It’s that spooky time of the year again, when ghoulish thoughts enter our dark hearts, and nightmares become all too real. When you want that spine-tingling, curl your toes type of horror novel this October, come and see us at Scott County Public Library! We have some new stories and new authors who will feed the monsters that await you in the darkness.
Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville
On a snowy December night, single mother Rebecca Carter drives her van into a snowbank to avoid hitting an elk on a desolate mountain highway. She is at the end of her rope, out of money and food. Still, she refuses help from a man in a pickup truck- Rebecca’s adolescent daughter, Moonflower, is on the run from a grisly secret, and the last thing they can afford is to be remembered by anyone they meet.
Meanwhile, Special Agent Marc Donner of the FBI has spent the better part of two years hunting down a gruesome serial killer who drains victims of blood before severing their spinal cords, leaving a trail of bodies throughout the country. As Agent Donner’s investigation brings him closer and closer to where Rebecca and Moonflower are hiding out, in the foothills of Colorado, the life that Rebecca has fought so hard to hold together for her daughter becomes increasingly imperiled.
In this deadly, high-stakes game of cat and mouse, nobody is safe and nothing is certain- not even the line between predator and prey.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voice mail that the “Great Reawakening” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from his home in Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trancelike state in front of the tv. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.
Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.
But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart, literally, as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend glued to cable news or falling down internet rabbit holes. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?
This ambitious, searing novel from one of horror’s modern monsters holds a mirror to our divided nation and will shake readers to the core.
The Family Inside by Katie Garner
It takes a special kind of family to turn a home into a nightmare.
Since her husband’s unsolved murder three years ago, Iris Blodgett’s life has unraveled. Awash in grief and buried in debt, she can’t pay her mortgage-and now that she’s lost her job, she has no idea how she’ll provide for her unruly teenage daughter, Ellory.
Facing eviction, Iris turns to her new beau, prominent architect Hugh Smoll, for a shoulder to cry on. But the seemingly perfect Hugh offers her something more: an invitation to move into his mother’s centuries-old mansion while he renovates the property.
It seems like the perfect solution, but when Iris and Ellory arrive at Ravencliff, the family inside isn’t quite what they expected. Iris didn’t even know Hugh had siblings, much less that they’d all be living together.
With repairs underway, the house gives up its dark secrets one by one. Before long, Iris unearths a chilling family history-and the terrifying reason she and Ellory were invited in the first place.
Strap in for the newest action-packed space horror from S. A. Barnes, where desperation for eternal life leads to a fate worse than death…
Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay low; a gigantic space barge storing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth’s most fortunate citizens from more than a century ago.
The cryo program created by trillionaire tech genius Zale Winfeld is long defunct, and the AI hologram “hosts,” ghoulishly created in the likeness of Winfeld’s three adult children, are glitchy. The ship feels like a crypt, and the isolation gets to Halley almost immediately. She starts to see figures crawling in the hallways, and there’s a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents.
It’s not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from…
The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.
Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary; a mysterious staircase to nowhere.
One friend walks up- and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy-and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods.
So October will be especially ghoulish this year, especially if you curl up with one of these great stories!