Something Wicked this Way Comes
As the weather starts to turn and fall creeps up on us, it means more than falling leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, and cozy sweater and scarf combos. It’s the best time of year to read something to scare your pants off and haunt your dreams. You can never go wrong with horror classics like Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, or Interview with the Vampire, but there are always new books to experience to give yourself that thrill. Check out some of these 2019 horror releases that are worth sinking your teeth into.
- The Institute by Stephen King- 12-year old Luke Ellis is abducted in the middle of the night and wakes up in The Institute, a facility that tortures and tests the telekinetic and telepathic abilities of children. Luke is desperate to get out, but no child has ever escaped The Institute.
- The Need by Helen Phillips- A mother of two young children who, while confronting a masked intruder in her home, slips into an existential rabbit hole where she grapples with the dualities of motherhood--joy and dread, longing and suffocation.
- Full Throttle by Joe Hill- A short fiction collection in which Hill creates a darkly imagined odyssey through the complexities of the human psyche. Features “In the Tall Grass”, the basis for an upcoming Netflix feature film.
- A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs- Novella “It Is the Sky” examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself. In short novel “My Heart Struck Sorrow”, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South -which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.
- Stoker's Wilde by Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi- Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde team up to defeat a werewolf on a hunting part and begin a complicated friendship and journey into the supernatural.
- Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky- Kate Reese’s son Christopher vanishes for 6 days, finally emerging from the woods with a voice inside his head. The voice urges him to complete a mission, warning if he doesn’t his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again, and the pair are soon caught in a war between good and evil.
- Violet by Scott Thomas- A shadow has fallen over the quiet lake town of Pacington, Kansas. Beneath its surface, an evil has grown--and inside that home where Kris Barlow last saw her mother, an old friend awaits her return.
- Inspection by Josh Malerman- J is one of only twenty-six students at a school hidden away from the world, and life at the school is all he knows- and is allowed to know. J suspects that there is something out in the world and he's beginning to ask questions. Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, in a school very much like J's, a girl named K is asking the same questions. K and J both work to investigate the secrets of their two strange schools.
- Cardinal Black by Robert McCammon- December 1703 finds Berry Grigsby living as Mary Lynn Nash in a small English village, where she has fallen victim to Professor Fell's involuntary drug experiments. Her mind is quickly deteriorating under the drug's influence, and the only way to save her is a potion book that was stolen in an attack on the village orchestrated by a mysterious madman going by the name Cardinal Black.
- The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher- When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. In doing so, Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather's journal, which at first seems to be the ravings of a broken mind...until she encounters some of the terrifying things he described herself. Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse has to confront a series of impossible terrors--because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they're looking for you.
- The Toll by Cherie Priest- Titus and Davina Bell draw up to a halt at the edge of a rickety bridge with old stone pilings, with room for only one car. When, much later, a tow-truck arrives, the driver finds Titus lying in the middle of the road, but Davina is nowhere to be found.
- The Invited by Jennifer McMahon- A chilling ghost story with a twist: In 1924, a young mother, Hattie Breckenridge, is hanged from a tree in her yard by the town mob, accused of a crime that was actually committed by her daughter. Nearly a century later, the house’s current resident Helen becomes consumed by Hattie's story and the tragic legend of her descendants.
- Will Haunt You by Brian Kirk- This is the story of Jesse Wheeler. He just disappeared a couple of years ago, Rumor has it he had just finished reading a book like the one you're holding now. He's not the only one, either. Supposedly there's a whole bunch of people who've disappeared. but that's probably just a folktale, wouldn't you say?
- A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill- Monsters both figurative and very literal stalk the Turner family. The youngest child, Noah, narrates the family history and the various ways each member copes with the monsters.
- The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: beyond Arkham ed. Leslie S. Klinger- While Lovecraft’s stories are classics, this makes the 2019 cut because this annotated version is brand new. The annotations track Lovecraft’s evolution as a writer and give modern insight into these tales.
