Book picks similar to
Sacrifice by Russell James


horror
supernatural
fiction
suspense

The Waking Dark


Robin Wasserman - 2013
    Twelve people dead, in the space of a few hours. Five murderers: neighbors, relatives, friends. All of them so normal. All of them seemingly harmless. All of them now dead by their own hand . . . except one. And that one has no answers to offer the shattered town. She doesn't even know why she killed—or whether she'll do it again.Something is waking in the sleepy town of Oleander, Kansas—something dark and hungry that lives in the flat earth and the open sky, in the vengeful hearts of upstanding citizens. As the town begins its descent into blood and madness, five survivors of the killing day are the only ones who can stop Oleander from destroying itself. Jule, the outsider at war with the world. West, the golden boy at war with himself. Daniel, desperate for a different life. Cass, who's not sure she deserves a life at all. Ellie, who believes in sacrifice, who believes in fate, who believes in evil. Ellie, who always goes too far.They have nothing in common. They have nothing left to lose. And they have no way out. Which means that they have no choice but to stand and fight, to face the darkness in their town—and in themselves.

Heart-Shaped Box


Joe Hill - 2007
    -- so when his assistant tells him about a ghost for sale on an online auction site, he immediately puts in a bid and purchases it. The black, heart-shaped box that Coyne receives in the mail not only contains the suit of a dead man but also his vengeance-obsessed spirit. The ghost, it turns out, is the stepfather of a young groupie who committed suicide after the 54-year-old Coyne callously used her up and threw her away. Now, determined to kill Coyne and anyone who aids him, the merciless ghost of Craddock McDermott begins his assault on the rocker's sanity.

Twisted


Andrew E. Kaufman - 2015
    Christopher Kellan spends his days at Loveland Psychiatric Hospital, overseeing a unit known as Alpha Twelve, home to the most deranged and psychotic killers imaginable. His newest patient, Donny Ray Smith, is accused of murdering ten young girls and making their bodies disappear. But during his first encounter with Donny, Christopher finds something else unsettling: the man looks familiar.The killer with a secret…Donny Ray knows things about Christopher—things he couldn’t have possibly learned at Loveland. As the psychologist delves deeper into the mysterious patient’s case, Christopher’s life whirls out of control. The contours of his mind are rapidly losing shape, and his grasp on reality is slipping even faster. Is he going mad, or is that what Donny Ray wants him to think?The terror that binds them…In this taut psychological thriller from Andrew E. Kaufman, bestselling author of The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted, a tormented man must face his fear and enter the mind of a killer to find the truth…even if it costs him his sanity.

Castaways


Brian Keene - 2009
    Each one hoped to be the last to leave. Now they're just hoping to stay alive. It seems the island isn't deserted after all. Contestants and crew members are disappearing, but they aren't being eliminated by the game. They're being taken by the monstrous half-human creatures that live in the jungle. The men will be slaughtered. The women will be kept alive as captives. Night is falling, the creatures are coming, and rescue is so far away. . .

The Devil's Footprints


Amanda Stevens - 2008
    The prints vanish with the melting snow…only to reappear seventy years later near the gruesome killing of Rachel DeLaune.Years after her sister's unsolved murder, New Orleans tattoo artist Sarah DeLaune is haunted by the mysteries of her past. Sarah has always believed that her sister was killed by a man named Ashe Cain. But no one else had ever seen Ashe. He had "appeared" to Sarah when she needed a friend the most, only to vanish on the night of her sister's murder. The past bleeds into the present when two mutilated bodies are found near Sarah's home, the crime scene desecrated by cloven footprints.

To Hell in a Handbasket


Willow Rose - 2016
    To Tim Robertson, they're his worst nightmare From the Queen of Scream comes a novel that will raise the hair on the back of your neck. Not every grandmotherly type bakes cookies.What's more frightening than finding out that the kindly old ladies living across the street from you are anything but?As a child, Tim Robertson is selling cookies with his best friend Damien when they knock on the door of the house across the street from him. Two old ladies open the door and Tim never sees his best friend again.Twenty years later, Tim has tried to move on and forget what happened back then. He is married, has a son, and just bought the house of his dreams in small town Cocoa Beach. When the house across the street from them is sold, they are all looking forward to getting new neighbors, until Tim realizes the old ladies are back to haunt him and the rest of the town. To Hell in a Handbasket is Willow Rose, when she is at her most horrifying. Every page of this book is oozing with dread, and this novel stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best of Koontz and King. Anyone who has read a Willow Rose book knows it's harder to put the book down than to just finish it.

The Haunting of Marshall Heights


Amy Cross - 2018
    A nearby trainline causes the entire building to regularly shudder. And some nights - at precisely 3am - the dead can be heard knocking on the doors, begging for help.When she arrives at Marshall Heights to search for her missing sister, Megan Booth immediately realizes that something's wrong. The local police refuse to go near the place, so Megan has to uncover the truth herself. She soon finds, however, that even the residents of the building are scared to discover what really lurks in the corridors.The Haunting of Marshall Heights - originally released as 3AM - is the story of a building where the barrier between the living and the dead has worn thin, and where an evil force is trying to force its way back into this world.

Nightingale House


Steve Frech - 2017
    After months of grief, this will be the place where they start their life as a family of two.But something is wrong—Daniel can’t settle. There’s an odd, cold feeling in the master bedroom, and a mysterious dripping noise that seems to move from room to room. Whispers of I can’t sleep echo through the corridors, long into the night.And then Daniel uncovers the chilling story of the family who lived in the house years before, of betrayal, tragedy, and murder. Could the Nightingale House be not the home Daniel dreamed of for his daughter—but a place that will bring their worst nightmares to life?

Shadowlands


Kate Brian - 2013
    Rory survived and the serial killer who attacked her escaped. Now that the infamous Steven Nell is on the loose, Rory must enter the witness protection program. Entering the program alongside her, is her father and sister Darcy. The trio starts a new life and a new beginning leaving their friends and family behind without a goodbye. Starting over in a new town with only each other is unimaginable for Rory and Darcy. They were inseparable as children but now they can barely stand each other. As the sisters settle in to Juniper Landing, a picturesque vacation island, it seems like their new home may be just the fresh start they need. They fall in with a group of beautiful, carefree teens and spend their days surfing, partying on the beach, and hiking into endless sunsets. Just as they’re starting to feel safe again, one of their new friends goes missing. Is it a coincidence? Or is the nightmare beginning all over again?

Last Call


Sean Costello - 2015
    Gamble, Trish heads out from her Northern Ontario home that very day to stand at his bedside. But along the way, she crosses paths with a man who will upend her life and the lives of everyone she cares about.Meet Bobcat, a savage serial killer christened The Dentist by the press, a deranged trophy hunter who sees Trish as the ultimate prize.Last Call is a story of lost innocence, sociopathic obsession, and moral redemption that is certain to haunt you long after you’ve read the last page.

No Doors, No Windows


Joe Schreiber - 2009
    But now he has come back to his New Hampshire hometown only to find that his family is in ruins, his nephew needs a home, and a shattering truth is clawing its way into the light.Fifteen years ago, Scott’s mother died in a fire. And now the shadowy circumstances–the bodies buried beneath the ashes, the lives ripped apart that fateful day–are starting to be revealed. The answers unspool in the pages of a peculiar old manuscript–an unfinished ghost story written in his father’s own hand that beckons Scott out to a strange house in the woods with a lightless corridor that cannot be seen from the outside. Here Scott Mast will uncover all that has been hidden–and perhaps finish his father’s unspeakable work.

The Devil in Silver


Victor LaValle - 2012
    It also has a very, very old one.   Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die?  The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.

Lost Boy Lost Girl


Peter Straub - 2003
    A week later, her son -- fifteen-year-old Mark -- vanishes. The boy's uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before Nancy's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from basement to attic with the echoes of a long hidden true-life horror story, and Tim comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.

Moran and Moran (Death Hunter #2)


Ron Ripley - 2020
    

The Legend of Devil's Creek


D.C. Alexander - 2012
    More abductions and killings soon follow. Justin Riddley, recently transferred to the island’s small college, faces growing evidence that one of his new friends and fellow students may be the murderer. John Marshall, redemption-seeking captain of the local police force, leads the frantic murder investigation and struggles to figure out whether the killings are tied to the island's dark and violent past. Tormented by tragic wartime memories, and more convinced with each day that it is humanity’s fate to destroy itself, Marshall races against both the murderer and the specter of his own mental breakdown. As blood continues to spill, Riddley and Marshall wonder whether there may be a dark, universal force that drives evil deeds great and small, and whether the nature of one’s childhood might sometimes, in the end, be all that separates the saint from the psychopath.