Archives de catégorie : Horror

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS de Grady Hendrix

In the vein of Rosemary’s Baby, Grady Hendrix’s 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
Berkley, January 2025
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

“Hendrix’s genius as a horror writer is his ability to develop complex, human-scale emotional arcs. He gilds these dramas with a glorious, gory layer of monsters and magic, but in his work, the uncanny exists primarily to symbolize real-world issues. His characters are complex, particularly the women, and don’t fall into the easy tropes that often plague horror stories…never before has one of his books so aptly met the moment…at turns frightening, anxiety-producing, infuriating, beautiful and sad.” – The New York Times

“Another stellar novel from Hendrix, a perfectly constructed story that has a strong emotional core, compelling plot, unforgettable characters, and 360 degrees of terror.” – Booklist (starred review)

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which was adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.

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.

TINY THREADS de Lilliam Rivera

Black Swan meets The Devil Wears Prada in this creepy horror about fashion, about sexuality as a commodity, and the power wielded by men trying to harness it.

TINY THREADS
by Lilliam Rivera
Del Rey, March 2023
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

After the death of her grandmother, Samara Martín leaves her overbearing Cuban family behind in New Jersey for a job at a once-edgy fashion brand in Vernon, California. Touted as up-and-coming, Vernon turns out to be eerily desolate, made worse by the foul-smelling slaughterhouse near the office.
Trying to navigate office politics by appeasing her volatile boss, Samara throws all her focus into an upcoming runway show. But there are other forces at play; she finds names stitched into garments in the archive that disappear the next day, she starts having visions of a young girl that grow increasingly disturbing—and there’s Brandon Hernandez Murphy, a charming tech investor keen on reinventing Vernon who Samara finds herself drawn to.
Samara starts to hide her increasing instability by drinking more, casting aside her family’s warnings, but when the runway show is a success, the guardrails come off entirely. The afterparty is extreme in all senses: beauty, drugs, and sex—and Samara succumbs to every vice. But her visions aren’t through with her yet. They lead her to a disturbing discovery and a violent confrontation with consequences for both Samara’s world, and the world of the supernatural.

Lilliam Rivera draws upon her experiences as a founding editor of Latina magazine to examine the dark side of glamour and deliver a haunting story. She is also an award-winning writer and author of numerous young adult novels, including The Education of Margot Sanchez, We Light Up the Sky, Never Look Back, and Dealing In Dreams. She is also author of the middle grade Goldie Vance books. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.