Book picks similar to
The Essential Sick Stuff by Ronald Kelly
horror
short-stories
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The Summer I Died
Ryan C. Thomas - 2006
When Roger Huntington comes home from college for the summer and is met by his best friend, Tooth, he knows they're going to have a good time. A summer full of beer, comic books, movies, laughs, and maybe even girls. So much pain. The sun is high and the sky is clear as Roger and Tooth set out to shoot beer cans at Bobcat Mountain. Just two friends catching up on lost time, two friends thinking about their futures, two friends-- So much blood. --suddenly thrust in the middle of a nightmare. Forced to fight for their life against a sadistic killer. A killer with an arsenal of razor sharp blades and a hungry dog by his side. So much death. If they are to survive, they must decide: are heroes born, or are they made? Or is something more powerful happening to them? And more importantly, how do you survive when all roads lead to death!
The Corpse Garden
S.H. Cooper - 2016
From a young boy with with an unhealthy fixation on what could go wrong to a man who can't accept that his wife wants to leave him, traipsing through The Corpse Garden certainly isn't for the faint of heart. Author S.H. Cooper presents a combination of works popularized on Reddit's NoSleep and four, previously unreleased stories for brand new thrills and chills that are best read with the lights on.
The Family Plot
Megan Collins - 2021
Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she has spent the last several years living on her own, but unable to move beyond her past—especially the disappearance of her twin brother Andy when they were sixteen. With her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house she has avoided for years. But as the rest of the Lighthouse family arrives for the memorial, a gruesome discovery is made: buried in the reserved plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax. Each member of the family handles the revelation in unusual ways. Her brother Charlie pours his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims; her sister Tate forges ahead with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; and their mother affects a cheerfully domestic façade, becoming unrecognizable as the woman who performed murder reenactments for her children. As Dahlia grapples with her own grief and horror, she realizes that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, may hold the answers to what happened to her twin.
The Dark Game
Jonathan Janz - 2019
Their host is the legendary Roderick Wells. Handsome, enigmatic, and fiendishly talented, Wells promises to teach his pupils about writing, about magic, about the untapped potential that each of them possesses. Most of all, he plans to teach them about the darkness in their hearts.The writers think they are signing up for a chance at riches and literary prestige. But they are really entering the twisted imagination of a deranged genius, a lethal contest pitting them against one another in a struggle for their sanity and their lives. They have entered into Roderick Wells’s most brilliant and horrible creation...The Dark Game.
Monster
S.E. Green - 2019
For over a year, their captor forced them to play his sick games, using their hunger to test the lengths they’d go to survive.Caroline escaped. Her sister didn’t.Now a young woman gnawed by survivor’s guilt, Caroline’s horrific past has left her with a unique gift to understand the twisted motivations of serial killers. She couldn’t save her sister—but she can at least help the police keep other girls safe.But there’s something different about her latest case.Something familiar.Teenage girls are being murdered, their organs removed. As the scope of horror widens, Caroline begins to experience blackouts of lost time and disturbing hallucinations that are leading her to one terrible, impossible conclusion.Caroline is a keeper of secrets. She knows her captor can’t be responsible.Yet a message is being sent…a buried echo resurfacing…a personal connection of a dark and dangerous appetite.
Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors
Adam Nevill - 2016
In the big white house on the hill angels are said to appear. A forgotten tenant in an isolated building becomes addicted to milk. A strange goddess is worshipped by a home-invading disciple. The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests. Cannibalism occurs in high society at the end of the world. The sainted undead follow their prophet to the Great Dead Sea. A confused and vengeful presence occupies the home of a first-time buyer . . . In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer's novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author's own. Adam Nevill's best early horror stories are collected here for the first time.
Clownflesh
Tim Curran - 2018
The mother of all blizzards has locked it down. The roads are impassable. Nobody gets in. Nobody gets out.With the freezing winds and blowing snow has come an apex race of predators. They hide in the shadows. They crawl from the drifts. They use the storm as camouflage to hunt their human prey.By morning, the town will be a morgue.Unless one small group of survivors can destroy the monsters in their midst.Horrors beyond imagining.Clowns.
I'm a Therapist, and My Patient is Going to be the Next School Shooter: 6 Patient Files That Will Keep You Up At Night
Dr. Harper - 2019
A boy who planned to be the next school shooter. A patient with OCD whose loved ones really did suffer every time he missed a ritual. A choir boy who claimed he was being molested -- not by a priest -- but by God Himself. A patient with PTSD who gave me nightmares. A husband and wife who accused each other of abuse, and only one of them was telling the truth.And how could I ever forget, Patient #220.The problem is, my patients have a habit of dying. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the common denominator. Or maybe that's just the cost of taking on exceptionally broken clients.Either way, I'll never stop trying to help.
The Telling
Alexandra Sirowy - 2016
That was before, when her life was small and quiet. Her golden stepbrother, Ben was alive. She could only dream about bonfiring with the populars. Their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell truth from lies, and Ben's childhood stories were firmly in her imagination.Then came after.After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors, deaths that only make sense in fairy tales, and terrors from a past Lana thought long forgotten: love, blood, and murder.
Walking Alone: Short Stories
Bentley Little - 2018
In "Sticky Note," Gary finds a note with two simple words on it in the gutter: Kill her. Was it part of someone's to-do list? Bentley Little tells us where this yellow square piece of paper takes Gary in a way that only he can. A bad confrontation with a maid at a fancy resort leads a couple on a chilling journey they never dreamed would happen. "The Maid" may make you think twice about asking the front desk for extra towels or complaining about anything ever again. You'll never think of small-town rodeos the same way after reading "The Last Rodeo on the Circuit," and neither will Rob and Teena after they decide to take in the local bizarre entertainment in an unscheduled stop along their road trip to Vegas. Would you anonymously write your negative thoughts about your friends in a slam book? What if the words you wrote changed things? "Slam Dance" shows you what the consequences of that might be. Sometimes, a "Palm Reader" knows more than they're willing to reveal to their customers, chilling things that their clients don't really want to know. Would you tell them anyway? Snowmen aren't scary, right? Hal and April Katz are out on a wintery drive when they see a snowman on the side of the road. Then another that looks almost the same a few miles later. And then, hundreds of snowmen around the next bend. You might think snowmen aren't scary, but "Snow" will prove you dead wrong. Bentley Little can take the innocuous, twist it around, and write a story that will change your way of thinking. Walking Alone: Short Stories is a shining example of his talent to scare you, creep you out, and make you shudder. Table of Contents: Milk Ranch Point Snow Children's Hospital Palm Reader Slam Dance Last Rodeo on the Circuit The Car Wash The Feeb The Mall Hunting The Piano Player has no Fingers The Man Who Watched Cartoons Apt Punishment Black Friday MoNA Retrospective, Los Angeles Jorgensen's Fence The Silence of Trees Sticky Note The Smell of Overripe Loquats The Maid Schoolgirls Under Midwest Skies Pictures of Huxley My College Admission Essay Pool, Air Conditioning, Free HBO The Train A Random Thought from God's Day
To Offer Her Pleasure
Ali Seay - 2021
One that calls forth a shadowy horned figure.She comes with unexpected gifts and the comfort of a dependable presence.She asks for very little in return, really. The more Ben offers her, the easier it gets.Sometimes, family requires more than a little sacrifice...
Gone to See the River Man
Kristopher Triana - 2020
Groupies. Stalkers.These people will give anything for the idols they worship, be they rock stars, actors or authors. Or even serial killers.Lori is just such a fanatic. Her obsession is with Edmund Cox, a man of sadistic cruelty who butchered more than twenty women. She’s gone so far as to forge a relationship with him, visiting him in prison and sending him letters on a regular basis. She will do anything to get close to him, so when he gives her a task, she eagerly accepts it.She has no idea of the horror that awaits her.Edmund tells her she must go to his cabin in the woods of Killen and retrieve a key to deliver to a mysterious figure known only as The River Man.In her quest, she brings along her handicapped sister, and they journey through the deep, dark valley, beginning their trip upriver. The trip quickly becomes a surreal nightmare, one that digs up Lori’s personal demons, the ones she feels bonds her to Edmund. The river runs with flesh, the cabin is a vault of horrors, and ghostly blues music echoes through the mountains. Soon they will learn that The River Man is not quite fact or folklore, and definitely not human -- at least, not anymore. And the key is just the beginning of what is required of Lori to prove she’s worthy of a madman’s love.
Occultation and Other Stories
Laird Barron - 2010
P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
And Hell Followed: An Anthology
Wrath James WhiteSam West - 2019
What if the prophecies of Revelation hit today? What sort of craziness and evil would ensue? With this list of excellent authors contributing, it’s sure to be a Hell of a read! Wrath James White Sam West The Sisters of Slaughter Jeff Strand K Trap Jones C Derick Miller Christine Morgan Patrick C. Harrison III John Wayne Comunale Hyäne Sawbones Delphine Quinn James Watts Wile E. Young Chris Miller Mark Deloy Richard Raven