Adult Fiction

Second Edition

Shortlisted for the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

A haunting and horror-filled tale of loneliness, trauma and spiritual yearning from the award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.

After a recent string of disappearances in a small Connecticut town, a grieving widower with a grim secret is drawn into a dangerous ritual of dark magic by a powerful and mysterious older gentleman. Meanwhile, a member of local law enforcement tasked with uncovering the culprit responsible for the bizarre disappearances soon begins to learn of a current of unbridled hatred simmering beneath the guise of the town’s idyllic community―a hatred that will eventually burst and forever change the lives of those who once found peace in the quiet town of Henley’s Edge.

An insidious darkness threatens to devastate a rural New England village when occult forces are conjured and when bigotry is left unrestrained. In this revised second edition, readers can appreciate a terrifying, new alternate ending.

By: Mikaella Clements (Author), Onjuli Datta (Author), 2025, Hardcover

For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, an "exciting new hybrid horror-romance" about queer love in a small town that serves as an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life is a monster ready to possess us all (New York Times Book Review).

Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that's dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. 

Upon Jagvi's arrival, an ancient evil is awakened, and a monstrous force infiltrates Angelina's life. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it — the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?

15+ pages of new, original content, including a glossary of terms, in-universe writings, and more!

A USA Today Best-Selling Novel, and one of the Best Books of 2019 according to NPR, the New York Public Library, Amazon, BookPage, Shelf Awareness, BookRiot, and Bustle!

WINNER of the 2020 Crawford Award
Finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards

“Unlike anything I’ve ever read. ” ―V.E. Schwab

“Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” ―Charles Stross

“Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through.” ―NPR

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead nonsense.

Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, first in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as arcane revenants. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon’s sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead.

THE LOCKED TOMB SERIES
BOOK 1: Gideon the Ninth
BOOK 2: Harrow the Ninth
BOOK 3: Nona the Ninth
BOOK 4: Alecto the Ninth

By: Elliot Gish (Author), 2024, Paperback

“Gish’s prose is as sharp as a scalpel.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Grey Dog is a bewitching tale of the horrors of spinsterhood in the early 1900s, with madness and magic threaded through every sentence.” — Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads and Lullabies for Little Criminals

A subversive literary horror novel that disrupts the tropes of women’s historical fiction with delusions, wild beasts, and the uncontainable power of female rage

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd — spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist — accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past — riddled with grief and shame — has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something old and beastly — which she calls Grey Dog — is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory loosens, and Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, behaving erratically and pushing her newfound friends away. In the end, she is left with one question: What is the real horror? The Grey Dog, the uncontainable power of female rage, or Ada herself?

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

“[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”―Roxane Gay

“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”―Karen Russell

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025
Debutiful • LitHub • CrimeReads • LGBTQ Reads

A “paranoid, self-annihilating” (Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo) horror debut following a woman who seeks refuge at an all-trans girl commune only to discover that demons haunt her fellow comrades—and she's their next prey!

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.

A compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the queer novella that inspired Dracula.

"A dark, sensuous, gothic story of female appetite, ravenous desire and insatiable rage. A blood-drenched, glittering jewel of a novel that I absolutely devoured.” ―Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne and Atalanta

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.

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.

Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted—both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family—and a people—determined to heal from old wounds.

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?

By: Poppy Z. Brite, 1993, Paperback

At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, look for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, longing for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself.

Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds—Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes—are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh.

They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself. . . . 

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

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.