FREE/BARGAIN - Horror/Supernatural

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

An interesting suggestion from BookBub:

Only the Devil is Here - $1.99



I haven't read the book yet. But based on the (two) reviews, I did buy it.

That does sound interesting. The sale is past but I've got the sample and will add it to my ereaderiq if I like the writing.

[ZodWallop]

A BookBub discovery that honestly didn't at first appeal to me. However, the reviews sold me on it: The Last Hellfighter by Thomas S. Flowers is $0.99 at Amazon.

Here's the (very long) synopsis. If it doesn't sound great, read the reviews and see if that sways you any.

Ben Harker, Harlem native. WWI veteran. Vampire slayer.

In the year 2044, reporters from the Public Relations Ministry gather at the home of Benjamin Harker, the last surviving member of the Harlem Hellfighters. At the age of 144, he is the oldest recorded man alive.

Hidden among them, Clyde Bruner is looking for a different kind of story. Across the United States, despite the Great Walls and patrol drones built to keep America secure, something has found its way in. And now towns are vanishing during the night. Entire populations, gone. Only to return after the sun sets, changed, unholy, and lethal. And whatever this evil is, its spreading west.

According to a bedtime story Bruner’s grandfather told him when he was a boy, Benjamin Harker has seen this before. He’s faced this scourge. Fought this evil. Survived them. Killed them. From the trenches of the Great War to the jungles of Vietnam to the sands of Iraq, Harker will search his past to save our future.

But as each city light extinguishes across the country, is there no time left to stop what’s coming?

[svenlind]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

A BookBub discovery that honestly didn't at first appeal to me. However, the reviews sold me on it: The Last Hellfighter by Thomas S. Flowers is $0.99 at Amazon.

Here's the (very long) synopsis. If it doesn't sound great, read the reviews and see if that sways you any.

I will try that one. Thank you.

[ZodWallop]

Another BookBub find. Now, most of these things I've never heard of and are typically self-pubbed. I only share the ones that intrigued me enough to buy them myself. As I share these, I haven't read them myself, so check the reviews.

Spike Black's Don't Look Inside is $0.99. He has several other books that have interesting premises, but none are as cheap as this one.

Lizzie finds a tattered old book and is intrigued by its creepy cover. Suddenly the words DON'T LOOK INSIDE scratch furiously into the leather, as if carved by an invisible hand. Lizzie jolts, terrified. She intends to heed the warning. No way in hell is she opening the book now.

But her curiosity gets the better of her. She feels compelled to look inside. Her hands move with a will of their own, opening the book. Her heart hammers in her chest as she reads the first line. No. She reels in horror. What have I done? She should have obeyed the warning. She never should have looked inside. But now it's too late, because the book is about to exact a hideous punishment...

[ZodWallop]

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett is $2.99 at Amazon.

Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map.

In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things.

After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home in Wink, New Mexico. And the closer Mona gets to her mother's past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different...

[pastanley]

$1.99 (US) on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...api_tkin_p1_i1

[ZodWallop]

Here's a quirky one. Brom's Krampus: The Yule Lord is on sale for $1.99.

I'm more familiar with Brom as an illustrator, but over the years I've heard good things about this book. My mother-in-law got it in hard copy as a gift, years ago. But I never borrowed it.

At first glance, this novel’s premise is a bit of a stretch. Krampus, child of Loki and spirit of Yule, is imprisoned by Santa Claus. There’s no love lost between the two. Krampus hates Santa for the betrayal that led to his imprisonment, while Santa Claus believes that Krampus is a relic, far past his time. Enter the hapless Jesse, who witnesses a fight between Krampus’ followers (the belsnickels) and Santa as he’s cursing himself for failing to get his daughter what she wanted for Christmas. His wife has already left him, and he’s sinking into despair. Then he finds Santa’s sack in his bedroom, where it fell through the roof of his trailer. Yes, he gets his daughter what she wanted. Then his wife accuses him of stealing it, the belsnickels track him down, and we get to the meat of the plot: Krampus’ revenge on Santa, which will reveal Santa’s true history and maybe give Jesse hope. This is a surprisingly good story, told with entertaining style and some unexpectedly sympathetic characters, and the illustrations are a treat. --Regina Schroeder

[ZodWallop]

Dan Simmons' The Terror is $2.99 at Amazon.

"Dan Simmons writes with the salty grace and precision of Patrick O'Brian. But in piling supernatural nightmare upon historical nightmare, layering mystery upon mystery, he has produced a turbocharged vision of popular doom." -Men's Journal

[ZodWallop]

John Everson's (a member here!) Violet Eyes is on sale for $0.99 at Amazon.

I picked it up, but haven't read it yet. But I do have several of his books from the old Leisure Horror book club: Covenant, Sacrifice and Siren.

The small town near the Everglades was supposed to offer Rachel and her son a fresh start. Instead it offered the start of a nightmare, when an unknown breed of flies migrated through the area, leaving painful bites in their wake. The media warned people to stay inside until the swarm passed. But the flies didn't leave. And then the radios and TVs went silent. That's when the spiders came. Spiders that could spin a deadly web large enough to engulf an entire house overnight. Spiders that left stripped bones behind as they multiplied. Spiders that, like the flies, sought hungrily for tender flesh...through Violet Eyes.

[ZodWallop]

Douglas Clegg has a collection of collections of his short stories available. Lights Out collects The Nightmare Chronicles, Night Asylum, Wild Things. 700 pages of short stories for $0.99. What a deal!

[ZodWallop]

Richard Laymon's The Woods Are Dark is only $0.99 at Amazon. Like all Laymon novels, this one is a bunch of schlock silliness. But I really did enjoy the book when I read it a few years ago.

Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, this reissue of Laymon's second horror novel (first published in 1981) restores the editorially butchered text to all of its gory glory. In gleefully gruesome fashion, it recounts the ordeal of three different groups of people - hikers Neala and Sherri, vacationing teacher Lander Dills and his family, and local yokel Johnny Robbins-as they attempt to defend themselves against the cannibal Krulls, a forest-dwelling family of inbred savages who for centuries have demanded that the citizens of the nearby burg of Barlow provide them with waylaid travelers for their feeding and breeding. In their desperation to survive at all costs, the seemingly civilized victims find themselves stooping to behavior as beastly as that practiced by their predatory pursuers.

This novel is prime Laymon (The Cellar), featuring characters reduced to appetites both carnal and carnivorous and a plot flensed free of all but the bloody bones of storytelling. While not every horror reader's meat, this savage shockfest is a good example of the pulpy approach that has earned the late author a loyal readership for three decades.

[ZodWallop]

Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist is $1.99 at Amazon. A fantasy author tring his hand at horror, this is the only Feist novel I've read and I have actually reread it.

Phil Hastings was a lucky man—he had money, a growing reputation as a screenwriter, a happy, loving family with three kids, and he'd just moved into the house of his dreams in rural of magic—and about to be altered irrevocably by a magic more real than any he dared imagine.

For with the Magic came the Bad Thing, and the Faerie, and then the Fool . . . and the resurrection of a primordial war with a forgotten People—a war that not only the Hastings but the whole human race could lose.

[ZodWallop]

Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger is on sale for $1.99.

"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

[ZodWallop]

Joe Hill's NOS4A2 is on sale for $2.99 at Amazon

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country.

Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”

Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

[ZodWallop]

Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys is on sale for $1.99. One of three Card horror novels that I'm aware of.

For Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children, the move to tiny Steuben, North Carolina, offers new hope and a new beginning. But from the first, eight-year-old Stevie's life there is an unending parade of misery and disaster.

Cruelly ostracized at his school, Stevie retreats further and further into himself -- and into a strange computer game and a group of imaginary friends.

But there is something eerie about his loyal, invisible new playmates: each shares the name of a child who has recently vanished from the sleepy Southern town. And terror grows for Step and DeAnne as the truth slowly unfolds. For their son has found something savagely evil ... and it's coming for Stevie next.