Book picks similar to
Ritual by Steve Stred
horror
novella
cults
ebooks
Descent
Cameo Renae - 2013
This is a story of forbidden love, an unbreakable bond, and the start of a dark adventure that will fill your heart with many emotions.
Red at Night
Katie McGarry - 2014
She's the girl with purple hair from the wrong part of town. He's a high school senior who hangs with the cool crowd. Until a car accident leaves him haunted by guilt, and Jonah starts spending time at Stella's favorite refuge…the local cemetery.Stella knows she should keep her distance—after all, she spent her girlhood being bullied by Jonah's friends. Once he's sorted out his tangled emotions, Jonah won't have time for her anymore. Too bad she's already fallen for him.
Agents of Dreamland
Caitlín R. Kiernan - 2017
Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible—the Children of the Next Level—and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from ‘other’ sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA’s interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.
Kellie's Diary #1
Thomas Jenner - 2013
When the world crumbles and the dead walk, Kellie struggles to survive and find her way home, all the while sharing her tale with her diary.This is an account of our hypothetical past, present and future.
Hate F*@k: Part 1
Ainsley Booth - 2015
This doesn't end well. And it's going to get much worse before it ever gets better.Cole:I push her buttons. I want to push them in the good way. Dirty, up-against-the-wall, my-hand-in-her-pants kind of way.But that’s not possible, because I’m dark and she’s light, and we both know it.So I push her buttons in the bad way, making her hate me. Hailey:If a genie granted me three wishes, I’d ask for Cole Parker to never look at me again, that I’d forget the dark promise in his eyes, and that just once, before he vanished from my life completely, that he’d push me up against a wall and fuck me.Then I’d go wash my mouth out with soap.
Alessa's Melody: A Psychological Gothic Horror Novella
Jayson Robert Ducharme - 2019
His fragile world falls to pieces upon the arrival of a young girl, who possesses a special and familiar talent that threatens to drive Louis over the edge.
Crawlspace
Evans Light - 2011
Jusk ask Tom. He's a man who has a lot to juggle: a frustrated wife, a secret new girlfriend, and the unpleasant task of trying to keep his deteriorating farmhouse from falling down around him. Now with his wife out of town for the week, Tom is eager to get busy under the covers with his beautiful new lover - but first there's something he has to finish up...in the CRAWLSPACE.
Such a Pretty Smile
Kristi DeMeester - 2022
Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waves her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.
Blackbird
Cheryl McIntyre - 2013
I love you, Hope. And I'm not the only one. I know you care about me. I see it in your eyes. I feel it. Everybody needs love. Everybody. And some people need it more than others. You're a liar if you say you don't. I'll do that for you. I'll love you. All you have to do is let me." –Sometimes Never What happened in the years between the final chapter and epilogue of Sometimes Never? Blackbird is an 18,000+ word novella that continues Mason and Hope's story as they finish high school, start separate colleges, and confront their demons. Though Blackbird can be read on its own, it is better enjoyed after reading Sometimes Never. Recommended for 17+ due to harsh language and some sexual situations.
Slag Attack
Andersen Prunty - 2010
Slag Attack features four visceral, noir stories about the living, crawling apocalypse. The Devastated Insides of Hollow City - Hack detective Shell joins in the insane search for a girl named Pearl, who just might hold the key to restoring order. Vincent Severity - A woman is taken hostage by a very severe man in a sleazy El Camino. Corpse Mountain - Two guys named Cobra and Commando chug gasoline and help build grotesque robots to save the world. All Alone at the End of the World - Re-introduces Shell in a radically different light, building to a ferocious conclusion.
Damned
Chuck Palahniuk - 2011
The newest Palahniuk novel concerns Madison, a thirteen year old girl who finds herself in Hell, unsure of why she will be there for all eternity, but tries to make the best of it.The author described the novel as "if The Shawshank Redemption had a baby by The Lovely Bones and it was raised by Judy Blume." And "it's kind of like The Breakfast Club set in Hell."
The Best of Indie Horror
Kevin J. KennedyJ.C. Michael - 2020
Having worked with a tremendous number of authors over the years, I decided to gather some of my favourites together and do an unthemed book. This book is the result of that idea. Inside the cover, you will find an array of styles covering a wealth of sub genres. I present you with, the best of indie horror.Over 100K of new stories by:Shaun HutsonTim CurranMark LukensLee MountfordJohn R. LittleAndrew LennonCalvin DemmerJ.C. MichaelDavid Owain HughesLee MurrayChristina BerglingMark CassellChristopher MotzMike DukeKyle M. ScottSteven StacyLex JonesDouglas HackleNicola Lombardi
Resisting Madness
Wesley Southard - 2019
You’ll discover how far a prisoner will go to be with his dying wife, and what lurks between the walls of that Louisiana jailhouse to keep him there. You’ll find out how deep a man can cut himself to dig out the past. You’ll meet a college professor whose fear of flying might be the least of his worries. And you’ll learn how a sister’s love for sweet treats can reunite a broken family…whether they want it or not. Aliens and lot lizards…disembodied lips…the voice of God Himself… Thirteen stories and a brand new novella from horror author Wesley Southard. Within these pages, we all go a little mad…
The Hole
Hye-Young Pyun - 2016
His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Ogi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Ogi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.Evoking Herman Koch’s The Dinner and Stephen King’s Misery, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Ogi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.
City Infernal
Edward Lee - 2001
Forget the old-fashioned sulphurous pit you may have read about. Over the millennia, Hell has evolved into a bustling metropolis with looming skyscrapers, crowded streets, systemized evil, and atrocity as the status quo.Cassie thought she knew all about Hell. But when her twin sister, Lissa, committed suicide, Cassie found that she was able to travel to the real thing—the city itself. Now, even though she's still alive, Cassie is heading straight to Hell to find Lissa. And the sights she sees as she walks among the damned will never be in any tourist guidebook.