FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[salty-horse]

Cross-posted to SF&F.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is £2 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
These stories were originally posted to the SCP Wiki, and later self-published by the author. This new traditionally-published edition has been professionally edited, and all mentions of SCP removed. More about the changes.

An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so…

These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you – and you’ll never even know anything changed.

And they aren’t just feeding on us. They’re invading.

But how do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war?

WELCOME TO THE ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION

NO, THIS IS NOT YOUR FIRST DAY

[salty-horse]

Undertow Publications are having a sale, with several titles at $3.
https://undertowpublications.com/ebooks

Of note:

The Best Weird Fiction of the Year: Vol. 1 (2024) edited by Michael Kelly (who manages Undertow) Contents

Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha
Debut collection. Critically acclaimed (by many critics I follow), and was just nominated to the PKD Award.
Has 2 unpublished new stories, and the rest are mostly available online if you want to sample. (Contents)

[salty-horse]

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher is £2 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

Dark and twisted family roots threaten to strangle their home's foundations in this chilling haunted house novel from the award-winning master of modern horror, T. Kingfisher.

In this ordinary North Carolina suburb, family secrets are always in bloom.

Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house.

Inside, everything has changed. Gone is the eclectic warmth Sam expects; instead the walls are a sterile white. Now, it's very important to say grace before dinner, and her mother won't hear a word against Sam's long-dead and little-missed grandmother, who was the first to put down roots in this small southern town.

The longer Sam stays, the stranger things get. And every day, more vultures circle overhead…

[ZodWallop]

The Toll by Cherie Priest is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

From Cherie Priest, the author of The Family Plot and Maplecroft, comes The Toll, a tense, dark, and scary treat for modern fans of the traditionally strange and macabre.

Take a road trip into a Southern gothic horror novel.
Titus and Melanie Bell are on their honeymoon and have reservations in the Okefenokee Swamp cabins for a canoeing trip. But shortly before they reach their destination, the road narrows into a rickety bridge with old stone pilings, with room for only one car.
Much later, Titus wakes up lying in the middle of the road, no bridge in sight. Melanie is missing. When he calls the police, they tell him there is no such bridge on Route 177 . . .

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

The Toll by Cherie Priest is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

This is in the current humble bundle.

[ZodWallop]

Audition by Ryu Murakami is $2 at Amazon and Kobo.

In this gloriously over-the-top tale, Aoyama, a widower who has lived alone with his son ever since his wife died seven years before, finally decides it is time to remarry. Since Aoyama is a bit rusty when it comes to dating, a filmmaker friend proposes that, in order to attract the perfect wife, they do a casting call for a movie they don't intend to produce. As the résumés pile up, only one of the applicants catches Aoyama's attention—Yamasaki Asami—a striking young former ballerina with a mysterious past. Blinded by his instant and total infatuation, Aoyama is too late in discovering that she is a far cry from the innocent young woman he imagines her to be. The novel's fast-paced, thriller conclusion doesn't spare the reader as Yamasaki takes off her angelic mask and reveals what lies beneath.

[salty-horse]

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

**From an author “destined to become a titan of the macabre and unsettling” (Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author), a haunting debut—**soon to be a Netflix original movie—about two homeowners whose lives are turned upside down when the house’s previous residents unexpectedly visit.

As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it” (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).

[salty-horse]

Angry Robot book. Cross-posted to SF&F.
Awakened by Laura Elliott is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

From debut author Laura Elliot comes a tense horror novel emboldened by the surreal, perfect for fans of 28 Days Later and The Quiet Place.

Science has stolen sleep and awakened a world of horror.

“I’ve been an insomniac all of my life, but I’m not Sleepless and I won’t become Sleepless, just as long as the chips that were put into their heads never get put into mine. There’s little chance of that, since I won’t put the machinery into my brain and neither will Edgar and neither will the Professor, and we’re the only three left who could. I don’t want to be Sleepless…”

Civilisation has ended. In a bid to make us more productive, to give us more time, science took sleep from humanity. But sleeplessness turned people into feral monsters and now a small group of scientists are trapped in the Tower of London, consumed by guilt at what they have done and desperately searching for a cure. And then one day, as the last ravens circle, two miraculous survivors walk into the Tower.

Are they the answer or a terrible question?

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Angry Robot book. Cross-posted to SF&F.
Awakened by Laura Elliott is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Got it.

Thank you!

[salty-horse]

Very much not for me.

rekt by Alex Gonzalez is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

**A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, about a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.

“A visionary book that is at once pensive, rollicking, and truly, bone-deep unsettling. Alex Gonzalez's rekt is an absolute stunner.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts**

> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man

Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.

Then a car accident changed everything.

Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.

The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself…

[salty-horse]

Cross-posted to SF&F.
But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The Shape of Water meets Mexican Gothic in this sapphic monster romance novella wrapped in gothic fantasy trappings

The old keeper of the keys is dead, and the creature who ate her is the volatile Lady of the Capricious House⁠—Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides.

Dália, the old keeper’s protégée, must take up her duties, locking and unlocking the little drawers in which Anatema keeps her memories. And if she can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor's execution, Dália might just be able to survive long enough to grow into her new role.

But there’s a gaping hole in Dália’s plan that she refuses to see: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she eventually devours every single bride that crosses her path.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Angry Robot book. Cross-posted to SF&F.
Awakened by Laura Elliott is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Oh man! I was out of the country and missed out on both of these.

[salty-horse]

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Classic queer horror novel from 1996.

From the acclaimed author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes the provocative and thrilling serial killer novel that #1 New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub calls “a guidebook to hell.”

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his own art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim.

Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. With “intelligence, sweep, nerve, knowledge, and deeply unsettling erotic power” (Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk), Exquisite Corpse is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.