Book picks similar to
The Horror at Criven Farm by Amy Cross
horror
horror-thriller
fiction
mystery
It Will Just Be Us
Jo Kaplan - 2020
Its labyrinthine halls, built by her mad ancestors, are filled with echoes of the past: ghosts and memories knotted together as one. In the presence of phantoms, it's all Sam can do to disentangle past from present in her daily life. But when her pregnant sister Elizabeth moves in after a fight with her husband, something in the house shifts. Already navigating her tumultuous relationship with Elizabeth, Sam is even more unsettled by the appearance of a new ghost: a faceless boy who commits disturbing acts—threatening animals, terrorizing other children, and following Sam into the depths of the house wielding a knife. When it becomes clear the boy is connected to a locked, forgotten room, one which is never entered, Sam realizes this ghost is not like the others. This boy brings doom. As Elizabeth's due date approaches, Sam must unravel the mysteries of Wakefield before her sister brings new life into a house marked by death. But as the faceless boy grows stronger, Sam will learn that some doors should stay closed—and some secrets are safer locked away forever.
The Silence
Tim Lebbon - 2015
Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed... Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death.Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?
Bad House
Sam West - 2015
Ian has his brilliant career, a wife he loves and a son whom he would die for. Their new, five-bed detached is the icing on the cake.But what if your new home is not as it first appears? What if it is something more than mere bricks and mortar? What if your new house has a hidden agenda?As soon as Ian moves in, the headaches start. The family he loves so dearly begins to grate on his nerves. Nightmares plague his every night and nasty thoughts constantly simmer beneath the surface of his mind.It’s almost as if his mind is no longer his own, like his own imagination is turning against him. Ian will come to realise that just as some people are born toxic, then so are some places…He should have listened to his son from the start: “This house is angry, Daddy. This is a bad house...”'Bad House' is a psychological horror and contains scenes some readers may find offensive.The first chapter of Djinn is included at the end of the story.
Into the Wolves' Den
Jon Athan - 2019
He enlists the help of Gerald Greenwood, an old friend and a private investigator. When their investigation stalls and desperation creeps in, Keith’s methods become unorthodox, illegal, and extremely violent. Meanwhile, Keith’s daughters, fourteen-year-old Carrie and eight-year-old Allison, witness horrors beyond imagination at the Wolves’ Den, a house in the middle of nowhere. In that house, a group of psychopaths in animal masks produce snuff films and other disturbing content for clients across the globe. Jon Athan, the provocative author behind Dr. Sadist and Lovesick, delivers another dark and disturbing horror novel filled with mystery, suspense, and gore. Can you handle a visit to the Wolves’ Den? WARNING: This novel contains graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.
Bunny
Mona Awad - 2019
A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.
The Burning Girls
C.J. Tudor - 2021
J. Tudor.Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself.Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find some peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. "But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known."The more Jack and her daughter Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo is troubled by strange sightings in the old chapel, it becomes apparent that there are ghosts here that refuse to be laid to rest.But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village's bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
Dark Matter
Michelle Paver - 2010
Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his life, so when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, but the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return--when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...
The Book of Accidents
Chuck Wendig - 2021
And now what happened long ago is happening again . . . and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family—and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this battle: their love for one another.
Luckenbooth
Jenni Fagan - 2021
But the real reason she's there is to bear him and his barren wife a child, the consequences of which curse the tenement building that is their home for a hundred years. As we travel through the nine floors of the building and the next eight decades, the resident's lives entwine over the ages and in unpredictable ways. Along the way we encounter the city's most infamous Madam, a seance, a civil rights lawyer, a bone mermaid, a famous Beat poet, a notorious Edinburgh gang, a spy, the literati, artists, thinkers, strippers, the spirit world - until a cosmic agent finally exposes the true horror of the building's longest kept secret. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close hurtles the reader through personal and global history - eerily reflecting modern life today.
The Crowlands
T.M. Creedy - 2019
Sara Robinson – gambling addict, liar, thief – lived a hand-to-mouth existence in a dingy flat in London. Now she's running for her life after the chance to make some easy money goes horribly wrong. She has three things which might save her - a passport in someone else’s name, a ticket to Australia and a suitcase full of cash. Sara finds herself the custodian of a crumbling Victorian mansion known as Crowlands House, once a children’s home in the rural town of Ararat. At first, the airy property seems cool and welcoming in the harsh Australian sunlight. It’s a private haven where Sara can forget about what happened in London, and a place to escape the hostile local townsfolk. But there are things in the house that aren't quite right. And Sara can't ignore them forever. The doors that won't stay open, the scratching sounds in the walls at night, the objects that disappear only to reappear in a room she has never even been in. And then the children come out to play - one by shadowy one..... Sara begins to delve into the mysteries of the mansion and uncovers a secret so gruesome it refuses to stay buried. But the evils of the past will do anything to keep the dead silent, and Sara must find a way to survive the horror that still resides at Crowlands House. The crows in the gum tree wait patiently for the souls of the dead to leave the house, but he will never set them free.
The Haunting of The Meade Mansion (A Riveting Haunted House Mystery, #1)
Skylar Finn - 2019
But when she and her husband Jesse arrived at the house, they discovered that Aunt Matilda was murdered—and the culprit was still at large. Guided by the ghosts of Matilda and the orphans she raised, can Emily and Jesse catch the criminals and save themselves?
The Guest House Hauntings Boxset: A Riveting Haunted House Mystery
Hazel Holmes - 2021
While its citizens have fallen on hard times, they've managed to survive decades of harsh, northern winters. But when drifter Sarah Pembrooke rolls into town looking for work, the frigid cold will be the least of their worries.
A Good and Happy Child
Justin Evans - 2007
After months of accepting his lame excuses and strange behavior, his wife has had enough. She demands that he see a therapist, and George, desperate to save his unraveling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, reluctantly agrees. As he delves into his childhood memories, he begins to recall things he hasn’t thought of in twenty years. Events, people, and strange situations come rushing back. The odd, rambling letters his father sent home before he died. The jovial mother who started dating too soon after his father’s death. A boy who appeared one night when George was lonely, then told him secrets he didn’t want to know. How no one believed this new friend was real and that he was responsible for the bad things that were happening. Terrified by all that he has forgotten, George struggles to remember what really happened in the months following his father’s death. Were his ominous visions and erratic behavior the product of a grief-stricken child’s overactive imagination (a perfectly natural reaction to the trauma of loss, as his mother insisted)? Or were his father’s colleagues, who blamed a darker, more malevolent force, right to look to the supernatural as a means to end George’s suffering? Twenty years later, George still does not know. But when a mysterious murder is revealed, remembering the past becomes the only way George can protect himself–and his young family.A psychological thriller in the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History–with shades of The Exorcist–the smart and suspenseful A Good and Happy Child leaves you questioning the things you remember and frightened of the things you’ve forgotten.From the Hardcover edition.
The Red Tree
Caitlín R. Kiernan - 2009
Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant--an anthropologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property.Tied to local legends of supernatural magic, as well as documented accidents and murders, the gnarled tree takes root in Sarah's imagination, prompting her to write her own account of its unsavory history.And as the oak continues to possess her dreams and nearly almost all her waking thoughts, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago...
A Garden Lost in Time
Jonathan Aycliffe - 2004
Fifteen-year-old Simon Lysaght is sent after the death of his father to live with his uncle Sir David Trevelyan at their estate house, Trevelyan Priors. Exploring after a day of heavy snow, Simon discovers a track of fresh footprints in an enclosed garden, long abandoned and overgrown. Who do they belong to?