Book picks similar to
Penetralia by Jordan Krall
bizarro
horror
fiction
bizarro-fiction
In This Skin
Simon Clark - 2004
From Vaudeville, through the big bands and up to the hottest rock acts, the Luxor had them all. It's closed now, a boarded-up relic, standing alone in a run down industrial part of town. But the old dance hall isn't empty. A hideous presence lives there, a monstrous evil that has the ability to invade people's fantasies and nightmares . . . and bring them to life. Three strangers will soon learn the extent of the dance hall's power. As their lives become more and more entangled in its inescapable web, they will come to see that what haunts the Luxor is far worse than any ghost.
Ponies
Kij Johnson - 2010
If you want to be friends with TheOtherGirls, you're going to have to give something up; this is the way it's always been, as long as there have been Ponies.
Jenny Pox
J.L. Bryan - 2010
A lifetime of avoiding any physical contact with others has made her isolated and painfully lonely in her small rural town.Then she meets the one boy she can touch. Jenny feels herself falling for Seth...but if she's going to be with him, Jenny must learn to use the deadly pox inside her to confront his ruthless and manipulative girlfriend Ashleigh, who secretly wields the most dangerous power of all.* * *Not recommended for readers under eighteen.BONUS: Includes an excerpt of Glimpse by Stacey Wallace Benefiel.
Crimson Orgy
Austin Williams - 2008
He has just one hellish week to shoot "Crimson Orgy," seventy-six minutes of mayhem destined to become the world's most notorious cult movie... and just maybe the first true "snuff film" ever made. Struggling to cope with a reluctant starlet, a booze-ravaged leading man, a backwoods cop bent on revenge, a mutinous crew, a devastating hurricane, and his own inner demons, Meyer relentlessly pursues a vision of unrivaled box office horror. He gets what he's after, but at a price no one could imagine!
The Butterfly Legacy
Kathleen M. Rice - 2011
Feeling the familiar rush of intrigue, Raleigh removes the kid's latest note from behind the ceramic half-moon tacked above the cottage door. The note contains a riddle half-written in Gaelic. Mystified and irritated, he puts the note away with other childish things - soon to be forgotten. Twenty-six years will pass before Raleigh, now a Boston police detective, realizes that the note holds clues he needs to solve a murder; and that it contains the key to his true heritage, which began with star-crossed lovers a century before he was born.Against the backdrop of Ireland's "Great Hunger," the violent struggle of the 1860s to free Ireland, and "The Troubles" of the 1970s,
The Butterfly Legacy
, a 95,000-word historical novel, is a richly rendered story of Nelly, a young Irish girl and her descendants that began when she and an English captain fall in love. Resulting in twins who are separated at birth, their affair ends with the captain's presumed abandonment of Nelly and her subsequent exile to Prince Edward Island, Canada where she enters into an arranged marriage to a man she does not know.From Nelly's near fatal voyage with the healthier twin across the Atlantic in a "coffin ship" to the 1978 murder of an Englishman whose brutalized body is found on the grounds of Winnekenni Castle located in Haverhill, Massachusetts (the city featured in Andre Dubus's acclaimed memoire, Townie), the novel traces the adventures of 6 generations of characters as they encounter adversity and twists of fate, suicide and other family secrets, misguided patriotism and murder. These themes - tempered with healthy doses of Irish wit - will resonate with readers from most any ethnic group as they are drawn into the pain and joy of difficult lives fully lived.Amazon.com Best Seller
Breverton's Phantasmagoria: A Compendium of Monsters, Myths and Legends
Terry Breverton - 2011
People, Beings and BeastsWhere does the boogeyman come from?What creatures feast on faithful men?How do you defeat a minotaur?What really riles a dragon?Where would you find real-life werewolves?What happened to Atlantis?From dragons, vampires, werewolves and fairies to flying carpets, lost cities and modern-day mysteries,this delightful compendium of over 250 weird and wonderful legends, myths and monsters will entertain and astound anyone
Lightning / Midnight / The Bad Place
Dean Koontz - 1992
Throughout her childhood she is plagued by ever more terrifying troubles, but she is protected by a mysterious stranger who acts as her guardian. Then the lightning strikes once more and shatters her world. The adventure - and the terror - have only just begun.
Midnight:
What is the dark and fearful secret that haunts Moonlight Cove? A string of inexplicable deaths has occurred in this idyllic, picturesque coastal town, and four people are drawn together by terrifying circumstances. As the darkness descends, these four must confront the chilling nightmare of Moonlight Cove.
The Bad Place:
Frank Pollard awakens in an alley, knowing nothing but his name - and that he is in great danger. Bobby and Julie Dakota help him to solve this mystery, but they are drawn into ever-darkening realms where they encounter the deadly, hate-filled figure stalking Frank.
Fade to Black
Tim McBain - 2014
Die. Repeat.Dying violent deaths over and over again totally blows. Loner Jeff Grobnagger has learned this the hard way. Every time he has a seizure, he dreams that a hooded man strangles and kills him. He runs. He fights. He hides. No matter what he does, his efforts end in a pretty bad case of death.But when someone tries to kill him in real life, he realizes that what happens with the hooded man isn't just a dream.Who is the hooded man? And who tried to kill Grobnagger in real life? His quest for answers leads to a missing girl, cults obsessed with astral projection, an arcane puzzle sphere, an evil book, a buxom private detective named Louise and a mustached man named Glenn that makes 'the best martini you've ever tasted.'Yep. If it weren't for all of the horrific deaths, Jeff Grobnagger would be having the time of his life.
Three Ghost Stories
Charles Dickens - 1998
Considered one of the English language's greatest writers, he was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and memorable characters, and achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime. The popularity of his novels and short stories has meant that not one has ever gone out of print. Dickens wrote serialised novels, the usual format for fiction at the time, and each new part of his stories was eagerly anticipated by the reading public. Among his best-known works are Sketches by Boz (1836), The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865).
Nocturnes
John Connolly - 2004
In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.
Possessions
Nancy Holder - 2009
Ethereal, popular Mandy and her clique are plotting something dangerous. Lindsay overhears them performing strange rituals, and sees their eyes turn black. It doesn’t help that the school itself is totally eerie, with ancient, dilapidated buildings tucked into the Northern California woods, a thick white fog swirling through campus. There are hidden passageways, odd reflections in the windows at night, and scariest of all is the vast lake rumored to have captured the ghost of a girl who drowned many years ago.What Lindsay doesn’t yet realize is that Mandy and her cohorts are becoming possessed by spirits who have haunted the school for two hundred years. Spirits who want someone dead...And that someone is Lindsay.
The Night Ocean
Paul La Farge - 2017
Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story The Night Ocean); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City.The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
The Weight of Blood
David Dalglish - 2010
Instead, they become his greatest disciples, charged with leading his army of undead.While they prepare, Harruq trains with an elf named Aurelia, to whom he owes his life. She is a window into a better world, but as war spreads between the races their friendship takes a dire turn.Velixar orders them to fight alongside the humans, changing Aurelia from friend to foe. To protect her, Harruq must turn against his brother and fight the killing nature of his orcish heritage.To side with one means to turn on another. No matter Harruq’s decision, someone he loves will die.
Hellucination
Stephen Biro - 2011
A drug-fueled trip through the gruesome levels of Hell may sound like a fictional horror story to some, and since the traveler in question was movie distributor Stephen Biro, it could just as easily have been one of his film projects. But Stephen's experiences were the real, life-changing sort. They're also proof that the Lord does work in mysterious ways -- extending all the way to squares of LSD and nitrous oxide cartridges.Armed with psychedelics, hallucinogenics and a brave desire to meet God no matter the personal cost, Stephen pushed beyond the boundaries of safe drug use. He took the most nightmarish of trips from a cramped one-bedroom apartment that he used for running his underground video business. With initial difficulty finding God in his altered state, Stephen instead encountered depravity and grotesquery enough to make his soul weep, but he pushed on. And if that wasn't bad enough, his Hellish experiences bled over into his waking days, and his friends and acquaintances began identifying themselves to him as Antichrists, deities and other assorted beings from "the other side." Reality was blurring and shifting, and Stephen was run utterly ragged. Could he fulfill his quest to learn universal truths before his extreme drug use took its toll?Hellucination: A Memoir spares no disturbing detail of the unusual route that one man took to find Christ and the God of the Bible. The memoir also follows younger Stephen through his 1970s childhood and his bizarre early encounters with religion that drove him to Atheism."An utterly surreal memoir. I'd say it was 'mindbending, ' but "HELLUCINATION" doesn't just bend your mind, it twists it, stretches it, stabs it, and tosses it on the grill!" - Jeff Strand, author of the upcoming book, "PRESSURE" and "WOLF HUNT" He's been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2006, 2008, and 2010."HELLUCINATION takes the form of a page-turning memoir, combining personal trip reporting with science fiction, horror movie, and religious mythologies, philosophical speculation on the nature of the author's experiments with psychedelic drug combinations, strange encounters with other people who may not be what they seem, and the rationale behind his spiritual conversion from atheism to Christianity." --David Jay BrownAuthor of "Mavericks of the Mind" and "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse" "HELLUCINATION is a powerful read. In fact, it might distinctly appeal to fantasy readers, film lovers and lovers of fiction. Biro writes passionately with a purpose... you may end of ripping your eyes out afterwards though." -- Review, Horrornews.netMind-boggling and enthralling. The visualization techniques used is astounding. - Paul White - Producer of Bride of Re-Animator and Brian Yuzna's SocietyI felt myself questioning my faith, or lack of faith, on religion, Jesus, God, the Devil, and what the purpose and point of my life and existence really was/is. I think that is the point of the book. The book raises awareness and makes readers think about the meaning of life and what their purpose is in it. That, in itself, is a pretty scary thing to think and ponder about. - Hellucination - Book review by www.shuizmz.comCinematic... it's going to scare the Hell out of some Christians. - Jim VanBebber - Director of The Manson Family and Deadbeat At Dawn
Prophecy of the Sisters
Michelle Zink - 2009
They have also become enemies. As they discover their roles in a prophecy that has turned generations of sisters against each other, the girls find themselves entangled in a mystery that involves a tattoo-like mark, their parents' deaths, a boy, a book, and a lifetime of secrets. Lia and Alice don't know whom they can trust.They just know they can't trust each other.