FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

If I didn't already have hard copy, I'd jump on this. I've been thinking of re-reading it (it's been many years) and hearing about her death just makes me want to read it more.

Soon...

I, too, have a hardback of this. Mine is a First Edition, w/DJ, both in Excellent Condition.

[ZodWallop]

The Poison Thread by Laura Purcell is $1.99 at Amazon US.

From the author of The Silent Companions, a thrilling Victorian gothic horror story about a young seamstress who claims her needle and thread have the power to kill

Dorothea Truelove is young, wealthy, and beautiful. Ruth Butterham is young, poor, and awaiting trial for murder.

When Dorothea's charitable work brings her to Oakgate Prison, she is delighted by the chance to explore her fascination with phrenology and test her hypothesis that the shape of a person's skull can cast a light on their darkest crimes. But when she meets one of the prisoners, the teenaged seamstress Ruth, she is faced with another strange idea: that it is possible to kill with a needle and thread--because Ruth attributes her crimes to a supernatural power inherent in her stitches.

The story Ruth has to tell of her deadly creations—of bitterness and betrayal, of death and dresses—will shake Dorothea's belief in rationality, and the power of redemption. Can Ruth be trusted? Is she mad, or a murderer? For fans of Shirley Jackson, The Poison Thread is a spine-tingling, sinister read about the evil that lurks behind the facade of innocence.

The author has several of these Victorian gothic horror novels (The Silent Companions, The House of Whispers, The Shape of Darkness). They all sound promising.

[ZodWallop]

Twelve Gauge by Ronald Kelly is $0.99 at Amazon US. (Originally published by Zebra as Father's Little Helper.)

Includes the bonus short story "Killing Time."

BLACK CHRISTMAS

The citizens of Cedar Bluff, Tennessee, have never recovered from the Christmas Massacre of 1978 ... that tragic day when Richard McFarland, armed with a shotgun, abandoned his wife and son and selected a local church as the stage for a bloody, murderous rampage. McFarland paid for his crimes in the electric chair. Yet not even death will stop him from finishing what he started ...

BLOODY LEGACY

After fourteen years, Sonny's father is back. He'd been away so long that Sonny hardly remembered him. But Richard McFarland remembered his only son. And now he will teach him how to kill. Sonny is about to become a deadly force that will be unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens of Cedar Bluff. For when the time is right, he will return to the small, quiet town, bringing death and destruction on an even more terrifying Christmas Day!

[Kieran Seymour]

For anyone who can shop in the UK...

Misery by Stephen King. 99p.

amazon.co.uk | Kobo

[ZodWallop]

Black Evening: Tales of Dark Suspense by David Morrell is $1.99 at Amazon US.

David Morrell is best known for testosterone-fueled thrillers like Extreme Denial and First Blood (whose excellent movie version stars Sylvester Stallone as Rambo). But Morrell has also penned many frightfully scary short stories. In Black Evening, he presents 16 of his favorites, each with a fascinating introduction explaining what provoked him to write it.

"The Dripping" (1971) came to the author in a dream that most would regard as a nightmare. In this eerie little number, a father faces his worst fear when his family goes missing. Morrell suffered his own family tragedy in January of 1987, when his son Matt was diagnosed with bone cancer. "Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" (the Horror Writers Association's best novella of 1988) was written shortly before Matt's death. Writing about a mad painter kept Morrell sane: "The made-up horror was paradoxically providing a barrier from real-life horror." But after Matt's death, Morrell was besieged with panic attacks, and could do nothing but "stare at the ceiling" for three years. A harrowing story about lost children and a long buried family secret, "The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves" (another HWA award-winner) signified Morrell's return to short fiction. The title is taken from Walt Whitman's poem about death and children; John Rambo's name is a pun on Arthur Rimbaud. Morrell is a genre writer with a poet's soul.

And whether he's writing stories of subtle psychological terror or conjuring up scenarios of pure horror, Morrell never fails to scare the bejesus out of us. --Naomi Gesinger

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by Kieran Seymour

For anyone who can shop in the UK...

Misery by Stephen King. 99p.

amazon.co.uk | Kobo

Amazing to see Stephen King for that price. I assume it was only for a day.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

Amazing to see Stephen King for that price. I assume it was only for a day.

Original post was on the 26th, but STILL 99p TODAY - right now!

Hurry up, get your britches on, wind up your computer, call your bank, and buy that sucker right now!

[ZodWallop]

One of Stevie's sons, Joe Hill, has The Fireman on sale for $2.99 at Amazon US.

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.

The fireman is coming. Stay cool.

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

[ZodWallop]

The Red Church by Scott Nicholson is $0.99 at Amazon US.

I bought this as a paperback original from a grocery store shelf way back when. I thought I'd written a review, but can't find it anywhere. I did like it and recommend it. Just remember, it is a first novel.

THE RED CHURCH

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," McFall preaches, and unless Frank and Ronnie stop him, everybody pays.

The original paperback cover:

[ZodWallop]

Floating Staircase by Ronald Malfi is $1.99 at Amazon US.

Horror writer Travis Glasgow and his wife, Jodie, have bought their first house in Westlake, Maryland, just steps from Travis’s older brother’s home. Travis is buoyed by the thought of renewing his relationship with his estranged sibling and overcoming the darkness from his past. But the house has other plans for him. Travis is soon awakened by noises in the night and finds watery footprints in the basement that lead him to the nearby lake, which has a strange staircase emerging from its depths.

When Travis discovers that a former occupant of his house—a ten-year-old boy—drowned in the lake, he draws connections to his own childhood tragedy. As his brother and wife warn him to leave well enough alone, Travis is pulled into a dark obsession, following the house’s secrets to the floating staircase—and into the depths of madness...

[ZodWallop]

Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum is $0.99 at Amazon US.

Hide and Seek is a book about games. Reckless, dangerous games. Games you might even want to play yourself if you're with the right people. But shouldn't. Not ever. In a small Maine town, a group of thrill seeking college kids finds a game of hide and seek in an abandoned house turning into a reality of stark terror.

[ZodWallop]

A couple of Mark Morris deals available at Amazon US.

The Immaculate - $1.99

Jack Stone thinks he knows all about fear. After all, he's a successful horror writer. But when a death in the family sends him back to his childhood home, he encounters things that even he could not have imagined. The house and town are much as he remembers them, yet there's something wrong, something that can't be true. — All of his childhood fears are waiting for him. Memories long buried come back to haunt him, some taking on a physical form. But there is one figure from his past, dead for many years, that Jack fears the most. The one that hurt him the worst. The one that's most eager to welcome him back...

Horror Hospital $3.99
This is apparently part of a shared fiction universe called Zombie Apocalypse!. But this is a stand-alone and chronologically the first book, so no need to worry about reading a series.

London is in turmoil following riots and the Trafalgar Square Massacre. A doctor in a big East End hospital, already hard hit by government cutbacks and increasing social unrest, starts to get reports of something having happened at All Hallows church...

Then, the first of the injured, including policemen and soldiers, start to be brought in, but the nurses and doctors on the day shift still can't make sense of what the victims are talking about. Soon their resources begin to be overwhelmed.

Some of the injured begin to 'change' and soon the hospital, like so many other buildings throughout the city, is on lockdown. But as things grow increasingly chaotic outside, for those trapped within the old hospital building, both staff and patients, things quickly become infinitely worse as the dead return to life and stalk the corridors in search of flesh.

[Dr. Drib]

^
How would you like to have that guy on the cover of Zombie Apocalypse! Horror Hospital as your personal surgeon?

At least he's wearing a surgical mask!

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

^
How would you like to have that guy on the cover of Zombie Apocalypse! Horror Hospital as your personal surgeon?

At least he's wearing a surgical mask!

I don't think he would be in network for me

[ZodWallop]

The Mouth of the Dark (Fiction Without Frontiers) by Tim Waggoner is $0.99 at Amazon US.

Jayce’s twenty-year-old daughter Emory is missing, lost in a dark, dangerous realm called Shadow that exists alongside our own reality. An enigmatic woman named Nicola guides Jayce through this bizarre world, and together they search for Emory, facing deadly dog-eaters, crazed killers, homicidal sex toys, and – worst of all – a monstrous being known as the Harvest Man. But no matter what Shadow throws at him, Jayce won’t stop. He’ll do whatever it takes to find his daughter, even if it means becoming a worse monster than the things that are trying to stop him.