Book picks similar to
You Know It's True by J.R. Hamantaschen


horror
short-stories
weird-fiction
dark-fiction

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day


Ben Loory - 2011
    In his singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.Contains 40 stories, including "The Duck," "The Man and the Moose," and "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," as heard on NPR's This American Life, "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts, and "The TV," as found in The New Yorker.A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.Winner of the 2011 Nobbie Award for Best Book of the Year."This guy can write!" –Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451

One Star


The Behrg - 2019
    But when Li posts a one-star review of a novel on her book blog, the results are far more frightening than she could ever have imagined. Not every story was meant to have a happy ending.ONE STAR is a previously unpublished horror short story, being released in The Behrg's upcoming short story collection--"The Passengers You Cannot See." It is the author's love letter to book bloggers and reviewers, and thus is being offered as a free download to any book reviewer in part to thank all those who have been a part of the author's journey. And if you haven't yet been a part, there's no better time than now to jump in that car and ride along. Oh, the vistas you will see.

Lingering Things and Other Dark Tales: A Horror Anthology


Dana Noraas - 2019
    A woman is left struggling to survive after a bear attack leaves her alone in the wilderness. A writer desperately tries to complete his book while being harassed by a relentless spirit. A poem of warning from a traveling salesman. A young boy disappears after hearing his mother calling to him from the woods and returns later that night acting strangely. This horror anthology features both supernatural and realistic situations that will make you double-check your locks at night. Before you tell yourself that these 15 original stories are just made up, rest assured knowing that one of them is inspired by true events.

The New Weird


Ann VanderMeerHal Duncan - 2008
    Assembling an array of talent, this collection includes contributions from visionaries Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, modern icon Clive Barker, and audacious new talents Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, and Sarah Monette. An essential snapshot of a vibrant movement in popular fiction, this anthology also features critical writings from authors, theorists, and international editors as well as witty selections from online debates.ContentsIntroduction: The New Weird: “It’s Alice?” by Jeff VanderMeer“The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines” by Alistair Rennie“Watson’s Boy” by Brian Evenson“Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered” by Cat Rambo“Jack” by China Miéville“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker“Forfend the Heaven’s Rending” by Conrad Williams“Locust-Mind” by Daniel Abraham“Tracking Phantoms” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke“Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes” by Felix Gilman“The Lizard of Ooze” by Jay Lake“Festival Lives: Preamble: An Essay” by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer“At Reparata” by Jeffrey Ford“Immolation” by Jeffrey Thomas“The Art of Dying” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke“Whose Words You Wear” by K. J. Bishop“The Neglected Garden” by Kathy Koja“Letters from Tainaron” by Leena Krohn“The Luck in the Head” by M. John Harrison“Crossing Cambodia” by Michael Moorcock“Death in a Dirty Dhorti” by Paul Di Filippo“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” by Sarah Monette“The Braining of Mother Lamprey” by Simon D. Ings“The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” by Steph Swainston“A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing” by Thomas Ligotti“European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird: An Essay” by Martin Šust, Michael Haulica, Hannes Riffel, Jukka Halme, Konrad Walewski“The New Weird: I Think We’re the Scene” by Michael Cisco“New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term” by various authors

The Best of Joe R. Lansdale


Joe R. Lansdale - 2010
    A soul-sucking Mummy stalks Elvis and John F. Kennedy. Joe Bob Briggs has a moral dilemma: If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do?And that’s the tame stuff.In this red-hot collection from world-champion Mojo storyteller Joe R. Lansdale, you’ll find his best, most outrageous stories. The high priest of Texan weirdness does it all: horror, mystery, satire, suspense, and even Westerns. Prepare to be offended, shocked, and cackling like a crazed redneck.Featuring five Bram Stoker Award–winning stories, this career retrospective contains some of Lansdale’s rarer work, his nonfiction forays into drive-in theaters and B-movies, and the novella Bubba Ho-Tep, later made into a cult-classic major motion picture.Come on in—the weirdness is fine.

The Dark Rites of Cthulhu


Brian M. SammonsGlynn Owen Barrass - 2014
    Hapless mortals have invoked monstrous entities from beyond through foul magicks, incantations and rituals. When will they learn that here can be no profit nor joy to be gained through relations with the insidious old ones? These sixteen tales of depravity, sorcery and madness may offer some illumination, but ultimately there can be no salvation for those who dabble in The Dark Rites of Cthulhu.

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories


M.R. James - 1904
    R. James's writings currently available, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as "Count Magnus," set in the wilds of Sweden; "Number 13," a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; "Casting the Runes," a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including "A Night in King's College Chapel," James's first known ghost story.

The Gulp


Alan Baxter - 2021
    The residents have grown used to it. The isolated Australian harbour town of Gulpepper is not like other places. Some maps don’t even show it. And only outsiders use the full name. Everyone who lives there calls it The Gulp. The place has a habit of swallowing people.A truck driver thinks the stories about The Gulp are made up to scare him. Until he gets there. Teenage siblings try to cover up the death of their mother, but their plans go drastically awry. A rock band invite four backpackers to a party at their house, where things get dangerously out of hand. A young man loses a drug shipment and his boss gives him 48 hours to make good on his mistake. Under the blinking eye of the old lighthouse, a rock fisher makes the strangest catch of his life.Five novellas. Five descents into darkness. Welcome to The Gulp, where nothing is as it seems.

Jirel of Joiry


C.L. Moore - 1934
    L. Moore created Jirel, ruler of Joiry, in reaction to the beefy total-testosterone blood-and-thunder tales of '30s pulp magazines, but Jirel is no anti-Conan. She's a good Catholic girl, stubbornly purposeful, relentless in pursuit of enemies or vengeance, hard-boiled and a little stupid, and cannot be distracted by mere physical attractiveness. Indeed, in Jirel's world, beauty = decadence = corruption. Were these stories written today, inevitably Jirel would have a lot of hot sex, but as they were first published in Weird Tales between 1934-1939, sexual attraction is mostly only vividly implied. No loss. Jirel's journeys through unnatural landscapes and her battles with supernatural opponents are still wonderful to read, and though newcomers Red Sonja and Xena are more famous now, Jirel rules as the archetypal, indomitable redheaded swordswoman in chain mail and greaves, swinging her "great two-edged sword."Contents:· Jirel Meets Magic · nv Weird Tales Jul ’35 · Black God’s Kiss · nv Weird Tales Oct ’34 · Black God’s Shadow · nv Weird Tales Dec ’34 · The Dark Land · nv Weird Tales Jan ’36 · Hellsgarde · nv Weird Tales Apr ’39

Sing Your Sadness Deep


Laura Mauro - 2019
    Human and humane tales of beauty, strangeness, and transformation told in prose as precise and sparing as a surgeon’s knife. A major new talent!Featuring "Looking for Laika," winner of the British Fantasy Award, and "Sun Dogs," a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard


Robert E. Howard - 2008
    Some of Howard’s best-known characters–Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and sailor Steve Costigan among them–roam the forbidding locales of the author’s fevered imagination, from the swamps and bayous of the Deep South to the fiend-haunted woods outside Paris to remote jungles in Africa.The collection includes Howard’s masterpiece “Pigeons from Hell,” which Stephen King calls “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century,” a tale of two travelers who stumble upon the ruins of a Southern plantation–and into the maw of its fatal secret. In “Black Canaan” even the best warrior has little chance of taking down the evil voodoo man with unholy powers–and none at all against his wily mistress, the diabolical High Priestess of Damballah. In these and other lavishly illustrated classics, such as the revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and “The Cairn on the Headland,” Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world’s great masters of the macabre.

A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror


John Hornor Jacobs - 2019
    P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.In My Heart Struck Sorrow, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South—which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.Breathtaking and haunting, A Lush and Seething Hell is a terrifying and exhilarating journey into the darkness, an odyssey into the deepest reaches of ourselves that compels us to confront secrets best left hidden.

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.

Sourdough and Other Stories


Angela Slatter - 2010
    In the cathedral-city of Lodellan and its uneasy hinterland, babies are fashioned from bread, dolls are given souls and wishes granted may be soon regretted. There are ghosts who dream, men whose wings have been clipped and trolls who long for something other. Love, loss and life are elegantly dissected in Slatter's earthy yet poetic prose. As Rob Shearman says in his Introduction: 'Sourdough and Other Stories manages to be grand and ambitious and worldbuilding-but also as intimate and focused as all good short fiction should be . . . The joy of Angela Slatter's book is that she's given us a set of fairy tales that are at once both new and fresh, and yet feel as old as storytelling itself.'

The Innsmouth Syndrome


Philip Hemplow - 2011
    to investigate a cluster of inexplicable mutations among the young people of Innsmouth, a sickly and destitute town on the Massachusetts coast. Initially skeptical, she rapidly discovers that the true mystery is older and more horrifying than anything for which her training has prepared her. As the danger mounts, a double helix of history and urban folklore draws her inexorably to the door of a sinister, evangelical cult - and beyond the limits of her science and belief.