Published May 15, 2018 by Rockhill Publishing LLC She's back and this time she brought a friend... The story continues: the sequel to Th...
Guest Post || Itching to Write! by Myron Edwards
Published June 18, 2013 by 47North T hey only come when it snows, and nobody ever gets away. A group of close friends gathers at a secluded...
Book Review || The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn
Published June 18, 2013 by 47North
A group of close friends gathers at a secluded cabin in the wintry mountains of Colorado for a final holiday hurrah. Instead, it may be their last stand. First a massive blizzard leaves them marooned. Then the more chilling realization: something is lurking in the woods, watching them, waiting...
Now a weekend of family, friends, and fun has turned into a test of love and loyalty in the face of inhuman horrors. The only hope for those huddled inside is to fight—tooth and nail, bullet and blade—for their lives. Otherwise, they'll end up like the monsters' other victims: bright pools of blood on glittering snow, screams lost in the vast mountains.
Published March 15, 2023 by Shadowpaw Press Reprise The first English edition of the popular young adult novel Les fantômes de Spiritwood, o...
Guest Post || Curiosity Kills the Cat but Benefits the Writer by Martine Noël-Maw
Published March 15, 2023 by Shadowpaw Press Reprise
Curiosity Kills the Cat but Benefits the Writer
by Martine Noël-Maw
The sanatorium, named Fort San, had opened its doors in 1917. The institution resembled a village, with many pavilions scattered in the valley along the lake shore. It included a nurses' residence, a visitor lodge, doctors and employees’ homes, and even a one-room school, a theatre and a library. It was even equipped with its own radio station, thanks to the ingenuity of some patients that had a lot of time on their hands. It would broadcast original programming performed by patients.
Maybe it is the location of the sanatorium, isolated in the fold of the hills, which contributed to its aura of mystery. According to many people, “The San” as it was familiarly called, was host to many ghosts. I heard numerous stories, starting with one from my neighbour, a respectable mother of three, who had stayed at The San, after it was converted into the Echo Valley Conference Centre. She was the sole occupant of a room with two single beds. One night, she got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back to her room, she was shocked to see a little boy dressed as a cowboy, including boots, hat and fake revolvers, sitting on the bed next to hers.
Around the same time, a friend of mine attended a conference at The San with a group of college students. Someone took a picture of her and two of her classmates. The picture is very good but also very spooky: the student sitting next to my friend, a girl in her early twenties, looks like a 90-year-old woman, with a wrinkly face and scruffy white hair... I saw the picture and it sent shivers down my spine.
The most famous ghost story related to The San is the one of Nurse Jane. According to some sources, the young woman would have hung herself from a tree, in front of the nurses’ residence. According to others, she hung herself in a bathroom located on the third floor of the children’s pavilion. What is really intriguing is the fact that, according to many, children could see her at the window. A witness told me that in the morning, they would wave at her ghostly figure as they were walking to school.
Being a French literature graduate and having grown up with a ghost in my living room, I have always been interested in that kind of story. So, the day my boyfriend took me to Fort San, after I walk the grounds of this mythical site, I told him: “This is it! I know what my first novel is going to be about.” That visit triggered my curiosity like nothing before. It launched me on a research journey that lasted nearly five years. My first novel, Dans le pli des collines was published in 2004. It became an award-winning book and was published in English in 2013 under the title In the Fold of the Hills (Ekstatis Editions of Victoria, British Columbia). The book is still taught in college, and I am always happy whenever a ghost-lover reader reaches out to me.
What set me on the path to becoming a professional writer is my insatiable curiosity. And I didn’t stop with that first book. Since then, I have spent years researching characters like Will James and Louis Riel. I even embarked on two walks on the Camino de Santiago, in Spain, to write the story of a pilgrim. All this to say that although curiosity may be bad for cats, it has given me the gift of a very rewarding and fulfilling career. As I write these lines, I am anxious to find out where my curiosity will take me next.
© Martine Noël-Maw 2023
Get ready to pad your TBR, here are just a few of September's new releases! If you've missed the previous lists ( January , Febr...
This Month in Horror || October 2023
Get ready to pad your TBR, here are just a few of September's new releases!
If you've missed the previous lists (January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September), you can still check those out. And 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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The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey
Expected publication: October 3, 2023 by Tor Nightfire
Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out thirty-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s been trying to establish herself in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top.
Julie is desperate for a quick career boost to break the dead-end grind, but her pleas draw the attention of an eldritch god who is hungry for revenge. Her power grab sets off a deadly chain of events that puts her closest friends – and the entire world – directly in the path of annihilation.
The first explosive adventure in the Carrion City Duology, The Dead Take the A Train fuses Khaw’s cosmic horror and Kadrey’s gritty fantasy into a full-throttle thrill ride straight into New York’s magical underbelly.
Let the Woods Keep Our Bodies by E. M. Roy
Expected publication: October 10, 2023 by Ghoulish Books
In the small town of Eston, Maine . . . weird things happen sometimes.
Leo Bates knows what’s behind every corner in her hometown, where she’s lived her whole life. Some disjointed memories and grief for her late parents, sure, but nothing dangerous. Nothing unexplainable.
But the familiar becomes strange the longer you look at it. When Tate Mulder goes missing and Leo is pinned as the prime suspect, she can only watch as the town she thought she knew deteriorates around her. She is forced to confront the truth about her parents, Eston, and her relationship if she is to survive an onslaught of conspiracies, cryptic monstrosities, and whatever is hiding in the woods where Tate was last seen. Finding the girl she loves may be the only way to restore balance to Eston—if such a thing ever existed to begin with.
A Light Most Hateful by Hailey Piper
When a summer storm sweeps through a sleepy town unleashing a monstrous and otherworldy power that threatens to break reality, Olivia will stop at nothing to find her best friend and get them to safety.
Mona Awad’s Bunny meets Stranger Things in this mind-bending and terrifying examination of female friendship and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love, from the Bram Stoker award winning author of Queen of Teeth.
Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower.
Olivia figures she’ll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow.
If Olivia’s going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she’ll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm’s otherworldly powers and find Sunflower.
But as the night strains friendships and reality itself, Olivia suspects the storm, and its monster, may have its eyes on Sunflower and everything she loves.
Including Olivia.