I can't believe that we are already in the month of December. I'm not ready for the cold and the dark, but I'm always ready for a read to keep me up all night under the blankets. December is an odd month for horror releases but that doesn't mean there aren't still some great stories being released. See if there's anything on the list you'd like to ask Santa for!
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The Shivering Ground & Other Stories by Sara Barkat
Publication date: December 1st, 2021
The Shivering Ground blends future and past, earth and otherworldliness, in a magnetic collection that shimmers with art, philosophy, dance, film, and music at its heart.
A haunting medieval song in the mouth of a guard, an 1800s greatcoat on the shoulders of a playwright experiencing a quantum love affair, alien worlds both elsewhere and in the ruined water at our feet: these stories startle us with the richness and emptiness of what we absolutely know and simultaneously cannot pin into place.
In the tender emotions, hidden ecological or relational choices, and the sheer weight of a compelling voice, readers “hear” each story, endlessly together and apart.
A haunting medieval song in the mouth of a guard, an 1800s greatcoat on the shoulders of a playwright experiencing a quantum love affair, alien worlds both elsewhere and in the ruined water at our feet: these stories startle us with the richness and emptiness of what we absolutely know and simultaneously cannot pin into place.
In the tender emotions, hidden ecological or relational choices, and the sheer weight of a compelling voice, readers “hear” each story, endlessly together and apart.
Read now
Bedding the Lamia: Tropical Horrors by David Kuraria
Publication date: December 3rd, 2021
David Kuraria is your guide as you push through drenched tropical foliage in the torrential downpour. In these tales we see a Melanesian farmer seeking land rights from a dominant tribe. Bearing gifts of persuasion, the farmer finds that the tribes gods might first need appeasing. An artist experimenting with narcotics and obscure occult methods inadvertently solicits an unwelcome muse. A group of holidaymakers travel up a Northern Australian River on a converted war barge. Here brutal colonial past reaches out to ensnare them on a journey into horror.
Waif by Samantha Kolesnik
Publication date: December 7th, 2021
Angela has everything she thought she ever wanted—a successful husband, a lavish house, and a bottomless fortune.But the sight of a strange man in a grocery store one night reawakens her dormant sexuality and soon Angela embarks on a dangerous descent into the world of underground pornography and back-alley plastic surgery.
As the stakes get higher, long-buried memories resurface and Angela finds herself enamored with Reena, a fetish film performer. With some help from a queer gang called The Waifs, Angela is forced to make the decision between her unhappy upper-class life and the treacherous world of underground film.
A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw
Publication date: December 7th, 2021
Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.
Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.
Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.
Gwen, in Green by Hugh Zachary
Publication date: December 21st, 2021
Links: Amazon | Goodreads
To the real estate man, Gwen and George seemed like any normal young couple. And, for that matter, they were… until they bought their dream island and began to live on it.For in the cool, clear pool near the house—the one where there had been a tragic drowning so many years before—lay the terrifying secret that had been there for centuries.
Suddenly Gwen found herself with strange new powers—sexual power, telepathic power… even the power to kill. She heard voices in her mind and she knew what she had to do.
George no longer knew the woman he called his wife, because she was really somebody else...
Square3 by Mira Grant
