Occult Horror Fiction

Go into Hell, the hot demons said. It’ll be no big deal, they said. I was only supposed to walk through a Hellish Ring or two so we could find out my demonic origin. Easy peasy, Right? Wrong. Now I’m alone, locked up in some freak’s dungeon, and mourning the loss of my demons. Could they have done the impossible and survived the attack? Can they find me here? I don’t even know where here is. And...why the hell do I have wings? I don’t have time for this shit. I need to figure out what I am, where I am, and how to get out of here.

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there. Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black. Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.

Angie DeSaria has spent years of her life trying to have a child. Now, her marriage has crumbled under the strain. Adrift and alone, she returns to her childhood home, a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest, to help try and rescue the beloved, failing family business. Lauren Ribido is a senior in high school. She dreams of an Ivy League education, escaping her hometown and her troubled mother.

In the acclaimed first novel from short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle.

When Cassie's twin sister, Lissa, commits suicide, Cassie discovers she can travel to Hell to retrieve her sister's soul. Cassie thought she knew all about the Hell of legend, but finds Hell has evolved over the millennia into a bustling city full of the damned with looming skyscrapers, crowded streets, systemized evil, and atrocity as the status quo.

Lucas Tappan, a wealthy and eccentric billionaire and founder of Icarus Space Systems, approaches the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute with an outlandish proposal—to finance a careful, scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site, where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1947. A skeptical Nora Kelly, to her great annoyance, is tasked with the job.

An unpopular teenage girl, whose mother is a religious fanatic, is tormented and teased to the breaking point by her more popular schoolmates. She uses her hidden telekinetic powers to inflict a terrifying revenge.

Bigfoot is real. That's what primatologist Dr. Sarah Bishop's father told her before his academic disgrace and untimely death. Now, Sarah is eager to restore her father's good name. Survival show host Russ Cloud is just as eager to boost his plummeting ratings. They'll both have a shot at redemption when they find themselves hired by eccentric billionaire Cameron Carson. After a series of his publicity stunts end in spectacular failure, Carson has a plan to redeem his tarnished image: capture a live Sasquatch.

"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the frist and last time since his stroke. What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson.

Born and raised in rural Alabama, Billy Creekmore was destined to be a psychic. His mother, a Choctaw Indian schooled in her tribe's ancient mysticism, understands the permeable barrier between life and death - and can cross it. She taught the power to Billy, and now he helps the dead rest in peace.

Rory Morris isn’t thrilled to be moving back to her hometown, even if it is temporary. There are bad memories there. But her twin sister, Scarlett, is pregnant, estranged from the baby’s father, and needs support, so Rory returns to the place she thought she’d put in her rearview. After a night out at a bar where she runs into Ian, an old almost-flame, she hits a large animal with her car. And when she gets out to investigate, she’s attacked.

On a foggy winter morning, high school kids Luca and Emma discover the impossible: the wreck of an eighteenth-century ship stranded in a flower field. Emma enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn’t the last to disappear. . . . Soon a government agency begins to investigate, determined to uncover the ship’s secrets before a media storm erupts. They enlist Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult, to unravel the mystery, and he soon realizes the ship could be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened under the sea.

Small town secrets are the most disturbing... and the most deadly. In 1983, four teens got together in the forest surrounding Scab Wood, North Dakota, and did something terrible. Something so horrific, it's haunted them to the present day. But when children begin to emerge from the woods—kids presumed missing and dead for years—the four are reunited one last time against their will to set things right and keep that secret buried. WARNING - this novella contains strong language and violent situations. I'm guessing you got that figured out already.

The 15 stories in After the People Lights Have Gone Off, by Stephen Graham Jones, explore the horrors and fears of the supernatural and the everyday. Included are two original stories, several rarities and out-of-print narratives, as well as a few "best of the year" inclusions.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated - and sinister - than Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast ever could have anticipated. Pendergast, together with his ward, Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton.

Young Fleetwood Shuttleworth is with child again. As the mistress of Gawthorpe Hall, she is anxious to provide her husband with an heir. But none of her previous pregnancies have come to term. Then she discovers a hidden letter from her physician that warns her husband that she will not survive another pregnancy. Distraught over the frightening revelation, Fleetwood wanders the woods of Pendle Hill, where she comes across a young local woman named Alice Gray who is gathering herbs. A midwife, Alice promises Fleetwood she can help her deliver a healthy baby.

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death. Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town.

Three terrifying novels in one collection from master of horror, Lee Mountford. The Demonic: A woman returns to her childhood home to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. But in this house, the ghosts are real. The Mark: A satanic cult. A woman's brutal assault. Can one woman face her darkest fears before a demonic entity is unleashed? Forest of the Damned: A group of paranormal researchers investigate the infamous Black Forest.... What they find is far beyond even their worst nightmares.

Captain Hayward leads the official homicide investigation, while Pendergast, D'Agosta, and Nora undertake a private quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them into a part of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive and deadly hotbed of Obeah, the West Indian Zombii cult of sorcery and magic. And it is here they find their true peril is just beginning.