FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Gotta Ketchum all!

[salty-horse]

Cross-posted to SF&F.
The World Wasn't Ready for You: Stories by Justin C. Key is $2 (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon.com)

Black Mirror meets Get Out in this gripping story collection reminiscent of the work of Octavia E. Butler, which deftly blends science fiction, horror, and fantasy to examine issues of race, class, and prejudice—an electrifying, oftentimes heartbreaking debut from an extraordinary new voice.

Justin C. Key has long been obsessed with monsters. Reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps as a kid, he imagined himself battling monsters and mayhem to a triumphant end. But when watching Scream 2, in which the movie’s only Black couple is promptly killed off, he realized that the Black and Brown characters in his favorite genre were almost always the victim or villain—if they were portrayed at all.

In The World Wasn’t Ready for You, Key expands and subverts the horror genre to expertly explore issues of race, class, prejudice, love, exclusion, loneliness, and what it means to be a person in the world, while revealing the horrifying nature inherent in all of us. In the opening story, “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins,” a sci-fi love story turned nightmare, a husband uses new technology to download the consciousness of his recently deceased Black wife into the body of a white woman. In “Spider King,” an inmate agrees to participate in an experimental medical study offered to Black prisoners in exchange for early release, only to find his body reacting with disturbing symptoms. And in the title story, a father tries to protect his son, teaching him how to navigate a prejudiced world that does not understand him and sees him as a threat.

The World Wasn’t Ready for You is a gripping, provocative, and distinctly original collection that demonstrates Key’s remarkable literary gifts—a skill at crafting science fiction stories equaled by an ability to sculpt characters and narrative—as well as his utterly fresh take on how genre can be used to delight, awe, frighten, and ultimately challenge our perceptions. Wildly imaginative and powerfully resonant, it introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

[ZodWallop]

Abarat by Clive Barker is $3 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

Clive Barker, author of The Thief of Always, delivers an epic battle filled with fantasy and adventure that readers won't want to put down!

A journey beyond imagination is about to unfold...

It begins in Chickentown, USA. There lives Candy Quackenbush, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future might hold.

When the answer comes, it’s not one she expects.

Welcome to the Abarat, a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day. Candy has a place in this extraordinary land: She is here to help save the Abarat from the dark forces that are stirring at its heart—forces older than Time itself, and more evil than anything Candy has ever encountered. She’s a strange heroine, she knows. But this is a strange world.

And in the Abarat, all things are possible.

Don't miss this first book in Clive Barker's New York Times bestselling Abarat series.

[ZodWallop]

The Lost by Jack Ketchum is $2 at Amazon (exclusive)

It was the summer of 1965. Ray, Tim, and Jennifer were just three teenage friends hanging out in the campgrounds, drinking a little. But Tim and Jennifer didn’t know what their friend Ray had in mind. And if they’d known, they wouldn’t have thought he was serious. Then they saw what he did to the two girls at the neighboring campsite—and knew he was dead serious.

Four years later, the sixties were drawing to a close. No one ever charged Ray with the murders in the campgrounds, but there was one cop determined to make him pay. Ray figured he was in the clear. Tim and Jennifer thought the worst was behind them, that the horrors were all in the past. They were wrong. The worst was yet to come.

[BetterRead]

New $2.99 title from Valancourt Books. Now through May 15.

Antique Dust: Ghost Stories by Robert Westall.

"Dealers are undertakers of a sort. When a man dies, the undertaker comes for the body, and the dealer comes for the rest. I deal in dead men’s clocks, pipes and swords. Passing through my hands, they give off joy, loneliness, fear . . . I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England."

So speaks Geoff Ashden, a regular guy trying to make an honest living as an antique dealer, but who has an uncanny knack for finding cursed objects and haunted places: a sinister Georgian clock carved with obscene and Satanic designs, a hideous doll with deadly powers, a pair of old spectacles that let their wearer see a little too clearly, an ugly house with a terrifying secret, a church full of graffiti scrawled in decomposing human flesh.

In this collection, award-winning children’s author Robert Westall delivers a set of chilling tales for adults and proves himself, as Orrin Grey writes in the introduction, "an obvious successor to that godfather of the English ghost story, M.R. James ."

Note: The second $2.99 Valancourt title is One by David Karp and is posted in the Science Fiction & Fantasy thread.

[Paperbackstash]

Creepy cover!

I think Valancourt, based off the past 3 months, has changed from two monthly deals to changing out their 2 deals every 15 days.

[ZodWallop]

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff is $2 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

Highly recommended. The HBO TV series is also recommended. A rare case where the show was the equal of the book.

The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.

Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.

At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.

A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

[ZodWallop]

The House at Phantom Park by Graham Masterton is $2 at Amazon and Kobo US.

Disturbing. Original. Terrifying. The 'master of horror' is back with the chilling tale of what lurks in the walls of an abandoned hospital.

In this abandoned hospital, pain lives on... and it wants revenge.

St Philomena's military hospital has been abandoned for over three years. Now Lilian Chesterfield is in charge of developing it into a luxury-housing complex.

But as soon as she and her colleagues start work in the mansion, they hear screaming from wards full of empty beds and see faces peering at them from the mullioned windows.

Lilian doesn't believe in the supernatural. But just when she's put her mind at rest by scouring the mansion from top to bottom, a warning arrives. The hospital is haunted. And it is haunted by something a thousand times more terrifying than ghosts...