FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[TrevorViking]

Stephen King’s Carrie is on sale for $1.99 at Amazon US right now

https://www.amazon.com/Carrie-Stephe...01BANK2I&psc=1

[ZodWallop]

The Hollow Ones by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan is $2 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo.

A horrific crime that defies explanation, a rookie FBI agent in uncharted territory, and an extraordinary hero for the ages: an investigation spirals out of control in this heart-pounding thriller.

Odessa Hardwicke's life is derailed when she's forced to turn her gun on her partner, Walt Leppo, a decorated FBI agent who turns suddenly, inexplicably violent while apprehending a rampaging murderer. The shooting, justified by self-defense, shakes the young FBI agent to her core. Devastated, Odessa is placed on desk leave pending a full investigation. But what most troubles Odessa isn't the tragedy itself -- it's the shadowy presence she thought she saw fleeing the deceased agent's body after his death.

Questioning her future with the FBI and her sanity, Hardwicke accepts a low-level assignment to clear out the belongings of a retired agent in the New York office. What she finds there will put her on the trail of a mysterious figure named Hugo Blackwood, a man of enormous means who claims to have been alive for centuries, and who is either an unhinged lunatic, or humanity's best and only defense against unspeakable evil.

From the authors who brought you The Strain Trilogy comes a strange, terrifying, and darkly wondrous world of suspense, mystery, and literary horror. The Hollow Ones is a chilling, spell-binding tale, a hauntingly original new fable from Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro and bestselling author Chuck Hogan featuring their most fascinating character yet.

[salty-horse]

The Ones Who Got Away by Stephen Graham Jones is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
New reissue by Open Road of a 2010 collection.
I'm currently listening to this Chthonica interview which mentions some of the stories in it.

Stephen Graham Jones takes familiar horror tropes—zombies, camping mishaps, damaged children—and intertwines them with the dark forces of human nature to create unique and unforgettable short fiction. These thirteen tales run the gamut, immersing you in worlds you think you’ve seen before, but with outcomes you’ll never see coming.

In “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” a dad and his child are lost in a snowstorm and learn what the true cost of survival is. A snake-oil salesman makes his way across Arizona territory, peddling his wares to unsuspecting customers—and leaving ghost towns in his wake—in “Lonegan’s Luck.” While in “Raphael,” four twelve-year-old outcasts, seemingly invisible to everyone around them, make up a “scare” club, pushing themselves further and further into the unthinkable.

As Laird Barron says in his introduction, “The Ones Who Got Away is a slippery collection; it resists and gnaws at the bonds of genre, yet may be the most pure horror book I’ve come across.”

Jump in and hold on for your life . . .

[ZodWallop]

The Night Parade by Ronald Malfi is $2 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

One man’s gifted daughter may be the cure to a mysterious illness causing hallucinations and death in this horror novel by the author of Little Girls.

First the birds disappeared.

Then the insects took over.

And the madness began . . .

They call it Wanderer’s Folly—a disease of delusions, of daydreams and nightmares. A plague threatening to wipe out humanity.

After two years of creeping decay, David Arlen woke up one morning thinking that the worst was over. By midnight, he’s bleeding and terrified, his wife is dead, and he’s on the run in a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter, who may be the key to a cure.

Ellie is a special girl. Deep. Insightful. And she knows David is lying to her. Lying about her mother. Lying about what they’re running from. And lying about what he sees when he takes his eyes off the road . . .

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock is $3 at Amazon. Full price elsewhere

This one has been on my wishlist after seeing some good reviews of it on YouTube.

On sale again, this time on Kobo as well. (US, WW)

[Kieran Seymour]

It looks like the Stephen King price reductions have started up again in the UK after a bit of a break. Amazon UK and Kobo

Mr Mercedes - 99p (monthly deal)

The following are all down to £2.99:
Cujo
Danse Macabre (non-fiction)
The Dead Zone
Desperation
Firestarter
Lisey's Story (been this price for months)
Sleeping Beauties (with Owen King)
Stephen King Goes to the Movies

[ZodWallop]

A couple of Christopher Golden spooky books are on sale:

Road of Bones - $3: Amazon, Kobo US

An American documentarian travels a haunted highway across the frozen tundra of Siberia in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones, a “tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell” (Stephen King) supernatural thriller.

Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.

But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.

Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl—and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be.

Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.

All Hallows - $2: Amazon, Kobo US

New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden is best known for his supernatural thrillers set in deadly, distant locales...but in this suburban Halloween drama, Golden brings the horror home.

It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man.

There’s a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn’t belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?

All Hallows. The one night when everything is a mask...

[Cactus Chef]

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes -- and the stuff of nightmare.

Got an eReaderIQ ping on this one this morning. Apparently it was on my watchlist.

[ZodWallop]

Holly by Stephen King is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and resourceful characters, returns in this chilling “exploration of grief and delusion, just pure undistilled evil” (New York magazine) as she uncovers the truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency, hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly Gibney is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just passed away. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny’s desperate voice makes it impossible to turn her down.

Meanwhile, mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are also harboring a shocking, unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to…for they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless. Now Holly must summon all of her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver these unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries in this chilling and unforgettable masterwork from Stephen King.

[SomeSteve]

The Best of Richard Matheson (Penguin Classics) is $1.99 at Kobo US and Amazon US, and around that price at some other Amazon sites.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the...chard-matheson

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Richard-.../dp/B06X17X26D

[salty-horse]

The Wilding by Ian McDonald is £3 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
McDonald's latest novel.

Strange things have been happening at Lough Carrow.

Local villagers have told dark rumours about the vast peat bog ever since the huge project to rewild it began.

Strange tracks have been seen leading into and out of the site. Livestock has been mutilated in the area. And on their trek to a camp site in the heart of the bog some of Lisa's group - five teenagers and three teachers she's guiding on a wilderness experience - spot wolves, wolverines, and something that looks older and scarier than either . . . even though Ireland's lost wild animals are yet to be introduced to the park . . .

They have planned one cosy campout in this strange wilderness, where time and space themselves seems to be shifting, but as darkness falls it's clear they have a very different night ahead.

The camp is attacked.

The campers are trapped.

And something out there has only just begun to hunt . . .

[ZodWallop]

Mr. X by Peter Straub is $2 at Amazon. Straub's take on Lovecraft, though this is NOT a Lovecraftian book. I remember really enjoying it.

Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan has a paralyzing seizure in which he is forced to witness scenes of ruthless slaughter perpetrated by a mysterious figure in black whom he calls Mr. X.

Now, with his birthday fast approaching, Ned has been drawn back to his hometown of Edgerton, Illinois, by a premonition that his mother is dying. On her deathbed, she imparts to him the name of his long-absent father and warns him that he is in grave danger. Despite her foreboding, he embarks on a search through Edgerton’s past for the truth behind his own identity and that of his entirely fantastic family.

But when Ned becomes the lead suspect in three violent deaths, he begins to realize that he is not the only one who has come home. . . .

[ZodWallop]

The Bright Lands by John Fram is $2 at Amazon and Kobo. I read this one last year and would recommend it.

The town of Bentley holds two things dear: its football, and its secrets. But when star quarterback Dylan Whitley goes missing, an unremitting fear grips this remote corner of Texas.

Joel Whitley was shamed out of conservative Bentley ten years ago, and while he’s finally made a life for himself as a gay man in New York, his younger brother’s disappearance soon brings him back to a place he thought he’d escaped for good. Meanwhile, Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark stayed in Bentley; Joel’s return brings back painful memories—not to mention questions—about her own missing brother. And in the high school hallways, Dylan’s friends begin to suspect that their classmates know far more than they’re telling the police. Together, these unlikely allies will stir up secrets their town has long tried to ignore, drawing the attention of dangerous men who will stop at nothing to see that their crimes stay buried.

But no one is quite prepared to face the darkness that’s begun to haunt their nightmares, whispering about a place long thought to be nothing but an urban legend: an empty night, a flicker of light on the horizon—The Bright Lands.

Shocking, twisty and relentlessly suspenseful, John Fram’s debut is a heart-pounding story about old secrets, modern anxieties and the price young men pay for glory.

[ZodWallop]

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus is $2 at Amazon and Kobo.

Named a Best Book of 2023 by Book Riot, Shelf Awareness, and NPR

Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.

The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid’s tentacles and drawn into the whale’s mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out—one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale.

Suspenseful and cinematic, Whalefall is an “powerfully humane” (Owen King, New York Times bestselling author) thriller about a young man who has given up on life…only to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places.

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

This month's FREEBIE from Tachyon Publications:

Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva, by James Morrow.

Not horror.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix is £2 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

‘I did an evil thing to be put in here, and I’m going to have to do an evil thing to get out.’

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. There, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to keep her baby and escape to a commune. Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Every moment of their waking day is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid . . . and it’s usually paid in blood.