Need a Last Min. Gift? Try These Books!
Last Minute Books to Buy for The Book Lover in Your Life!
It’s almost time for the holidays, and if you haven’t had a chance to pick up a book for the book lover in your life, here are some incredible selections that you can still get in time for gift giving!
Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic Anthology
Description:
Are you sure something’s wrong? Or are you just hysterical?
Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic is rage-made-art, an unsettling meditation that also serves as a charitable platform to support abortion rights in the United States. Inside are twenty-six haunting speculative tales that explore the social, political, and personal dimensions of hysteria.
Women who are convicted of sexual transgressions are forced to become living seed mounds.
A lonely young man makes his perfect girl out of caulk and endeavors to teach her about the wonders of the world.
The poor barter for health insurance by serving as living batteries for the elite.
In this anthology of feminist dark fiction, presented by CHM, author and editor Jolie Toomajan has curated a collection of nightmares from both award-winning and emerging writers, including Hailey Piper, Christi Nogle, Joe Koch, Kelsea Yu, Laura Cranehill, and more.
Proceeds will benefit the Chicago Abortion Fund
Pre-Approved for Hauntings: And Other Stories by Patrick Barb
Description:
In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term.
A young couple is reunited with their lost son whose favorite fuzzy bear suit connects him to the ghost of a vengeful mama bear while he's alone in the forest.
A jaded screenwriter can’t escape the haunted screenplay that’s ruined his career.
A man returns to his small hometown, where the people are gone and the trees have taken over.
A Slasher and Final Girl brother-sister duo match wits and blades against a sentient, dimension-hopping apocalypse at a never-ending summer camp.
From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.
Realtor Caleb Birch is on the precipice of earning everything he’s ever dreamed: a partner position at his prestigious realty firm, financial stability that would make his mother proud, and a respectable professional reputation amongst Los Angeles’s wealthy and elite. All he has to do is nail his open house and secure a contract.
Enter a mysterious woman with an air of familiarity claiming to be the perfect buyer. Her ruse dissolves revealing nefarious intentions and a twisted game that Caleb must win to survive the night. But she isn’t the only threat lurking behind closed doors. There are skeletons in the closet, and they’re coming out to play.
College Macabre: An Exhibition of Art Horror
Description:
Your work will betray your secrets. Obsessions, hidden desires, and desperate wishes all woven into the fabric of what we make. A sculpture crafted with longing, a painting of a dream just barely articulated, the craving that cannot speak its name buried in a short film’s score. Old want only spoken aloud through someone else’s voice. Need etched on someone else’s lips for all the world to see. A false self created for the audience to claim as its own, still hiding what it knows.
Through these eighteen stories, dread is the medium of choice, winding its way through each unsettling and terrifying tale about human creation, the artistic follies and triumphs we imbue with so much meaning. You will find artists and audiences alike grappling with confrontations beyond their comprehension, works that require more than careful consideration—sometimes a little bit of blood is necessary. Art is alive if you are. Inside these pages you will be asked to open yourself up like a wound and expose your mind to the darker side of our oeuvre.
Confirmed Sightings: A Triple Cryptid Creature Feature
Horror fans and cryptid lovers unite! Grab your popcorn and candy, settle into your seat, and make sure to silence your phone for this triple creature feature!
A Piasa for Christmas by Bridget D. Brave | Kaycee has returned to her hometown and finally found her soulmate in the most unexpected package: a transdimensional, all-powerful creature once trapped in a temporal prison. Can true love prevail between this headstrong aspiring influencer and an ancient immortal god?
eyeofmoth.exe by P.L. McMillan | When the crew of the CRS Piasa encounter a space station drowning in madness caused by a creature from Pre-Calamity Earth, they become desperate to get back to their ship and warn the Company in a race against the clock.
Once Upon a Time in Turu by Ryan Marie Ketterer | When a jackalope from the good part of town ends up dead, Policefoot Orli is tasked with solving the bizarre murder before the already tense town of Turu erupts in cryptid fury. But it won't be as easy as it looks when all the usual suspects are very unusual themselves.
In Memory of Exoskeletons by Rebecca Cuthbert
“Cuthbert's chapbook celebrates the domestic, seemingly delicate spheres of women's lives. From house witches to cryptids to body horror, this collection probes the edges of the speculative poetry genre. Supple and lyrical, these poems are cunning, intelligent, and tender.”
-Holly Lyn Walrath, author, The Smallest of Bones
Epiphany by JV Gaghs
When pregnant Estela learns that her wife Eva has hanged herself from an oak tree, she can't believe she would have done so voluntarily.
Eva, a journalist obsessed with the crimes of the so-called Garden of Horrors, was about to release a podcast about the convicted killer, Coral, who always maintained it wasn't her who slaughtered her family and her missing new born, but an evil forest spirit.
As Estela dives deep into the recordings, emails, and letters from Eva's investigation, in Coral's retelling of the murders, she will be forced to face a simple question that could cost her life as well as her unborn baby's:
"Do you believe in magic?"
Dust and Deliverance by Benjamin DeHaan
Description:
Paulo, a father, high school counselor and recent widower, searches for his lost daughter Adriana who has become bound to the cocaine drug cartel. Adriana, daughter of Paulo, runs away from higher education and seeks fortunes and a life of paradise. Sam, gaming addict and divorced Denver Police officer, blames his failed marriage on his wife’s misunderstanding. Harold, protector of Adriana and ex-opera singer of Mexico City, yearns for nothing more than to get his singing voice back.
San Isabel National Park, Colorado, a place where four broken people collide and are set free.
This is a story of the heart’s deliverance.
Hunger and Other Dark Tales by Benjamin DeHaan
Collected together in one volume for the first time, five chilling horror stories by Benjamin DeHaan
Cats of the Pacific Northwest by J. W. Donley
Description:
David, an unsure young man, is trying to figure out how to be a "man" in the modern age. Well, at least what his girlfriend, Emma, expects of him.
When she suggests a backpacking trip out on the Olympic Penninsula, he jumps at the opportunity to demonstrate his worth. But, once they get out into the wilderness, they are quickly lost. Now they are out of food and beginning to starve, when a strange couple of cats cross their path.
The Darkness Beyond the Stars: An Anthology of Space Horror edited by P.L. McMillan
Description:
Beyond this rock we call home, horror awaits. Meteors slash through the sky, illuminating terrors beyond our wildest imagination. In the furthest reaches of the coldest cosmic expanse, there are things waiting, whose very existence our minds are not equipped to comprehend.
Can you survive the final frontier?
Featuring 14 stories from some of the best up-and-coming talents in the genre, The Darkness Beyond The Stars is an anthology of space-themed horror that seeks to twist humanity’s greatest aspirations into our greatest fears
Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary edited by Jacob Steven Mohr
Evil lurks within the pages of Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror...
A video game walkthrough harbors sinister secrets. A grieving sister’s letters blur the line between alive and dead (and alive again). A chain of frightening emails is the only evidence that a young woman ever walked the earth. And a series of journals pursue a dwindling wagon train marching into Hell—or someplace worse.
Haunting podcast transcripts. Blood-soaked police reports. Bewildering court findings. Brace yourself for an anthology that resurrects the chilling power of epistolary fiction—where ordinary documents transform into vessels of absolute terror.
Spanning 21 original tales blending the classic gothic horror of Stoker’s Dracula with the contemporary dread of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, Dead Letters contains both short sharp shocks and prolonged sojourns into the macabre—and promises to haunt your sleepless nights.
Featuring thrilling contributions from Gemma Files, Ai Jiang, Gordon B. White, J.A.W. McCarthy, and Red Lagoe, and curated with precision by Jacob Steven Mohr (The Unwelcome and Nightfall and Other Dangers) Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror solidifies its place among the pantheon of must-read horror anthologies.
The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future by Christi Nogle
The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future collects Christi Nogle’s finest psychological and supernatural horror stories. Their rural and small-town characters confront difficult pasts and look toward promising but often terrifying futures. The pieces range in genre from psychological horror through science fiction and ghost stories, but they all share fundamental qualities: feminist themes, an emphasis on voice, a focus on characters’ psychologies and a sense of the gothic in contemporary life. Stories here may recall Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Renegade,” or Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals.”
Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia edited by Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle
Wilted Pages is a new Dark Academia anthology filled with gloomy buildings, hidden histories, secret societies, lurking shadows, futuristic boarding schools, corrupt systems, gothic aesthetics, occult learning and forbidden texts… And that's only your first semester.
Merciless Waters by Rae Knowles
Aboard the ship Scylla, there is no future or past. Jaq, her fickle lover Lily, and their all-female crew exist in an endless present. It's better this way. At least it keeps Lily by Jaq's side, where she belongs. But the meddling gods care little for Jaq's longing, and despite her protective rituals, their punishment arrives all the same: A man, adrift on the open ocean. Delivered to snatch Lily from Jaq's arms forever. Jaq knows what to do. She's lost Lily before. Her lover will return-when this interloper, this distraction, is snuffed out. But Jaq's murderous schemes may not be enough. The intruder's presence infects her crew with a plague her spells cannot cure: memory. And as the women recall how they came to Scylla, their minds bend one by one towards revenge.
The Disappearance of Tom Nero by TJ Price
The Disappearance of Tom Nero concerns a young man's investigation into the impossible disappearance of a friend. As he learns more about the circumstances and searches for answers, the re-emergence of a metatextual horror from legend puts not only him, but his new lover, in jeopardy.
The story explores themes of contagious and invasive thoughts, disappearances, as well as the relationship between reality and the written word. It is uniquely structured, with a variety of clues hidden in the text for the savvy reader—but beware, for the horror might not only affect the characters in the story...it may also affect the reader themselves.
Ahh! That’s What I Call Horror: An Anthology of 90’s Horror edited by Chelsea Pumpkins
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?
Howls from the Wreckage: An Anthology of Disaster Horror edited by Christopher O’Halloran
“Cuthbert's chapbook celebrates the domestic, seemingly delicate spheres of women's lives. From house witches to cryptids to body horror, this collection probes the edges of the speculative poetry genre. Supple and lyrical, these poems are cunning, intelligent, and tender.”
-Holly Lyn Walrath, author, The Smallest of Bones
Hungers as Old as This Land by Zachary Rosenberg
Description:
The settlement of Grey's Bluffs is a prosperous town. An independent community dwelling in the shadows of the mountains known only as The Hungers.
Esther Foxman and Siobhan O'Clery have grown up in Grey's Bluffs, thriving out on the western territories in the aftermath of the Civil War. Devoted to one another and their home, the two set out to complete a regular pact at the Hungers to ensure that Grey's Bluffs continues to prosper.
Cyril Redstone is a man who knows death well. Becoming a mercenary after the Civil War, Cyril leads the marauding Blackhawks from one slaughter to the next. Hired to destroy Grey's Bluffs, Cyril cares little for morality, nor that he owes its founder his life.
Esther and Siobhan are left to defend the only home they have ever known from the Blackhawks, their confrontation driving them deep into the mountains.
Where the darkest secrets of the Hungers await them.
The Long Shalom by Zachary Rosenberg
Alan Aldenberg is a down-on-his-luck detective. With dwindling fortunes and the worry his old friends in the Jewish mob will pay him a visit, the last thing he expects is a visit from his old flame.
But when the wrong Shalom brings Erika Nakamura back to his door, Alan learns that innocent people are missing all through New York. Agreeing to the job for the cash, Alan soon discovers a conspiracy reaching through the city's halls of power and not all of them are human. Joining forces with old friends, Alan faces a dark alliance of politicians, the mob, and abominable beings that transcend space and time.
With the fate of New York in the balance, Alan must be prepared for nightmares beyond human comprehension.
That may even make him face the long Shalom
Description:
It’s just an average night at the Ink Tank, the tattoo shop in Austin, Texas, where Brynn works as a tattoo artist. After a long shift, all she wants to do is head home, pop a few pills from the fresh bottle of Roxicodone in her jacket pocket, and slip into a nice buzz. Her plans crumble when she’s abducted by her convict father, Alan, and forced into the road trip from hell: a cross-country trek to the Rocky Mountains and the shelter he built years ago to protect his family from the monsters living in his head, the monsters he says will erupt from the earth at any minute—the feeders. With each mile he unravels further, thrusting Brynn back into the childhood nightmare she thought she’d escaped forever. Alan is paranoid, and he’s definitely dangerous—but is he crazy? In this novel, we find that truth is not always what it seems, and that some secrets are better left buried.
The Girls in the Cabin by Caleb Stephens
Description:
This camping trip is Chris’s last chance to repair his relationship with his daughters, Kayla and Emma. Nothing’s been the same since they lost their mom. But things go wrong as soon as they get to the mountains.
When they make camp, nine-year-old Emma runs off into the woods. By the time they find her, there’s a snowstorm rolling in. And Emma’s leg is badly broken. They need to find shelter, fast.
They think they’re safe when they come across an old farmstead. The woman inside welcomes them in from the howling blizzard and straps up Emma’s leg.
They settle down for the night, but when Chris wakes at dawn and looks over . . . Emma is gone.
And this family’s nightmare is only just beginning.
Remember the '90s? Well...the town of Demise, North Dakota doesn't, and they're living in the year 1997. That's because an alien worm hitched a ride on a comet, crash-landed in the town's trailer park, and is now infecting animals with a memory-loss-inducing bite-and right before Christmas! Now it's up to nineteen-year-old Realene and her best friend Nate to stop the spread and defeat the worms before the entire town loses its mind. The only things standing in the way are their troubled pasts, a doomsday cult, and an army of infected prairie dogs.
Our annual anthology, where the best genre fiction is brought together under one roof. Welcome to Sley House
