may be a monster, and the person he has fallen in love with may not even exist. Francis holds onto the memories he thinks are real …until he is almost consumed by them.Francis is isolated in a world of mesmerism, with his tormentor and healer Doctor Hughes.Francis is a guest in this hotel with his past, his present, and who he believes to be his future. Isabelle. His world is a labyrinth … he feels her hand in his. The fingers intertwine and there is nothing left but her …She is a memory, a ghost, and a hallucination.He can almost remember the moment when his father’s glass shattered into his face…he can almost remember who he was before he was broken in two.He can almost remember…He can almost…He can…He…

In the Shadows of Men


Robert Jackson Bennett - 2020
    Though each man is lured there by the promise of wealth, they are also fleeing something: a history of trauma, of failure, of family abuse, and shame.But the motel proves to have a history of its own. Once the business of a distant relative of theirs, Corbin Pugh, the brothers begin to discover signs that it might have been more than just a motel.As they live and labor in its dusty halls, fighting the crawling feeling that they are not alone here, they begin to wonder: what kind of a man was Corbin Pugh? What happened in the rooms he owned, so many decades ago? And is the motel changing them, warping them to become more ruthlessly ambitious and brutal—or is this what men must become in order to survive on the edge of civilization?

Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre


Alison PeirseKatarzyna Paszkiewicz - 2020
    These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.

Remnants of Liberation (True paths series, #3)


G.P. McKenna - 2020
    Follow along as Kilco, Ilya and Pogue fight to end the Ascotian civil war at the siege of Swannanoa, where not everything is as it seems. Loyalties and long-held values are tested when the question arises: in a war between nobles, what actually is the difference between the good and bad?

Remnants of Redemption (True paths series, #2)


G.P. McKenna - 2020
    Her best friend hates her, the Kingdom's hero is stalking her, her mother doesn't trust her, and there is a pompous Warlock lounging about her infirmary wearing nothing but a fluffy pink robe. And all that is before she even adventures off to fight the demon taking refuge at the heart of an impassable mountain range. At the Princess' orders, Kilco must work alongside Ilya and Pogue, the source of all her frustrations, to defeat Sedna and fulfil the prophecy of the legendary Casteel sword once and for all. But on a mountain where nothing is ever what it seems, secrets that should remain hidden begin bubbling to the surface, proving that the Morrigan might be the least of Kilco's worries. Danger lurks closer to home.

Uninvited Others: Book 1 in the Haven Manor trilogy


S. Feaker - 2020
    

Some Kind of Monster


Tim Waggoner - 2020
    

Come Tomorrow: And Other Tales of Bangalore Terror


Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - 2020
    There are shades of Lovecraft, Ligotti and Aickman, but most of all these stories seek to capture something of the layered, uncanny nature of the city they are set in. Let Jayaprakash Satyamurthy be your guide on a tour of the bean town that might change you forever.

Lady Vago's Malediction


A.K.M. Beach - 2020
    She cannot fulfill her purpose as a banshee: to warn her loved ones of their deaths and watch over them while they pass. To solve the mystery of her imprisonment, she must sift through the rubble and ruin that surrounds her. By communing with old paintings, broken furniture, and even the stones themselves, she rediscovers who she was in life.Before she was Lady Vago, she was Rovena Stoddard, a sharp-witted horse merchant's daughter that caught the eye of a charming baron. Lord Kalsten Vago's life as a wandering knight was over, but it inspired visions of a better life for his most vulnerable subjects. Rovena was far less afraid of bold change than his staunch and loyal steward, who saw her presence as a threat to Lord Kalsten's success. Love and shared dreams alone wouldn't overcome the controversy of the couple's hasty and unequal union, as well as the trials of governing a fledgling barony—Rovena knew that. What she failed to recognize was the deeper darkness taking root in Vago lands and hearts... Every memory of what Rovena loved is a reminder of what she lost, but she cannot let grief halt her search. Devoted spectres of ash are begging their lady for an end to their torment, and she will not let their agony–or her own–go unanswered anymore.

Night Terrors & Other Tales


Lisa Morton - 2020
    During a career that has spanned more than three decades, she has produced work that has been hailed as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening” (the American Library Association’s Readers Advisory Guide to Horror).If you’ve never encountered Lisa Morton’s work before, you’ll find out why Famous Monsters called her “one of the best writers in dark fiction today.” If you’re already a fan, this collection will offer up a chance to revisit these acclaimed and award-winning stories. You’ll also find a new story here, written just for this collection: “Night Terrors” reveals ordinary people trying to cope with extraordinary and terrifying dreams that have spread like a plague.

A Season of Whispers


Jackson Kuhl - 2020
    There Lyman must adjust to a new life among idealists, under the fatherly eye of the group's founder, David Grosvenor. When he isn't ducking work or the questions of the eccentric residents, Lyman occupies himself by courting Grosvenor's daughter Minerva.But Bonaventure isn't as utopian as it seems. One by one, Lyman's secrets begin to catch up with him, and Bonaventure has a few secrets of its own. Why did the farm have an ominous reputation long before Grosvenor bought it? What caused the previous tenants to vanish? And who is playing the violin in the basement? Time is running out, and Lyman must discover the truth before he's driven mad by the whispering through the walls.

Nightmare Asylum & Other Deadly Delights


Sonia Kilvington - 2020
    Dark secrets from Lydia’s past unleash a truth that conjures her fears into unspeakable horror. Other Deadly Delights – Tales from the psychotically unsound and deadly deluded.A stalker turns serial killer; a cleaning lady is imprisoned in the basement, there’s a prophetic warning for a woman in peril, and an android with love addiction, plus many more… a deliciously dangerous collection of short stories, ranging from psychological horror to paranormal, sci-fi and noir.Dare you enter the nightmare Asylum?