The Vivisectors: A Novel

Missouri Williams

A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance. In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all. Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.

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Scorpion Deep

C.G. Drews

CG Drews, New York Times-bestselling author of Don't Let the Forest In and Hazelthorn, weaves a disturbing and intoxicating siren-call in Scorpion Deep, about a lonely boy who accidentally awakens an obsessive eldritch sea god. The only thing Jonathan Covey wants from the gloomy, moldering isle of Kelcarrow is to leave it. Summer is ending, and his friends are looking forward to college on the mainland, unaware that Jonathan was not accepted to join them. He'll be left behind with nothing but the ocean's haunts and a rising dread of being abandoned. In an act of wild desperation, Jonathan pays a tithe to Scorpion Deep, an eldritch sea god who many of the locals have dismissed as myth. He wants to forget the past, he wants to follow his friends, and most of all he wants to finally escape. To his shock and horror, the ritual works—Scorpion Deep awakens. And despite his terror, Jonathan can't help but feel drawn toward the ageless entity that seems just as mutually obsessed with him. As scales start growing down his spine and Scorpion Deep's adoration of him turns bloody, Jonathan realizes the only way to end the nightmare is to destroy the monster one way or another. But once a god has awoken, the only way to be free is to pay a price of blood.

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There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel

Jason Pargin

A massive, sticky pile of severed human limbs suddenly appears in the parking lot of a vacant department store in a desolate small town. A set of footprints is found trailing away in the snow, as if a single pair of bare feet had wandered off the pile. If this wasn’t puzzling enough, the cops soon find that no one seems to be missing the limbs. Some of the fingerprints on the severed arms belong to living people with all their appendages intact, others match no one on file, and the rest of the limbs somehow have no prints at all. This sounds like a case for local weirdos John, David, and Amy, partly because the cops don’t want the headache and partly because David’s own arm is in the pile, despite an identical copy of it still being attached to his body. When a mysterious man then shows up at David’s home claiming to be in pursuit of an entity he calls “the Penetrator,” it seems clear the trio is in for a long weekend. In addition to stopping whatever this nonsense is, the gang will also have to quell the panicked headlines that threaten to ensue, which could prompt the feds to try to just wipe the whole town off the map (again). As such, the first thing you need to know is that, contrary to whatever ugly rumors you may have heard, there are no giant crabs in this novel.

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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems. First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.

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About a Place in the Kinki Region

Sesuji

My friend is missing. When he disappeared, he’d been working on a magazine about the paranormal—his first real job as an editor. With almost no budget, he’d resorted to digging through back issues and unused research material, looking for inspiration. As he did, a terrifying truth began to emerge about a certain place in the Kinki region. I have collected the relevant articles, interviews, and other materials in this book. And once you have understood everything, I would like to ask for your cooperation. I hope you will get in touch.

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Draugr

Klas Persson

DRAUGR A VIKING FOLK-HORROR SAGA DRAUGR is Klas Persson's debut folk-horror novel depicting a group of warriors searching the wilderness in Viking Age Sweden for a lost missionary, but are instead themselves hunted by a supernatural horror. ABOUT ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO... There was a time when the pagan gods clashed against the new religion of Christ. There was a time when the seid crones performed heathen sorcery inside their dusty hovels. There was a time when the dark beings of ancient horrors still stalked the night. In viking age, Sweden, a missionary bishop goes missing somewhere deep inside Eyeskogamörk, a vast forest that made a natural border between the South and the still pagan North. To find him, or his murderers, they send Hakon Grettirson—famed warrior and lord of Sigtuna. With him, he brings his troubled foster daughter, Nanna. Born in the dark North and plagued with visions and dreams of her pagan past. This is the first time any of them will have entered these dark parts since the harsh Christinization attempts made years earlier during the reign of Anund Jakob the Coalburner. Inside the darkness of Eyskógamörk they will both encounter the demons of their past. But also an ancient evil, lurking in the shadows. The aptrganga The walking dead The DRAUGR Draug slips into the abyss of madness and mayhem, blood and butchery. It holds tight to its ebony black fantasy while saturating itself in a grim sense of reality.

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The Nonexistent Knight

Italo Calvino

The Nonexistent Knight (Italian: Il cavaliere inesistente) is an allegorical fantasy novella by Italo Calvino, first published in Italian 1959 and in English translation in 1962. The tale explores questions of identity, integration with society, and virtue through the adventures of Agilulf, a medieval knight who exemplifies chivalry, piety, and faithfulness but exists only as an empty suit of armour.

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Crossroads

Laurel Hightower

How far would you go to bring back someone you love? When Chris's son dies in a tragic car crash, her world is devastated. The walls of grief close in on Chris's life until, one day, a small cut on her finger changes everything. A drop of blood falls from Chris's hand onto her son's roadside memorial and, later that night, Chris thinks she sees his ghost outside her window. Only, is it really her son's ghost, or is it something else—something evil? Soon Chris is playing a dangerous game with forces beyond her control in a bid to see her son, Trey, alive once again.

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Beneath the Salton Sea

Michael Paul Gonzalez

Every memory is a recording. Nothing about the Salton Sea is normal. The sand isn’t sand. Just piles and piles of desiccated bones. There are little pockets where life clings on, birds, reptiles, people. It’s an ecosystem of living things that rely on other living things too stubborn to leave. Life forcing itself on death, or maybe the other way around. Dee and her wife Sharon find this out the hard way after making a quick stop at Salvation Mountain to film some b-roll and see the sights out in the middle of the vast nothing. A bizarre rumor of a “crack in the sky” from one of the locals sends them on the hunt for an abandoned yacht club— where they make a discovery that changes their lives forever, and those close to them as well. Could you identify a loved one by their whisper? Beneath the Salton Sea is a cosmic horror technological nightmare transcribing the raw honesty of what makes a family, what breaks them, the difficulties of communication, and the painful joy of memories. If you knew this was the last thing I’d ever tell you, what would you want me to say?

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The Hill in the Dark Grove

Liam Higginson

'Eerie. Dangerous. I loved it' - Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground'Evocative, tender, terrifying . . . Superb' - Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies'Powerful, inventive and gripping to the very end' - Ian McGuire, author of The North Water'A hypnotic tale of twisted folklore that won’t let go' - Scott Preston, author of The Borrowed HillsExquisitely written and impossible to put down, The Hill in the Dark Grove is a haunting and sinister story steeped in Welsh folklore. Moving and chilling in equal measure, it is a story about a lost way of life and the terrifying lengths we go to to protect what we know.Carwyn and Rhian – the last in a long line of sheep farmers – are living out a brutal year on their hillside farm, deep in the mountains of Eryri, North Wales.When Carwyn discovers a buried prehistoric ruin in one of the fields on their land, his curiosity quickly descends into obsession. His wife, Rhian, meanwhile, is confronted with the growing realization that the man with whom she shares her life and home is becoming a frightening stranger.As the harsh winter closes in, Rhian finds herself alone with her increasingly peculiar husband, and the mountains, and the looming megalithic stones.'Vibrates with unease' - Anthony Shapland, author of A Room Above a Shop

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Better the Devil

Erik J. Brown

A harrowing, edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller about a queer homeless teen who, in a bid for safety, assumes the identity of a boy who went missing ten years ago...only to find that his new home is anything but a safe haven—from All That's Left in the World author Erik J. Brown! Perfect for fans of Karen McManus, Holly Jackson, and Ryan La Sala. When a runaway teen is arrested for shoplifting, he's desperate not to be sent back to the hyper-religious parents he knows will never accept him. While at the police station, he notices a resemblance to the aged-up photos of Nate Beaumont, a child who went missing ten years ago—and, in a moment of desperation, he takes Nate’s identity in hopes that it will help him make a quick getaway. Before he can run again, Nate’s family arrives and welcomes him home to a life he never had. As "Nate" watches and waits for his chance to run, he finds that the Beaumonts are nurturing and loving, very different from his own parents. But soon unsettling things start to happen—vandalism, alarms going off in the middle of the night—and it becomes clear that someone knows "Nate" isn't who he says he is...and that the real Nate wasn't kidnapped, but murdered. As he starts to unravel the mystery, he gets ever closer to the devil he may know—and learns he might be their next victim.

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