FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[salty-horse]

Freakslaw by Jane Flett is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

In this riotous horror debut, a traveling carnival of troublemakers arrive in a small Scottish town and perform their favorite pastime: revenge.**

It is the summer of ‘97 and the repressed Scottish town of Pitlaw is itching for change.

Enter the Freakslaw—a travelling carnival of deviant queers and architects of mayhem. There’s Gloria, fortune teller and worm charmer; her daughter Nancy, a contortionist witch; big-hearted tightrope walker, Werewolf Louie; not to mention illusionists and conjoined twins, Cass and Henry, and tattooed human pincushion, the Pin Gal. Against Pitlaw’s miserably grey landscape, the carnival shines electric and bright, and it doesn’t take long for the town’s teenagers to be seduced by its neon charms and the possibility of escape.

But beneath it all, these newcomers are harboring a darker desire: revenge. Revenge for being cast out, never allowed to settle, punished for purely existing. And as tensions reach fever pitch between the stoic, unwelcoming locals and the dazzling intruders, a violence that has been bubbling for centuries is about to be unleashed . . .

Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love meets Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus in this sizzling debut by a writer as captivating as she is incisive, as wild as she is precise. Read this and try not to run away with the Freakslaw. Go on. We dare you.

“THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING . . . an ode to Tod Browning’s Freaks, Kathryn Dunn’s Geek Love, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes . . . Grotesque, creepy, and celebratory, Freakslaw is sure to be one biggest books of the year (and possibly, one of the defining novels of the century).” —CrimeReads

[salty-horse]

Please delete

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Freakslaw by Jane Flett is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Sounds wickedly, wonderfully joyful.

Got it!

Thank you.

[salty-horse]

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker is $3 in the US (Amazon only ATM, but price-matchable on Kobo)

From the critically acclaimed, USA TODAY bestselling, New York Times Top 100, Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng and Hell to Pay, a lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, following two people living centuries apart who discover a door between their worlds.

October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn't always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.

October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.

One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.

Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

[salty-horse]

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Novella. Translated by Mary Robinette Kowal.

An Icelandic night may hide secrets and affairs – or even bodies – in this gruesomely cathartic horror thriller from the author of The Night Guest.

Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door.

When she tracks down the cat’s wayward owner, she finds a young woman just as lost and in need of help. Like a gust of cold air in a Reykjavík night, Ásta and her pet slip into Unnur’s life.

It’s unexpected, but welcome. Unnur likes the company, and she begins to rely on Ásta in turn. But like a black cat, trouble has been tailing her new friend, and Unnur is the only one there for Ásta when things take a violent turn.

The two women quickly learn: nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands.

[salty-horse]

The Thief of Always by Clive Barker is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true . . .

Mr. Hood's Holiday House has stood for a thousand years, welcoming children into its embrace. It is a place of miracles where every whim may be satisfied. There is a price to be paid, of course, but young Harvey Swick, bored with his life and beguiled by Mr. Hood's wonders, does not consider the consequences. It is only when the house shows its darker face—when Harvey discovers the pitiful creatures that dwell in its shadows—that he comes to doubt Mr. Hood's generosity.

But the house and its mysterious architect will not release Harvey without a battle. Mr. Hood has plans for his young guest, a boy whose soul burns brighter than any he has encountered in ten centuries. . . .

[ZodWallop]

The Witching House by John Everson is $1 at Amazon and Kobo. This is a preorder. It'll release on October 20. But hey, it's a buck.

Angry and alone, Gianna tests urban legend and writes the name Madelyn in blood on the mirror of the Witching House. When the ghost actually answers, she gains an unexpected friend. But soon Gianna learns friendship isn’t what the dead girl wants the most. Madelyn wants revenge for her murder. Can Gianna stop her before half the town is dead?

[salty-horse]

New release. Cross-posted to SF&F.
Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

"Paul Tremblay is on fire. . . . As entertaining and pop-culture savvy as this novel can be, it's emotionally wrenching and truly scary."
—Ed Park, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed, Different Dreams and An Oral History of Atlantis

Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers in this genre-bending near-future tech nightmare that is as bitingly funny as it is horrifically believable from the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie.

Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn’t like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse. One sham interview later, she’s offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state—one with proprietary AI implanted in his head—from California to the East Coast.

To sum up in Julia’s own words: “You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country.” In a word, yes. But he’s not dead dead.

Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn’t remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember.

Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was—and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.

Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a heady, horrific genre-bender from one of the most groundbreaking voices in fiction today.

[ZodWallop]

Wretch: or, The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw by Eric LaRocca is $2 at Amazon or Kobo.

From award-winning horror author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes a haunting and “utterly original” (Booklist, starred review) tech-Gothic thrill ride about sorrow, memory, and the unabashed complexity of love as a transgressive act.

After his husband dies, Simeon Link finds himself overcome by grief and seeking comfort in an unusual support group called The Wretches, who offer an addictive and dangerous source of relief. They introduce Simeon to a curious figure known as Porcelain Khaw—a man with the ability to let those who are grieving have one last intimate moment with their beloved...for a price.

“Immersive and compelling” (Library Journal, starred review), Wretch transports us to a world where not everything is as it seems, and those we love may be the ones who haunt us most.

[salty-horse]

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
Novella-ish. Translated by Megan McDowell.

Amanda knows she has to answer the questions. Lying feverish and unseeing in her hospital bed, she tries her best to account for how she came to be there. She remembers the lake, the house and the strange woman next door with her unthinkable confession. She remembers the fear of losing her young daughter, Nina. Now she is alone and Nina is gone. At what moment did everything go dark?

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Fever Dream is an unforgettable masterpiece of psychological terror from Samanta Schweblin.

‘I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read . . . I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows’ – Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

[salty-horse]

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Young adult.

A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors.

"A long, sustained scream to the various strains of anti-transgender legislation multiplying around the world like, well, a virus." —The New York Times

Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with.

But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC’s leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji’s darkest secret: the cult’s bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all.

Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick’s terms…until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Young adult.

Thanks. Sounds interesting.

[ZodWallop]

Shadowland by Peter Straub is $2 at Amazon and Kobo. This one is pretty popular, though I remember not caring for it when I read it years ago. Maybe it's due for a re-read.

You have been there...if you have ever been afraid.

Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.

Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.

Only one of them will make it through.

[ZodWallop]

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is $3 at Amazon and Kobo.

Enter a darker age with New York Times bestselling author Christopher Buehlman's Between Two Fires, a medieval horror adventure unlike anything on the shelf.

And Lucifer said: “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of heaven down…”

The year is 1348.

Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith?

She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon.

There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

[salty-horse]

Why I Love Horror edited by Becky Siegel Spratford is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Non-fiction.

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Nonfiction
Finalist for the World Fantasy Special Award – Professional

A captivating anthology and heartfelt tribute to the horror genre featuring essays from several of the most celebrated contemporary horror writers including Grady Hendrix, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Josh Malerman, Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and Rachel Harrison.

For twenty-five years, Becky Siegel Spratford has worked as alibrarianinReader Advisory, training library workers all over the world on how to engage their patrons and readers, and to use her place as a horror expert and critic to get the word out to others; to bring even more readers into the horror fold.

Why I Love Horror is a love letter to the horror genre from many of the most influential and bestselling authors in the industry.