Themes › fungi horror ; dystopias ; euro dystopia ; military
Type › novel
Summary
In a post-nuclear Eastern Europe, Hammel E Varka departs for a remote island to join a survey team cataloguing the abandoned Gollitok prison in the hopes that he will redeem his family’s tarnished reputation.
After the passage across the strait leaves a team member injured, Varka quickly realizes that this survey is far from routine and that what he thought he knew about the island was a cover for more horrifying truths. As his team presses deeper into the decaying facility, hidden agendas splinter the team, and they find themselves beset with dangers beyond their worst nightmares.
Knock Knock, Open Wide weaves horror and Celtic myth into a terrifying, heartbreaking supernatural tale of fractured family bonds, the secrets we carry, and the veiled forces that guide Irish life.
Driving home late one night, Etain Larkin finds a corpse on a pitch-black country road deep in the Irish countryside. She takes the corpse to a remote farmhouse. So begins a night of unspeakable horror that will take her to the very brink of sanity.
She will never speak of it again.
Two decades later, Betty Fitzpatrick, newly arrived at college in Dublin, has already fallen in love with the drama society, and the beautiful but troubled Ashling Mallen. As their relationship blossoms, Ashling goes to great lengths to keep Betty away from her family, especially her alcoholic mother, Etain.
As their relationship blossoms, Betty learns her lover’s terrifying family history, and Ashling’s secret obsession. Ashling has become convinced that the horrors inflicted on her family are connected to a seemingly innocent children’s TV show. Everyone in Ireland watched this show in their youth, but Ash soon discovers that no one remembers it quite the same way. And only Ashling seems to remember its star: a small black goat puppet who lives in a box and only comes out if you don’t behave. They say he’s never come out.
Almost never.
When the door between the known and unknown opens, it can never close again.
Content Warnings
Major › amputation, animal death, body horror, car crashes, child abuse, classism, confinement, death, demolition, dog attacks, dogs, drug use, drugs smoking tobacco, gore, hand trauma, kidnapping, murder, necrophilia, parent death, police, rape, self harm, sexual assault, tcc, victim blaming, whorephobic language
Medium › arson, blood, child abuse, homophobia, house fires, insects, lesbophobia, military abuse, parent death, rape, sexual content, suicide, unsanitary, war crimes
Minor › alcohol use, alcoholism, anti rromani g slur, arson, cancer, csa, death, fatphobia, gore, house fires, incest, lesbophobic d slur, missionaries, murder, overdoses, vomit
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang
Info
Race / Nationality › chinese american woman of color
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.
Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.
Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.
A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.
Content Warnings
Major › animal cruelty, animal death, bullying, burns, classism, confinement, disordered eating, dogs, fertility abuse, hand trauma, insects, medical abuse, medical content, parent death, racism, rape, sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual content, torture
Medium › infidelity, sexual content
Minor › child abuse, excrement, Hitler, physical abuse, pregnancy, vomit
Ana and Reid needed a lucky break.
The horrifically complicated birth of their first child has left Ana paralyzed, bitter, and struggling: with mobility, with her relationship with Reid, with resentment for her baby. That’s about to change with the words any New Yorker would love to hear—affordable housing lottery.
They’ve won an apartment in the Deptford, one of Manhattan’s most revered buildings with beautiful vistas of Central Park and stunning architecture.
Reid dismisses disturbing events and Ana’s deep unease and paranoia as the price of living in New York—people are odd—but he can’t explain the needle-like bite marks on the baby.
Content Warnings
Major › ableism, alcoholism, antisemitism, body horror, cannibalism, childbirth, classism, death, domestic violence, hand trauma, harassment, homophobic slurs, injuries, insects, murder, neck trauma, physical abuse, pregnancy, racial slurs, racism, sexual content, spiders, suicide attempts, unsanitary, violence
Medium › addiction, antisemitism, child death, death, drug abuse, parent death, suicide
Minor › antiblack racism, sectioning, sexual assault, suicide
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
Minor › homophobic q slur, religious bigotry, spiders
Sign Here by Claudia Lux
Info
Race / Nationality › white american woman
Genre › horror
Themes › comedy ; religious horror ; hell
Type › novel
Summary
A darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping debut novel about a guy who works in Hell (literally) and is on the cusp of a big promotion if only he can get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sell their soul.
Peyote Trip has a pretty good gig in the deals department on the fifth floor of Hell. Sure, none of the pens work, the coffee machine has been out of order for a century, and the only drink on offer is Jägermeister, but Pey has a plan—and all he needs is one last member of the Harrison family to sell their soul.
When the Harrisons retreat to the family lake house for the summer, with their daughter Mickey’s precocious new friend, Ruth, in tow, the opportunity Pey has waited a millennium for might finally be in his grasp. And with the help of his charismatic coworker Calamity, he sets a plan in motion.
But things aren’t always as they seem, on Earth or in Hell. And as old secrets and new dangers scrape away at the Harrisons’ shiny surface, revealing the darkness beneath, everyone must face the consequences of their choices.
Content Warnings
Major › alcohol use, body image, bone fractures, burns, child abuse, child death, csa, disordered eating, drowning, drowning scenarios, drug use smoking Marijuana, gun violence, infidelity, injuries, kidnapping, mouth trauma, murder, physical abuse, police, pregnancy, rape, self harm, sexual abuse, sexual content, suicide ideation, transmisogyny, unsanitary, violence
Medium › bullying, misogyny, murder, torture
Minor › animal death, dogs, incest, manipulation, prisons, suicide, whorephobia
The September House by Carissa Orlando
Info
Race / Nationality › white american woman
Genre › horror
Themes › horror as a metaphor for trauma ; haunted houses ; domestic violence ;
Type › novel
Summary
A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.
Margaret is not most people.
Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.
Content Warnings
Major › alcohol use, alcoholism, animal death, arm trauma, blood, body horror, bone fractures, child abuse, confinement, death, domestic violence, grave desecration, injuries, insects, leg trauma, murder, police, snakes, torture, violence, whorephobic language
Medium › burns, drunk driving, fire death, overdoses
A terrifying Gothic thriller about grief and death and the depths of a father's love, Johnny Compton's The Spite House is a stunning debut by a horror master in the making—The Babadook meets A Head Full of Ghosts in Texas Hill Country.
Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.
When he comes across the strange ad for the Masson House in Degener, Texas, Eric thinks they may have finally caught a lucky break. The Masson property, notorious for being one of the most haunted places in Texas, needs a caretaker of sorts. The owner is looking for proof of paranormal activity. All they need to do is stay in the house and keep a detailed record of everything that happens there. Provided the house’s horrors don’t drive them all mad, like the caretakers before them.
The job calls to Eric, not just because there's a huge payout if they can make it through, but because he wants to explore the secrets of the spite house. If it is indeed haunted, maybe it'll help him understand the uncanny power that clings to his family, driving them from town to town, making them afraid to stop running.
Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he's right? The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes.
With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.
Dubbed 'The Three' by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention.
This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse.
The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival.
Content Warnings
Major › ableism, airplane crashes, alcoholism, animal cruelty, anti japanese racism, blood, car crashes, child abuse, child death, csa, cults, death, dementia, gore, grief, gun violence, homophobia, mass suicides, medical content, murder, nationalism, parent death, police, prisons, racial slurs, racism, religious bigotry, suicide, trafficking, unsanitary, zionism
Medium › 911, fatphobia, homophobic slurs, lynching, racism, religious bigotry, suicide
Minor › ableism, ableist language, ableist r slur, animal death, anti union sentiment, Asperger, blood, body horror, csa, drug use smoking tobacco, drug use weed, eugenics, gassing, gun violence, hiroshima, homophobia, murder, necklacing, pedophilia, police, police brutality, racial slurs, rape, religion jehovahs witness, serophobia, transmisogyny, unsanitary, xenophobia
Day Four (sequel / side-quel)
The chilling follow-up to THE THREE, Sarah Lotz's "hard to put down and vastly entertaining" debut.
Hundreds of pleasure-seekers stream aboard The Beautiful Dreamer cruise ship for five days of cut-price fun in the Caribbean sun. On the fourth day, disaster strikes: smoke roils out of the engine room, and the ship is stranded in the Gulf of Mexico. Soon supplies run low, a virus plagues the ship, and there are whispered rumors that the cabins on the lower decks are haunted by shadowy figures. Irritation escalates to panic, the crew loses control, factions form, and violent chaos erupts among the survivors.
When, at last, the ship is spotted drifting off the coast of Key West, the world's press reports it empty. But the gloomy headlines may be covering up an even more disturbing reality.
Content Warnings
Major › ableist language, ableist r slur, addiction, asphyxiation, burns, car crashes, death, drugging, excrement, fatphobia, fires, foot trauma, gore, homophobia, injuries, insects, lesbophobic slurs, mass death, medical content, murder, pandemic, paranoia, racism, rape, serial rape, sexual content, sexual harassment, suicide, suicide ideation, violence
Medium › antiblack racism, asphyxiation, bioessentialism, child abuse, csa, incest, mouth trauma, pedophilia, rape, sexual harassment, suicide, torture, toxic relationships
Minor › addiction, antiblack racist caricature, cancer, drug abuse, Islamophobia, misogyny, overdoses, sexual assault, stalking, suicide