Book picks similar to
The Wicked Ones: Children of the Lost by J.Z. Foster
horror
freebies
stand-alone
thriller
Good Me, Bad Me
Ali Land - 2017
Though Milly loves her mother, the only way to make her stop is to turn her in to the police. Milly is given a fresh start: a new identity, a home with an affluent foster family, and a spot at an exclusive private school. But Milly has secrets, and life at her new home becomes complicated. As her mother's trial looms, with Milly as the star witness, Milly starts to wonder how much of her is nature, how much of her is nurture, and whether she is doomed to turn out like her mother after all. When tensions rise and Milly feels trapped by her shiny new life, she has to decide: Will she be good? Or is she bad? She is, after all, her mother's daughter.
Carnival Of Strange Things
Amy CrandallSamie Sands - 2019
The carnival is about to begin, and the show is to die for... Grab your ticket and take a seat. The ringmaster’s opening act? A creature showcasing its bloody feat.There are haunting spirits with much to tell. Tales of torture and screams straight from the burning flames of hell.Tick-tock goes the time, seconds passing by as you slowly lose your mind.Watch.Wait.Listen.Evil is coming, and it’s striking from behind.Horror and fear, like filth on your skin it clings,Question is, are you brave enough to endure…The Carnival of Strange Things?
The Silence
Joss Stirling - 2019
The eccentric owner, Bridget, is keen to share her house with like-minded artists so also living there is Jonah – charismatic, volatile and pursuing a career in acting. But his past continues to dog him, both a curse and a blessing as his edgy persona gains traction in the acting world.Jenny is herself battling demons; unable to speak after a catastrophic incident when she was a teenager, she is reliant on strong painkillers to dull the constant pain. Gradually, an insidious addiction takes hold and Jenny’s life spirals out of control. A malevolent energy has gripped the house and Jenny, Jonah and Bridget find themselves battling to save not only their sanity, but also their lives…
Children of the Fog
Cheryl Kaye Tardif - 2011
Choose! Sadie O'Connell is a bestselling author and a proud mother. But her life is about to spiral out of control. After her six-year-old son Sam is kidnapped by a serial abductor, she nearly goes insane. But it isn't just the fear and grief that is ripping her apart. It's the guilt. Sadie is the only person who knows what the kidnapper looks like. And she can't tell a soul. For if she does, her son will be sent back to her in “little bloody pieces.” When Sadie's unfaithful husband stumbles across her drawing of the kidnapper, he sets into play a series of horrific events that sends her hurtling over the edge. Sadie's descent into alcoholism leads to strange apparitions and a face-to-face encounter with the monster who abducted her son--a man known only as...The Fog.
Cicada Spring
Christian Galacar - 2015
. .On a warm May evening in the spring of 1979, the people of Heartsridge, Massachusetts, are living the American dream. Families are gathered for barbecues. Kids are playing in front yards. Gardens are being kept. Meanwhile, Kara Price stumbles home through the woods, raped and beaten, her life shattered by a wicked act of violence, perpetrated by one of the town’s most beloved and public figures. Surrounding Kara is a cast of compelling and nefarious characters—a violent-tempered mayor who can do no wrong in the eyes of the town, a sheriff bound by the rules and plagued by a guilty conscience, a father bent on revenge, a serial killer in the midst of an identity crisis. And at the center of it all there's Kara, who just wants to move on with her life and forget everything that happened to her. But how can she do that when everyone thinks she is a liar who is only out for attention? With plot and emotion braided together by a careful hand, this haunted group of people all acting on behalf of their own interests begs the question: How far would you go to protect your own?
The Breakdown
B.A. Paris - 2017
She’s been trying to put the crime out of her mind; what could she have done, really? It’s a dangerous road to be on in the middle of a storm. Her husband would be furious if he knew she’d broken her promise not to take that shortcut home. And she probably would only have been hurt herself if she’d stopped.But since then, she’s been forgetting every little thing: where she left the car, if she took her pills, the alarm code, why she ordered a pram when she doesn’t have a baby.The only thing she can’t forget is that woman, the woman she might have saved, and the terrible nagging guilt.Or the silent calls she’s receiving, or the feeling that someone’s watching her…
The Alpha Plague
Michael Robertson - 2015
getting to his six-year-old son before the virus does. The Alpha Plague is a post-apocalyptic survival thriller.
Joe Coffin, Season One
Ken Preston - 2014
Joe Coffin is on his way. And he's mad as hell.Joe Coffin is fresh out of jail, but going straight is the last thing on his mind. The sickos who murdered his wife and child are still out there, and he’s going to get revenge.The problem is, Joe Coffin is in much deeper than he realizes, and his wife might not be as dead as he believes.Violent, gory, profane and explicit, Joe Coffin is for mature readers only.Written in serial form, there are four episodes in Season One, each available individually or as a complete set at a significant price saving.
Half-Made Girls
Sam Witt - 2014
But Joe is married to one of the most powerful witches in Pitchfork, and spends almost as much time keeping an eye on her as he does dealing with occult crimes and shadowy horrors in the rest of the county. Even his children, a little girl who plays host to a rogue's gallery of strange spirits and a young man with a demonic secret, keep him on his toes. All Joe really wants is a simple life, a bottle of good whiskey, and a break from the horrors of his job. But nothing in Pitchfork County is ever simple, and the horrors just keep on coming. Someone's hung a mutilated girl on a cross in Pitchfork's most infamous church, dragging Joe into the most challenging case of his career. Joe's investigation into the ritual murder leads him through the dark underbelly of the Ozarks to the doorstep of a twisted cult of meth addicts. As Joe digs deeper into the mystery, he soon finds himself the target of the murderers and must stop them before they can summon their dark god and destroy everything he holds dear.
Plague: 10th Anniversary
Jeremiah Donaldson - 2006
A traveler that infected everyone aboard and raced across the world while those in charge of its containment denied the real danger. Few survived the carnage, fewer left any record. Moss Valley was one of them.
Neighborly
Ellie Monago - 2018
Minutes from the city, affluent without pretension, low crime with a friendly vibe—it’s everything Kat never had, and that she’s determined to provide for her infant daughter. Snagging a nice bungalow in this exclusive enclave was worth all the sacrifice. But everything changes overnight when Kat finds a scrawled note outside their front door.That wasn’t very neighborly of you.As increasingly sinister and frighteningly personal notes arrive, each one stabs deeper into the heart of Kat’s insecurities, paranoia, and most troubling, her past. When the neighbors who seemed so perfect reveal their open secret, the menace moves beyond mean notes. Someone’s raising the stakes.As suspicious as she is of every smiling face and as terrified as she’s become of being found out, Kat is still unprepared for the sharp turn that lies just ahead of her on Bayberry Lane.
Steel Breeze
Douglas Wynne - 2013
It’s been a year since novelist Desmond Carmichael's wife Sandy was brutally murdered. Now, with someone stalking him and his four-year-old son, he fears that the wrong man has been imprisoned for the crime. Sandy’s parents and Detective Chuck Fournier have a different fear: that Desmond, despondent over Sandy’s death, has become too unstable to raise his own son.To prove them wrong, Desmond must work outside the law to defeat a threat born in the dust of an American wasteland, baptized by fire, and hellbent on riding the winds of karma.
Prince of Nightmares
John McNee - 2016
Nestled in the highlands of Scotland, it is unlike any other lodging. Guests can expect wonderful scenery, gourmet food, and horrifying nightmares—guaranteed. Daring travelers pay thousands to stay within the Ballador’s infamous rooms because of the vivid and frightening dreams the accommodations inspire. Before Josephine Teversham committed suicide, she made a reservation at the hotel for her husband, Australian magnate Victor Teversham. Once he arrives at the hotel, Victor finds himself the target of terrifying forces, revealing the nightmares and their purpose to be more strange, personal, and deadly than anyone could have guessed.
Diablo
Max Hawthorne - 2016
Fifty yards ahead, a school of chrome-colored fish fled terror-stricken before it. Measuring close to twenty feet in length, the enormous descendants of the prehistoric fish Xiphactinus audax were, themselves, top predators, each tipping the scales at over three thousand pounds. Compared to the whale-sized nightmare that pursued them, however, the toothy, tarpon-like creatures were little more than a snack. Before the nightmare that would become KRONOS RISING was unleashed, it was first contained in . . . DIABLO. Nestled off the coast of Cuba, and shielded by impenetrable reefs of razor-sharp rock, stands Diablo Caldera. To the rest of the world, the extinct, bowl-shaped volcano is hardly worth exploring. But the caldera has a secret. Its isolated saltwater lake has remained untouched since the fall of the dinosaurs. Inside this hellish aquarium are the deadliest marine predators the world has ever seen. Imprisoned since the Cretaceous behind towering walls of volcanic rock, and warded by a mysterious race, Diablo’s savage inmates rule with flipper and fang the only world they have ever known. But something is about to change. The prison that is Diablo is beginning to fail, and soon it will unleash into the unsuspecting Atlantic a primeval fury the likes of which it has never before known. It is one hundred tons of death. And it likes to eat.
The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle - 2012
It also has a very, very old one. Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die? The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.