Ah, New Year's Day. The time to reminisce on the days past and look forward to a brighter tomorrow. The day that everyone promises thems...

This Month in Horror || January 2023


Ah, New Year's Day.
The time to reminisce on the days past and look forward to a brighter tomorrow. The day that everyone promises themselves they'll do better, be happier, do MORE, and by the end of January that resolution is gathering dust in the closet with our rattling skeletons and those jeans from two sizes ago that we are holding onto "just in case".


As Billy Crystal said “New Year’s Day — now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."
For this reason alone, I don't make New Year's resolutions. I know myself far too well. I'm a sprinter, not a marathoner. But like a good little optimist, I reloaded my Goodreads challenge with another 100 books for 2023. At least I know that reading is something I will stick with, unlike that promise to give up caffeine and sugar. (Sure, like that would happen.)


What about you? Did you make a resolution for 2023? If like mine, it's to read more books, I got you, fam. Get ready to pad your TBR, here are just a few of January's releases!


If you are looking for what's still to come, you can see the whole list for 2023 here.

If you have a book releasing this year and want to get on the list, click here and I'll get you added!

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AHH! That's What I Call Horror: An Anthology of '90s Horror

ed. Chelsea Pumpkins
 

Expected publication: January 1, 2023 by PIT

With fourteen horror stories set during the decade of flannel shirts and neon dolphin Trapper Keepers, Ahh! That’s What I Call Horror features a PHAT (pretty horrific and terrifying) collection of totally rad horror and weird fiction authors exploring the darker side of what many consider a time of relative peace and prosperity. With Communism falling and Clear Channel rising, the horror of the 1990s requires peeling back layers of safe, sanitized media to reveal the nightmares waiting beneath. When it comes to ‘90s horror, this is one anthology guaranteed to be all that and a bag of haunted chips.

You won’t need a dial-up connection to reach the beyond in this time-warp to the ‘90s. With undead grunge rock icons, menacing action figures, family sitcoms gone very wrong, and more: these terror tales will return you to the end of the old millennium.

How will you get back?
Like, who says you will?




The Nightmare Man by J.H. Markert

Expected Publication: January 10, 2023 by Crooked Lane Books

T. Kingfisher meets Cassandra Khaw in a chilling horror novel that illustrates the fine line between humanity and monstrosity.

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life.

Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills, along with his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, is determined to find the link to the book—and the killer—before the story reaches its chilling climax.

As the series of “Scarecrow crimes” continues to mirror the book, Ben quickly becomes the prime suspect. He can’t remember much from the night he finished writing the novel, but he knows he wrote it in The Atrium, his grandfather’s forbidden room full of numbered books. Thousands of books. Books without words.

As Ben digs deep into Blackwood’s history he learns he may have triggered a release of something trapped long ago—and it won’t stop with the horrors buried within the pages of his book.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Expected publication: January 10, 2023 by Doubleday Books

In this gripping debut tinged with supernatural horror, a young Cree woman's dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too--a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina--Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams--and make them more dangerous.


What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?
.



Briardark by S.A. Harian

Expected publication: January 16, 2023 by Compass and Fern

Survival and cosmic horror collide in this new series, perfect for fans of LOST and House of Leaves.

For Dr. Siena Dupont and her ambitious team, the Alpenglow glacier expedition is a career-defining opportunity. But thirty miles into the desolate Deadswitch Wilderness, they discover a missing hiker dangling from a tree, and their satellite phone fails to call out.

Then the body vanishes without a trace.

The disappearance isn’t the only chilling anomaly. Siena’s map no longer aligns with the trail. The glacier they were supposed to study has inexplicably melted. Strange foliage overruns the mountainside, and a tunnel within a tree hollow lures Siena to a hidden cabin, and a stranger with a sinister message…

Holden Sharpe’s IT job offers little distraction from his wasted potential until he stumbles upon a decommissioned hard drive and an old audio file. Trapped on a mountain, Dr. Siena Dupont recounts an expedition in chaos and the bloody death of a colleague.

Entranced by the mystery, Holden searches for answers to Siena’s fate. But he is unprepared for the truth that will draw him to the outskirts of Deadswitch Wilderness—a place teeming with unfathomable nightmares and impossibilities.



The Cabinet of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston, 
Lincoln Child

Expected publication: January 17, 2023 by Grand Central Publishing

Preston & Child continue their #1 bestselling series featuring FBI Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene, as they cross paths with New York’s deadliest serial killer: Pendergast’s own ancestor…and now his greatest foe.

AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

Astoundingly, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, leaping at the chance, although it means leaving the present forever.

A DESPERATE OPPORTUNITY

Constance sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother. But along the road to redemption, Manhattan’s most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng, lies in wait, ready to strike at the slightest provocation.

UNIMAGINABLE ODDS

Meanwhile, in contemporary New York, Pendergast feverishly searches for a way to reunite with Constance—but will he discover a way back to her before it’s too late?





How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Expected publication: January 17, 2023 by Berkely

Your past and your family can haunt you like nothing else… A hilarious and terrifying new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group.

Every childhood home is haunted, and each of us are possessed by our parents.

When their parents die at the tail end of the coronavirus pandemic, Louise and Mark Joyner are devastated but nothing can prepare them for how bad things are about to get. The two siblings are almost totally estranged, and couldn’t be more different. Now, however, they don’t have a choice but to get along. The virus has passed, and both of them are facing bank accounts ravaged by the economic meltdown. Their one asset? Their childhood home. They need to get it on the market as soon as possible because they need the money. Yet before her parents died they taped newspaper over the mirrors and nailed shut the attic door.

Sometimes we feel like puppets, controlled by our upbringing and our genes. Sometimes we feel like our parents treat us like toys, or playthings, or even dolls. The past can ground us, teach us, and keep us safe. It can also trap us, and bind us, and suffocate the life out of us. As disturbing events stack up in the house, Louise and Mark have to learn that sometimes the only way to break away from the past, sometimes the only way to sell a haunted house, is to burn it all down.



Bloodtooth by D.W. Hitz

Expected publication: January 17, 2023 by Fedowar Press, LLC

After nightmares begin in the small town of Custer Falls, Montana, in 1992, it’ll be thirty years before they end.

Just outside of Custer Falls, something is sleeping. Life in the small town was never ideal, but it was safe, quiet, and predictable. After Wes Henson and his friends' field trip to Bloodtooth Caverns, all of that changes.

All they did was stray off the path. They didn't expect to break their bones and discover an ancient relic. But once it's in Wes's hands, he's the one that has to put it back.

Until he does, the town's nightmares are no longer harmless. The good side of your conscience may go quiet as the devil on your shoulder speaks up. Children fall into comas, while adults are torn to pieces in their sleep.

If Wes and his friends want to survive, they'll have to conquer the waking world and the dreamscape.



Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

Expected publication: January 17, 2023 by Tor Nightfire

Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep.

Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.

Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.



Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

Expected publication: January 24, 2023 by Redhook

A ghost-hunting reality TV crew gain unprecedented access to an abandoned and supposedly haunted mansion, which promises a groundbreaking thirteenth episode, but as they uncover the secret history of the house, they learn that “reality” TV might be all too real — in Bram Stoker Award nominated author Craig DiLouie's latest heart pounding novel of horror and psychological suspense.

Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. It’s led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin and features a dedicated crew of ghost-hunting experts.
 
Episode Thirteen takes them to Matt's holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This crumbling, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about the bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It's also, undoubtedly, haunted, and Matt hopes to use their scientific techniques and high tech gear to prove it. 

But, as the house begins to slowly reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. 
  
A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, correspondence, and research files, this is the story of Episode Thirteen — and how everything went horribly wrong.



River of Wrath by Alexandrea Weis, Lucas Astor

Expected publication: January 31, 2023 by Vesuvian Books

Leslie Moore is struggling to get through her last semester at St. Benedict High. Even her relationship with her boyfriend Derek is falling apart. But after receding floodwaters from the Bogue Falaya River expose the bones of a woman, Leslie becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer.


Sightings of an apparition haunting The Abbey send Leslie and her friends back to the scene of the horrors from last Halloween, but no one is prepared for what they find.

After a stranger—the handsome Luke Cross—arrives in town, another girl goes missing, and the sheriff suspects the newcomer is hiding something. Leslie believes the Devereaux family is connected to everything going wrong in St. Benedict. And she means to uncover the truth, no matter the cost.

Not all secrets can be kept silent. Some eventually find their way home.