Book picks similar to
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters by Douglas Clegg
horror
fiction
independent-press
first-edition-first-print
The Perfect Marriage
Jeneva Rose - 2020
At 33 years old, she is a named partner at her firm and life is going exactly how she planned.The same cannot be said for her husband, Adam. He is a struggling writer who has had little success in his career. He begins to tire of his and Sarah’s relationship as she is constantly working. Out in the secluded woods, at Adam and Sarah’s second home, Adam engages in a passionate affair with Kelly Summers.Then, one morning everything changes. Adam is arrested for Kelly’s murder. She had been found stabbed to death in Adam and Sarah’s second home. Sarah soon finds herself playing the defender for her own husband, a man accused of murdering his mistress. But is Adam guilty or is he innocent?
Daddy Love
Joyce Carol Oates - 2013
A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts to follow, but is run over by the kidnapper's van, mangling her body nearly beyond repair.The kidnapper, a part-time Preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love. He confines Robbie in a device called the Wooden Maiden, in essence a small coffin, and renames him 'Gideon'. Daddy Love slowly brainwashes 'Gideon' into believing that he is Daddy Love's real son, and any time the boy resists or rebels it is met with punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.As Dinah recovers from her wounds, her world and her marriage struggle to exist every day. Though it seems hopeless, she keeps a flicker of hope alive that her son is still alive.As Robbie grows older, he becomes more aware of just how monstrous Daddy Love truly is. Though as a small boy he was terrified of what might happen if he disobeyed Daddy Love, Robbie begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater chance he'll end up like Daddy Love's other 'sons,' who were never heard from again. Somewhere within this tortured young boy lies a spark of rebellion... and soon he sees just what lengths he must go to in order to have any chance at survival.
The Good Girl
Mary Kubica - 2014
I know where she buys her groceries, where she works. I don't know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she's scared. But I will.One night, Mia Dennett enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. At first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia's life. When Colin decides to hide Mia in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota instead of delivering her to his employers, Mia's mother, Eve, and detective Gabe Hoffman will stop at nothing to find them. But no one could have predicted the emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family's world to shatter.
The Violence
Delilah S. Dawson - 2022
Now three generations of women must navigate their chilling new reality in this moving exploration of identity, cycles of abuse, and hope.
Chelsea Martin appears to be the perfect housewife: married to her high school sweetheart, the mother of two daughters, keeper of an immaculate home. But Chelsea's husband has turned their house into a prison; he has been abusing her for years, cutting off her independence, autonomy, and support. She has nowhere to turn, not even to her narcissistic mother, Patricia, who is more concerned with maintaining the appearance of an ideal family than she is with her daughter's actual well-being. And Chelsea is worried that her daughters will be trapped just as she is--then a mysterious illness sweeps the nation. Known as The Violence, this illness causes the infected to experience sudden, explosive bouts of animalistic rage and attack anyone in their path. But for Chelsea, the chaos and confusion the virus causes is an opportunity--and inspires a plan to liberate herself from her abuser.
Crooked House
Joe McKinney - 2012
Read more about the novel here: http://www.darkregions.com/books/croo...From the best-selling author of Dead City, Mutated, Flesh Eater, Quarantined and more comes the all-new haunted house novel Crooked House published by Dark Regions Press to be available on Tuesday, October 23rd on the DarkRegions.com website. The book will be available in two premium signed collectible hardcover formats and a trade paperback edition.In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.Those words were true when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote them in 1851, and they were true in 1933, when a fire burned half of Crook House to the ground, taking James Crook’s wife and two sons with it. A disgraced bootlegger and former pro baseball player, James Crook returned from prison to find his house, and his life, a pile of cinders. Broken and insane, he rebuilt Crook House, putting his pain and loneliness into every timber.But Hawthorne’s words are still true today, and nobody knows that better than Dr. Robert Bell, who has just moved into Crook House as part of his hiring package from a small Texas college. He soon discovers that Crook House is more than just a new beginning for himself and Sarah and their daughter Angela. For the Bell family, Crook House is a place where the past still lives, and its horrors waiting for the next drowning man.With Crooked House, Joe McKinney brings you a chilling novel in the vein of The Shining by Stephen King, a haunted house tale that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.
Seraphim
Jon Michael Kelley - 2012
She appears to be at or near her present age of ten, but the studio's dated stamp on the back indicates that the photo was taken nearly a year before her birth. More alarming, however, is the beautiful woman standing beside Amy, a woman with whom he had an affair in the periphery of his own new marriage, during the time Amy was conceived. And the fact that this photograph has been in his wife's possession for more than a decade is perhaps the most disturbing element of all. Duncan's wife Rachel doesn't know about his affair with this woman, but he will soon tell her. And upon that revelation they will begin a journey that will take them clear across the continent, from California to Massachusetts, then ultimately in the boundless, uncharted territory of the human collective. There, a devil is waiting; the penultimate personification of evil. And he goes by the name of Mr. Gamble. "Apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word, Jon Michael Kelley's Seraphim is a stunning thriller with the very fate of the world at stake. Beautifully written, with prose as lush as it is chilling, Kelley is part poet, part prophet, but a true master of fear, through and through. This is top notch stuff of highest caliber!" -- Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Flesh Eaters and Inheritance "Seraphim is a beautifully wrought tale of angels and demons that starts out strong and just gets better and better. A thoroughly enjoyable read. Jon Michael Kelley proves to be a mature, intelligent new voice in horror right out of the gate." -- Craig Saunders, author of The Love of the Dead and A Stranger's Grave "Written with the finesse of a pro, Seraphim is one hell of a frightening horror novel. With bits of dark fantasy and humor mixed in, this one has it all! Hard to believe this is Jon Michael Kelley's first novel." -- David Bernstein, author of Amongst the Dead and Tears of No Return
Northwoods Deep
Joel Arnold - 2010
All are drawn to an old, dilapidated cabin. Inside lives an old man with awful urges, accompanied by a Rottweiler possessed by something...unnatural. But it's what resides beneath the cabin that they should really be worried about. Please join award-winning author Joel Arnold on a ride over the river and through the woods straight into terror in his newest novel, Northwoods Deep.
The Undoing of Saint Silvanus
Beth Moore - 2016
It's not like they were close. She hadn't seen him--or her grandmother, the ice queen--in almost 20 years. But when Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, called and said Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in for the burial, a free trip to New Orleans was too intriguing to resist.What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house wasn't a house at all and, whatever it was, bore the dead weight of a long and painful history. As soon as Jillian meets the odd assortment of renters and realizes that her grandmother had no idea she was coming, she hatches a plan to escape. But the investigation into her father's death quickly unfolds and Jillian is drawn into the lives of the colorful collection of saints and sinners who pass through Saint Silvanus. She soon discovers there is more at stake than she ever imagined. Who is behind the baffling messages and the strange relics left on the steps? Is it possible that her family is actually cursed? Or is it just this crazy old house that holds them all under its spell?Jillian walks into a web of spiritual and personal danger borne out of her family's broken history, and despite Adella's wiliest efforts, only God himself can orchestrate the undoing of all that is going on at Saint Silvanus.
The Silent Friend
Diane Jeffrey - 2020
The truth will tear them apart.It’s supposed to be Laura’s dream holiday: a trip to France with a group of friends to see their favourite band play live. But the holiday quickly turns to disaster, and Laura is left haunted by terrifying images from the worst night of her life. When Laura finds an online support group for victims like her, she’s not convinced it will help. But then Sandrine replies to her message, and she seems to understand what Laura’s going through, in a way that no one else can. Soon, Laura and Sandrine are sharing their deepest thoughts and feelings with each other. But one of them has a terrible secret – she isn’t who she says she is. And once the twisted truth is revealed, there’s no going back…
React
Jack Harding - 2021
A crowded fairground. A simple sequence of numbers that appear over and over again... and a horrible feeling that something is very, very wrong.Nina Vogel is haunted by a recurring nightmarish vision - but what does it mean?In this powerful short story by Jack Harding, step into this nerve-racking, fast-paced fever dream that blurs the lines between the real and the unreal.
The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard
Erin McGraw - 2008
It would have been better the other way around.” So begins this witty and transporting new novel by the acclaimed Erin McGraw, introducing us to Nell Plat, who, at age seventeen, finds herself unhappily married and the mother of two baby girls. For a young woman with a hunger for excitement and glamour, Kansas circa 1900 offers nothing but a flat horizon. Still, Nell find some joy sewing and making dresses for women in town. Dreaming over her sewing machine, she begins to entertain ambitions she knows she cannot share.Based on Erin McGraw’s grandmother’s life, here is the story—told in Nell’s own irreverent and wise voice—of what happens when Nell runs away to Los Angeles in the year 1901 as the new motion-picture industry is just taking root. Nell marries again, has a daughter, and goes into business as a costumer in the Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties, renaming herself Madame Annelle. But a knock on the door by her grown daughters, precisely the thing she has most feared, threatens to take apart the new life Nell has so carefully built. Forced to confront the legacy of the life she believed she had shed, Nell struggles to make the right choices the second time around and finds herself truly transformed.In vividly bringing to life the story of Nell Plat, Erin McGraw gives voice to the stories of the countless young women who, unsatisfied with their lives, headed to Hollywood in its heyday. The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard magically recreates that glamorous time and place, and allows us to witness it beautifully dressed, well lit, and close up