Book picks similar to
One for the Road by Wesley Southard
horror
novella
short-stories
signed
Jack's Magic Beans
Brian Keene - 2007
One moment, customers are happily shopping in the Save-A-Lot grocery store. The next instant, they are transformed into bloodthirsty psychotics, interested only in slaughtering one another and committing unimaginably atrocious and frenzied acts of violent depravity. Only Jack, Sammi, Angie and Marcel seem immune to the insanity that has infected the rest of the town. But can they stay alive long enough -- and trust each other long enough -- to unravel the secret of Jack's magic beans... Deadite Press is proud to bring one of Brian Keene's bleakest and most violent novellas back into print once more. This edition also includes four bonus short stories: "Without You", "I Am An Exit", "This Is Not An Exit", and "The King, in: YELLOW".
The Visible Filth
Nathan Ballingrud - 2015
He decides to keep the cell phone just until the owner returns and everything changes. Then the messages begin.Will’s discovered something unspeakable and it’s crawling slowly into the light.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini
Reggie Oliver - 2003
Foreword: Reggie OliverIntroduction: Christopher Barker**'Beside The Shrill Sea''Feng Shui''In Arcadia''The Evil Eye''Miss Marchant’s Cause''Tiger In The Snow''Gardens Gods''The Black Cathedral''The Boy in Green Velvet''The Golden Basilica''Death Mask''A Warning To The Antiquary''The Seventeenth Sister''The Copper Wig''The Dreams Of Cardinal Vittorini'
The Box: Uncanny Stories
Richard Matheson - 2008
. . someone you don't know. Would you still push the button?"Button, Button," Richard Matheson's chilling tale of greed and temptation, is now the basis of The Box, the new film from the director of Donnie Darko. In addition, this outstanding collection also contains many other unforgettable stories by Matheson, the award-winning author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come."The inventive plots and spare but convincing portraits of ordinary men and women caught up in forces beyond their control demonstrate why Stephen King has called Matheson his most significant influence."--Publishers Weekly
The Black Farm
Elias Witherow - 2017
Unable to cope with the misery that fills their days, they commit one last act together and die in loving relief. But when Nick wakes up, he soon realizes that death isn't the gentle darkness he expected. Panicked and horrified, he struggles to understand the twisted abominations and hellish world he's now trapped in. Driven by desperation and a sudden will to survive, he sets out to find Jess and is unable to cope with the thought of her having to suffer through the terrors this new reality holds. But nothing could prepare him for the nightmares he found...nothing could prepare him for The Black Farm.
I Will Rot Without You
Danger Slater - 2016
That much is obvious. But it's when you realize that he's also shameless about how he feels that you recognize you're in the hands of a mad-lover, a very funny-fiend, an artist...[I Will Rot Without You] is the kind of book that makes you want to write one of your own." - JOSH MALERMAN, author of Bird BoxMeet Ernie. His life is a mess. Gretchen's gone, and the apartment they once shared is this grey, grim city is now overrun with intelligent mold and sinister bugs.Then his neighbor Dee shows up, so smart and lovely. If he can just get past the fact that her jealous boyfriend could reach out of her blouse and punch him in the face at any moment, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.Unfortunately for all involved, a Great Storm is coming and it will wash away everything we've ever known about the human heart.
The Art of Horrible People
John Skipp - 2015
Splatterpunk legend John Skipp turns the mirror back on ourselves, showing us all the ways that make us the worst monsters of all. A decade in the making, The Art of Horrible People collects John Skipp's most horrific, hilarious, and starkly honest short stories, raising horror fiction to gleefully deranged new heights.
They Had Goat Heads
D. Harlan Wilson - 2010
Harlan Wilson returns with another ferociously mindbending collection of short fiction. Masked in absurdity, these stories reveal the horrifying and hilarious faces of everyday life. Wilson tells of egg raids, hog rippers, monk spitters, fathers who take their children to pet stores to buy them whales, sociopaths who threaten to clothesline eternity, and the simple act of the story itself becoming a means of repetitive, endless torture. Put on your goat head, hop in your hovercraft, and take a ride with a juggernaut of modern imaginative fiction.
Sow
Tim Curran - 2013
When she became pregnant, he was ecstatic. They would finally have a child to complete their love.But then Holly began to change.She began reading strange, old books and consorting with a mysterious midwife named Mrs. Crouch. Day by day, she becomes less like the woman Richard married, slowly degenerating into something evil and monstrous.The child she carries is not his. In fact, it's not even human.Holly is about to unleash hell into the world.
Forbidden Fruit
Calvin Demmer - 2017
Casey, author of Stygian Doorways
Merciless
Bryan Smith - 2019
Young, prosperous, and good-looking, they are seen by friends and family as the perfect couple. No one sees the dark side to their love. After their wedding, they embark on a trip across the country. As their honeymoon gift to each other, they plan to abduct, torture, and kill a stranger. But what was planned as a controlled one-time event soon explodes into a spiraling orgy of bloody, nightmarish violence and depravity.
Kingdom of Needle and Bone
Mira Grant - 2018
Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can’t have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn’t be here to talk about them. They don’t matter. They’re never coming back.How wrong we could be.It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.We live in an age of monsters.
The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle
William Holloway - 2019
A cup full of tentacles mixed with existential nihilism and sprinkled with liberal quantities of gore, this is Lovecraftian horror with a bloody bent that few others have dared to explore. --Peter Rawlik, author of ReanimatorsThey called it the Event.The Event changed everything. The earthquakes came first, including the Big One, shattering the Pacific Rim and plunging the world into chaos. Then the seas came, the skies opened, and the never-ending rain began. But as bad as that was, there is something worse.The Rising has begun.A lone man who abandoned the world for his addictions searches a waterlogged Austin for something, anything to cling to. Little does he know that something else searches for him.In the Sonoran Desert, the downtrodden of the world search for a better life north of the border, only to see the desert become an ocean: an ocean that takes life and gives death.In the woods of Alabama, survivors escape to Fort Resistance, but soon discover that it isn't just the horrors of the deep places of the world that they need to fear; but rather a new and more deadly pestilence that has grown in their own ranks.In England, it's too late to fight, and all that's left is to survive. One man reaches for his own humanity, but what to do when humanity is an endangered species?And in the Pacific, He is rising.In The Abyssal Plain: The R'lyeh Cycle, authors William Holloway, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, Brett J. Talley, and Rich Hawkins have created a timely and uniquely modern reimagining of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Goddess of Filth
V. Castro - 2021
But we weren’t witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school.” One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors. Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely—smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it's a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it’s something else—something far more ancient and powerful. As Father Moreno's obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her “bruja Craft crew” and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.