Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …
Coming 28 January, from writer Steve Stred and Black Void Publishing, Mastodon
17 years ago, Tyler Barton was born in the Rocky Mountains, while his parents were on a hike. On that day, his mother disappeared, never to be seen again. Now, history repeats itself. On the 17th anniversary of her disappearance, Tyler’s father is flying home when the plane he’s on disappears – in the same area where his mother was last seen. Undeterred by officials, Tyler decides to hike into the area in search of his father, hoping to find him alive and bring him back to safety. But there’s a reason that area is prohibited to enter and even though Tyler doesn’t care, he’ll soon find out that the wilderness can hide some of the deepest, darkest fears known to man. From the author of Incarnate, The Window In the Ground and Ritual comes a new novel that’ll make you rethink your Summer hiking trip. Available to pre-order in eBook, with a paperback to follow soon, you can guarantee your copy here.
Arriving 28 January from St. Martin’s Press and writer Christopher Golden, Road of Bones, a novel
Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common. But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road. Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl–and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be. Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past. Available 28 January in hardcover format, with other editions to follow, you can pre-order your copy here.
Creeper, the new horror novel from author Stuart James, coming 27 December
He’s known as Painswicks own Bogeyman. Parents tell their children that Creeper will come if they’re naughty. Adults continually look over their shoulders. It’s said that he hides out front late at night or crawls around in the basement. Others believe Creeper watches them as they sleep. Eight women have gone missing over the last twenty years. They’re known as the Painswick eight. Now, a ninth woman has vanished. Billy Huxton, an ex-private investigator, resides at a retirement home and tries to persuade the local, flamboyant entertainer, Declan Ryan, to help him solve the case. Sean and Jenny make documentaries, creepypastas, the paranormal, and unsolved mysteries. Together with their children, they move into a rundown farmhouse on Gallows Lane. As they begin to learn of Creeper and the terror many believe he brought to Painswick years ago, they begin to make a film, delving into the chilling story. But they soon learn it may not be just a story. Whatever happens, pray you don’t see Creeper… Coming 27 December in eBook, with a paperback to follow soon after, you can guarantee your copy here.
Released 18 January, the hotly-anticipated sixth volume in the Nightmareland Chronicles, Lily, by Daniel Barnett, available for pre-order now
Things have changed. For John Hawthorne and his companions, finished at last with their long drive north, there’s a feeling that wasn’t there before, a warmth both familiar and hard to define. For Gregory Fleck and the Flashlighters, spurred through nightmarish city streets and treacherous mountain passes in pursuit of revenge, the world has become a savage place – cold, hopeless, and brimming with horrors. Things have changed. And in the darkened wilderness of the Wyoming Range, as winter closes in around his brother’s cabin and old wounds threaten to reopen, John must choose between the family he has found and the blood that waits for him—sleeping and awake—in a blue house by the Atlantic Ocean. Lily is the sixth and final volume in the first ‘season’ of the Nightmareland Chronicles, an ongoing serialized adventure horror epic following one man’s journey to reach his estranged daughter in a world claimed by eternal night. Available to pre-order in eBook, with a paperback to follow soon, you can guarantee your copy here.
Available for pre-order now, Mary: An Awakening of Terror, from writer Nat Cassidy and Tor Nightfire, released 19 July 2022
Nat Cassidy’s highly commercial, debut horror novel Mary: An Awakening of Terror, blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself. But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer. Then the killings begin again. Mary’s definitely going to find herself. Available to pre-order in paperback, with other editions to follow, you can pre-order your copy here.
Limited edition, epic novel, The Ghoul n’ the Cape, available now from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Josh Malerman and Earthling Publications
The true first printing first edition of bestselling and Stoker Award-winning author Josh Malerman’s genre-spanning, epic adventure! “The Naught is nigh,” the Cape tells Ghoul in a dark corner of a Manhattan tavern. The Naught – who the Cape claims to be a nefarious celestial entity capable of tipping the balance of good and bad for all on Earth. They must leave at once, travel west. Will Ghoul go with him? Will Ghoul help the Cape outpace this horror while spreading the word of its arrival to all and everyone they meet? So begins the adventure of a lifetime, as Ghoul and the Cape travel across America and beyond, picking up other eccentrics along the way, even as they duck the Naught’s many dark agents: A destructor the size of a planet. A man made entirely of flowing blood. A knife that reflects Time and Space as it cuts. From a haunted jail and a cowboy graveyard, to the home of the most famous actress in the world and the barge as it carries the Statue of Liberty to America, Ghoul n’ the Cape — equal parts thriller and meditation — is about people becoming more than what they thought themselves capable of being, about man’s place in the modern world: a world facing the irrevocable alterations of the Naught. An interstellar story, a slasher story, a late-bloomer coming-of-age story, and an American story, too. An unclassifiable, epic experience that promises to change the titular duo…even as it changes those who read it. With only a thousand copies available, pick up this signed and illustrated edition from Earthling Publications while you still can, here.
KEV HARRISON
