Book picks similar to
Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder
horror
fiction
paperbacks-from-hell
bram-stoker-award-winners
Mistletoe
Alison Littlewood - 2019
Determined to bury her grief in hard work, and desperate to escape Christmas and the pitying looks of her colleagues, she rushes through the purchase of a run-down Yorkshire farmhouse, arriving just as the snow shrouds her new home.It may look like a Christmas card, but it's soon clear it's not just the house needing renovation; the land is in bad heart too. And Leah's mind starts playing tricks on her: she hears a child playing in the snow, but although there are snowballs, there are no footprints. Is this the ghost of her son, returned to her? She starts having visions of the farm's former occupants - the young widow and her son, the cousin who's wooing her, the maid who shares her secrets and the handsome labourer who's hanged for the murder of a child, a murder he didn't commit.Is Leah strong enough to lay the increasingly malevolent ghosts and find a way to move on? Or will her ashes end up scattered over the now-covered fields?
Night Things
Michael Talbot - 1988
Journey through a bizarre labyrinth into chambers of unearthly proportions, up creaking stairways leading nowhere. But never...never...venture into the black heart of the awesome edifice.YOU MAY NEVER LEAVE!For creatures roam the corridors of Lake House. Hideous beings older than civilization -- restless, waiting...hungry! Blood-chilling denizens of Hell that emerge only under cover of darkness... "Things" that will haunt your dreams and devour your soul!
The House
Bentley Little - 1997
Inexplicably, four men and one woman are having heart-stopping nightmares revolving around the dark and forbidding houses where each of them were born. When recent terrifying events occur, they are each drawn to their identical childhood homes, only to confront a sinister supernatural presence which has pursued them all their lives, and is now closer than ever to capturing their souls....
Maynard's House
Herman Raucher - 1980
He comes to own it by the generosity of a brother-in-arms—a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. The rugged landscape of Maine is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until Austin isn't exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. And just when our hero's had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins.
Sweetheart, Sweetheart
Bernard Taylor - 1977
Growing obsessed, David made his way to England to calm his fears -- instead he found an...UNBOUNDED HELL.Colin and his wife were dead -- victims of ghastly violence. Their seemingly serene cottage seethed with an aura of murder, madness, and betrayal. Overpowered by the evil, David soon embarked on a...JOURNEY INTO THE MACABRE.Suffocatingly, the presence grew...grew to a malevolent force trying to kill David's fiancee...grew until David himself was a helpless prisoner of unholy passion!
Novels & Stories: The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Other Stories and Sketches
Shirley Jackson - 2010
M. Homes. “It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse.” Jackson’s characters–mostly unloved daughters in search of a home, a career, a family of their own–chase what appears to be a harmless dream until, without warning, it turns on its heel to seize them by the throat. We are moved by these characters’ dreams, for they are the dreams of love and acceptance shared by us all. We are shocked when their dreams become nightmares, and terrified by Jackson’s suggestion that there are unseen powers–“demons” both subconscious and supernatural–malevolently conspiring against human happiness.In this volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson’s only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story–one of the most widely anthologized tales of the twentieth century–has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are “The Daemon Lover,” a story Oates praises as “deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than ‘The Lottery,’” and “Charles,” the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson’s secondary career as a domestic humorist.Here too are Jackson’s masterly short novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Rounding out the volume are 21 other stories and sketches that showcase Jackson in all her many modes, and the essay “Biography of a Story,” Jackson’s acidly funny account of the public reception of “The Lottery,” which provoked more mail from readers of The New Yorker than any contribution before or since.
Pretty Marys All in a Row
Gwendolyn Kiste - 2017
She calls herself Rhee, but everyone else knows her by another name: Resurrection Mary. And when she’s transported home each night to a decrepit mansion on a lane to nowhere, she’s not alone.In the antique mirror, call her name three times, and Bloody Mary will appear. Outside, wandering through a garden of poisonous flowers is Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary, a nursery rhyme come to gruesome life. Downstairs is another jump-rope rhyme—Mary Mack, forever conscripted to build her own coffin. And brooding in the corner with her horse skull is the restless Mari Lwyd.They are the Marys, the embodiment of urban legend and what goes bump in the night. Every evening, they gather around the table and share nightmares like fine wine, savoring the flavors of those they’ve terrified.But other than these brief moments together, the Marys are alone, haunting a solitary gloom that knows them better than they know themselves. That’s because they don’t remember who they were before—or even if there was a before. And worst of all, they don’t know how to escape this fate.That is, until a moment of rage inspires Rhee to leap from the highway—and into the mirror with Bloody Mary. Suddenly, the Marys are learning how to move between their worlds, all while realizing how much stronger they are together.But just when freedom is within their reach, something in the gloom fights back—something that isn’t ready to let them go. Now with her sisters in danger of slipping into the darkness, Rhee must unravel the mystery of who the Marys were before they were every child’s nightmare. And she’ll have to do it before what’s in the shadows comes to claim her for its own.
No One Gets Out Alive
Adam Nevill - 2014
So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be. It's not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire, that makes her uneasy - it's the whispers behind the fireplace, the scratching beneath floors, the footsteps in the dark, and the young women weeping in neighbouring rooms. And when Knacker's cousin Fergal arrives, the danger goes vertical. But this is merely a beginning, a gateway to horrors beyond Stephanie's worst nightmares. And in a house where no one listens to the screams, will she ever get out alive?
The Unloved
John Saul - 1988
Now, for the first time in two decades, Kevin Devereaux has returned here with his wife and children to visit Kevin's hated, and frightening mother. She said she was ill--but is that really why the old woman has summoned the son she has not seen in so many years? Suddenly, horribly, one of the Devereauxs is going to die. And now, all the dark secrets of this once-proud family will emerge to wrap their evil around the unsuspecting children. Until, in the shadowed corridors and dust-covered rooms of the decaying old house, they learn the true terror of The Unloved.
Kill Creek
Scott Thomas - 2017
For years it has remained empty, overgrown, abandoned. Soon the door will be opened for the first time in decades. But something is waiting, lurking in the shadows, anxious to meet its new guests…When best-selling horror author Sam McGarver is invited to spend Halloween night in one of the country’s most infamous haunted houses, he reluctantly agrees. At least he won’t be alone; joining him are three other masters of the macabre, writers who have helped shape modern horror. But what begins as a simple publicity stunt will become a fight for survival. The entity they have awakened will follow them, torment them, threatening to make them a part of the bloody legacy of Kill Creek.
Our Lady of Darkness
Fritz Leiber - 1977
Then one day, peering at his apartment window from atop a nearby hill, he sees a pale brown thing lean out his window…and wave.This encounter sends Westen on a quest through ancient books and modern streets, for the dark forces and paramental entities that thrive amidst the towering skyscrapers of modern urban life…and meanwhile, the entities are also looking for him.A pioneering work of modern urban fantasy, Our Lady of Darkness is perhaps Fritz Leiber’s greatest novel.
Headhunter Reimagined
Michael Slade - 1984
The Headhunter is loose on the streets of Vancouver. The psycho’s victims are everywhere - floating in the Fraser River, buried in a shallow grave, nailed to a totem pole on the university campus. All are women. All are headless.Then the taunting photographs arrive. Carefully posed shots of the women’s heads stuck on poles. The Mounties of Special X are up against a unique brand of killer. A killer whose sexual psychosis stretches back through Ecuador’s steaming jungle and a scream-filled New Orleans dungeon to a dead-of-winter manhunt in the Rocky Mountains a century ago.
White Is for Witching
Helen Oyeyemi - 2009
Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly -Slipping away from them -And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story."Miri I conjure you "This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.
Coldheart Canyon
Clive Barker - 2001
His fiercely loyal agent finds him just such a place in a luxurious forgotten mansion high in the Hollywood Hills. But the original owner of the mansion was a beautiful woman devoted to pleasure at any cost, and the terrible legacy of her deeds has not yet died. There are ghosts and monsters haunting Coldheart Canyon, where nothing is forbidden . . .
The Witches
Peter Curtis - 1960
But dreams can change into nightmares...When one of her students accuses his friend Ethel's grandmother of abusing her, Miss Mayfield cannot let it go. But Ethel won't say anything, despite the evidence of Miss Mayfield's own eyes. But as she attempts to get to the truth of the matter, she stumbles on something far more sinister. Walwyk seems to be in the grip of a centuries-old evil, and anybody who questions events in the village does not last long.Death stalks more than one victim, and Miss Mayfield begins to realise that if she's not careful, she will be the next to die...