Book picks similar to
Sound of Midnight by Charles L. Grant


horror
fiction
paperbacks-from-hell
danse-macabre

Abandon


Blake Crouch - 2009
    Recently, a similar party had also attempted to explore the town and was never heard from again. Now the area is believed to be haunted. This crew is about to discover, twenty miles from civilization with a blizzard bearing down, that they are not alone, and the past is very much alive.Revised edition: This edition of Abandon includes editorial revisions.

Heart-Shaped Box


Joe Hill - 2007
    -- so when his assistant tells him about a ghost for sale on an online auction site, he immediately puts in a bid and purchases it. The black, heart-shaped box that Coyne receives in the mail not only contains the suit of a dead man but also his vengeance-obsessed spirit. The ghost, it turns out, is the stepfather of a young groupie who committed suicide after the 54-year-old Coyne callously used her up and threw her away. Now, determined to kill Coyne and anyone who aids him, the merciless ghost of Craddock McDermott begins his assault on the rocker's sanity.

Prodigal


Melanie Tem - 1991
    The voice could only belong to one person, her brother Ethan, but his body, broken by drugs, lies cold in the morgue. An invisible hand has opened the door for Lucy and her sisters and though Lucy questions her parents they have receded into their private existence where nothing can touch them. Lucy is quickly losing touch with her reality of white fences and pristine lawns. She is drawn beyond that door into the dark abyss where her brother waits and evil is hiding in the shadows. Each day the voice grows stronger, demanding that she journey far away to the place that stole her brother's mind and body. As the secret unfolds, the Prodigal emerges.

Dead White


Alan Ryan - 1983
    The people of Deacons Kill have seen terrible storms before, and they settle down uneasily to wait it out. But this one is different. As the drifts creep higher, a train appears out of the storm, arriving on rusty abandoned tracks–an antique circus train bringing clowns...and shadows...and death

Castaways


Brian Keene - 2009
    Each one hoped to be the last to leave. Now they're just hoping to stay alive. It seems the island isn't deserted after all. Contestants and crew members are disappearing, but they aren't being eliminated by the game. They're being taken by the monstrous half-human creatures that live in the jungle. The men will be slaughtered. The women will be kept alive as captives. Night is falling, the creatures are coming, and rescue is so far away. . .

The Strangers


Mort Castle - 1984
    He’s everybody’s buddy, has a great sense of humor, works hard at his typical boring job to provide for the wife and kids. And he is a Stranger. Michael seethes with furious impatience for the coming of the Time of the Strangers, when he and millions like him will be able at last to reveal their true selves to a horrified, helpless world.

Falling Angel


William Hjortsberg - 1978
    For Harry Angel, a routine missing-persons case soon turns into a fiendish nightmare of voodoo and black magic, of dizzying peril and violent death. Many people feel that Falling Angel is the greatest American supernatural horror novel of the 20th century.With a new foreword by Ridley Scott, an introduction by the late James Crumley, and a new afterword by the author and a bonus short story, plus a letter from Stephen King, the first time that the letter has ever been published in its complete form.The hardcover edition is limited to just 300 copies and is signed by William Hjortsberg. Bound in cloth with a dustjacket with the original Stanislaw Zagorski wraparound dustjacket printed against a black background with spot varnish.

The Hollow Ones


Guillermo del Toro - 2020
    A rookie FBI agent in dangerous, uncharted territory. An extraordinary hero for the ages.Odessa Hardwicke's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, Walt Leppo, a decorated FBI agent who turns suddenly, inexplicably violent while apprehending a rampaging murderer. The shooting, justified by self-defense, shakes the young FBI agent to her core. Devastated, Odessa is placed on desk leave pending a full investigation. But what most troubles Odessa isn't the tragedy itself-it's the shadowy presence she thought she saw fleeing the deceased agent's body after his death. Questioning her future with the FBI and her sanity, Hardwicke accepts a low-level assignment to clear out the belongings of a retired agent in the New York office. What she finds there will put her on the trail of a mysterious figure named John Silence, a man of enormous means who claims to have been alive for centuries, and who is either an unhinged lunatic, or humanity's best and only defense against unspeakable evil.

Little Heaven


Nick Cutter - 2017
    Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous. Stirrings in the woods and over the treetops—the brooding shape of a monolith known as the Black Rock casts its terrible pall. Paranoia and distrust grips the settlement. The escape routes are gradually cut off as events spiral towards madness. Hell—or the closest thing to it—invades Little Heaven. The remaining occupants are forced to take a stand and fight back, but whatever has cast its dark eye on Little Heaven is now marshaling its powers...and it wants them all.

By Bizarre Hands


Joe R. Lansdale - 1989
    Lansdale is your man. In his first collection of short stories, the gruseome and outrageous cult classic "The Drive-In" pilots a wildly thrilling, violent and vivid roller coaster ride to Hell and beyond...plumbing the eerie depths of his remarkable imagination to create horrors unique and unsettling - dark products of twisted genius that weave the grisly fabric of nightmares. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! (back cover copy)CONTENTSFish NightThe PitDuck HuntBy Bizarre HandsThe Steel ValentineI Tell You It's LoveLetters From The SOuth, Two Moons South Of NacogdochesBoys Will Be BoysThe Fat Man And The ElephantHell Through A WindshieldDown By The Sea Near The Great Big RockTrains Not TakenTight Little Stitches In A Dead Man's BackThe Windstorm PassesNight They Missed The Horror ShowOn The Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folk

Hex


Thomas Olde Heuvelt - 2013
    Whoever settles, never leaves. Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear. The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past. This chilling novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in mainstream horror and dark fantasy.

The Vines


Christopher Rice - 2014
    But something sinister lurks beneath the soil of the old estate.After heiress and current owner Caitlin Chaisson is witness to her husband’s stunning betrayal at her birthday party, she tries to take her own life in the mansion’s cherished gazebo. Instead, the blood she spills awakens dark forces in the ground below. Chaos ensues and by morning her husband has vanished without a trace and his mistress has gone mad.Nova, daughter to Spring House’s groundskeeper, has always suspected that something malevolent haunts the old place, and in the aftermath of the birthday party she enlists Caitlin’s estranged best friend, Blake, to help her get to the bottom of it. The pair soon realizes that the vengeance enacted by this sinister and otherworldly force comes at a terrible price.

Chalk


Paul Cornell - 2017
    But one day they force him into the woods, and the bullying escalates into something more; something unforgivable; something unthinkable.Broken, both physically and emotionally, something dies in Waggoner, and something else is born in its place.In the hills of the West Country a chalk horse stands vigil over a site of ancient power, and there Waggoner finds in himself a reflection of rage and vengeance, a power and persona to topple those who would bring him low.Paul Cornell plumbs the depths of magic and despair in this brutal exploration of bullying in Margaret Thatcher's England.

Bird Box


Josh Malerman - 2014
    One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.

The Chill


Scott Carson - 2020
    Early in the 20th century, the town was destroyed for the greater good: bringing water to the millions living downstate. Or at least that’s what the politicians from Manhattan insisted at the time. The local families, settled there since America’s founding, were forced from their land, but they didn’t move far, and some didn’t move at all…Now, a century later, the repercussions of human arrogance are finally making themselves known. An inspector assigned to oversee the dam, dangerously neglected for decades, witnesses something inexplicable. It turns out that more than the village was left behind in the waters of the Chill when it was abandoned. The townspeople didn’t evacuate without a fight. A dark prophecy remained, too, and the time has come for it to be fulfilled. Those who remember must ask themselves: who will be next? For sacrifices must be made. And as the dark waters begin to inexorably rise, the demand for a fresh sacrifice emerges from the deep...