Published March 29th 2022 by Flame Tree Press

Investigator Oscar Basaran travels to Kidney Island off the coast of Maine to document the negative effects of shadow flicker from wind turbines on residents living near the windmills, but is unprepared for what he encounters from the islanders.

Oscar’s research shows that sleep deprivation, light deficiency and ringing headaches brought on by the noise and constant strobe-like effect of the sun filtered through the spinning blades of the turbines brings on hallucinatory episodes for the closest neighbors to the machines.

Melody Larson’s elderly father nearly chokes to death after stuffing dandelion heads into his mouth. The Granberrys' pregnant cow repeatedly runs headlong into a fence post. Tatum Gallagher mourns her young son who vanished more than a year ago, presumed swept out to sea by a wave while fishing on the rocky shore, but several people claim to see him appear only in the glimmer of the shadow flicker.

Aerosource, the energy corporation that owns the turbines, hired Oscar to investigate the neighbors’ claims, but the insurance agent shows no allegiance to the conglomerate, especially after learning a previous employee sent to the island a year before has disappeared without a trace.

When Oscar meets former island school science teacher Norris Squires, fired for teaching his students about the harmful effects of shadow flicker, he learns a theory regarding Aerosource that sounds too preposterous to believe.

While it seems the shadow flicker effect has driven some of the island’s animals crazy, is it possible it’s caused an even worse mental breakdown among the human inhabitants? Or is something more nefarious at work on the island?

As Oscar’s investigation deepens, he discovers the turbines create an unexpected phenomena kept secret by a select group of people on Kidney Island who have made a scientific breakthrough and attempt to harness its dark power.

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If you aren't familiar with shadow flicker, imagine a fan blade spinning with a bright light behind it. Now imagine that fan is up to 500 feet tall and it's between the windows of your house and the evening sun. That constant whir and light-dark-light pattern would be enough to drive anyone insane. 

Fictionally based on the true-life phenomenon of shadow flicker, the story follows investigator Oscar as he travels to Kidney Island on behalf of the Aerospace company to see if there really are ill effects on the residents from the turbines. After highly enjoying the author's winter-based novel, Snowball, I was thrilled to pick up Shadow Flicker. 

Horror frequently targets the small town and Kidney Island is no different. There are a ton of strange happenings on the island as both people and animals act erratically. At first, the symptoms of the shadow flicker fall into the expected territory—inability to sleep due to the hum, headaches from the flashing light, animals disturbed by the turbines. Then the true oddness is discovered. A child thought to have drowned in the water is seen again, but only in the flicker. Time actually stops for one of the island's residents. Oscar is treated like the outsider he is and slowly sinks into the oddness and delirium affecting the area and its inhabitants. 

As with Snowball, this takes about another bizarre turn with its slow burn. More and more of the characters' backgrounds start to creep to the surface. Where you think the novel will lead, is not where it takes you. I didn't dislike the ending but it definitely took it in a direction that I was not expecting. 

Ready to add a few more to your ever-growing TBR? 

Check out just a few of the summertime scares headed your way this month. 

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The Devil Takes You Home  by Gabino Iglesias

Expected publication: August 2, 2022 by Mulholland Books

From Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Locus award-nominated author, Gabino Iglesias, comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what’s left of his family, even if it means a descent into violence--both supernatural and of our own terrifying world.

Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.

The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

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The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel 

Expected publication: August 2, 2022 by Tin House Books

The islanders have only three rules: don’t stick your nose where it’s not wanted, don’t mention the war, and never let your guard down during October. 

Leigh Welles has not set foot in on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from a disappointing life on the Scottish mainland by her father’s unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past—her mother’s abandonment, her brother’s icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II—and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, a RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war.  

But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, bird-like creatures of Celtic legend—whispered to carry the souls of the dead—have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war’s wake, there are more wandering souls and more slaugh. When a local boy disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island’s dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own. 

Rich with historical detail and a skillful speculative edge, Emma Seckel’s propulsive and pulse-pounding debut The Wild Hunt unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption.

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The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

Expected publication: August 2, 2022 by Tor Books

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairytales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

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Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted by R.J. Joseph

Expected publication: August 7th 2022 by The Seventh Terrace

 

The Black women in these tales are women we all know. The mothers, wives, business owners, creatives, and more, that we see in everyday life. They perform the impossible and hold all ends together.

Sometimes, they’re an open book, their stories written in the beloved lines of their faces and the varied bodies they wear with pride or weariness.

Other times, their secrets squirm beneath the surface, aching for release and discovery while beckoning others to lean in. They whisper the horror of their predicaments, closer to home than you realize.

These Black women are more than we know. They’re also victims, monsters…and often, a little of both. 

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Demon Dagger by Russell James 

Expected publication: August 16th 2022 by Flame Tree Press

A Demon Hunter with a gift that becomes a curse. A Demon that hunts the hunter. A thrilling tale of darkness and vengeance for fans of the TV series 'Supernatural'.

Drew Price has a gift, or perhaps a curse.

When a demon possesses a person, Drew can see the horrific-looking demon that dwells within. This ability has made him a demon hunter, armed with the one weapon that can send these fiends back to Hell; the demon dagger.

A demon named Nicobar sets its sights on punishing this hunter. It starts by taking the soul of Drew’s son, condemning the boy to life as a psychopath.

This fast-paced, chilling novel follows Drew’s attempt to save his son’s soul and then use the blade to end Nicobar’s time on Earth.

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Travelers by Brett Riley

Expected publication: August 16, 2022 by Katherine Tegen Books

Now high school sophomores, the self-styled “Freaks” are back in class in quiet Quapaw City, Arkansas. They grapple with the ordinary challenges of everyday teen life: cliques, cars, and crushes. While everything appears normal on the surface, looks have rarely been more deceiving. A secret government task force—fully aware of the unusual powers the Freaks have acquired—is determined to capture them. Even as the mysterious Baltar Sterne shares ancient wisdom and offers hope, a new menace silently emerges in the woods outside of town. Clever, inexorable, and far more lethal than the Freaks’ first superhuman foe, this traveler from another world possesses powers that can only be described as godlike. The Freaks and their town will be tested in horrific ways they are powerless to predict or even imagine.

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This Appearing House by Ally Malinenko

Expected publication: August 16, 2022 by Katherine Tegen Books

From the author of Ghost Girl comes another standalone spooky middle grade for fans of Nightbooks and Ghost Squad, about a terrifying house and the girl haunted by her experience with cancer, grief, and healing. Are you brave enough to step inside?

For as long as anyone could remember there wasn't a house at the dead end of Juniper Drive . . . until one day there was.

When Jac first sees the House, she's counting down to the five-year anniversary of her cancer diagnosis, when she hopefully will be declared NED, or "no evidence of disease." But with a house appearing, and her hands shaking, and a fall off her bike, Jac is starting to wonder if these are symptoms--or if something stranger is happening.

Two classmates dare Jac and her friend Hazel to enter the House. Walking through the front door is the way in. It's definitely not the way out. There's something off about the House; Jac can feel it. The same way she knows it's no coincidence that the House appeared for her five-year marker. It wants something from her. And she won't be able to get out until she figures out what.

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Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives by Adam Cesare 

Expected publication: August 23rd 2022 by HarperTeen

 

After barely making it out of the Kettle Springs cornfields alive, Quinn’s first year of college back in Philadelphia should be safe and comparatively easy. All Quinn wants is to forget what happened and be normal again. But instead, Quinn finds that her past won’t leave her alone when she becomes the focus of a host of online conspiracy theories that claim to prove that the Kettle Springs Massacre never happened. It’s a deranged but relentless fantasy, and there’s nothing Quinn can do to get people to hear the truth — not even on her own campus or in her own dorm room.

So when a murderous clown attacks Quinn at a frat party while another goes after her father in Kettle Springs at the same time, Quinn realizes that that the facts alone are never going to save her. Her only option is to go back home, back into the cornfields, back to where the nightmare began, to set the record straight the only way she knows how. Because when the truth gets lost in the lies, that’s when real people start to die.

It’s an all-new horror classic about what happens when the truth is the last thing we want to believe, the sequel to the 2020 Bram Stoker Award winner. 

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Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste 

Expected publication: August 23, 2022 by Gallery / Saga Press

For fans of Mexican Gothic, from three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature--from Lucy Westenra, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre--as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967.

Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

Combining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world. 

 

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Ashthorne by April Yates 

Expected publication: August 23rd 2022 by Ghost Orchid Press 

In the aftermath of WWI, Adelaide Frost is on the run from a family who do not understand her. Hoping to do some good, she signs up to become a nurse at Ashthorne, a manor house newly designated as a convalescence home for injured soldiers. She quickly falls in love with the owner’s daughter, Evelyn, who hides a warm heart beneath a chilly exterior. But Evelyn has her suspicions about what’s really happening at the hospital, and as Adelaide helps her investigate, it soon becomes apparent that there are more inhabitants residing at Ashthorne than first thought.

A romantic Gothic treat perfect for fans of Sarah Waters and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Ashthorne is the debut novella by Derbyshire author April Yates, who was inspired to tell this story by the Ice Age art carved into the walls of local caves.

With riveting psychological complexity, The Ruins captures the glittering allure of the Mediterranean―and the dark shadows that wait beneath the surface.  

 

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Darling by Mercedes M. Yardley 

Expected publication: August 23rd 2022 by Black Spot Books

 

Darling has its demons.

Cherry LaRouche escaped the claws of Darling, Louisiana at sixteen. When she is forced to return after her mother’s death, Cherry and her children move back into her childhood home where the walls whisper and something sinister skitters across the roof at night.

While Cherry tries to settle back into a town where evil spreads like infection, the bodies of several murdered children turn up. When Cherry’s own daughter goes missing, she’s forced to confront the true monsters of Darling.

But her mother, suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's, is convinced the ghost stories are real. Not only is there something in the water, but it's watching them. Waiting for them. Reaching out to Meredith's daughter the way it has to every woman in their line for generations-and if Meredith isn't careful, all three women, bound by blood and heartbreak, will be lost one by one to the ocean's mournful call.

Part modern gothic, part ghost story, They Drown Our Daughters explores the depths of motherhood, identity, and the lengths a woman will go to hold on to both. 

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