Thursday, September 13, 2018

September Reading List #Mystery #Horror #Dark Fantasy #Zombie


The trees are hinting at their Fall colors here in the Midwest. Halloween is near. That means it's time to get some new books for your inside reading pleasure! A bunch of new ones are coming out, too! Next time, I'll have a bunch of horror and dark books for October!

Dark Fantasy
 Darkbeam, Part II, (Book 2, Dragonian Series), (Pre-order - Releases Nov. 6,) Adrienne Woods -  Everyone knows the Rubicon is predestined for evil, and the alpha dragon does nothing to change their opinions of him. What they don't know is that he harbors a secret, a secret that can set him free, but also trap him forever. Refusing to give in to that which can lead him to a path of freedom, Blake Leaf allows the darkness to attempt to claim his soul. But there is always a shining light somewhere, and sometimes it's just too dark to see it. Will Blake find his way back to light, or is it too late for him? Darkbeam Part II is about the events of Thunderlight and Frostbite (Book 2 and 3 in The Dragonian Series) told from Blake Leaf's point of view. 

Horror Anthologies

   


A World of Horror, Eric. J. Guignard, Editor - Twenty-two new dark and speculative horror stories from around the globe exploring myths, monsters, fables and fears from the authors' homelands. Includes illustrations.

Best Horror of the Year, Ellen Datlow, Editor - Includes: Introduction: Summation 2017—Ellen Datlow; Better You Believe—Carole Johnstone; 
Liquid Air—Inna Effress; Holiday Romance—Mark Morris
Furtherest—Kaaron Warren; Where’s the Harm?—Rebecca Lloyd
Whatever Comes After Calcutta—David Erik Nelson; A Human Stain—Kelly Robson
The Stories We Tell about Ghosts—A. C. Wise; Endoskeletal—Sarah Read
West of Matamoros, North of Hell—Brian Hodge; Alligator Point—S. P. Miskowski
Dark Warm Heart—Rich Larson; There and Back Again—Carmen Maria Machado
Shepherd’s Business—Stephen Gallagher; You Can Stay All Day—Mira Grant
Harvest Song, Gathering Song—A. C. Wise; The Granfalloon—Orrin Grey
Fail-Safe—Philip Fracassi; The Starry Crown—Marc E. Fitch
Eqalussuaq—Tim Major; Lost in the Dark—John Langan; Honorable Mentions


Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 3 - Randy Chandler, Cheryl Mullenax, Editors - Twenty stories of hardcore darkness from authors Tim Waggoner, Brian Hodge and others. 
Horror

** Check out NPR's list of 100 Best Horror Novels.


The Last Hellfighter, Thomas S. Flowers In the year 2044, reporters from the Public Relations Ministry gather at the home of Benjamin Harker, Black WWI fighter, the last surviving member of the Harlem Hellfighters turned vampire hunter. At the age of 144, he is the oldest recorded man alive. Hidden among them, Clyde Bruner is looking for a different kind of story. Across the United States, despite the Great Walls and patrol drones built to keep America secure, something has found its way in. And now towns are vanishing during the night. Entire populations, gone. Only to return after the sun sets, changed, unholy, and lethal. And whatever this evil is, its spreading west. 


Mystery

 Past and Present, A Marketville Mystery, Judy Penz Sheluk - (Pre-order, Releases Sept. 21) Sometimes the past reaches out to the present...
It’s been thirteen months since Calamity (Callie) Barnstable inherited a house in Marketville under the condition that she search for the person who murdered her mother thirty years earlier. She solves the mystery, but what next? Unemployment? Another nine-to-five job in Toronto?
   Callie decides to set down roots in Marketville, take the skills and knowledge she acquired over the past year, and start her own business: Past & Present Investigations. She and her new business partner pa
rtner, best friend Chantelle Marchand, get their first client: a woman who wants to find out everything she can about her grandmother, Anneliese Prei, and how she came to a “bad end” in 1956. It sounds like a perfect first assignment. Except for one thing: Anneliese’s past winds its way into Callie’s present, and not in a manner anyone—least of all Callie—could have predicted.  



                           Mystery  - Historical - Paranormal


 I Am Number 13 (Nowhere Series), Andra Watkins - (Pre-order, Releases Nov. 13When Emmaline Cagney’s father dies on her graduation day, she foregoes college and heads to Honduras to volunteer with Nicaraguan refugees. It’s 1986. The Sandinista-Contra war rages in the jungles all around her. But when General James Wilkinson reenters her life during a hurricane, can she trust him? Or should she flee?
   Because of his unsolved death, Wilkinson is stuck in an in-between world called Nowhere, a place he’s always used for his evil designs. Will he stick to his mission to help the Contras? Or will he ditch his mission to finally possess Emmaline?

Mystery - Historical 

The Innocents (Innocents Mystery Series Book 1), C.A. Asbrey Pinkerton Detective Abigail MacKay is a master of disguises—and of new crime-solving technology! But she’ll have to move fast to stay a step ahead of Nat Quinn and Jake Conroy. 
    Nat and Jake are the ringleaders of The Innocents, a western gang that specializes in holding up trains carrying payrolls—and Nat is pretty savvy when it comes to using the new sciences of 1868 in committing his crimes. Charismatic Nat and handsome Jake are on the run, and they’ve always gotten away before—before Abi. But when Abi is caught by another band of outlaws during the chase, there’s no other choice for Nat and Jake but to save her life. Abi owes them, and she agrees to help them bring in the murderer of a family friend. The web of criminal activity grows more entangled with each passing day, but Nat, Jake, and Abi are united in their efforts to find the murderer. Once that happens, all bets are off, and Abi will be turning Nat and Jake over to the law. But can she do it?


Speculative Fiction

The Rust Maidens, Gwendolyn Kiste , (Pre-order, Releases Nov. 16)Something’s happening to the girls on Denton Street. It’s the summer of 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio, and Phoebe Shaw and her best friend Jacqueline have just graduated high school, only to confront an ugly, uncertain future. Across the city, abandoned factories populate the skyline; meanwhile at the shore, one strong spark, and the Cuyahoga River might catch fire. But none of that compares to what’s happening in their own west side neighborhood. The girls Phoebe and Jacqueline have grown up with are changing. It starts with footprints of dark water on the sidewalk. Then, one by one, the girls’ bodies wither away, their fingernails turning to broken glass, and their bones exposed like corroded metal beneath their flesh. Soon government men to tourist arive to see the "Rust Maidens" in metamorphosis. 
    Whispering in secret, they know more than they’re telling, and Phoebe realizes her former friends are quietly preparing for something that will tear their neighborhood apart. Alternating between past and present, Phoebe struggles to unravel the mystery of the Rust Maidens—and her own unwitting role in the transformations—before she loses everything she’s held dear: her home, her best friend, and even perhaps her own body.

                                                        Supernatural Spy Thriller

The Judas Hit, - W.D. Gagliani James Bond meets Constantine with sly dark humor and kick-ass action sequences set against a Dan Brown-flavored background. It's all action with a hefty serving of the supernatural. 
    Playboy lady-killer, lover, assassin, immortal (almost), Betrayer...if the shadowy Vatican Secret Service used the double-0 tag, he'd be 008. This century he's just known as Simon Pound. But Simon has a secret--he is Judas Iscariot, who made a certain Deal right after putting the rope around his own neck. Now an expert assassin for the VSS, his assignment is to guard against evil and protect the papacy from its enemies. Most of his missions are routine assassinations, but occasionally Simon also assumes the role of avenger and executioner. So what's a vile religious artifact--that had once been safely locked away in the famed secret Vatican archives--doing beneath a mall construction site in Queens?

Terrorist- Thriller

Deep Silence, A Joe Ledger Novel #10, Jonathan Maberry (Pre-order, Releases Oct. 30) Terrorists-for-hire have created a weapon that can induce earthquakes and cause dormant volcanoes to erupt. One terrifying side-effect of the weapon is that prior to the devastation, the vibrations drive ordinary people to suicide and violence. A wave of madness begins sweeping the country beginning with a mass shooting in Congress. Joe Ledger and his team go on a wild hunt to stop the terrorists and uncover the global super-power secretly funding them. At every step the stakes increase as it becomes clear that the end-game of this campaign of terror is igniting the Yellowstone caldera, the super-volcano that could destroy America.

    Deep Silence pits Joe Ledger against terrorists with bleeding-edge science weapons, an international conspiracy, ancient technologies from Atlantis and Lemuria, and an escalating threat that could crack open the entire Earth.

Zombie

Jillybean & the First Giants: An Undead World Expansion, Peter Meredith - Six-year-old Jillybean finds herself alone for the first time in months. She’s in between wars, assassins aren’t after her, and she hasn’t killed anyone, accidentally or on purpose in almost an entire week. What ever will she do with herself?   If you know anything about Jillybean the answer is unsurprising: She destroys a million-dollar racing car, sets a town on fire, falls in love, and awakens the first of the hideous giant zombies that will eventually come to rule the world and drive humanity into the sewers where they will scrounge like rats, pecking out a bleak existence. 



Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter, C.A. Verstraete - Every family has its secrets…
    One hot August morning in 1892, Lizzie Borden picked up an axe and murdered her father and stepmother. Newspapers claim she did it for the oldest of reasons: family conflicts, jealousy and greed. But what if her parents were already dead? What if Lizzie slaughtered them because they’d become… zombies?
    ** Continue the story in book two, Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter 2: The Axe Will Fall 
*
Night of the Living Dead Coloring Book with 24 illustrations inspired by the classic Romero movie. Join in on the Kickstarter. 


3 comments:

  1. Awesome reading list, thanks for including Past & Present!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm assuming you'll need a couple extra red crayons for the Night of the Living Dead coloring Book.

    ReplyDelete

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