FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[ZodWallop]

Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

From award winning author Daryl Gregory comes Harrison Squared, a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.
Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.
On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

Got it.

Thank you!

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

This features a character first introduced as an adult in We Are All Comlpetely Fine.
You don't need to read that one to enjoy this, as it's a prequel, and his past isn't a spoiler.

There's also an accompanying Twine game:
https://darylgregory.com/books/harrison-squared/game/

EDIT: The version linked from that page is buggy. Here's a newer version: https://unbox.ifarchive.org/?url=htt...p&open=H2.html

[salty-horse]

Linghun by Ai Jiang is $2 on Amazon.com (It's only available there)
This novella won the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards.

Follow Wenqi, Liam, and Mrs. to the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the dead live again as spirits, conjured by the grief-sick population that refuses to let go.

This edition includes a foreword by Yi Izzy Yu, Translator of The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, the essay "A Ramble on Di Fu Ling & Death" by the author, and two bonus short stories from Jiang: "Yǒngshí" and "Teeter Totter."

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Linghun by Ai Jiang is $2 on Amazon.com (It's only available there)
This novella won the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards.

Wild cover! (I don't know whether to stand on my head or tip the universe upside down!)

I'm going to head back there and get it.

Thank you!

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Wild cover! (I don't know whether to stand on my head or tip the universe upside down!)

Upside-down houses are a trope in haunted house book cover designs, but they're usually reflections.

A scary reflected upside-down house is also featured in the beginning of The Fall of the House of Usher

[salty-horse]

Cross-posting to SF&F.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Today only! High on my wishlist.

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s sure hands, every uncovered secret is fraught with intrigue and creeping horror.”—Tananarive Due, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Reformatory

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.

[Desertway]

Misery by Stephen King is $2.99 at Amazon (US. I don't know about elsewhere.)

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Upside-down houses are a trope in haunted house book cover designs, but they're usually reflections.

A scary reflected upside-down house is also featured in the beginning of The Fall of the House of Usher

Ha-ha! Yes, that's right.

And don't forget how mirrors are used to offer writers an easy way to describe their character(s)!

[salty-horse]

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Complete Collection by Alvin Schwartz is £1 in the UK (Amazon only but Kobo is price-matchable)
This includes the original illustrations, which are missing from some editions.

"A wonderful collection of tales that range from creepy to silly to haunting. ...Gammell's drawings add just the right touch..." -- John Scieszka, Entertinment Weekly "Read these if you dare." -- The New York Times The iconic anthology series of horror tales that's soon to be a highly anticipated feature film! A classic collection of chillingly scary tales, collected and retold by Alvin Schwartz and featuring the original illustrations by lauded artist Steve Gammell. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark contains some of the most alarming tales of horror, dark revenge, and supernatural events of all time. Walking corpses, dancing bones, and narrow escapes from death-they're all here in this chilling collection of ghost stories. Make sure you read these books with the light ON!

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

And don't forget how mirrors are used to offer writers an easy way to describe their character(s)!

It was a dark and stormy night…

Not using a mirror is often high in in the list of writing rules, which are really just advice for beginners, or schoolchildren and are given too much weight.

You do need sensibly used tropes and stereotypes, or else the writing is too alien to the reader.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Complete Collection by Alvin Schwartz is £1 in the UK (Amazon

Oddly I get

No results for your search query in Kindle Store

This link does work here in Ireland (UK is Kindle for Ireland), when logged in.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Some-Exitin...dp/B0BY6QZBK5/
96p

Amazon plays games according to location and cookies and if logged in.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Quoth

It was a dark and stormy night…

Not using a mirror is often high in in the list of writing rules, which are really just advice for beginners, or schoolchildren and are given too much weight.

You do need sensibly used tropes and stereotypes, or else the writing is too alien to the reader.

...and yet some writers - the lazy ones, I might add - continue to do just that.

Oh, and don't forget the reflective pool of water!

(I just came up with a great idea: Using the sweat on your next victim's face...the descending knife...the approaching killer...the slithering snake! BUT WAIT! There's more! Shades of James Bond and the reflective eyeball...)

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Quoth

It was a dark and stormy night…

Don't mock it for its effectiveness. It's in The Three Musketeers. (English, French: C’était une nuit orageuse et sombre)

And while I'm at it, here's the reflected house in The Fall of the House of Usher, where the protagonist hopes that the house would look less scary from a different perspective:

It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.