Small Horrors

Something ancient stirs beneath Meadowvale. Something hungry. Wildlife biologist Stella Hartley returns to her hometown after a career-ending scandal, seeking the quiet life she once knew. What she finds instead are dead rabbits drained of blood. Then, the first human victim appears, and Stella discovers a horrifying truth: beneath her quiet hometown, an ancient hunger has awakened. Every hundred years, it transforms ordinary rabbits into blood-drinking killers that hunt with terrifying intelligence. As the creatures swarm the town and her childhood friend Vincent is bitten, Stella finds ...

After becoming the suspect in the murder of a young prostitute, Deputy Sam Hardy is “vanished” to a temporary post as the sole police officer in Angels and Hope, an idyllic town located in the middle of the desert, miles from any other sign of life. Hardy soon learns that Angels and Hope was constructed as a company town to support a magnificent amusement park - one to rival Disneyland - known as Captain Clive’s Dreamworld. The park is essentially empty of customers. None of the townsfolk ever seem to sleep. And girls seem to be going missing with no plausible explanation.

Nothing can harm them - or can it? There's a house on a hill at the very edge of the small town of Warren's End, a house that no one had any business in building up there. It's been said many times before now, but there's nothing quite like hindsight to bring everything into focus. Morris Stumper never was too good at taking advice, even when that advice could save a person a bushel load of heartache. Unfortunately, this hill was once the site of a cemetery with a ghastly history. Morris, anxious to pay as little money as possible for a home with a view, heedlessly sat his house on the ...

Welcome to Hayfork, Iowa, a peaceful farming community nestled in the heart of a tranquil valley, a town that looks after its own. It’s a place where gossip is king, but secrets are kept from outsiders, and those who are born there live and die at the mercy of the weather, or the forgiveness of the land. Now a strange terror roams the sky at night, a dread horror lurks among the corn, and a troubled widow gives birth to a boy who glows in the dark. Death on the streets and blood in the fields seed suspicion and division deep in the valley’s fertile soil.

Vampire painter, serial killer, an investigator who can see ghosts, a drunk ex-detective, a man who cannot sleep…they all have one thing in common, the peaceful town among the mountains…or is it?

Ivan Turgenev's Ghosts is a rare venture into the supernatural for this writer, and all the more precious for it. The story has all the beauty of Turgenev's language, all the power of his description, and the decidedly chilling feel of a true ghost story.

Shipwrecks are part of life in the remote village of Porthmorvoren, Cornwall. And as the sea washes the bodies of the drowned onto the beach, it also brings treasures: barrels of liquor, exotic fruit, the chance to lift a fine pair of boots from a corpse, maybe even a jewel or two. When, after a fierce storm, Mary Blight rescues a man half dead from the sea, she ignores the whispers of her neighbours and carries him home to nurse better. Gideon Stone is a Methodist minister from Newlyn, a married man.

Every spring in small town Ohio, kids get a touch more daylight, wander a little farther from the front porch, and spend a bit more time off on their own, exploring. One such spring, the Murphy twins were considered an Easter miracle. And now, almost 18 years later—Easter week, 1988—the girls approach their birthday, and busybodies around town get a little anxious. Every time their birthday falls on Easter Sunday, bad things seem to happen, and the neighbors have noticed.

Celebrate fall with four tales of mystery, intrigue, and suspense: Quarantine (Fall): A quarantine reveals dark secrets in a small town. Resonance (Halloween): A mysterious painting triggers strange events on a secluded estate. Duality (Thanksgiving): A group of siblings and cousins work together to help a neighbor on a cold case podcast solve this decades-old mystery of the girl who died twice. A Christmas Proposal (Christmas): Cindra and Keegan are challenged to give humanity the greatest gift: hope for the future.

In Riverton Falls, a small New England town, globe-trotting bartender Celeste Fortune stands in her kitchen puzzling over last night’s frightening dream - a woman at a window, lilacs blowing in the breeze, someone’s hands tight around her neck. Celeste is sure the dream belongs to someone else. Perhaps she has finally broken through to the collective dreams of Dreamland cult. Hoping her therapist and cult leader will help her untangle it, she heads off into the cold November morning to her final appointment with him - or so she hopes.

Osira was born and raised in the insular, suffocating town of Curdle Creek. Stuck in time and entrenched in elusive traditions, Curdle Creek has one particularly strict policy: one in, one out - and one day, it is Osira's turn. Forced into the great unknown, the sinister reality of her birthplace unravels around her. As she comes face-to-face with those she believed were lost, Osira must reckon with all she has ever been told and confront the insidious cruelties of inheritance.

When Emily Hayes arrives in Fairbrook for its annual Festival of Masks, she’s already haunted by her mother’s recent death. But the festival’s dark charm turns sinister when she encounters a creepy mask vendor, cryptic warnings, and whispers that the masks choose their wearers—not the other way around. After finding a bloodstained mask, Emily is pulled into a nightmarish game where festival-goers treat murder as entertainment, and her friends transform into either victims or hunters. As the body count rises, she discovers a horrifying truth: her mother’s death wasn’t an accident...

The Book of Speculation is Erika Swyler's gorgeous and moving debut, a wondrous novel about the power of books, family, and magic. Simon Watson lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home, a house perched on the edge of a cliff that is slowly crumbling into the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a travelling carnival and seldom calls.

Something dark lurks in the swamp behind Emily’s new home. When twelve-year-old Emily moves into her late grandfather’s house in Whispering Pines, she expects the usual new-kid struggles. Instead, she finds herself caught in a decades-old mystery surrounding her grandmother’s disappearance. Her mother’s desperate warnings to stay away from the swamp only fuel Emily’s curiosity about what really happened all those years ago. But as strange events begin to unfold, Emily discovers an ancient presence watching from the shadows—one that has been patiently waiting for her family’s ...

Beneath the Veil In the small town of Watertown, NY, a chilling secret threatens to unravel the lives of its unsuspecting residents. Moira Seymour, the esteemed leader of the local church, harbors a dark alliance with an ancient force that demands terrifying sacrifices to maintain its grip on the town. As disappearances escalate, Moira’s once unquestioned authority begins to crack. Bar owner Bret Morgan can no longer ignore the strange occurrences and sets out to uncover the truth, pulling Detective Dunn, a rational skeptic, deeper into the web of supernatural terror. At the edge of town,...

When Rebekkah returns to her small-town home for her beloved Grandmother’s funeral, little does she suspect that she is about to inherit a darkly dangerous family duty on behalf of Claysville’s most demanding residents – the dead. Everyone in Claysville knows that the Barrows are no ordinary family, but no one can really explain why.

Fate brings together a soldier and a time traveler Breanna is a reasonable woman, she doesn’t believe in things like, teleportation, or time travel. But after months of finding herself in other places, and living through events that haven’t taken place yet, she’s beginning to think there actually might be something more beyond normal. Recovering from an injury he'd sustained in combat, Ethan decides to lay low at his brother's place until he's back to his normal 100%. After seeing a ghost he automatically assumes he's lost it. Then Breanna comes into his life and all the pieces of the...

In the Suds & Duds, the scent of fabric softener masks the perfume of desire—and the whispers of something far more sinister. Mark Jensen thought he’d found a fresh start when he bought an old laundromat in the sleepy town of Pine Grove. But as whispers of a succubus spread and his nights become filled with strange encounters, Mark discovers that desire can be deadly. As his passion for the enigmatic Jenny spirals into obsession, Mark must confront a dark secret lurking in the shadows—one that could consume him and the entire town.

In this short story, Zeke had enough of big city life, but something has followed him to the backwoods. Every predator, natural or unnatural, gets only one chance to learn how dangerous it is to push a country boy in the corner.

A reminder from Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy that one might take great caution when pursuing hidden treasure.