Book picks similar to
Naming the Bones by Laura Mauro


horror
novellas
interested
setting-big-cities

Siren Promised


Jeremy Robert Johnson - 2005
    At the heart of each is Angie's daughter, Kaya. Angie's dreams end in death, the spreading of hand-shaped bruises across her daughter's throat. Curtis' dreams end in something else, something closer to obsession than love. Angie is worlds away, trying to keep her drug-shattered mind from falling apart, traveling through an American underbelly filled with inhuman shapes, dark whispers and old friends with empty eyes. Curtis is Kaya's new neighbor. He's getting closer to her, and her mentally unstable grandmother, Colleen. He's had families before, but he'd always made mistakes. Mistakes that led to new names, new towns. But this one time, he swears, things will all work out. He's got so much love to give. Siren Promised Featuring an introduction from author Simon Clark, over thirty illustrations by Alan M. Clark and an afterword by the book's creators, Siren Promised sets a new benchmark in visual and written storytelling.

Forest of Memory


Mary Robinette Kowal - 2016
    Her clients are rich and they demand items and experiences with only the finest verifiable provenance. Other people’s lives have value, after all.But when her A.I. suddenly stops whispering in her ear she finds herself cut off from the grid and loses communication with the rest of the world.The man who stepped out of the trees while hunting deer cut her off from the cloud, took her A.I., and made her his unwilling guest.There are no Authenticities or Captures to prove Katya’s story of what happened in the forest. You’ll just have to believe her.

Antioch


Jessica Leonard - 2020
    Now six women have been savagely murdered. The media dubs the killer 'Vlad the Impaler' due to the gruesome crime scenes of his victims. Clues are drying up fast and the hunt for the monster responsible is hitting a dead end.After picking up a late-night transmission on her short-wave radio, a local bookseller named Bess becomes convinced a seventh victim has already been abducted. Bess is used to spending her nights alone reading about Amelia Earhart conspiracy theories, and now a new mystery has fallen in her lap: one she might actually be able to solve.Assuming she doesn’t also wind up abducted.Antioch, a cross between Session 9 and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, is an eerie mind-bending debut horror novel guaranteed to leave you drowning in paranoia.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne


Tade Thompson - 2017
    Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.The rule is simple: don't bleed.For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

Weird Tales: 101 Weird, Strange, and Supernatural Stories (Civitas Library Classics)


Various - 2012
    May of these stories are from the pages of Weird Tales and other classic magazines which brought the work of masters like H.P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, and many others to the public. Includes an active table of contents.

Abortion Arcade


Cameron Pierce - 2011
    Cameron Pierce's work is an intoxicating blend of body horror and midnight movie madness, reminiscent of early David Lynch and the splatterpunks at their most sublime. His fiction will punch you in the brain and leave you gasping for more. Featuring: NO CHILDREN The apocalypse is over. Now zombies farm humans for their brains. As the imprisoned human cattle drift further from their humanity, the zombies flourish in a primitive renaissance, flying around in helicopters and living in smart houses made of human brains. THE ROADKILL QUARTERBACK OF HEAVY METAL HIGH After Heavy Metal High's star quarterback dies in a car accident, Danny the Dio-worshipping werewolf must transform from loser to gridiron star in this surreal pulp tragedy about teenage anxiety, high school violence, and heavy fucking metal. THE DESTROYED ROOM In a near-future city where automobiles have been outlawed and exotic animals roam the streets, a man wakes up one morning to discover that everyone in the world is a marionette. Now his wife is dead and he must find the answer, or else lose everything to the Great Shark Head in the Sky.

Semiosis


Sue Burke - 2018
    The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape--trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.

Basal Ganglia


Matthew Revert - 2013
    What else can you say?" - SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of Hill William and CrapalachiaAs teenagers, two lovers, Rollo and Ingrid, escape the world as it is known to live underground in a sprawling pillow fort that mirrors the structure of the human brain. Construction of the fort takes 25 years and once complete, their life exists to honor the fort in all it requires. Basal Ganglia begins countless years after they have become enslaved to the fort process. Rollo and Ingrid have lost any connection to their pasts and each other. Nothing exists beyond the patterns required by the fort. In an effort to become more than stasis, Ingrid expresses her desire to have a baby. Not wanting to subject another human to their strange world, she decides she will knit the baby using materials Rollo gathers from the fort. The emergence of this baby leads to paranoia between Rollo and Ingrid with both believing the other means the child harm. Within the confines of their cloistered world, the two engage in psychological warfare, desperately searching for a conclusion they don't understand. As a result, they will find connection with their past, each other and the true nature of their identities.

If I Could Stay


Stephanie Nicole Norris - 2018
    Then, her only mission was to attend college, pursue her modeling career, and leave her past hurts behind. But when Carmen receives some startling news, she decides the time to make her final appearance has arrived; however, reemerging could open old wounds and the obstacle of facing the man she left behind presents the biggest challenge of them all. Dominic Johnson has long since put thoughts of Carmen Mitchell out of sight and out of mind. Circumstances would bring her back to Brunswick, but there was no repartee to be spoken to the woman who’d left him years ago without so much as a goodbye. It isn’t until Dominic gains a first-hand glimpse of Carmen that old memories spark and a detonation of what was, and what could be, set off a myriad of images in his mind. Now Dominic is faced with a battle that’s waging internally, to stay out of her way or to succumb to Carmen Mitchell, again.

Infested


Mark R. Faulkner - 2014
    A novella, with spiders.Knowing it would be his final trip down the river, he wished upon a star to be left alone.He didn't realise the stars would answer.

Midnight's Tale


George Berger - 2012
    He's endured close confinement with a hostile camel. He even narrowly averted being the star attraction in a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Yet, despite handling these crises with aplomb, poor Midnight is ill-prepared for his latest, greatest adventure: a perilous foray into the affairs of the heart. He knows all there is to know of love that a farm can teach - but will it be enough to see the young goat through his darkest and most trying times?Midnight's Tale is a 12,000-word literary story of life and love in the treacherous, apple-laden world beyond the comforts of the barn.

Yesterday's Kin


Nancy Kress - 2014
    A deadly cloud of spores has already infected and killed the inhabitants of two worlds. Now that plague is heading for Earth, and threatens humans and aliens alike. Can either species be trusted to find the cure?Geneticist Marianne Jenner is immersed in the desperate race to save humanity, yet her family is tearing itself apart. Siblings Elizabeth and Ryan are strident isolationists who agree only that an alien conspiracy is in play. Marianne’s youngest, Noah, is a loner addicted to a drug that constantly changes his identity. But between the four Jenners, the course of human history will be forever altered. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent human extinction—and not everyone is willing to wait.

The Haunting of Forsaken Manor (Ghost Hunters Book 1)


Cat Knight - 2020
    

What Moves the Dead


T. Kingfisher
    Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

Fra Keeler


Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi - 2012
    A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling.--Robert CooverObsessive/delightful, FRA KEELER subtly elaborates on life's details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel's incidents pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language's bizarre disturbances. FRA KEELER is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer.--Lynne TillmanAzareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Per Petterson. FRA KEELER is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how 'one lives against one's dying, ' and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!--Michelle LatiolaisIn FRA KEELER a mind churns on itself, while reality--if it is reality--comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining.--Brian Evenson