Adult Fiction
Sort by:
49 of 458 products
49 of 458 products
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“I didn’t like this, I LOVED it.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Atmosphere and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
A Rolling Stone 10 Most Anticipated Books of the Year • An NBC Queer Summer Beach Read to Devour • A Barnes & Noble Best Horror Book of the Year • A Scary Mommy 11 Most Anticipated Books of the Year • A Them 10 Most Anticipated Books of the Year • A Goodreads Editors' Top Pick of the Month • A Town & Country Must Read Book of the Winter • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Fable Most Anticipated Read of the Year • A Goodreads Readers’ Most Anticipated Horror Novel of the Year • A Book Riot Most Anticipated Book of the Year
A compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the queer novella that inspired Dracula.
It’s the height of the industrial revolution and ten years into Lenore’s marriage to steel magnate Henry, their relationship has soured. When Henry’s ambitions take them from London to the remote British moorlands to host a hunting party, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night. Carmilla, who stirs up something deep within Lenore. And before long, girls from the local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger . . .
As the day of the hunt draws closer, Lenore begins to unravel, questioning the role she has been playing all these years. Torn between regaining her husband’s affection and the cravings Carmilla has awakened, soon Lenore will uncover a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk.
“Hungerstone is a delicious tribute to the inherent horrors of womanhood and the desperate and exquisite vulgarity of desire. This is everything I dream of in a novel.” —Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning and Lady Macbeth
Sometimes, you just pick your poison and pray
Stay the hell out of the swamp - the backwater town of Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment. But when exotic dancer Emmy Joiner sneaks under the dark tree-canopy behind her family trailer, she meets mysterious, tattooed Zara, the first girl she dares to kiss.
But the small-town South hates a woman who dares to dance instead of plucking chickens for minimum wage, and as Emmy's life falls apart, her relationship with Zara grows more tangled and bizarre. Zara's offering something beautiful. But while Emmy's slowly strangling, its price may be more than she's willing to pay.
Shifting between the green-bright cypress cathedral and the dreamland of a dance club, Broadbent's unforgettably-voiced debut confronts the brutal realities of poverty in the South, with a sapphic tale both sultry and sinister, gritty and gothic.
The car speeds up, heading through the tall pines that line the winding road. I feel the vibrations of the music rattling up the door. I turn to face him, and he smiles at me-
"-Izzy...where did you go this time?"
"I was in the woods again...In the Pines." I closed my eyes and mentally repeated the words I had been chanting for the last five years.
"What have we said about it? Use your words, Izzy. It's alright to say them out loud."
"I'm safe, I'm alive, I'm strong, I survived," I said in almost a whisper. But I knew that wasn't completely true...
I wasn't safe.
Once known as a young, rising, Hollywood star, Isabelle "Izzy" Chambers's life was completely turned upside down after narrowly escaping a serial killer. Her formerly busy and vibrant life was now dull and lonely, especially when her once-missing girlfriend, Eyvette, was pronounced dead.
Then, on the fifth anniversary of her homecoming, the rest of the world would soon learn what Izzy knew: that the woods surrounding the mountains of South and North Carolina had become a nightmarish hunting ground for missing women.
"A deceased hiker was discovered this morning in the mountain foothills while another local climber is still reported as missing. This is the third woman to go missing in the North Carolina mountains..."
Now, Izzy is left to pick up the pieces of her disillusioned world while it crashes around her. Riddled with guilt and fear, she struggles to grapple with reality as she's forced back into the woods to help find these missing women. Their very survival could depend on her.
Because there is no such thing as coincidence.
Someone was still out there... preying on women.
All the signs everyone missed.
All the things she knew.
Up-and-coming podcast host Eyvette has spent the last few years of her life trying to put her rural Southern upbringing behind her. And she's just about managed it - she's got a snazzy Los Angeles apartment, a talented actress girlfriend, and a growing online following of her own.
Then, Eyvette's comfortable new world comes crashing down around her. She learns that her childhood friend and first love, Charlene, has been named the second woman to go missing in the woods surrounding her tiny hometown. Eyvette can't help herself - she packs her things and heads back home to the foothills of South Carolina in search of answers.
It's not long before Eyvette realizes she may have bitten off more than she can chew. There are no leads into Charlene's disappearance, and the once-familiar woods now seem wild and menacing. As she ventures farther and farther into the pines in search of answers, Eyvette begins to realize that she's not alone in the woods - and she may be running out of time to find her friend before someone, or something finds her first.
What lies within the pines that surround Traveler's Rest? Where do all the missing girls go? Who can you trust in the woods? Do people truly disappear without a trace?
Lucky Day is the newest novel of terror from Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays, where one woman must go up against the most horrifying concept of all: nothing.
Vera is a survivor of a global catastrophe known as the Low Probability Event, but she definitely isn't thriving. Once a passionate professor of statistics, she no longer finds meaning in anything at all.
But when problematic government agent Layne knocks on her door, she's the only one who can help him uncover the connection between deadly spates of absurdity and an improbably lucky casino. What's happening in Vegas isn't staying there, and the world is at risk of another disaster.
When it comes to Chuck Tingle, the only thing more terrifying than a serious horror novel is an absurd one...
Also by Chuck Tingle:
Bury Your Gays
Camp Damascus
Straight
"By far the best book I've read this year.” ―Roxane Gay
#1 Best Book of 2022 (Vulture) • A Best Horror Novel of All Time (Cosmopolitan) • One of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 (Esquire, Library Journal, Paste, and CrimeReads) • A Top 10 Horror Debuts of 2022 (Booklist) • A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Horror • A Best Book of 2022 (Tor.com) • A Best SFF Book of 2022 (Gizmodo) • A Top 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature (The New York Times Style Magazine).
Manhunt is an explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and trans men on a grotesque journey of survival.
“A modern horror masterpiece.” ―Carmen Maria Machado
Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate.
Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe.
After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.
"A filthy, furious delight."―The New Yorker
Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin:
Cuckoo
Black Flame
Welcome to Rivers Solomon’s dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things―the strange and the unexplainable―began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.
As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?
Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.
FINALIST FOR THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD * FINALIST FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD * FINALIST FOR THE THIS IS HORROR AWARD * HONORABLE MENTION, LOCUS AWARDS * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2016 BY TOR.COM AND BOOK RIOT
A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy, whose family lives on the fringe of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them.
He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his aunt Libby and uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not understand or want them. They are mongrels, mixed blood, neither this nor that. The boy at the center of Mongrels must decide if he belongs on the road with his aunt and uncle, or if he fits with the people on the other side of the tracks.
For ten years, he and his family have lived a life of late-night exits and narrow escapes--always on the move across the South to stay one step ahead of the law. But the time is drawing near when Darren and Libby will finally know if their nephew is like them or not. And the close calls they've been running from for so long are catching up fast now. Everything is about to change.
A compelling and fascinating journey, Mongrels alternates between past and present to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his family and his place in a complex and unforgiving world. A smart and innovative story-- funny, bloody, raw, and real--told in a rhythmic voice full of heart, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, novel that illuminates the challenges and tender joys of a life beyond the ordinary in a bold and imaginative new way.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST EDITED ANTHOLOGY • BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEE FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN AN ANTHOLOGY • LOCUS AWARD FINALIST
A bold, clever, and sublimely sinister collection that dares to ask the question: “Are you ready to be un-settled?”
“Never failed to surprise, delight, and shock.” —Nick Cutter, author of The Troop and Little Heaven
Featuring stories by:
Norris Black • Amber Blaeser-Wardzala • Phoenix Boudreau • Cherie Dimaline • Carson Faust • Kelli Jo Ford • Kate Hart • Shane Hawk • Brandon Hobson • Darcie Little Badger • Conley Lyons • Nick Medina • Tiffany Morris • Tommy Orange • Mona Susan Power • Marcie R. Rendon • Waubgeshig Rice • Rebecca Roanhorse • Andrea L. Rogers • Morgan Talty • D.H. Trujillo • Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. • Richard Van Camp • David Heska Wanbli Weiden • Royce K. Young Wolf • Mathilda Zeller
Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Family secrets. High strangeness. Reality TV.
The Trenholm clan helped found Lower Congaree, South Carolina. Their land is cursed. Their abusive patriarch has croaked. Only heirs who attend the funeral will inherit.
But when Truluck Trenholm suffered his eventually-fatal stroke, oldest son Ash turned the haunted plantation into an enormously successful reality show-with all the attendant ethical issues of profiting off its legacy. Forced to tolerate the intrusion of California producers, grip guys, and cameras, toting a ton of childhood trauma, Ash's brother and cousins have plenty of animosity for each other, along with a strong aversion to the paranormal shenanigans of their childhood home. But when Truluck's funeral goes pear-shaped and the cousins are cut out of his will, Hollywood producers offer the deal of a lifetime: they'll turn the Trenholms into witchy Kardashians with a Southern drawl.
If the cousins walk away, they'll lose everything. But the farm's high strangeness keeps getting stranger. Something's happening on Cypress Bend. And filming might make it worse...
Combining the literary tradition of William Faulkner, Michael McDowell, and Octavia Butler with the shimmered lunacy of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Elizabeth Broadbent's Ninety-Eight Sabers is a Southern Gothic novel about a family determined to stick together as history threatens to tear them apart. This is a book that asks how we live with the past-and how we accept our responsibility for it in the present.
Tamsyn Muir's New York Times and USA Today bestselling Locked Tomb Series continues with Nona ...the Ninth?
A Finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards!
An Indie Next Pick!
The Locked Tomb is a 2023 Hugo Finalist for Best Series!
“You will love Nona, and Nona loves you.” ―Alix E. Harrow
“Unlike anything I've ever read.” ―V.E. Schwab on Gideon the Ninth
“Deft, tense and atmospheric, compellingly immersive and wildly original.” ―The New York Times on Gideon the Ninth
Her city is under siege.
The zombies are coming back.
And all Nona wants is a birthday party.
In many ways, Nona is like other people. She lives with her family, has a job at her local school, and loves walks on the beach and meeting new dogs. But Nona's not like other people. Six months ago she woke up in a stranger's body, and she's afraid she might have to give it back.
The whole city is falling to pieces. A monstrous blue sphere hangs on the horizon, ready to tear the planet apart. Blood of Eden forces have surrounded the last Cohort facility and wait for the Emperor Undying to come calling. Their leaders want Nona to be the weapon that will save them from the Nine Houses. Nona would prefer to live an ordinary life with the people she loves, with Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, but she also knows that nothing lasts forever.
And each night, Nona dreams of a woman with a skull-painted face...
An anthology of original horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award® winners Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from historically excluded backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, "other."
Offering new stories from some of the biggest names in horror as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate reading experience for horror fans who want to examine fear of "the other."
Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual orientation or gender identity, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren't part of the community's majority—and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what's different, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is . . . it's much larger than you think.
In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds have created stories of everyday people, places, and things where something shifts, striking a deeper, much more primal, chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us is really the other, after all?
CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, S.A. Cosby, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, Michael Thomas Ford, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Christina Sng, Denise Dumars, Usman T. Malik, Annie Neugebauer, Gabino Iglesias, Hailey Piper, Nathan Carson, Shanna Heath, Tracy Cross, Linda D. Addison, Maxwell I. Gold, Larissa Glasser, Eugen Bacon, Holly Lyn Walrath, Jonathan Lees, M. E. Bronstein, Michael H. Hanson
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls—a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit.
“A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . deliciously ghoulish.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever—but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.
Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled—or perhaps just grimly exploited—and soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.
A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.
A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2021
A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021
The Stonewall Book Award winner of 2022
Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!
A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.
Vern―seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised―flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.
But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past and, more troublingly, the future―outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering not only the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history of America that produced it.
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals but entire nations. This is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.
RECOMMENDED BY GILLIAN FLYNN ON THE TODAY SHOW • “A lush, seductive Southern Gothic that’s deliciously queer . . . K. L. Cerra’s gift for gorgeous, gruesome atmosphere had me spellbound.”—Layne Fargo, author of They Never Learn
A woman investigating her brother’s apparent suicide finds herself falling for her prime suspect—his darkly mysterious girlfriend—in this “creepy, compelling, and utterly original” (Karen Dionne) thriller.
“Get it out of me.”
It was the last message Holly received from her brother, Dane, before he was found cleaved open in the lavish Savannah townhouse of his girlfriend, Maura. Police ruled his death a suicide sparked by psychosis, but Holly can’t shake the idea that something else must have happened—something involving another message he sent earlier that night about a “game” Maura wanted to play.
Determined to discover the truth, Holly begins to stalk Maura, a magnetic, black-eyed florist with a penchant for carnivorous plants. But what begins as an investigation quickly veers into a fixation that lures Holly into the depths of Maura’s world: Savannah high society, eerie black roses, and a whisper of something more sinister. Soon Holly is feeling a dark attraction to the one woman she shouldn’t trust. As Holly falls deeper for Maura and her secrets, she’s left with only one choice: find out what happened to Dane or meet the same fate.