The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World


Brian Allen Carr - 2014
    Few people ever visit Scrape, and the unlucky ones who live there never seem to escape. They fill their days with fish fries, cheap beer, tobacco, firearms, and sex. But Scrape is about to be invaded by a plague of monsters unlike anything ever seen in the history of the world. First there's La Llorona -- the screaming woman in white -- and her horde of ghost children. Then come the black, hairy hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. But the hands are nothing to El Abuelo, a wicked creature with a magical bullwhip, and even El Abuelo don't mean shit when the devil comes to town.

The Cannibals of Candyland


Carlton Mellick III - 2009
    They live in an underground world filled with lollipop forests and gumdrop goblins. During the day, while you are away at work, they come above ground and prowl our streets for food. Their prey: your children. They lure young boys and girls to them with their sweet scent and bright colorful candy coating, then rip them apart with razor sharp teeth and claws. When he was a child, Franklin Pierce witnessed the death of his siblings at the hands of a candy woman with pink cotton candy hair. Since that day, the candy people have become his obsession. He has spent his entire life trying to prove that they exist. And after discovering the entrance to the underground world of the candy people, Franklin finds himself venturing into their sugary domain. His mission: capture one of them and bring it back, dead or alive. Cannibals of Candyland is an erotic horror story for the bizarro reader. Dark, disturbing, and absurd; this isn't the board game version of candy land you used to play as a kid.

Queenpin


Megan Abbott - 2007
    Notoriously cunning and ruthless, Gloria shows her eager young protégée the ropes, ushering her into a glittering demimonde of late-night casinos, racetracks, betting parlors, inside heists, and big, big money. Suddenly, the world is at her feet--as long as she doesn't take any chances, like falling for the wrong guy. As the roulette wheel turns, both mentor and protégée scramble to stay one step ahead of their bosses and each other.

Crime Seen


Michaelbrent Collings - 2014
    A madman who slaughters at a whim. A murderer bent on destroying everything and everyone Evan loves. An assassin who can't be killed... because he's already dead.Evan is about to begin the longest day of his life. A day that will determine what is true, what is false. What crimes are reality...... and what crimes are merely seen.

The Summer I Died


Ryan C. Thomas - 2006
    When Roger Huntington comes home from college for the summer and is met by his best friend, Tooth, he knows they're going to have a good time. A summer full of beer, comic books, movies, laughs, and maybe even girls. So much pain. The sun is high and the sky is clear as Roger and Tooth set out to shoot beer cans at Bobcat Mountain. Just two friends catching up on lost time, two friends thinking about their futures, two friends-- So much blood. --suddenly thrust in the middle of a nightmare. Forced to fight for their life against a sadistic killer. A killer with an arsenal of razor sharp blades and a hungry dog by his side. So much death. If they are to survive, they must decide: are heroes born, or are they made? Or is something more powerful happening to them? And more importantly, how do you survive when all roads lead to death!

A Feast of Snakes


Harry Crews - 1976
    "No number of adjectives in the thesaurus can do full justice to the dazzlingly bizarre nature of Crews' creations".--"Washington Post Book World".

Fever Dream


Samanta Schweblin - 2014
    A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.

Perfect Nightmare


John Saul - 2005
    And what they might be after. Or whom. Now, ponder the unthinkable and surrender to your darkest dread, as sinister storyteller extraordinaire John Saul weaves a heart-stopping tale of lurking terror and twisted intent.Every parent’s nightmare becomes reality for Kara Marshall when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night. The police suspect that the girl is just another moody teenage runaway, angry over leaving behind her school and friends because her family is moving. But Lindsay’s recent eerie claim – that someone invaded her room when the house was opened to prospective buyers – drives Kara to fear the worst: a nameless, faceless stalker has walked the halls of her home in search of more than a place to live.Patrick Shields recognizes Kara’s pain – and carries plenty of his own since he lost his wife and two children in a devastating house fire. But more than grief draws Patrick and Kara together. He, too, senses the hand of a malevolent stranger in this tragedy. And as more people go missing from houses up for sale, Patrick’s suspicion, like Kara’s, blooms into horrified certainty. Someone is trolling this peaceful community – undetected and undeterred – harvesting victims for a purpose no sane mind can fathom. Someone Kara and Patrick, alone and desperate, are determined to unmask. Someone who is even now watching, plotting, keeping a demented diary of unspeakable deeds... and waiting until the time is ripe for another fateful visit.

Clown Girl


Monica Drake - 2006
    Against a backdrop of petty crime, she struggles to live her dreams, calling on cultural masters Charlie Chaplin, Kafka, and da Vinci for inspiration. In an effort to support herself and her layabout performance-artist boyfriend, Clown Girl finds herself unwittingly transformed into a corporate clown, trapping herself in a cycle of meaningless, high-paid gigs that veer dangerously close to prostitution. Monica Drake has created a novel that riffs on the high comedy of early film stars -- most notably Chaplin and W. C. Fields -- to raise questions of class, gender, economics, and prejudice. Resisting easy classification, this debut novel blends the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty with stunning skill.

We Are All Completely Fine


Daryl Gregory - 2014
    Now he’s in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses. Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these likely-insane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within and which are lurking in plain sight.

Zerostrata


Andersen Prunty - 2006
    Back home, he stays in Zerostrata, a treehouse in the backyard. The Nothing family is as dysfunctional and depressed as ever. His mother keeps a cat on her head and incessantly munches prescription medication. His father has left the house to pursue a career as a superhero. His brother has become a shut-in, brooding in the darkened basement. Hansel realizes, after a life of sadness, a life only half-remembered, the only thing he wants is for himself and his family to be happy. But what type of bizarre world must he enter to obtain this happiness?

The Insides


Jeremy P. Bushnell - 2016
    Bushnell’s “wonderfully weird and entertaining” (Esquire) debut, The Weirdness   Ollie Krueger’s days as a punk kid practicing street magic are are mostly behind her. Now she’s a butcher at Carnage, a high-end restaurant offering deconstructed takes on meat, and on the busiest nights of the week she and her partner, Guychardson, race to see who can produce more finished cuts. Ollie’s the better butcher, but somehow Guychardson almost always wins.  And Ollie thinks maybe it’s because the mysterious knife he uses is magic.   Before she knows it, Ollie’s interest in the knife has thrown her square in the path of a dangerous ex-marine called “Pig” and his hired psychic, Maja, who are on the hunt for the knife too—who want it so badly, in fact, that they might kill for it.   Now, magic is back in Ollie’s life and she’s being chased through New York City, with the fabric of space-time tattering around her and weird inter-dimensional worms squirming their way into her kitchen.  And before all this is over she’s going to need to face up to the Possible Consequences of some bad decisions, to look at the uncomfortable truths that she stuffed away long ago, deep down inside . . .

Laura


Vera Caspary - 1942
    No man could resist her charms—not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Laura's death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power. Soon he realizes he's been seduced by a dead woman—or has he? Laura won lasting renown as an Academy Award-nominated 1944 film, the greatest noir romance of all time. Vera Caspary's equally haunting novel is remarkable for its stylish, hardboiled writing, its electrifying plot twists, and its darkly complex characters—including a woman who stands as the ultimate femme fatale.

Bloom: Or, the unwritten memoir of Tennyson Middlebrook


Martin Kee - 2013
    The fairy tales he invented for his childhood friend Allison were only meant as a distraction from their troubled lives. For Tennyson, the stories were a whim, meant only to offer comfort in a bleak time of mass extinction and despair. The characters in his stories never even had names...But Lil’it is real, if not quite human. She is feh, a non-person, existing in a fractured world of hoarded knowledge where the simple act of writing is a crime punishable by death. At best she is property; at worst she is an exotic commodity, something to be sold off to rich, superstitious lords and bankers who would use her organs as aphrodisiacs. She lives in a cage, kept as a pet, her saliva a pathogen used to concoct potions. But when she is sold to the prince of a kingdom as a plaything, she discovers her world is much bigger, more dangerous, and far more terrifying than she had ever imagined from inside the safety of her prison.The world has been afflicted by bloom, a parasitic fungus striking down the very people who might be able to stop it. For a disease that feeds on information, the minds and memories of humanity are the perfect food.As bloom scatters the remains of his species, Tennyson becomes separated from Allison. When he learns that she may still be alive, he must decide how far he is willing to go to see the end of the world with the only woman he ever loved... even if she has no memory of him.

Look Behind You


Sibel Hodge - 2014
    She escapes through deserted woods with her life, but no one believes her story.And when she suspects her husband is lying to her, Chloe is forced to retrace her past, following in her own footsteps to find the truth and stay alive.But who is following Chloe?Look Behind You. You never know who’s out there.