Book picks similar to
Long Black Coffin by Tim Curran
horror
fiction
first-reads
adult
Nightmare Man
Alan Ryker - 2013
He spends his days working a job he hates. He spends his nights tormented by night terrors.He once had goals and dreams. Now he's just trying to get by.Unfortunately for Jessie and his family, while he's given up on his dreams, his nightmares haven't given up on him. And right now one is crossing over into the waking world.
Lilith
Toby Tate - 2012
Navy’s newest state-of-the-art super carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, something supernatural and as ancient as time itself. And it’s taking over the crew one by one.Reporter Hunter Singleton and his wife Lisa, guests invited aboard to witness a routine training mission off the coast of North Carolina, soon learn that the CIA is onboard as well, and that some of the ship’s crew are acting irrationally, even violently. When an unexpected monster hurricane slams New York, the ship rushes to assist in the aftermath, and Hunter, Lisa and the crew are faced with the terrifying realization that whatever has come aboard the Ford must be stopped before it is set free on the streets of Manhattan.But how do they fight something beyond human comprehension? How do they kill something that may not even be alive?The clock is ticking…and Time itself is running out.
Burnt Offerings
Robert Marasco - 1973
They find a beautiful old country mansion on Long Island -- restful, secluded, with pool and private beach -- perfect, for the right people. But their "perfect" summer home hides terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. During that long summer the house becomes a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.
The Traveling Vampire Show
Richard Laymon - 2000
All over the rural town of Grandville, tacked to power poles and trees, taped to store windows, blowing along the sidewalks, fliers have appeared announcing the mysterious one-night-only performance of The Traveling Vampire Show.The show will feature Valeria, the only known vampire in captivity. According to the fliers, she is a gorgeous, stunning beauty. In the course of the performance, she will stalk volunteers from the audience, sink her teeth into their necks and drink their blood!For three local teenagers who see the fliers, this is a show they don't want to miss. But they may have to.Though they can probably scrape up the price of admission, other obstacles stand in the way. One problem, nobody under 18 years of age is allowed into the show. Dwight, Rusty, and Slim are only 16. Another problem, the show begins at midnight and the three teens always have to be home by then. If that weren't bad enough, the show is to take place at Janks Field -- a desolate patch of ground with a nasty history -- that has been declared off limits by their parentsThe situation appears hopeless.Though Dwight and his friends fear they won't be able to attend the actual performance of the Traveling Vampire Show, they do have the entire day to themselves. Why not hike out to Janks Field and take a look around? With any luck, they might be able to watch the crew make preparations for tonight's performance. If they're really lucky, maybe they'll get a peek at Valeria, the gorgeous vampire.And so the three friends set off on foot for Janks Field...Dwight is a solid, honest kid, long on common sense and loyalty to his friends. He always tries to do what's right.Rusty is a husky guy who relishes trouble.Slim, their long-time pal, is the brains of the outfit, a voracious reader of novels, an aspiring writer, and a girl. Also, she is sometimes too brave for her own good.The Traveling Vampire Show is the tale, told in Dwight's own words, of what happened to him, Rusty and Slim on that hot summer day they hiked to Janks Field. It's the story of their friendship and love, their temptations, their betrayals, and their courage as they went where they shouldn't go, did what they shouldn't do...and ran into big trouble.
Experimental Film
Gemma Files - 2015
A. Macalla Whitcomb. By deciding to investigate how Mrs. Whitcomb's obsessions might have led to her mysterious disappearance, Lois unwittingly invites the forces which literally haunt Mrs. Whitcomb's films into her life, eventually putting her son, her husband and herself in danger. Experimental Film mixes painful character detail with a creeping aura of dread to produce a fictionalized "memoir" designed to play on its readers' narrative expectations and pack an existentialist punch.
The Sentinel
Jeffrey Konvitz - 1974
The old brownstone apartment she simply had to have. The grotesque blind priest who watched down on her day and night from an upper-story window. The pair of perverted creatures who wanted her to join their circle. The mad little old man who gave her tea and sympathy. The cool, calculating, supremely rational lover who first mocked her fears.And the secret you will never be able to forget, even if you try...
Naomi's Room
Jonathan Aycliffe - 1991
Brimming with excitement, Charles sets off with his daughter Naomi on a Christmas Eve shopping trip to London. But, by the end of the day, all Charles and his wife have left are cups of tea and police sympathy. For Naomi, their beautiful, angelic only child, has disappeared. Days later her murdered body is discovered.But is she dead?In a howling, bumping story of past and present day hell, Jonathan Aycliffe's haunting psychological masterpiece is guaranteed to make you sink to untold depths of teeth-shaking terror.
The Ritual
Adam Nevill - 2011
No longer young men, they have little left in common and tensions rise as they struggle to connect. Frustrated and tired they take a shortcut that turns their hike into a nightmare that could cost them their lives.Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, they stumble across an isolated old house. Inside, they find the macabre remains of old rites and pagan sacrifices; ancient artefacts and unidentifiable bones. A place of dark ritual and home to a bestial presence that is still present in the ancient forest, and now they’re the prey.As the four friends struggle toward salvation they discover that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees...
The Pilo Family Circus
Will Elliott - 2006
You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?"Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place—peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous—where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself. When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead!
Hell House
Richard Matheson - 1971
Two previous expeditions to investigate its secrets met with disaster, the participants destroyed by murder, suicide or insanity. Now a new investigation has been mounted - four strangers, each with his or her own reason for daring the unknown torments and temptations of the mansion...
Harbor
John Ajvide Lindqvist - 2008
One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While the couple explore the lighthouse, Maja disappears -- either into thin air or under thin ice -- leaving not even a footprint in the snow. Two years later, alone and more or less permanently drunk, Anders returns to the island to regroup. He slowly realises that people are not telling him all they know; even his own mother, it seems, is keeping secrets. What is happening in Domaro, and what power does the sea have over the town's inhabitants?
Snowblind
Christopher Golden - 2014
Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children's windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.Now, as a new storm approaches twelve years later, the folks of Coventry are haunted by the memories of that dreadful blizzard and those who were lost in the snow. Photographer Jake Schapiro mourns his little brother, Isaac, even as-tonight-another little boy is missing. Mechanic and part-time thief Doug Manning's life has been forever scarred by the mysterious death of his wife, Cherie, and now he’s starting over with another woman and more ambitious crimes. Police detective Joe Keenan has never been the same since that night, when he failed to save the life of a young boy . . . and the boy’s father vanished in the storm only feet away. And all the way on the other side of the country, Miri Ristani receives a phone call . . . from a man who died twelve years ago.As old ghosts trickle back, this new storm will prove to be even more terrifying than the last.
Voracious
Wrath James White - 2013
His ethics, however, leave a bit to be desired. When the Aphrodite Aesthetic Reconstruction Clinic hires him to create a genetic weight-loss treatment, Doctor Adams uses a synthetic retro virus to transport pygmy shrew DNA into clients willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be able to eat whatever they want without gaining a pound. Pygmy Shrews have metabolisms so fast they don’t store fat cells and have to eat every two hours, twice their body-weight in food every day, or they will die. When they are hungry, they will attack and consume prey more than twice their size. They have fangs tipped with a red iron ore, saliva that contains a paralyzing neurotoxin, are the size of a quarter, and are considered to be some of the most vicious animals on earth. When Doctor Adams’s clients begin burning more calories than they can possibly consume, he is afraid he has made one terrible mistake.
Stinger
Robert R. McCammon - 1988
Inferno is a town in trouble, driven to the brink by racial tension, gang violence, and a collapsing economy. But things can always get worse, and they do so with astonishing speed when an unidentified spacecraft crash lands in the desert outside of town, followed by a second craft bearing the alien being who will soon be known as Stinger. Stinger is a kind of interstellar hunter on a mission he intends to complete, whatever the cost. He brings with him an endless array of technological marvels and an infinite capacity for destruction that threaten the existence of Inferno, its inhabitants, and the larger world beyond"--Dust jacket flap.
Lost Boy Lost Girl
Peter Straub - 2003
A week later, her son -- fifteen-year-old Mark -- vanishes. The boy's uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before Nancy's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from basement to attic with the echoes of a long hidden true-life horror story, and Tim comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.