Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …
Arriving 26 January from authors Carver Pike, Lucas Mangum and Rowland Bercy Jr. and Crystal Lake Publishing’s Dark Tide series, Hunted Highways
Embark on a journey into terror, where every mile is marked by suspense and horror. These three horror novellas transform travel into a treacherous adventure where the next stop could be your last.
In ‘B.I.R.D.S’, a 2023 reimagining of Hitchcock’s classic by Rowland Bercy Jr., a group of friends embarks on a cross-country trip, unwittingly stirring a vengeful avian onslaught. After a team of hunters raid their fortress, Dracula and Lucifer hit the road in search of a new place to call home in Lucas Mangum’s ‘Dracula and the Devil Walk Into a Bar.’ In ‘Road Wrath,’ by Carver Pike, Melanie and her friends are on a fun-filled trip to tour their favorite college campus. But the voyage is about to take a violent and macabre turn.
Everything wrong with the world is wrong with books. When overworked assistant Sylvia Hix finds a strange moss smothering the library books, there’s little to worry about. But when patrons start eating it, gaining direct knowledge of the books, then losing their minds—Sylvia has deep problems. Moreover, her supervisor is a glue addict, her best friend Albert is growing into a giant, and Clara Gamelin, the Library Board Director, is shaping her to be the next ball busting head librarian. It is a job she does not want.
Sylvia is haunted by the moss, because it’s somehow connected to a horrific creature from her childhood. A creature she once named Grasshands and since forgotten. Stopping Grasshands from decaying the town’s mind, the library’s books, and the slow rot of time is the only job now available to her, whether she wants it or not. A novel of biblio-horror, body horror, and melancholic friendship, Grasshands is ready for check-out. Get your library card ready. Available now in eBook and paperback, you can grab your copy here.
Disintegration: the breaking down of something into small particles or into its constituent elements. Fifteen of the greatest minds in speculative fiction come together to explore this concept, with their own unique takes on the theme. From relationship disintegration to age disintegration to dark post-apocalyptic fantasy, these stories weave a web of imagination that encroaches upon our real lives all too disturbingly.
With stories by Tim Lebbon, Angela Slatter, Brian Evenson, Michael Griffin and others, you can pick up your copy in paperback, here.
In an expanded, week long series of events, talks, readings, panels and workshops, The UK Ghost Story Festival returns, run once again by Alex Davis Events. Beginning on 12 February as an online event, the festival continues throughout the weekend, in-person at Derby’s Museum of Making. Featuring authors such as Elizabeth Hand, Emilia Hart, Andrew Michael Hurley and many others, you can check out the full line-up of events and buy your tickets here.
Comedian Jason Hawks carries with him a mountain of emotional issues and an impressive drug habit. When he learns his high school sweetheart went on a shooting spree before turning the gun on herself, he returns home to confront a past that includes a drunken orgy in an abandoned factory and six close friends who never spoke to each other again.
Something more sinister is at work than teenage hormones, however, and what Jason learns as he reconnects with his past will either fix him or shatter him further. And it could send an entire city into an abyss of lust-fueled horror. Available now in eBook and paperback editions, you can pick up your copy here.
KEV HARRISON