Archives de catégorie : Horror

SUCH LOVELY SKIN de Tatiana Schlote-Bonne

For fans of The Ring, this debut is a techno-horror about a streamer finding supernatural evil in her video game.

SUCH LOVELY SKIN
by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Page Street YA/St. Martin’s Press, September 2024

After spending the summer wracked with guilt about causing the accident that killed her little sister, ambitious gamer and chronic liar Viv returns to Twitch streaming. She never told her parents the truth about the accident, but she hopes that maybe making it big in streaming and giving the money to them is penance enough for her mistakes. The weekend before school starts, Viv finds the perfect horror game to make her Twitch comeback, and during an offline practice run, an NPC asks Viv for a secret. She decides to tell them the truth about her sister’s death since a game could never share her secret—in doing so, she accidentally welcomes a demonic mimic into her life. No one believes Viv when she tells them about her evil doppelganger. Viv has lied to get her best friend’s sympathy and has spread rumors for attention, so why should anyone trust her now? The only person who believes her is Ash, a cute social outcast whom Viv once bullied. In trying to clear her name and kill the mimic, Viv discovers that her lies have hurt people who never deserved it, herself included.

“Evil is lurking behind every corner in this impeccably paced and immersive supernatural horror debut. Surveillance, guilt and a need to belong collide with blood-curling demonic terror. Utterly compelling!”—Katya de Becerrra, author of When Ghosts Call Us Home

“Perfectly creepy and utterly transfixing, I devoured SUCH LOVELY SKIN in a single sitting. Schlote-Bonne has masterfully crafted a story of a flawed and sympathetic teen enduring a demon’s torments while battling her inner ones, delivering spine-tingling tension, terrifying jump scares, and heart-wrenching moments alike. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.”—Diana Urban, award-winning author of Under the Surface

“SUCH LOVELY SKIN is a gripping and layered coming-of-age story about guilt—and features one of the scariest demons I’ve read in YA. Fans of J-horror and video games will absolutely devour this one. Visceral, twisty, and terrifyingly real. This book sinks its claws into you and doesn’t let go.”—Catherine Yu, author of Direwood and Helga

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is a writer, weightlifter, and gamer. She has an MFA in creative writing from The Nonfiction Writing Program at University of Iowa.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS de Grady Hendrix

In the vein of Rosemary’s Baby, Grady Hendrix’s next highly-anticipated horror novel takes place in the 1970s at a home for unwed mothers, exploring motherhood and women’s autonomy.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS
by Grady Hendrix
Ace, TBD
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

Set in 1970, at a home for unwed mothers in Florida, this book follows five pregnant teenage girls as they wait out the last three months of their pregnancy in seclusion, hoping to have their babies, surrender them for adoption, and return to their regular lives. They must be hidden away from the public, their communications are monitored, and they’re not even allowed to share their real names with each other.

Each girl has a betrayal in her recent past that brought her here, whether it’s being ditched by her married lover, parents breaking up her planned marriage to a boyfriend they think is inappropriate, or rape. Then there’s Holly, barely 13 years old and enormously pregnant, who doesn’t speak at all. In the pressure cooker of the home, the girls begin to believe that the house is haunted, and they soon realize that most of the supernatural activity revolves around Holly. One by one they reach their due dates and come back from the hospital traumatized, prompting the remaining girls to vow that they won’t give up their babies, which sets them against the women who run the home and who are determined to get them to surrender their babies.

As the war between the girls and their social workers intensifies, it becomes very clear that the house isn’t haunted, Holly is. The father of her baby may not be human, and soon the house’s worst nightmare is going to come true as he shows up to cause a kind of trouble few people have seen and survived.

Grady Hendrix is the author of the novels Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which is like Beaches meets The Exorcist, only it’s set in the Eighties. He’s also the author of We Sold Our Souls, and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

He’s also the jerk behind the Stoker award-winning Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the 70’s and 80’s horror paperback boom, which contains more information about Nazi leprechauns, killer babies, and evil cats than you probably need.

DREAD NATION SERIES de Justina Ireland

At once provocative, terrifying, and darkly subversive, DREAD NATION is Justina Ireland’s stunning vision of an America both foreign and familiar—a country on the brink, at the explosive crossroads where race, humanity, and survival meet.

DREAD NATION SERIES
by Justina Ireland
Balzer + Bray, 2018 – 2020
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

Book 1: DREAD NATION (April 2018)

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.

In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.

But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies.

And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

Book 2: DEATHLESS DIVIDE (February 2020)

After the fall of Summerland, Jane McKeene hoped her life would get simpler: Get out of town, stay alive, and head west to California to find her mother.

But nothing is easy when you’re a girl trained in putting down the restless dead, and a devastating loss on the road to a protected village called Nicodemus has Jane questioning everything she thought she knew about surviving in 1880s America.

What’s more, this safe haven is not what it appears—as Jane discovers when she sees familiar faces from Summerland amid this new society. Caught between mysteries and lies, the undead, and her own inner demons, Jane soon finds herself on a dark path of blood and violence that threatens to consume her.

But she won’t be in it alone.

Katherine Deveraux never expected to be allied with Jane McKeene. But after the hell she has endured, she knows friends are hard to come by—and that Jane needs her too, whether Jane wants to admit it or not.

Watching Jane’s back, however, is more than she bargained for, and when they both reach a breaking point, it’s up to Katherine to keep hope alive—even as she begins to fear that there is no happily-ever-after for girls like her.

Justina Ireland is the New York Times bestselling author of DREAD NATION and its sequel, DEATHLESS DIVIDE, as well as Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows. She is also one of the creators of the Star Wars High Republic series and is the author of the Star Wars adventures A Test of Courage, Out of the Shadows, and Mission to Disaster. She lives with her family in Maryland, where she enjoys dark chocolate and dark humor and is not too proud to admit that she’s still afraid of the dark.

DEAD MEAT de Maya Fowler

When meat’s the only thing left to eat.

DEAD MEAT
by Maya Fowler
TBD
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Fifteen year old Natalie has had a horror of blood and meat since the day her bother, Flynn now 17, raped her at age 9. Yet sheand her family (mother, Viv, former trophy wife, now hapless housewife; father, Ray, former accountant, now handyman; andgrandmother, Eleanor) are trapped on an enormous factory farm in a world where climate change has left plant cropsdevastatingly rare, and the Corporation ensures meat is virtually all there is to eat. With grains grown exclusively for raisingcattle, pigs and chicken for slaughter, and greens a black-market luxury, Natalie is emaciated, bitter and angry. She is desperateto escape, but electric fences and the draconian punishments of the Corporation stand in her way.

In contrast to his sister, Flynn is passive, complacent to the horrors of the farm, and hobbled by guilt and shame over the abuse.With a pet rat his only friend, he goes about the daily grind, wishing for a way to make amends to Natalie, who bristles at hisevery advance.

One night Flynn helps Natalie steal apples from the farmer’s private orchard; the farmer’s devious, arrogant 11-year-old son,Brett, sees them and threatens to tell, which would get them killed. In a scuffle on a wall overlooking the free-range pig pen,Natalie pushes Brett to his death, where he is eaten alive by the pigs. Afterwards, the entire farm is in fear, wondering who mightbe blamed and put to death.

Quietly nightmarish and utterly gripping, the psychological horror DEAD MEAT has all the makings of a cult classic. It may besome time before you’re able to eat a bacon sandwich again.

Maya Fowler is a South African novelist, editor and translator, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of the novels Patagonia, The Elephant in the Room and Tebatso Gaan See Toe. Her current focus is literary and general fiction, although she’s produced award-winning workfor young adults and children.

CUCKOO de Gretchen Felker-Martin

IT meets But I’m a Cheerleader and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in a brand new horror novel from the acclaimed author of Manhunt.

CUCKOO
by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Tor Nightfire, June 2024

In 1993, five young queer kids, whose parents want them “fixed,” find themselves thrown together at a secretive “tough love” camp deep in the Utah desert. Tormented and worked to the point of collapse by hardline religious zealots intent on straightening them out, they slowly become aware that something in the mountains north of the camp is speaking to them in their dreams and that the children who return home to their families aren’t the ones they sent away.

Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, is a Massachusetts-based horror author and film critic. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon, Nylon Magazine, The Outline, and more.