Small Horrors

The Queen of Spades is decidedly one of Pushkin's gloomier tales. It inspired several movie adaptations and a magnificent opera by Tchaikovsky. Its determined, but misguided, protagonist stakes his life with dire consequences on a very old secret that might or might not even exist.

Recovering from a terrible auto accident just before the turn of the millennium, college dropout and hobbyist computer-game programmer Lucien Swenson becomes the caretaker of a house in Northern Minnesota. Shortly after moving in, Lucien sets out to find a woman with whom he had an affair, who vanished along with money stolen from the bank where they had worked together. His search will take him to Rose of Sharon, a white supremacist church deep in the wilderness, where a cabal of outcasts await the end of the world at a place they call The Land.

Five friends. One vengeful plan. A carnival that knows their darkest secrets. When Lila Moran and her four friends crash on a lonely road, they are trapped in a nightmare where every ride is a test and every game holds deadly stakes. But this is no ordinary carnival—it’s a twisted venue where secrets must be confessed and lies are paid for in blood. A grinning Ringmaster whispers their darkest deeds out loud. Sweet-talking Miss Ruby runs a motel where no one sleeps peacefully. And a silent Strong Man makes sure there’s no escape. As her friends face deadly challenges one by one, Lila ...

It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living alone with her eccentric mother - who conducts seances for the local Ludthorpe community - she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life. When the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. But Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep. Then Lucy goes missing.

It is 1953, and Melbourne society is looking forward to coronation season, the grand balls and celebrations for the young queen-to-be. Tilly Dunnage is, however, working for a pittance in a second-rate Collins Street salon. Her talents go unappreciated, and the madame is a bully and a cheat, but Tilly has a past she is desperate to escape and good reason to prefer anonymity.

Penny and Hattie, orphaned sisters in a small town, are best friends, bound together to the point of knots. But Penny, at the mercy of her brutal husband, is desperate for a fresh start. Willing to do anything for her older sister, Hattie agrees to help. A match is struck, and a fire burns Penny's marriage to the ground. With her husband gone, Penny is free, and the sisters, it seems, get away with murder. But freedom comes at a cost. More than a year after the fire, a charming young man comes to town. Their love for him threatens the delicate balance.

One night, Annie went missing. Disappeared from her own bed. There were searches, appeals. Everyone thought the worst. And then, miraculously, after 48 hours, she came back. Though she couldn't, or wouldn't, say what had happened to her. But something happened to my sister. I can't explain what. I just know that when she came back, she wasn't the same. She wasn't my Annie. I didn't want to admit, even to myself, that sometimes I was scared to death of my own little sister.

When growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls, aka Cataract City - a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place - one of Jake's closest confidants was his uncle Calvin, a sweet but eccentric misfit enamored of occult artifacts and outlandish conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turned 12, Calvin invited him to join the "Saturday Night Ghost Club" - a seemingly lighthearted project to investigate some of Cataract City's more macabre urban myths.

This lovely and nevertheless rather spooky tale by Nikolai Gogol is rooted in Ukrainian lore. It starts quite ordinary - a young man is in love with a beautiful young girl, but other people and unforeseen circumstances stand in the way of their happiness. Quite unexpectedly, our young hero receives an offer of help from a very unlikely source.

While making rounds in an old palace, a devout, dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution meets an unexpected visitor and gets to hear his thoughts on the latest events and allocation of power.

Mayhem explodes when monsters mix with guns, rednecks and beer. Craig Nybo's second novel, Small Town Monsters, visits the town of DePalma Beach, Montana, a peaceful lake community with a five-star rating in any tour travel guide. Monster hunter isn't in the job description when Kurt McCammus, a Los Angeles homicide detective, leaves the big city and all its violence behind to take a job as chief of police in DePalma Beach. He falls in love with the clean air and peaceful community. That is until a local rancher finds 50 head of sheep mutilated on his spread.

Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past. But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom soon finds himself unable to resist.

She thought she had escaped the past. She was wrong . . .16-year-old Kitty has worked hard to get her life back on track after years of traumatic abuse at the hands of her stepfather. And with the support of her boyfriend Aaron and her best friend Lexi, she really starts to believe she can put the past behind her for good. Until girls at her school start getting assaulted. Someone is stalking and targeting her friends one by one. The local sheriff has no idea who the attacker is or how to find him. Which means Kitty must try to discover the identity of this masked serial rapist herself, ...

Welcome to Pearl, a town obsessed with Halloween: the spooky decorations, the costumes, the candy. No one seems to notice that every October 31st, a kid goes missing. Mason Miller does, though. Somehow he’s the only one who has any memory the person existed at all. When Mason’s sister, Meg, vanishes while they’re trick-or-treating, Mason and his friends are pulled into an underworld where monsters roam the streets. They need to fight the evil taking over Pearl, but none of them know the true danger they're facing.

They’re not undead; they’re just angry… The DataMind meditation app has revolutionized the world, making people smarter, happier, and more productive. But a programming glitch in the final update causes billions of users to experience uncontrollable rage and aggression. Nick, an ordinary high school senior in Fairbanks Alaska, is suddenly thrust into this life or death arena. He and his brother must escape the zombie-like hordes of blood-thirsty maniacs and seek refuge north of the arctic circle. The four-hundred-mile journey tests the boys, their wits, and their trust in each other. ...

When five friends are invited to a religious celebration in a small, isolated town, they are initially showered by the townsfolk with gifts and attention. As the days go by, however, it becomes clear that the community is not as innocuous as it initially presented itself. Mysterious, robed figures violently beat people who express different opinions, strange rituals take place in the church at night, and armed gunmen patrol the town perimeters–all under Prophet Martin’s orders.

When Lady Mae turns eighteen, she’ll inherit her mother’s ghastly job as the Butcher: dismembering Settlement Five’s guilty criminals as payment for their petty crimes. But then their leaders, known as the Deputies, come to Lady Mae’s house, and there in the living room they murder her mother for refusing to butcher a child. Within twenty-four hours, now alone in the world, Lady Mae begins her gruesome job. But a chance meeting years later puts her face to face with the Deputy that murdered her mother.

Why would flesh-eating monsters leave a body untouched? The answer lies at Storm Lake, and it might cost Protector Rachel Needham her life... Twelve years ago thirteen-year-old Rachel Needham lost her mother to the claws and fangs of the grendels, Storm Lake’s monsters. Now, Rachel leads teams of protectors into the forests to eradicate the scourge that has spread around the world. Then an old friend, now a reporter, comes to her with a request: help him uncover the creatures’ origins. Rachel agrees to take the mission and brings her team along. They enter the forests around Storm Lake,...

A TOWN ON THE EDGE OF THE UNKNOWN. A WOMAN ON THE BRINK OF SANITY. A DARKNESS THAT WILL NOT BE CONTAINED. On a quiet Halloween night in 1957, Jimmy Ray Barton and his pregnant wife, Sharon Rose, encounter something beyond their comprehension—a glowing green cloud that drags their truck off the road and sets off a horrifying chain of events. By morning, Jimmy Ray is dead, Sharon’s memories are shattered, and her sanity hangs by a thread. Was it an accident, a crime of passion, or the work of something otherworldly? But Sharon isn’t the only one in Clairton, Pennsylvania, struggling ...

Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky's beautifully written and powerful take on the age-old question: "What would happen if you received exactly what you wanted?"