I found this book gripping and suspenseful; in short, I couldn’t put it down!
It begins with a séance in a haunted house. What a great way to start a murder mystery! The folks in this tight-knit community have interesting quirks and fascinating backgrounds, providing a host of possible perpetrators.
This is a masterful look into how people find reasons to grow suspicious of each other, and to treat each other less-than-kindly. Chief Inspector Gamache is having devastating problems of his own: someone in the organization is out to destroy his life.
Who can he trust? How can he solve this murder while watching his own back? My first Louise Penny book will not be my last. (I’ve already bought two more.)
It's Easter, and on a glorious spring day in peaceful Three Pines, someone waits for night to fall. They plan to raise the dead! When C. I. Gamache of the Surete du Quebec arrives the next morning, he faces an unusual crime scene. A seance in an old, abandoned house has gone horrifically wrong and someone lies frightened to death. For in idyllic Three Pines not all is as it seems. Toxic secrets lie buried, and something terrible has finally clawed its way out. And even Gamache has something to hide. One of his own team is preparing to betray…
I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
Haunted House so enthralled and inspired me, I bought it three times! It originally came out in a full-scale edition, then in half-size. I bought both, and the smaller version again, as a gift.
This is a pop-up book on steroids. The mechanics behind it is stunning—a tour de farce of paper engineering. The story line is riotous. Smart writing, great illustration, and a super clever concept, Haunted House is a kid’s book only on the surface.
Revisit - if you dare! - one of the best-loved pop-up books of all time, now more gleefully ghoulish then ever with the addition of several spooky surprises.
Enjoy a tour of this spooky old house where a spine-tingling surprise lurks in every dark corner. Re-issued in its original full-size format, with four new pop-ups, this definitive edition brings the classic novelty to a whole new generation.
I’ve loved Scotland ever since I spent a year studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh. In fact, I loved it so much that I returned to the University a couple of years later to complete my master’s degree in creative writing. Between the rugged dramatic landscapes, the stunning Gothic architecture, and the dark cold weather, Scotland was the perfect place to inspire a young aspiring suspense author such as myself—and the ideal setting for a creepy, atmospheric thriller like my debut novel. Although I’ve since moved back to the U.S., I’m always on the lookout for a Scottish-set thriller to take me back to the country where I left my heart but—blissfully—found my husband.
I have not infrequently fantasized about running away to a remote Scottish island, so the premise and American protagonist of this novel immediately spoke to me.
Add to that a big creepy house, unexplained ghostly occurrences, and elegant literary writing, and this is a big winner for me. I loved the brooding, sensitive atmosphere of this novel, and it kept me guessing until the end.
A PACY, CHILLING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO STOP READING!
'Intensely atmospheric' Mail on Sunday
A house full of secrets... The McBride house lies on a remote Scottish island, isolated and abandoned. A century ago, a young widow and her son died mysteriously there. Last year a local boy, visiting for a dare, disappeared without a trace.
A woman alone at night... For Zoe Adams, the house offers an escape from her failing marriage. But when night falls, her peaceful retreat is disrupted-scratches at the door, strange voices-and Zoe is convinced she is being watched.
As horror writer, I’m often asked what scares me most, and almost every fear I have is, at its core, about the Unknown. Not just what we don’t know but the things we cannot know. In all my books, I’ve tried to lean into that personal fear as much as possible, and with Heavy Oceans, I was inspired by the cases Mulder and Scully investigated back when the idea of a government lying to and spying on its own citizens seemed almost quaint by comparison to the moments we’re living. And, as the show’s title credit often said, in glowing words that blazed over a darkened sky…"The Truth is Out There."
Is it cheating to pick a short story collection? Nah. Of course not!
Fracassi is one of my favorite writers. And if you want to know why, just check out his incredible novel Boys in the Valley. But a novel (usually) is a single story, and all the ideas therein serve that story. What a joy it is to see a writer unleash his full power, his idea machine, in a collection of short stories.
You get a little boy’s birthday wish that backfires in a horrifying way. A story written from the perspective of a haunted house. Yes, you read that right! The world’s most dangerous beach, along with eleven other stories that are pulpy, literary, chilling, and terrifying.
I love that Fracassi completely leans into the pulpy nature of these stories, giving us all the shocks and scares that we used to get from the “monster of…
No One Is Safe! presents fourteen stories of macabre, pulpy terror; a book filled with futuristic noir mysteries, science fiction thrillers, alien invasions, and old-school horror tales that will keep you up late into the night. Inside these covers, you’ll discover haunted dream journals and evil houses, birthday wishes gone wrong, a neighborhood cat that cures any disease, a flesh-eating beach, and mysterious skeletons on a hidden moon base. You’ll meet wise-cracking detectives, suburban vampires, murdered movie stars, and monsters of the deep. And remember—don’t get too attached to the characters you’ll meet on these pages because there’s no holding…
I’m Catherine Cavendish – writer of Gothic and ghostly horror stories. I lived in a haunted house. It didn’t scare me because our ghost seemed to go out of her way to make us welcome. Elsewhere in the building was a different matter. This was occupied by a social club and in one room in particular, an entity targeted lone females, taking delight in poking and shoving them. Since we left there, I wonder about our friendly ghost. Does she continue to watch over her old home? As for the malevolent spirit – one encounter was quite enough for me! My experiences left me fascinated by the power of buildings to absorb its ghosts.
Gaby Triana excels at creating and transmitting atmosphere. She transports you into the swamps, oppressive heat, terrors, and scares of the Florida she has created in her Haunted Florida trilogy of which this is the final part.
In City of Spells, Queylin Sanchez runs a shop selling incense, charms, and all manner of items designed to appeal to those interested in the occult, but when an elderly man crosses the threshold and enlists her help in ridding his home of an unwanted ghost, she accepts the commission and sets in motion a frightening chain of events that threaten her sanity and her life – in fact, much more than that is at stake as she unravels the sinister and disturbing truth.
I can assure you, the tradition of Southern Gothic is alive and well in this author’s capable hands. If you haven’t read any of Gaby’s work yet – it’s…
A haunted Old Florida home. A ghostly woman in white. Witchcraft from Miami's darker side.When a mysterious old gentleman enters Queylin's trendy new age shop, she hopes he'll buy incense, sage, maybe a nice rose quartz pendulum for his wife. Instead, the man enlists her help getting rid of La Dama de Blanco, a ghostly woman in bloody white dress who's been haunting his 100-year-old Palmetto Bay estate.But when Queylin's rituals and spells uncover terrifying secrets hidden in the walls of the old mansion, she realizes La Dama de Blanco is only the beginning of the haunted home's evil legacy.
My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries.
When I was younger, I stayed overnight in a haunted house, or at least a house that felt haunted. I was in a big, creepy room by myself, and sleep was impossible. Instead, I sat up through the night, feeling very alone. During that long wait for dawn, this book was there for me.
It’s a satire that’s now more famous than many of the grim rural novels that inspired it; more important to me then, it’s the very funny story of Flora Poste, a modern young woman who goes to stay at a remote country farm with her relatives, the dramatic Starkadders, ruled over by Aunt Ada Doom, who once saw something nasty in the woodshed. Flora’s story is a glorious triumph of common sense over an ominous atmosphere.
When the sukebind was in bud, the orphaned Flora Poste, expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, descended on her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm, which she rightly imagines will be awful in an interesting way. She takes it on herself to bring order into chaos.
While I love straight-up fiction and read plenty of novels, I’ve always been just as interested in art as I have been in writing. The further into my writing career I get, the more it becomes obvious that art and illustration are just as vital to the way I want to tell my stories. I did the covers for my first few books and started experimenting with illustrating them as well with The Writhing Skies, creating a very strange blend of splatterpunk horror and Betty Boop-inspired illustration. Soft Places is a further step in the direction of telling stories in a way that’s a little different.
Edward Gorey is a forever favorite of mine, a pen and ink artist popular for the dozens of strange and macabre little books he created. The West Wing is unique in that it has no words at all, and the story is told entirely through his meticulous pen and ink images. Without a plot, or even any characters, there is only mood and vibes, and they are spooky and mysterious. Each page shows a different part of The West Wing and its seemingly endless rooms with their hints of ghosts and the feeling that someone has just left, or that something horrible has just happened. It’s my favorite haunted house story of all time.
Edward Gorey's The West Wing is an invitation to the imagination. On each page, a room beckons, inviting the reader to wonder why three shoes lie here abandoned, what is retreating in that mirror's reflection, or why there is an imprint of a body on the wallpaper, faded and floating four feet above the floor. A wordless mystery, it is one of Gorey's finest works.
I’m a writer of sapphic horror and romance fiction, and a professor of nineteenth and twentieth literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. I’ve been an avid reader of ghost-focused fiction since I was a little kid. This fascination was, in part, encouraged by my horror-loving parents, but I think I’ve just always loved being scared, and for me, the scariest thing imaginable is a haunted house. I’ve read widely in the genre, by turns spooked, thrilled, and baffled, and this reading eventually encouraged me to write my own haunted house novels. If you love a chilling tale, you’re going to love the books on this list.
This is one of those books that creeps up on you. The setting is unusual and it uses the tropes of Southern Gothic in unexpected ways. For one thing, McDowell’s novel is set at the beach during a vacation. Most of the haunted activity takes place during the day in the oppressively sunny landscape of the vacation home for a group of visitors recovering from various ills. For another, and like a lot of Southern Gothic stories, family dynamics and history are a big part of the backstory here, but there are unpredictable elements as well, including the very nature or un-nature of the setting itself.
"The finest writer of paperback originals in America." - Stephen King
"Surely one of the most terrifying novels ever written." - Poppy Z. Brite
"Beyond any trace of doubt, one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country." - Peter Straub
"Readers of weak constitution should beware!" - Publishers Weekly
"McDowell has a flair for the gruesome." - Washington Post
After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses…
I loved this book because it’s beautifully written, and the main character is very different from most. She’s a no-nonsense girl without being boring. I also love the angsty romance throughout the book.
This is a Victorian murder mystery with a twist. Our main character can see the dead and knows Death himself. Using her gift, she tries to solve her aunt’s murder and the attempted murder of her cousin while facing her inner demons.
One of the best books I’ve read and an all-around amazing story.
The New York Times bestselling author of All the Stars and Teeth brings to life a highly romantic, Gothic-infused world of wealth, desire, and betrayal.
Orphaned as a baby, nineteen-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each one more interested in her wealth than her well-being—and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy. Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation, and his daughter suffers…
I think of reading horror stories as perfect armchair adrenalin-thrill-seeking. I prefer horror on the quiet side, dark and thematic, with any depiction of blood and gore in measured quantities. My favorite is historical horror with a moral edge, or underlying theme that explores who we are—good, bad, or in-between—as human beings, and how societal norms have changed from one era to another. The monsters of our imaginations are scary, but for true terror, there's nothing more frightening than the things we've done to each other throughout history. Dress society’s ills or expectations in monster clothes and write a story about them, and I’ll want to read it.
I can never get enough ghost and haunted house stories that have social commentary themes. This is one of the books that helped inspire my own book. Trevor Riddell’s parents are separated, and Trevor and his father move to his lumber-robber-baron grandfather’s mansion in the woods of the northwest, where Trevor’s father and aunt hope to talk their ailing father into a big-money real estate deal involving the house and land.
This book has everything I love: ghosts, intrigue, mystery, history, emotionally-complex antagonists, and epistolary story-telling through letters and journals. Woven into all that, Stein manages to insert a moral about conservation and trees (and other things I’ll let you discover on your own). Ghost stories have a history of being morality tales, and this is a modern version—true to the tradition—that I really enjoyed.
From the author of the million-copy bestselling The Art of Racing in the Raincomes the breathtaking and long-awaited new novel.
This novel centres on four generations of a once terribly wealthy and influential timber family who have fallen from grace; a mysterious yet majestic mansion, crumbling slowy into the bluff overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle; a love affair so powerful it reaches across the planes of existence; and a young man who simply wants his parents to once again experience the moment they fell in love, hoping that if can feel that emotion again, maybe they won't get divorced after…
