Book picks similar to
Ancient Lights by Davis Grubb
fiction
horror
ebooks
recommended-3-5-stars
Gospel Hour
T.R. Pearson - 1991
When Donnie Huff survives a near-fatal logging accident, his ambitious mother-in-law insists that he has returned from the dead, and he embarks on a Pentecostal revival trail and a discovery of his own faith.
The Feral Children 2: Savages
David A. Simpson - 2019
The fierce winter and the battle with Gordon and his gang are fading memories until new friends emerge and old enemies resurface to shatter their fragile existence. They thought they were doing good. They thought the hard part was over. They thought they were the only survivors left in a zombie ravaged world. They were wrong. Fur and fangs, claws and steel will be put to the ultimate test as the tribe seeks justice and revenge against those who won't leave them in peace. To survive, you have to fight.
Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo - 1939
This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome... but so is war. Winner of the National Book Award.
Girl A
Abigail Dean - 2021
She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings - and with the childhood they shared.
Rant
Chuck Palahniuk - 2007
A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life.
Everything Is Always Gonna Be Alright, Durban Frankenshooze
Jamie McHone - 2019
He's tired of being made fun of by all the other flying birds, so he sets off on a journey to find out who he really is. Along the way, he meets Maudry, a smart and sassy female bird, and Wainwright, a grumpy worm with a short temper. Together, the unusual trio goes through thick and thin to discover what it really means to be yourself.
Highlander’s Trusted Traitor
Alisa Adams - 2020
When their paths cross, Keith feels like thunder hit him! Yet he knows that he is the last man Rose would ever marry.Desperately trying to get her out of his mind, Keith wonders through the castle and witnesses something that would make Rose faint!Keith will use all the courage he has to tell Rose the truth. The result? Not only does Rose not believe him, but she sees him as the treacherous liar.Thus, still hidden in the shadows, Rose's most trusted companion is beyond suspicion planning to kill her...Will Rose finally trust her only true ally or will she condemn herself to doom?"Highlander's Trusted Traitor" is a standalone story by best selling author Alisa Adams, packed with mystery, betrayal, and romance, set on the beautiful backdrop of the Scottish Highlands.
Before Safe Haven: Lucy
Christopher Artinian - 2018
The UK and Ireland have remained uninfected...until now. Lucy Blair is an American doctor stationed at a field hospital outside the quarantined city of Leeds. Each day she hears more rumours circulating about the virus spreading. Each day she plays her part in the vast mechanism that has been constructed by the British government to safeguard the population. But today, the rumours stopped. Today, the rumours became reality. Now she is in a new kind of Hell as she fights her way through a dangerous city to find a last ray of hope and that one last chance for survival.
The Narrator
Michael Cisco - 2010
Cisco's prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.
The Third Policeman
Flann O'Brien - 1967
Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles andcontradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.
The Pesthouse
Jim Crace - 2007
In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love.
Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s most compelling novel to date. Rich in its understanding of America’s history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit.
One Fifth Avenue
Candace Bushnell - 2008
One Fifth Avenue, the Art Deco beauty towering over one of Manhattan's oldest and most historically hip neighborhoods, is a one-of-a-kind address, the sort of building you have to earn your way into -- one way or another. For the women in Candace Bushnell's new novel, One Fifth Avenue, this edifice is essential to the lives they've carefully established -- or hope to establish. From the hedge fund king's wife to the aging gossip columnist to the free-spirited actress (a recent refugee from L.A.), each person's game plan for a rich life comes together under the soaring roof of this landmark building. Acutely observed and mercilessly witty, One Fifth Avenue is a modern-day story of old and new money, that same combustible mix that Edith Wharton mastered in her novels about New York's Gilded Age and F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated in his Jazz Age tales. Many decades later, Bushnell's New Yorkers suffer the same passions as those fictional Manhattanites from eras past: They thirst for power, for social prominence, and for marriages that are successful--at least to the public eye. But Bushnell is an original, and One Fifth Avenue is so fresh that it reads as if sexual politics, real estate theft, and fortunes lost in a day have never happened before. From Sex and the City through four successive novels, Bushnell has revealed a gift for tapping into the zeitgeist of any New York minute and, as one critic put it, staying uncannily "just the slightest bit ahead of the curve." And with each book, she has deepened her range, but with a light touch that makes her complex literary accomplishments look easy. Her stories progress so nimbly and ring so true that it can seem as if anyone might write them -- when, in fact, no one writes novels quite like Candace Bushnell. Fortunately for us, with One Fifth Avenue, she has done it again.
How To Exit Your Body: and Other Strange Tales
Christopher Maxim - 2018
This book is guaranteed to horrify you in the best way possible. Open it up, turn the page, and take a journey to a world consumed with mystery in madness.
Planescape Torment: The Unofficial Torment Novel
Chris Avellone - 2000
Rhys Hess has compiled the story from dialogs written by the original script-writers at Black Isle Studios and linking descriptions by himself.
Things We Set on Fire
Deborah Reed - 2013
Jackson, Vivvie’s husband, was shot and killed 30 years ago, and the ramifications have splintered the family into their own isolated remembrances and recriminations.This deeply personal, hauntingly melancholy look at the damages families inflict on each other – and the healing that only they can provide – is filled with flinty, flawed and complex people stumbling towards some kind of peace. Like Elizabeth Strout and Kazuo Isiguro, Deborah Reed understands a story and its inhabitants reveal themselves in the subtleties: the space between the thoughts, the sigh behind the smile, and the unreliable lies people tell themselves that ultimately reveal the deepest truths.