In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice? Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

Seventeen-year-old Aderyn ("Ryn") only cares about two things: her family, and her family's graveyard. And right now, both are in dire straits. Since the death of their parents, Ryn and her siblings have been scraping together a meager existence as gravediggers in the remote village of Colbren, which sits at the foot of a harsh and deadly mountain range that was once home to the fae. The problem with being a gravedigger in Colbren, though, is that the dead don't always stay dead. The risen corpses are known as "bone houses," and legend says that they're the result of a decades-old curse. When Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker with a mysterious past, arrives in town, the bone houses attack with new ferocity. What is it that draws them near? And more importantly, how can they be stopped for good? Together, Ellis and Ryn embark on a journey that will take them deep into the heart of the mountains, where they will have to face both the curse and the long-hidden truths about themselves.

Communications specialist Alto’s shift aboard the starship M.G. Yellowjacket turns hellish after waking from a tryst to learn every crewmate has vanished. Worse, a sinister presence has crawled aboard the ship. It’s violent, destructive, and it can reach into your thoughts to make you see and feel what it wants. Anxiety-ridden Alto might be the least-qualified person to face a creature that can hack minds like computers. Only a perilous journey to the ship’s bridge can reunite comms specialist with crew and give them a chance to call for help. But the intruder only scratches the surface of this crisis, and discovering the truth will bring Alto face to face against a nightmare beyond flesh and thought.

OBSOLESCENCE is a collection of short stories about horrifying or fantastical interactions with technology. All leaps in technology are scary. Mysterious. Misunderstood. Until they slowly creep into our daily lives and become impossible to get rid of. Like an evolving parasite. The broken cell phone that can only text with your dead husband. The backyard tire swing that becomes a portal to another world. The Radio Shack Walkie-Talkies that pick up an alien GPS… In OBSOLESCENCE, technology gets repurposed, subverted, and redefined.

What does carrion taste like? Andi has to know. The vultures circling outside her home taunt and invite her to come understand the secrets hiding in their banquet of decay. Fascination morphs into an obsessive need to know what the vultures know. Andi turns to Dr. Fawning, but even the therapist cannot help her comprehend the secrets she’s buried beneath anger-induced blackouts. Her girlfriend, Luna, tries to help Andi battle her inner darkness and infatuation with the vultures. However, the desire to taste dead flesh, to stitch together wings of her own and become one with the flock sends Andi down a twisted, unforgivable path. Once she understands the secrets the vultures conceal, she must decide between abandoning the birds of prey or risk turning her loved ones into nothing more than meals to be devoured.

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. The bloody messes don't bother her, not when she's already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whispered two words: bat eater. Months pass, the killer is never caught, and Cora can barely keep herself together. She pushes away all feelings, disregards the bite marks that appear on her coffee table, and won't take her aunt's advice to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. Cora tries to ignore the rising dread in her stomach, even when she and her weird co-workers begin finding bat carcasses at their crime scene clean-ups. But Cora can't ignore the fact that all their recent clean-ups have been the bodies of East Asian women. Soon Cora will learn: you can't just ignore hungry ghosts.

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.

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children No Solicitations No Visitors No Quests Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world. But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of the matter. No matter the cost.

Welcome to the Island of Anchor's Mercy. For generations, Anchor’s Mercy has welcomed visitors from all over the world to revel in the island’s pristine beauty and queer culture. But something is wrong. Very wrong. And Ollie Veltman is going to have to figure it out if he wants to stop his island, and everyone upon it, from drowning within a supernatural, radiant plague rising from the waves. Take a deep breath... Told as a kaleidoscopic drama between past and present, narration and interview, text and pictures, The Dead of Summer is a story within a scavenger hunt for truths so dangerous they will make your skin crawl and your lungs ache for air. Get ready to scream!

Kristen Simmons's masterful breakout novel for young adult readers, Jumanji but Japanese-inspired, about estranged friends playing a deadly game in an eerie folkloric underworld. Four years ago, five kids started a game. Only four survived. Now, at the end of their senior year of high school, the survivors—Dax, Maddy, Emerson, and Owen—have reunited for one strange and terrible reason: they’ve been summoned by the ghost of Ian, the friend they left for dead. Together they return to the tunnel where their friendship ended with one goal: find Ian and bring him home. So they restart the deadly game they never finished—an innocent card-matching challenge called Meido. A game without instructions.As soon as they begin, they're dragged out of their reality and into an eerie hellscape of Japanese underworlds, more horrifying than even the darkest folktales that Owen's grandmother told him. There, they meet Shinigami, an old wise woman who explains the rules: They have one night to complete seven challenges or all of them, Ian included, will be stuck in this world forever. Once inseparable, the survivors now can’t stand each other, but the challenges demand they work together, think quickly, and make sacrifices—blood, clothes, secrets, memories, and worse. And once again, not everyone will make it out of Meido alive.

If the remainder of your life was only as long as your ability to avoid your own reflection, how long would you last? An hour? A day? Perhaps a week? It’s been said that at the core of every legend lies a seed of truth. For four American tourists vacationing in Greece, this is a lesson learned the hard way. When the group sets out to find a subterranean pool that’s rumored to be the one by which the demi-god Narcissus once wasted away in self-obsession, what started as a fun excursion quickly escalates into a full-blown nightmare. After looking into the waters of the pool, they come to find their own reflections have become infected by an ancient evil. As they’re picked off one-by-one by a malevolence that resides in the reflective world, those remaining race to find a way to bring the nightmare to an end before it takes them all. In the meantime, all they’ll have to do is avoid their own reflections.

The toppings: Terror and torment. The crust: Stuffed with dread and despair. And the sauce: Well, the sauce is always red. Whether you’re in the mood for a Chicago-style deep dish of darkness, or prefer a New York wide slice of thin-crusted carnage, or if you just have a hankering for the cheap, cheesy charms of cardboard-crusted, delivered-to-your-door devilry; we have just the slice for you. Bring your most monstrous of appetites, because we’re serving suspense and horrors both chillingly cosmic and morbidly mundane from acclaimed horror authors such as Brian Evenson, Jessica McHugh, and Cody Goodfellow, as well as up-and-coming literary threats like Craig Wallwork, Sheri White, and Tony McMillen. Tales From the Crust, stories you can devour in thirty minutes or less or the next one’s free. Whatever that means.

In a world where the dead can wake and walk among us, what is truly real? Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead? Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she's loved one of them. She'll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.

Madeline Dyer, editor of Being Ace, developed this anthology to challenge expectations about who can be a hero. Centering disabled and chronically ill teenagers protecting others from ancient evils, vanquishing ghosts, and defying death, these stories explore horror sub-genres including paranormal, gothic, psychological, and body horror. With a diverse array of own-voices representation for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Crohns Disease, Diabetes, PTSD, and more each entry complicates traditional horror with new perspectives. Contributors include bestselling and award-winning as well as emerging authors: Dana Mele, Lillie Lainoff, Soumi Roy, Fin Lavoie, S.E. Anderson, K. Ancrum, Pintip Dunn, Lily Meade, Mo Netz, P.H. Low, and Carly Nugent.